The Sharp End (Shadowrun)

O'Hare Subsprawl, Ares Extraterritorial Compound
December 10th, 2057

The door closed behind me, cutting off the sounds and smells of the Knight Errant military camp that had been set up on the grounds of O'Hare Airport outside the Chicago Containment Zone. As soon as I stepped inside the rec room I took one step to the left to clear the doorway for anyone who might be coming behind me, and stopped and hurriedly scanned the room. Sweeping my eyes around as I'd been trained I reflexively marked movement, silouhettes, possible targets and positions-

"Easy, trooper." the short woman with the blonde buzz-cut sitting on one of the nearby couches said to me seriously, my eyes drawn toward her as soon as she spoke. She was dressed in ordinary field utilities and a light armor vest, not infantry combat armor like I was, but the helmet and assault rifle laying next to her on the end table looked like they'd seen regular use, as did the sidearm in her shoulder holster. She had corporal's insignia on her shoulders, a Knight Errant logo matching mine embroidered on her shoulder, and a stenciled nametag saying Mierson, R. above her chest pocket.

"Is this Fireteam three, 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 6th Rapid Response Battalion?" I asked her.

"So you're our newbie." another voice broke in, and I glanced aside to see the man whose own sergeants' insignia told me that I was talking to my new fire-team leader. He was a handsome sonofabitch with a challenging smile and a neatly-trimmed dark beard, looking young for his rank at apparently only a couple years older than I was. Like everyone else in this barracks he was in top physical condition, because the first-line militaries of the late 2050s had no room for slackers anymore and a first-line corporate military like the one serving Ares Macrotechnology megacorporation even so. "Sergeant Gabriel Sinclair, fire-team leader for 1st-Three, Alpha Company."

"Trooper Mitchell Stone. Reporting in, sir." I turned to face him smartly and snapped to attention.

"I advise that you pull the stick out, rookie." a third man sitting nearby wearing the insignia of a Trooper 1st Class chimed in amusedly. "They're really not comfortable to sit on."

"There a reason you're done up in full kit, Trooper?" Sinclair said to me, his voice firm and disapproving. "We don't go on the alert rotation until 1600."

I took a deep, steady breath. "When we boarded the transport the orders were that everyone travel in full combat loadout, Sergeant. This is how I got off the plane."

"Are they still overflying the Zone on the way in?" Corporal Mierson rolled her eyes disapprovingly. "That's all we need, to lose a full shipment of replacements and supplies if the bird dumps an engine over the wrong grid square."

"Ours not to reason why." Sergeant Sinclair said mildly, before turning back to me. "All right. I looked over your dossier earlier this morning, but just to make sure that they didn't cross any wires-" He reached into his pocket and came out with an Ares-issue military Personal Digital Assistant, then pulled the connector cable free from one side and neatly slotted the connector into the datajack beneath his right ear. "Trooper Mitchell Stone, born 5 July 2033 in the Confederation of American States. Joined the CAS Army right out of high school, qualified for the Rangers practically out of AIT- how'd you do that?"

"I was honorman in CAS boot camp, sir. It gave me first choice of available slots." I answered.

"Right." he nodded at that. "Administratively separated from the CAS military almost eleven months ago because of- hmm." He wordlessly raised an eyebrow at what the Ares corporate personnel system was feeding him about me through his datajack. "Got picked up by one of our corporate headhunters, did our transition course for veterans, then the Force Security and Rapid-Response advanced courses, and your first field assignment is here. Anything about that not accurate?"

"No sir." I said. We didn't say 'sir' to NCOs in the Army, but I'd already been through enough corporate training to assimilate that Knight Errant had a different policy about chain-of-command. At least I still didn't have to salute except for actual commissioned officers, like our platoon leader.

"How much do you know about bugs?" Jeffers asked seriously.

"Just what I got in the orientation before being deployed here." I admitted.

"Right." Sinclair nodded, as he jacked out of his PDA and returned it to its pocket. "That duffel bag got all your gear in it you're not wearing?" he pointed at the big carryall I'd dropped next to me when reporting in. "You've already reported in to the CO, gotten all the admin settled with the company clerk?"

"Yes sir." I nodded again.

"So introductions. That's Corporal Rebecca Mierson, number two in the fire-team and also our signals-intelligence specialist and drone operator. Trooper First Class Lawrence Jeffers-"

"Larry." he said good-naturedly.

"He's our first rifleman, his particular focus is CQB and intrusion. Trooper Nick Adamson is our heavy-weapons gunner, he's on an errand right now, you'll meet him later. And you'll be our second rifleman as well as our designated marksman."

"Yes sir." I repeated yet again. "So this particular task force is using the five-team model?"

"It is." he acknowledged. "Team leader, two riflemen, one heavy weapons, and one specialist as they're available. Our team drew a techie, other teams get a mage or an adept, whatever's available. Any two teams in the platoon are supposed to mesh and form a squad as needed."

"You said we go on alert at 1600, sir?" I asked, while noting the time stamp of 1417 discreetly tucked into one corner of my cybereyes' Heads-Up Display. Shit, I was still on a day schedule and I was going to have to go right into a full night rotation?

"We're up for rapid-response, not patrol." Sergeant Sinclair nodded at me. "That means full combat load and don't leave the barracks because we've got to be available to roll out on five-minute notice, but we won't be actively deployed. You can still get your sleep, though, just-"

"Just make sure you've got a dose of Long-Haul handy for if something pops loose before morning." Jeffers wisecracked.

"Stims might be all right for you, jackrabbit, but I want our marksman to have steadier hands than that." Sinclair said. "Mierson, they should have taken care of it at Company but you make sure he's synced in properly to the platoon tacnet right now."

She nodded a wordless acknowledgement to him, then pointed her finger firmly at the couch next to her. "Sit." I breathed deeply again and did as I was told, and she pulled a length of heavy-duty datacable out of a web pouch and jacked it into a port on what I could now see was a portable armored cyberdeck. Without asking she reached up and clicked the other end of the cable home into my own datajack port-

I felt a presence lightly brush against my mind, as she closed her eyes and dropped into a full-dive neural interface. "Okay, his interface software's got the latest updates." she said absently, her consciousness at least halfway on the digital plane. "Tacnet sync check, encryption keys check, smartgun interface check..." Several icons on my internal HUD blinked red, then green again. "Test cycle complete. He's wired in." The digital presence faded away as she opened her eyes and unplugged the cable.

"Yeah, if any of your digital gear locks up don't even bother taking it to Logistics. Becky can slap it back into shape better than any of those counter monkeys can." Jeffers said good-naturedly.

"Don't call me Becky." she glared at him in what was clearly an ongoing repetition between them given how matter-of-factly Sinclair just ignored the entire byplay.

"You've eaten?" he asked me.

"Yes sir." I nodded to him.

"We've already done our day's PT, but sometimes I like to stretch my legs in the afternoon. And we're stood down until 1600, so we've got time to do a few laps. Follow me, rookie. They'll watch your bag."

I waved my hand down at my full combat loadout of the several dozen pounds of advanced laminate composite and sealed ballistic-weave bodysuit that was KE-issue infantry combat armor, my web gear full of magazines and grenades, my immediate field pack, and my slung advanced-smartlink battle rifle. "Where do I change out of this?"

"Did I tell you to go get changed?" Sinclair grinned thinly back at me.

Despite my starting to get a little fed up with the hazing, I didn't bother registering any verbal objections. After all, it was like this when I'd first reported aboard to the 75th Rangers as well. Nobody had raised the topic of what had happened to the guy I was replacing, and I certainly wasn't going to be the first one to bring it up, but Knight Errant's role in the whole 'Bug City' crisis wasn't just to stand around on the Wall and stare down from the guard tower. That job was safely in the hands of the Illinois National Guard and the UCAS Army. Knight Errant was being paid to be here and back them up with our more advanced technology and training, as well as - for most of us, at least - our greater experience. And that meant we got the special tasks, the ones that required going over the Wall and deep into the city. This wasn't a garrison posting I was up for, this was frontline combat service, so if my new teammates wanted to keep testing me until after I'd proven that I wasn't going to fuck it up for everyone, then they were going to do that and all I could do was my best.

Which was small comfort when I was trying not to drop from heat stroke when my new sergeant took me on a fucking two mile run in heavy body armor and full kit, while he was relatively breezing it in fatigues and jump boots! The only gear he was humping along was his sidearm and garrison gunbelt, but I had almost seventy pounds of crap weighing me down on top of that. If I hadn't had the muscle-and-tendon bioware augmentation that Ares paid for all Knight Errant combat troopers, this would have left me with enough muscle strain that I'd be less than fully-fit to fight tonight.

Now if only they made any kind of cyberware or bioware that would let you put up with almost dying of heat stroke, because despite the best the engineers had done to make the inner layer composed of heat-wicking synthetic the simple fact was that if you tried long-distance running while wearing a suit of NBC sealed heavy body armor, you were going to sweat like a pig. Still, I just knew that Sinclair was waiting for me to start complaining or whining even the tiniest bit, because this was an obvious stress test if there ever was one, so I just kept a lid on it.

"Quiet one, aren't you?" he said conversationally as we started our fifth lap around the section of perimeter road they'd marked off for runners like us.

"Running a grinder here, sir." I said, unavoidably letting a bit of No duh, jackass! into my tone of voice despite my best efforts. "Not wasting my oxygen."

"You don't have much of a filter, do you Stone?" he probed as we kept up a steady ground-eating pace. "Is that how you got yourself shitcanned?"

"I got myself shitcanned because I wouldn't sign off on my buddy's death being his fault when it wasn't, sir." I bit out before I could stop myself.

"Figured it was something like that." he nodded matter-of-factly, and I couldn't help but turn to gape at him.

"What, thought I wouldn't believe you?" he said, holding up up his hand to signal that we should slow down to a walk. "Ares wouldn't have let you in as a night watchman, let alone a first-line trooper, if there were any doubts about your attitude. So whatever the official version of whatever incident it was - and it wasn't on your dossier here, so I don't even know what it was - it had to be bullshit or else our recruiter would never have talked to you."

"Trust them to do their job and you'll do yours?" I probed.

"That's how the corporation works." he nodded. "You've got a task, you do it to the best of your ability, and everyone else does likewise. But you can do your job without having to worry that the next man over isn't doing his. And if you do ever have to worry about that, then someone else out there will really need to worry about it- but not for long."

"Well, down South it was more like 'if the guy who got killed in a DUI was a grunt and the person driving the other car was a Congressman's daughter, then it's going to be the first guy's fault even if Lone Star and DocWagon both have to mysteriously 'lose' her field sobriety test and her hospital tox screen. Even if they both said that she was flying high on enough novacoke to pay for Aztechnology's laundry bill.'

"So you took it to the MPs?" he asked me.

"Yeah." I nodded. "Especially since I had to explain to the base hospital why my right arm needed replacing from where I'd been in the wreck. And then a week later I find out that I'm being discharged-without-prejudice for a 'clerical error' on my security clearance that says I should never have had it in the first place, and the VA is busy telling me that they don't have to pay for a prosthetic because my injury 'wasn't service-connected'."

"Well that was just vindictive." he looked at me curiously. "Pull some strings to get you discharged right away so the incident can be buried, I can see how that fits in, but to also cheat you out of your veterans' benefits? What interest does that serve? Even a crooked bastard doing a cover-up had his objective already taken with the first, he didn't need to go on and scorch the earth."

"Don't ask me." I shrugged. "So yeah, when the Ares recruiter looked me up as I was busy trying to learn how to feed myself as Lefty the One-Armed Wonder, he didn't really have to work very hard on his sell. A steady paycheck doing the only thing I know how to do, Ares corporate citizenship so I could get out of the CAS, and a top-line cyberarm as a replacement? I didn't even care that that last one had me commit for two extra years on my tour, sign me the hell up."

"You do your part for the corporation, and the corporation will do its part for you." he agreed. "All right, go get a shower and then get back into your gear. Dinner will be field rations and not the mess because we'll be on the alert platoon, but unless something kicks loose that needs a rapid-response team we've got nothing else on the schedule tonight so you'll have time to unpack and settle in the barracks."

"Right." I husked out, still a little short of breath, and lumbered off to do exactly as I was told. I was so soaked in sweat that a good brisk shower was the blessings of God raining down from Heaven on me personally at that point, and I just finished finding my bunk and getting at least some of my belongings stowed in my new locker when the fifteen-minute call came in and it was time to get back in my full armor and kit and muster with the rest of the platoon.

Lieutenant Menendez, our platoon leader, was someone I'd met only once before for the few minutes it had taken me to report aboard. Given that our Knight Errant task force was a special-operations unit, not a line company, I could already begin to pick up that they were running a slightly more decentralized command here. Between our cyber- and bioware augs, the sophistication of our weapons and armor, and the capabilities of things like neural-interface smartlinks, computer-assisted tacnets, and squad-level drone support, one squad of troopers were effectively the equivalent of a 20th-century light-infantry platoon when it came to firepower anyway. But now he was up in front of the platoon - dressed in fatigues, I noted, not armor like the rest of us - giving us our briefing.

"All right. First Platoon of Bravo is now the duty fast-reaction platoon as of 1600 local time." he began. "According to the posted ops schedule, we don't have anything major running in the Zone and there hasn't been any major incidents since the Logan's Square firefight three days ago, so, here's hoping for a quiet night. As per usual policy all troopers are restricted to barracks and immediate environs, and need to have their full combat loadout where you can be on the choppers, fully loaded, within five minutes of an alert call. Watch schedule is posted to the tacnet, pull them up on your PDAs. Any questions?"

Of course there weren't any, this being the largest nothingburger of a briefing I'd ever attended. Hurry-up-and-wait, a whole night and day of nothing but sitting on your packed bags as your platoon took its turn of being the one waiting to jump on the choppers and rush out to anyone in our sector who needed backup in a hurry.

"Fucker isn't wearing his armor again." Trooper Nicholas Adamson, the big surly ork that I'd found out was our fire-team's heavy weapons trooper, growled distortedly through his tusks.

"Don't let me hear you referring to an officer that way again." Sinclair snapped at him, before unconvincedly continuing. "I guess he figures that any situation major enough to require the HQ element to move out with the whole platoon en masse instead of just sending one or several teams as a detachment will have more than five minutes' warning."

I opened my mouth to state the obvious rejoinder of That's not how it's supposed to work, remembered that I was the FNG in this unit, and closed it again. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Corporal Mierson nodding knowingly at my expression anyway.

"You play cards, Southern boy?" Adamson turned to me as the briefing broke up and we all went to find comfortable spots in our barracks to sit and wait.

"Not when I'm broke." I politely lied, something about his expression setting off my instincts. I was more than flush, but I just had a feeling that if I got into a card game tonight then he wouldn't be a gracious loser, and I certainly didn't want to be one either.

"How'd that happen?" Jeffers asked curiously, knowing full well that I'd just come out of a training cycle and hadn't had more than a couple of days off before reporting in to spend any of my pay at all.

"I played cards in the barracks." I lied smoothly, and him and Sinclair both chuckled softly at that.

"Arm-wrestle?" Adamson tried again, flexing his bicep.

I took one look at his size - he was on the larger side even for an ork, meaning he had at least half a foot and fifty pounds of muscle on me, and I'd been a varsity cornerback in high school - and shrugged. "You win." I conceded immediately.

He looked askance at me at that, but visibly couldn't find anything to take offense at. With a muttered grunt, he shrugged and moved off to get closer to the group of guys watching Urban Brawl over on the trideo in the corner.

"What did I miss?" I asked the general atmosphere.

Sinclair and Mierson looked at each other, and something wordless passed between them in their expressions before he shook his head slightly and she shrugged.

"It's for him to bring up, if he ever does." Sinclair said. "In the meantime just do your best to work together."

"Yes sir." I agreed. Well, it was only in war simsense where everyone in a unit was everybody's best friend anyway.

Over the next few hours I actually managed to earn the privilege of calling Corporal Mierson 'Rebecca', as she was overjoyed to find someone else in the platoon who actually played chess. The two of us synced our PDAs over short-range wireless and I narrowly lost the first two matches learning more about her play style, as we dug tooth-and-nail into the third. Since we were taking the full three minutes for each move as per tournament rules, it was taking more than a bit of time.

"Not what you imagined?" she asked softly as we each stared warily at the other's pawns.

"I did a year patrolling the Azzie border with the Airborne Rangers." I reassured her. "Hurry-up-and-wait is an old, old friend."

"Good." she nodded. "A lot of the kids who come in straight out of college, no prior experience, they hear 'Knight Errant' and 'rapid-response trooper' and think it'll be like a Desert Wars sim. And when it isn't, not right away, sometimes they go try to find out where the 'real action' is hiding from them."

"And sometimes they find it?" I asked knowingly.

"And sometimes they find it only once." she agreed.

"The guy I'm replacing?" I asked after a thoughtful silence.

"No, his wife just had a baby and so he transferred out to a site security position so he could spend more time at home." she replied.

"Well, congratulations to him then." I agreed good-naturedly. "Wherever he-"

And then a loud BEEP-BEEP-BEEP kicked in over both the wall-mounted speaker and our helmet radios.

"Reaction alert. Reaction alert. Fire-Teams Three and Five deploy to ready birds immediately. Fire Teams Three and Five deploy to ready birds immediately." the computer-synthesized voice repeated.

"Grab it and go, people!" Sinclair's voice boomed out as both Rebecca and I immediately turned off our PDAs, shoved them in our pockets, and then in a well-rehearsed sequence of movements jacked ourselves into our suits' comm suite and linked up to the unit tacnet. We shot to our feet, grabbed our helmets and slammed them home n our armor's neck rings, and slung our rifles, and were out the door along with the rest of our team and Fireteam Five, our partner for this callout, in under a minute and a half. Less than two minutes after that we were out at the helipad, each team filing aboard one of the two Ares Skyhawk helicopters waiting there for us with their rotors already spinning.

"Right, our tasking is search-and-rescue!" Sergeant Sinclair said as we strapped into our seats in the passenger compartment. The Skyhawk was a heavy milspec transport helicopter, capable of carrying fifteen men plus the crew, so even with each of our teams riding along on one we still had enough room in the helo to lift a full squad out. "There's a team that's called for emergency extraction, with an LZ about half a mile north of the old University of Illinois hospital." he continued as we lifted off and headed east over the Wall and into the Zone, the night sky already twinkling over Lake Michigan as the last purple traces of nautical twilight slipped below the horizon behind us.

"That's right in the middle of no-man's-land!" Adamson burst out disbelievingly, and I was grateful to him for it because I personally knew sweet fuck-all about the geography of Chicago. "Who the hell got stuck in there? Lieutenant said there was nothing scheduled tonight!"

"Then it must have been unscheduled." Sinclair said stolidly. "Or above our pay grade. Either way, that's not our concern! This one's from up top and it's Priority 1-A, so it's on us!"

"Boss, a 1-A should have had its own dedicated extraction force." Jeffers pointed out.

"The flash said that their extraction blew a turbine on takeoff." Sinclair said. "We were up on the rotation, so we're the backup."

"So we're dropping in blind and late." Rebecca swore viciously. "And you said search and rescue. Do we even have contact with who we're pulling out?"

"No." Sinclair nodded grimly. "According to the dispatch they got out their trouble call, then went off-net. We'll have to search for rescue beacons."

"With just two fire teams and two slicks?" I asked incredulously. "Are we at least getting a gunship?"

Sinclair held up a hand to his ear as he called that one in, then 'listened' to whatever was coming through his own feed. "Right, they're linking up now. Everyone switch to channel three."

"Extraction team, this is mission control call sign Prophet. You are now tasked as emergency extraction for operation POPCORN, with Sergeant Sinclair as on-scene leader, call sign Popcorn One-One." the calm, matter-of-fact voice of whatever senior officer was riding herd on this mess spoke into our ears.

"Popcorn One-One, acknowledge." Sinclair said, accepting responsibility as the senior of the two NCOs out of the two fire-teams now assigned to whatever the heck POPCORN was. "Specific tasking, sir?"

"Extractees are a four-man unit of specialists, designate 'Alpha', vitals now being uploaded your tacnet. First mission priority is recovery of specialist Alpha-Two, second mission priority is personnel evac of remainder of Alpha. They have been out of contact for nine minutes mark. Last known position is marked on your HUDs. Your tacnet is now being synced to their IDs and recognition codes." Four images of troopers dressed in anonymous low-signature combat armor scrolled briefly across our HUDs, along with anonymized ID codes simply reading 'Alpha-One' through 'Alpha-Four'. At least they included mug shots of them with the helmets off so we could recognize their corpses if need be.

"Black ops team." Mierson sighed quietly. "Above our pay grade indeed, sir."

"You're talking get out and search the ground, Prophet?" Sinclair focused. "We may need more boots for that."

"That decision is still being evaluated, but time is critical. Be advised that possible opposition may include raiders, looters, gang members, and insect spirits." Prophet non-replied.

Rebecca and I rolled our eyes at each other, because Prophet had of course just said that they had no clue what we were potentially in for. Then she closed her eyes and dropped into full-VR, reaching out through her cyberdeck-

"Prophet, Popcorn One-Two reports negative reading on any of those SAR beacons." Rebecca's voice sounded on the tacnet. "I say again, my feed from the overhead drone is registering zero beacons. Were beacons registered in the first place, and if so, when did they cut out?"

"They were registered on the position fix we gave you, but they went offline over ten minutes ago."

"Great, those guys are already bug shit. And we're next." Jeffers' head slumped.

"How long do we have?" Sinclair asked after a thoughtful pause, his real question of How long do we have to keep looking before we bail out? echoing in our ears.

"Operation will continue until you have the objective or your birds are bingo fuel, Popcorn Lead." Prophet said mercilessly.

"Acknowledged. Popcorn is two minutes from LZ, Prophet. We'll check back in when we have something." Sinclair said professionally, then switched his mike to local-net only.

"Lord fuck a duck, Sinclair, is this a shit sandwich or what?" the voice of Fire-Team Five's leader cut in.

"I've had better, Popcorn Two-One." Sinclair agreed. "Right, if we have the birds hover low than the noise will bring every rubbernecker within a mile and they'll be vulnerable on the ground all the time we're out searching around. If they stay at altitude the noise might still wake people up, but they won't have any idea where we're heading within several miles. So now we'll demonstrate why all rapid-response troopers need to be jump qualified."

"Parachute insertion?" one of the other voices on our second fire-team asked.

"Roger that." Sinclair nodded. "My team jumps first, Popcorn Two follows us down. Popcorn Flight, you copying this?"

"Roger that, Popcorn Lead." the senior pilot's voice sounded on our tacnet. "Recommend insertion from ten thousand feet. Mark your intended drop zone on the plot and we'll set up to compensate for prevailing winds."

After a brief consultation between them our two sergeants decided that the best LZ would be the parking lot west of the big athletics stadium in the area, and the two Skyhawks banked sharply up, swivelled in mid-air, and came to a hover precisely 10000 feet over the exit point. Each of us drew a parachute from the ones prepacked and waiting for us on the aircraft and strapped it on.

"Final tacnet sync." Sinclair called, and each of us double-checked our datajacks and made sure our BattleTac software was online and switched to the proper plot. The augmented-reality display kicked in and little icons denoting the friendly-status and identity of each of my teammates flickered into view around each of them, piped directly into my brain's visual center through the neural feed. In my peripheral vision five similar icons glowed distantly through the fuselage of the chopper, marking the positions of the other team as they waited in the passenger compartment of their own bird parallelling ours a couple hundred feet to the side. The BattleTac software was automatically doing a regular ping off of each of our GPS trackers to mark everyone else's position on the display for everyone regardless of intervening terrain.

"Check parachutes fore and aft." Sinclair called out on the net, and each of us did so and then clicked an acknowledgement over the tactical net as we finished.

"Popcorn Two, standing by." the call came in as the last acknowledgement registered.

"Popcorn One, standing by." Sinclair acknowledged. "Popcorn Flight, we are ready for drop."

"All birds, pop the hatch." our lead pilot called out over our dedicated mission commnet, and the chill winter air burst in as the rear ramp of the Skyhawk hissed open on its hydraulics. "Jumpers, insertion will be from 10000 feet, winds are 10 mph and north-northwest. Visibility is clear and unlimited." A glowing patch popped up on our AR displays marking the drop zone below us and to the east, along with little arrows displaying wind and weather data.

"Shit, and in the Rangers we were busy trying to find one pathfinder with a road flare from up here." I whispered.

"Nothin' but the best for daddy Damien's boys." Jeffers agreed good-naturedly.

"No chatter." Sinclair said tolerantly as we carefully lined up at the top of the rear ramp. "All hands, we'll deploy chutes at 2000 feet, wait for your team leader's call. Keep weapons tight until we land. ROE is Bravo, I say again Bravo, do not engage unless engaged. We stay low-signature during the search phase if possible."

"Shit." Adamson swore, because 'low-signature' meant he didn't get to fire at all without specific permission. But he was the one carrying the Firelance man-portable anti-armor laser system, so it was essentially impossible for him to shoot without making a flash bright enough to be seen from a mile away- in the daytime.

"Prophet, this is Popcorn, we are waiting at final mark. Confirm go." Sinclair said to HQ.

"Popcorn, this is Prophet. You are go for mission, repeat, go for mission."

"Go, go, go!" Sinclair called, and the five of us smoothly ran abreast down the ramp abreast and leapt into the open air. After a precise fifteen-second wait, the second team followed us.

The freefall over the city was the first chance I'd had to actually stop and admire the scenery beneath me. According to my headware clock it was 2109, several hours after sunset, but the once-megalopolis of Chicago was as dark as a Carolina cornfield at night. It was over two years since the Bug City crisis had begun, when Ares had discovered the existence of extradimensional 'insect spirits' that had been pulling a full-on 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' in the depths of the Windy City. Oh, turns out they'd also been secretly trying it in other places, through the 'Universal Brotherhood' charity foundation/cult as a front, but Chicago had apparently been the site of their main nest. Which had been orders of magnitude larger than anything anticipated. When an elite Ares spec-ops team had penetrated the Cermak Power Plant expecting to find only some bugs and instead had found all the bugs, the situation had rapidly escalated to the point where detonating a tactical nuclear warhead in Cermak had been the only way to be sure.

And even that hadn't contained the breach. Bugs all over the inner city had 'woken up' with the radioactive death of their center hive, shed their human guises, and went to town on everything they could reach. The UCAS government, already knocked off-balance by the assassination of newly-inaugurated President Dunkelzahn earlier this year, had latched onto a desperation solution for the problem of an unknown number of extradimensional hostiles capable of possessing human beings and nigh-undetectably walking them around as skinsuits - they'd abandoned the city entirely. The UCAS Army had knocked down buildings and cleared a strip along Irving Park Road from the lakeshore all the way in to Harlem Avenue, then back east along 115th street until reaching the lake again. Then the combat engineers had bulldozed the rubble into an improvised berm, and built guard towers and motion sensors all along it. 'The Wall' now enclosed the heart of Chicago, and the rule was simple - if you were inside, you didn't leave.

Of course they assured us grunts that the situation wasn't going to be left at that, and that 'top men' both government and corporate were ceaselessly working on a longer-term solution for the problem and that this was just a temporary stopgap. Not that anybody inside the Containment Zone believed that anymore, if they ever had. While relief drops of supplies still went regularly into the city, and even the occasional intervention mission was sponsored by either us or the military, the fact remained that inside the CZ things had reverted to the most primitive form of post-apocalyptic feudalism. If you weren't a bug then you either served a warlord or were one, or else you were dead. Ex-cops, neighborhood watches, street gangs, remnants of the Chicago Mafia, and psychos and cultists of all description had each claimed their own piece of turf and defended it with everything they had. And in-between those patches of control lay unclaimed territories like this, full of nothing but the desperate and the dead.

And the bugs, of course. Hell, the simple fact that giant wasp and fly spirits occasionally patrolled the airspace inside the CZ was one reason why we wouldn't have dared a daytime jump, and why we were doing a nighttime HALO jump. I'd done these before with the CAS Airborne Rangers, of course, and everyone else had qualified similarily somewhere in order to be eligible for the Rapid-Response Teams, but they were still nothing you took casually-

"Team one, deploy!" Sinclair's voice came in on my comms, and my hands yanked my D-ring on sheer trained reflex. The shock of the chute opening rattled my teeth like it always had, and I grabbed the handles and fell into line behind the clearly marked beacon of my team leader in my AR display as we made the final approach into a large parking lot just west of a giant athletic stadium, its outline strobing in the digital overlay as our marked drop zone. I cursed softly as this big statue of some bald guy holding a basketball came out of nowhere as I was swooping in, and I barely jinked in time to avoid getting that ball up my ass.

"One-Five on the ground." I called out as soon as my boots touched pavement on the broad sidewalk out in front the stadium building, and I manually activated the small attached chemical capsule that would dissolve the chute's plastic into a powder residue and cut it loose. I immediately snatched my rifle off its sling, synced up the smartlink, and started scanning my assigned sector through the low-light visor of my armor helmet.

A soft flutter in my hearing had me look up to see the chutes of Team Two flaring overhead as they came in to an equally smooth landing and huddle in the parking ltg nearby. The five of them got into a crouch formation and stayed down low behind some abandoned and rusting cars, just like we had behind the low stone wall near the building, and we all did a quiet look-and-listen.

"Looks clear. Last known position of Alpha was two blocks west of here. Time to leg it." Sinclair said.

"I don't like the idea of going right down the avenue." Sergeant Washington, the leader of our second fire-team, came in on the comm. "Every trog in this city has natural low-light or thermographic vision, our camo won't do shit." I could hear Adamson's teeth grinding from here at that last remark, and I understood why.

"One-Two, get us an IR feed from the drone." Sinclair said. "Check the buildings along the route."

A small picture-in-picture window popped up on all our HUDs as she did a link to the Wandjina fire-support drone we had tasked to us and circling overhead. The passive sensor array of the Wandjina looked down and metaphorically quivered, seeking signs of life-

"I've got intermittent heat signatures here, here, and here." Rebecca continued, marking them on everyone's plot. One cluster of people clearly in the open and walking down a side street, two more muffled clusters that were probably people in buildings. "The buildings along the north side of the avenue look clear."

"Any signs of Alpha?" Sinclair asked.

"Nothing vis- hold one." she said, and the camera feed from the Wandjina swivelled up north and to the east. "I've got what looks like a car recently set on fire, still smoldering, and several bodies all around it." The drone feed switched to low-light and zoomed in. "Looks like dead gang members, all female."

"That car looks like a thermobaric grenade popped it." Adamson cut in professionally. "I think Team Alpha had a skirmish there."

"So they were still alive at least that far." Sinclair agreed. "Right, we make for the battle site and pick up their trail from there. Infil via this alleyway, wedge formation. Anyone spots anything, call it out."

"Delinking from drone." Rebecca said, and her eyes opened as she left full-dive VR again.

Our two teams left the parking lot, crossed the north-south of Damen street, and started making their way down an alley that ran behind the storefronts and buildings on the north side of Madison. Popcorn One set the pace out in front, with Sinclair behind us in the center and the rest of us in a loose wedge. About seven meters behind us Popcorn Two advanced in its own wedge, close enough to support and watch our backs but far enough away not to get caught in a blast radius. If we'd had time our two teams would have advanced by bounding overwatch, one team set up and in cover as the other team crept forward, then switch positions, but we were on a search-and-rescue mission and we were already on minus time so we had to hustle.

As we were all of us combat veterans - even me, the FNG to Knight Errant - the commnet stayed entirely silent of chatter as we advanced, which was a lot harder to do than it sounded. The BattleTac software meant that we could skip a lot of routine callouts as everyone was made immediately aware of everyone else's movements and gross status anyway, and so outside of several simple hand signals for 'Go', 'Stop', and 'Listen', nobody needed to say anything.

"Movement two-o-clock low." I was the first to speak out loud, as I crouched behind a fence line to break up visibility and brought my rifle up to my shoulder. It was the latest-model Ares Alpha - integrated Smartgun-II link, advanced recoil compensation, underslung grenade launcher, and an advanced imaging scope for an optical backup if the smartlink failed. Right now I was using the scope as an improvised monocular, peering close at the corner of that low brick building up ahead trying to see what I'd seen-

"I got nothing." Adamson said after a moment, him being the person nearest to me on my side of the wedge.

"One-Two, query the drone." Sinclair said after a thoughtful pause.

The view from the drone camera popped into view on our tacnet HUDs again, then zoomed in at the corner where I'd been looking and around. "Nothing visible." she said, cycling through several vision modes.

"Keep it together, twitch case." Adamson growled at me.

"All clear. Resume advance." Sinclair said reprovingly, and we kept going forward. The corner drew closer... closer- and some instinct prompted me to look down.

"Tripwire!" I yelled - my helmet meant that nobody outside would hear me anyway - into my mike. Everybody instantly froze mid-step on the call, and I 'thought' a command into the tacnet to put a digital marker on everyone else's AR display where I was looking. Barely eight feet in front of us, right on the corner where I thought I'd spotted movement, a wire was strung about two feet off the ground across the alleyway. The wire ran to some kind of gizmo that was duct-taped to the wall of the building.

Every single one of us carefully looked down at our own feet and around for other tripwires before daring to so much as plant a toe and crouch.

"The fuck kind of bomb is that?" Jeffers thought out loud, looking at the gizmo.

"It's an alarm." Rebecca said, peering at closely through her helmet's image-magnification optics. "The cheap kind you can get in a home-supply store. Yank the wire, pop goes the screamer. Whoever set it put the wire high off the ground so it won't go off on dogs or cats."

"Good job there, One-Five." Sinclair said to me. "So this is someone's turf, and they're exercising at least basic perimeter control. Eyes open, people."

"But where's the tags?" Adamson asked, looking around at the bare brick walls nearby. "Gang turf means you put up your flag, you let people know."

"So who doesn't want people to know that they live here?" Sinclair asked rhetorically. "Jeffers, get rid of that wire."

"Why do you always send the short guy?" he groused good-naturedly as we all covered him while he crept forward, checked to make sure that the alarm wasn't the 'goes-off-when-tension-is-released' kind, then got out his cutters and snipped through the wire.

"You're the smaller target." Sinclair replied with rare humor, and we set up and resumed our advance more cautiously.

"Coming up on the cross street." Jeffers said from where he was out front at the point of our wedge.

"Hold there. Status, Popcorn Two?" Sinclair asked.

"Quiet night so far, One." they replied.

"Right, we're going to do a look-and-listen at the cross street and then sprint the hell across and set up on the other side. You wait on this side for our go. Dammit, I hate being out in the open."

"You'd hate being in the storm drains around here even more." Two replied sardonically. "All right, play is set."

We spent a long minute looking up, down, around, and sideways, while Rebecca did another sweep with the drone. While it was dark out and we had our armor's paint set to digital night urban camo, the simple fact was that anyone with basic thermographic vision - which was any troll in town, anyone with the right cybereyes or goggles, or any insect spirit - would see us radiating on a cold winter's night like this as brightly as a lit bulb in a dark closet. So our only hope was to cross the street when nobody was looking, or that if anyone did happen to be looking then they'd be properly uncurious as to a few dimly glimpsed shapes in the distance.

"Contact, half a dozen of them down the street." Adamson called, as the heat signatures in question almost a block away shone as brightly on our visors as we could on theirs, if they had any. Several of them had flashlights mounted on their rifles and were sweeping around with them, so we had enough illumination for our low-light optics to pick up details.

"Zooming in." Rebecca said, and did so. The contacts in question were half a dozen young women, done up in punk colors and shocking multicolored hairdos. My eyebrows raised as I also registered that they were all-

"God damn, are they all 10s?" Jeffers said wonderingly. "Are we on a Containment Zone op or a studio set? That crew looks like someone paged Central Casting looking for hot butch gals for a porno sim!"

"Gang colors are listed in the database as those of the 'Nasty Grrls'." Rebecca said disapprovingly. "Way to stereotype us there, ladies. No known turf listed for them, no known affiliations, no known much of anything. Except that they're 'formidable'."

"They definitely have a good connection for weapons." I said, peering at them through my rifle's scope. "Those ladies are packing Colt-M22A3's with all the trimmings, the best you can buy on the market next to what we're carrying. And they're all new."

"Uniform weapons loadout, brand-new issue, high-end gear." Sinclair said. "And enough left over for cosmetic surgery, plus access to a clinic that can do that kind of work. Somebody from outside the Zone has been paying them very well, and I can guess for what."

"Shadow ops." Popcorn Two agreed. "One, didn't your drone operator say that the corpses from that skirmish were all female?"

"Looks like we know who Team Alpha was running from." Sinclair agreed. "All hands, treat Nasty Grrls as hostile. I say again, treat Nasty Grrls as hostile. ROE Bravo still in effect."

"Want me to drop something from the drone south of us, try to pull them away?" Rebecca asked.

"Save your firepower, we've only got one drone." Sinclair decided. "Let's wait and see if they move."

After a short wait wherein the half-dozen 'Nasty Grrls' down the block did exactly nothing and moved nowhere, we regretfully came to the conclusion that they were apparently going to be standing watch on that intersection all night.

"Popcorn Flight, status?" Sinclair asked.

"All quiet and lazy up here, Popcorn Lead." our transport birds answered from where they were still holding station enough thousands of feet overhead that their rotors blended into the background noise. "Fifty minutes until bingo fuel."

"So we don't have all night. Right, these girls are apparently out here in force. That's a roadblock, not a sweeper team, which means these 'Nasty Grrls' are out here in enough force that they can hold at least a loose perimeter around the search zone while they've got other teams combing through it. We'll go in as fast and quiet as we can, but unless we're dead lucky we're going to run into someone in there before we find who we're looking for."

"At least we know they haven't found Alpha yet either, because they're still here." Rebecca said. "But yeah, the op-tempo around here is about to increase substantially. Call for reinforcements?"

A full sweep with the Wandjina turned up the disapproving results that there were at least a platoon of 'Nasty Grrls' in there, if not more, most of them popping into and out of buildings in a two-block radius around where Team Alpha had gone dark. Several more small groups of them, like the group south of us, were standing watch on key intersections around the perimeter. They didn't appear to have any large cluster being held back as a central reserve - they weren't that professional - but someone with at least half a brain was organizing their sweep.

Sadly, about twenty minutes after we'd gotten our alert call, a major firefight had kicked loose between two of the largest warlords, and one of them - 'Catherine The Terrible' - was a retired officer who'd used her connections to cut a deal with the UCAS Army, trading access and Zone intel for supplies. So she'd used some favors owed her to call for reinforcements against the big push her rival was making, and between that and half the Wall going to high alert at the flare-up, all of the troops potentially available to reinforce us were now getting sucked into the latest flashpoint.

"We're on our own." Sinclair swore. "Well, the Rapid-Response concept is all about how small highly-trained teams with the proper force multipliers and fire support teach can take on larger indigenous forces and send them packing, and tonight we'll get to prove it again. Team Two, close up on us in a tight wedge. We'll double-time it to the objective from here and start running the trail as fast we can. If the Nasty Grrls have any sense, they'll leg it as soon as they see our colors. If they try us on, we'll bleed them until they either pack it in or concentrate all their force against us, then blast that concentration with the drone."

"Acknowledged, Popcorn Lead." Team Two replied.

"Three... two... one... go!" Sinclair called it, and both of our teams broke out in a dead sprint across the road and to the other side. We had no idea if the Nasty Grrl concentration to our south spotted spotted us or not, but we continued down the alleyway at double-time, doing our best to try and spot any hostiles - or any more tripwires - despite the speed we were moving at.

"Contact front!" Rebecca called as we advanced down a narrow side street between a row of low apartment buildings and office fronts on the other side. Several Nasty Grrls had exited one of the apartment buildings about fifty yards in front of us, seeing us as clearly as we did them.

"Engage, engage!" Sinclair yelled, near simultaneously with the enemy's first reflexive shots. and Team One all went for the nearest cover we could find while rifle bullets spang'ed off the pavement around us. I felt the adrenaline burst kick in and the world move into slow-motion as my wired reflexes kicked in, and the smartgun softlink ticked quietly at the back of my mind as I felt my rifle swing up into position. The scope was my eyes, the barrel was my arm, the electronic trigger was my thoughts, and even the wind was a gentle tug at my reflexes as the computerized rangefinder and ballistic computer of the smartlink automated the entire process of direction/distance/windage to put the little targeting reticule precisely where the bullet was going to go, as soon as I-

Bam. Bam. Two aimed shots, double-tapped, and a Nasty Grrl hit the ground spurting holes from her overlarge chest. Jeffers' rifle kicked in almost as immediately as mine did, and his three-round burst caught a second hostile right through the lungs and she dropped like a stone. The third Nasty Grrl caught my aimed shot right through her forehead, the recoil compensator making it trivially easy for me to bring the rifle back into battery after my first two shots and the smartlink making sharpshooter work at this close a range as easy as snap shots on a skeet range.

Adamson held fire, his heavy laser still being colossal overkill for several infantry targets caught at this short a range even though we weren't low-signature anymore, and good fire discipline kept everyone else's fingers off their triggers as all three of the targets died.

"Move!" Sinclair yelled, and everybody broke into a dead run. Even if we'd been fast enough to keep any of the dead Grrls from calling for help - none of them had been wearing a comm headset, and they'd certainly hadn't had any time to get a handset out - our gunshots had just told everyone with several blocks that someone was here.

"Any Ares unit in the vicinity of Chicago Stadium, this is Rescue Force Popcorn in the blind!" Rebecca's voice came out on the general emergency radio frequency in the clear - well, on the lowest-security Ares general encryption channel, not in the clear clear, but still. Now that we'd broken stealth and gone loud, we didn't have to keep our radio traffic on the tight-links we'd been using so far to talk to each other and to the helicopters, or to Prophet through the helo's relay. "You still alive out there, guys?"

A resounding silence greeted us as we finished the last block of our sprint and the burning car came into sight. Glowing icons started showing up in our HUDs as the drone orbiting overhead started marking the heat signatures converging on our location and the BattleTac computers started displaying their computed positions as outline-ghosts in our HUDs despite the buildings still between us and them.

"Team One, here! Two, there!" Sinclair ordered briskly, marking two waypoints clearly on our displays. "Dig in and hold this corner!"

Our two teams set up in a low storefront and outside near an abandoned garbage truck, using them as cover against small arms fire as we set up a hasty interlocking-fields-of-fire setup against the advancing wave of Nasty Grrls. Whoever was their corporate sponsor seemed to have sprung for at least some level of wired reflexes as well as top-tier small arms and cosmetic surgery, because they were almost as quick as we were. However, they clearly weren't chipped for smartguns and they apparently didn't have our training budget either, as we were connecting with almost 50% of our shots fired - a miraculously high ratio for an actual firefight, especially at night - while they were operating with a notably less superhuman ratio.

"The fuck are they juiced on?" Adamson swore as his Firelance laser CRACK'ed with ionizing air as he swept the beam across a pair of Grrls, cutting through the car they were hiding behind to slice them in half as well. "They're going down when you hit the vitals, but outside of that they're just not feeling pain!"

"Black Lace? Kamikaze? Who knows what they're using?" Sinclair said. "They all bleed the same!" He swore and fired a single round from his underbarrel grenade launcher at a small clump of Nasty Grrls, scattering them but only winging two as they dived for cover quickly. "It's doing wonders for their reflexes, though!"

"They're staying split up in fire teams, like we are." Rebecca said as she split her attention between monitoring the overhead drone feed and contributing her own rifle fire to the engagement. "I don't have anything worth a drone shot yet."

"Two, watch the flanks!" Sinclair called. "This wave's got us pinned, and if they're this organized then they might know the anvil-and-hammer routine too!"

"Contact, west side!" Team Two acknowledged barely thirty seconds later. "We're repositioning to get a better angle on the alley we just came out of, second group of them swung in behind!"

I ejected my magazine and reloaded. Even with me limiting myself to single aimed shots, and generally hitting what I aimed at, I'd still gone through thirty rounds so far. "Boss, we've got at least twenty of them down and they're still not giving up!"

"Wait, a lot of the second wave aren't Nasty Grrls." Rebecca said as she kept watching her drone camera. "Orks in Impaler gang colors, looks like. Rent-a-muscle from the South Side warlords?"

"Looks like somebody really wanted Alpha gone." Sinclair said. "Well, at least we-"

The BOOM of a concussion grenade knocked half our team sprawling as a particularly lucky Nasty Grrl managed to get it right through the window of our improvised strongpoint from her own M22's underbarrel grenade launcher. Rebecca, who'd been furthest from the window, nailed her in the face with a short burst from her rifle while the rest of the grenadier's squad barely made it halfway across the street before Adamson and I got back in the game and cut them to pieces in the open.

"Casualties?" Sinclair coughed as he regained his own footing, to be met with a reassuring wave of denials.

"Intensity's dropping." Team Two called in, as we ourselves noticed the amount of incoming fire against us starting to slacken off. Each of us had several lead splashes on our armor that would have been incapacitating or fatal wounds for anyone not decked out in top-line Ares wargear, but outside of a few bruises we were all still fully combat-effective.

"They're drawing back." Sinclair noted. "Right, let's shift south a little while they're reorganizing their next push. Two, head first down this route-" he methodically marked waypoints on the map "-while we cover, then set up at the end and guide us in."

"Team Two moving." they acknowledged, and after I methodically sniped the couple of lookouts the Nasty Grrls had left to watch where we'd dug in we relocated half a block south and got set up in a new position.

"Any answer to the hail?" Sinclair asked Rebecca.

"I left it looping the whole time while we were busy, but nothing." she shrugged. "If they're still alive there's no way they haven't heard the noise by now, so-"

"They're either really paranoid or else they're toast." Jeffers agreed.

"We can't call mission complete until we've at least stepped on the bodies." Sinclair noted. "Let's hope the Grrls aren't willing to throw too much of their good money after bad-"

"Technical coming up from the south!" Rebecca noted, as the drone feed popped up on all our HUDs again with the latest threat highlighted on it. The truck in question was a heavy Ford pickup with the classic Third World improvisation of a .50-caliber heavy machine gun, genuine vintage 20th-century issue, mounted on a pintle in the truck bed. A Chicago city bus, repainted in flamboyant gang colors, followed along behind it.

"Damn, a genuine Browning. Shame to blow up a venerable antique like that." Jeffers said wistfully.

"And there's their reinforcements." Sinclair said with satisfaction. "Status on the Wandjina?"

"Cocked and locked." Rebecca said smugly. "I wait until they stop?"

"Whoever's in charge of the Grrls here is going to want to talk to their backup team." he agreed. "We let them get in and feeling confident, then blow their reinforcements and their command structure all at once."

"Contact." Team Two reported. "Nasty Grrls are pushing a blocking force forward to pin us in place while their reinforcements get set up to roll us over."

"Stand by..." Sinclair said softly, as Team Two began trading just enough shots with the front line of Nasty Grrls to keep them interested but not enough to expose themselves to enemy fire to any real degree.

"Almost there." Rebecca said, her voice cat-calm as she closed her eyes and synced with the drone. "Almost there..."

The gun truck and the troop bus came into view of the rest of us at the end of the block, and a small grouping of Nasty Grrls down there left cover to run over to the bus and get ready. We all huddled down as much as we could - the gun truck was in a position where it could cut any of us to pieces, museum piece or not, if we were stupid enough to expose ourselves.

"Now." Sinclair nodded just as the huddle over there reached maximum excitement, and from its lazy circle over 5000 feet above us the Wandjina fire-support drone kicked loose a single hypervelocity anti-armor missile. Screaming straight downward at almost Mach Two, the 'Fencer' anti-armor missile landed directly on top of the technical to blow it, the bus, and everyone within a ten-meter radius around it into superheated confetti.

"Bullseye!" Sinclair yelled triumphantly as our air support blew the guts out of the enemy force with a single shot. "All right, light them up!" he continued, and we all got back on the firing line and started blasting away with everything we had. The sudden shock of heavy losses, the decap strike of their leader and the CO of the arriving reinforcements, and our show of force did exactly what it was supposed to - make the surviving Nasty Grrls realize that this was not their night. And they'd taken all of these losses against ten of us, without us bringing in any reinforcements except for one tactical drone. We hadn't even had the Skyhawks swoop down to add any contributions from their own Firelance laser turrets.

"And there they run." Adamson said with satisfaction. "Now we get back to work."

"Popcorn, this is Alpha." a cool radio voice suddenly broken in our tacnet. "Transmit recognition codes."

"Nice to hear from you, Alpha! Where the hell have you been?" Sinclair spoke for us all as Rebecca uploaded the recognition codes we'd been given by Prophet to the tacnet.

"Codes check out. Popcorn. And we were staying out of sight, as we were ordered to." came the curt rejoinder. "We're in the abandoned bank building to your northwest, coming out now."

"Everyone hold fire to the northwest, blue, blue." Sinclair dutifully repeated, despite the fact that all of us had clearly heard the transmission and none of us were remotely stupid enough to shoot the very people we were here to rescue.

"Bank vault." Rebecca noted to me softly as we brushed ourselves off and got ready to link up. "No wonder their comms and beacons went dark."

"Don't loosen up just yet." Sinclair said as we fell back into formation and exited the building. "We're still-"

"CONTACT!" Team Two's leader shouted in a panic. "Bugs bugs bugs, they're right on top of us!"

"Call your evac birds, we have got to go!" Alpha-One's voice broke in on us.

"Team Two, what's your status?" Sinclair asked as we broke into a run towards their position. "Team Two-"

Glaring red icons began to pop into view at the tops of our displays. Loss indicators, indicating when a trooper's vital-signs monitor just flatlined. Team Two Lead, down. Team Two-Five, down. Team Two-Three-

"Popcorn Flight we need dust-off now now now, LZ is hot, LZ is hot!" Sinclair shouted, while marking a nearby intersection with a digital waypoint to indicate where the choppers were landed. "Alpha, link up with us and push to Two's position!"

"Like hell." Alpha-One replied dispassionately. "Our only priority is to cover the package. You do what you have to do, but as soon as those birds touch dirt one of them will be leaving with us on it."

"Have it your way!" Sinclair shouted disgustedly. "The rest of you, follow me!"

"Popcorn Flight on the ground in one minute." the tacnet transmitted.

"Popcorn Flight, this is Prophet." Mission control broke in. "Team Alpha will exfil immediately on Flight One, Flight Two will remain on station to cover and extract Popcorn."

We ignored the byplay as we rounded the corner and saw the remnants of Team Two frantically trying to hold back a push of several giant mantis monsters. Team Two's own heavy-weapons trooper was essentially all that was keeping them in the fight, as his Firelance had already blasted several of them in half, but we arrived just in time to see his weapon overheat and cycle out and before it could finish cooling down one of the monsters blurred forward and tore him to shreds with its forelimbs, armor and all.

Before Sinclair could even issue a command we all moved on reflex. Adamson roared in anger and started firing his own laser on maximum aperture, recklessly burning through his battery and coolant pack as quickly as he could. Rebecca let her rifle snap back onto its magnetic mount as she unhesitatingly dove forward to grab the fallen Two-Four - by now the only survivor of Team Two - and try to pull him back to the rest of us. Me, Sinclair, and Jeffers fell into a phalanx and volley-fired APDS rounds on full automatic, doing our best to chip and distract the several man-sized insect monsters long enough for Adamson to finish burning them down-

-and then one of them glared at us with intelligence in its eyes, and with a terrifying hiss and a twitch of its foreleg a freaking stunball detonated in the middle of our group, knocking us all for a loop. When the fuck could bugs cast spells-?

Adamson staggered and fell to one knee, his laser fire ceasing as the magic knocked him half-unconscious and left him helpless against their rush. Jeffers and Sinclair, both caught in the center of the detonation, hit the ground. Rebecca was still moving, but had her hands full and her back turned and out of position.

And I snarled and nervelessly thought a command into my smartlink, and my underbarrel grenade launcher pinged back with an acknowledgement as the advanced Ares multi-mode high-explosive memory-plastic grenade reconfigured itself just as I'd instructed.

Anti-vehicle/shaped charge. the grenade acknowledged, and the Smartlink-II's ballistic computer drew a smooth dotted arc on my HUD as I delicately lofted my rifle barrel just so to lob the 40mm grenade straight-down that bug's laughing gullet.

The ludicrous gibs of the insect shaman spattering all over made the other two pause long enough for our big ork to get back in the game, and his Firelance hit full overheat and automatically shut off just as soon as he finished turning the second into ashes. The whup-whup-whup overhead of Popcorn Flight-Two coming in low over our alley and using its own nose-mounted laser turret to burn the next wave of bugs down the alley to ash was a welcome salute to our continued survival, and we helped the rest of the team - and the sole, shellshocked survivor of Team Popcorn-Two - back to their feet.

"Nice shooting back there." Adamson grudged out to me reluctantly. "Thanks."

"Yeah, well, that laser you're carrying costs something like half a million nuyen and I didn't want them taking it out of my salary for the rest of time." I threw back sarcastically, my exhaustion letting my brain-to-mouth filter slip again.

"Oh fuck you." he snapped back, and then one corner of his lip involuntarily quirked up in a grin.

We nodded at each other and then I turned to acnowledge Sergeant Sinclair coming up to me. "Overhead looks clear, so we've got time to carry the bodies back to the LZ. Get out the bags." he ordered us, and Jeffers and Rebecca set up on overwatch while the three of us bigger guys finished loading what was left of our comrades into the body bags and loading them onboard the remaining Skyhawk. After a quick head-count to make sure everyone was on board, dead or alive, Sinclair gave the all-clear to the pilot and the rear hatch hissed shut behind us on a whisper of hydraulics as the bird tilted and we got back in the air.

"He all right?" Sinclair asked Rebecca, who was kneeling over the now-unconscious survivor of Popcorn-Two along with the helicopter's crew chief.

"Physically." she said ruefully.

"I had to trank him, poor guy was about ready to completely lose it. They'll have to medevac him back at base for a full neuro consult." the crew chief contributed.

"Can't blame him." Jeffers agreed, looking down at the lucky - or unlucky - trooper who'd just lost four teammates in the blink of an eye. "Man, it really turns on a dime out here doesn't it? Tear through like half a company of indigs as easily as taking a dump, then turn around and lose half our effectives to bug monsters before we can even stop to wipe our ass."

"Popcorn, this is Prophet. We confirm Team Alpha's safe return to base camp, so we'll register this one as mission accomplished. Your opcon is hereby returned to your normal chain of command, so RTB and resume your rotation. Good work out there, gentlemen, and good night." they concluded, and then the link to Prophet closed out of our unit's tacnet.

"Well, that's what they pay us for." Sinclair reassured us after a long pause. "And good work to all of you. Especially you, Trooper." he said, looking meaningfully at me.

"You're welcome, sir." I acknowledged his thanks, flush with pride at no longer being 'rookie' anymore.

---

Author's Note: First off, no, this is not set in the same timeline as "The Unconquerable". And our MC is not a CYOA user, not an isekai, not an SI. He's just a guy who lives here.

I needed to write something but I was stuck for any grand ideas, so now I'm trying something more street level. The cyberpunk genre's gotten a revival recently, and my experience with 'Unconquerable' has given me a taste for writing for Shadowrun, so we're going back to Shadowrun. But, everybody's written and/or writing the tale of the plucky street samurai, so, let's explore how life goes on the corpo side. And from a grunts'-eye view (to start with, at least), not the CEO's suite. So screw it, it's time for some Call of Duty: Shadowrun.

This one has no story bible, no real outline, no plan, and no guarantees. But when RL is getting bleah, at least spending a couple hours every day doing creative work beats spending them staring at the monitor rereading the same old flame wars.

Bolt counters are advised that early-edition Shadowrun suffers from being a cyberpunk game written in the 80s and 90s, meaning that the 'future' tech lists completely overlooked common technologies that we have now, let alone should have had in the future. So while I'll do my best to stick to the overall Shadowrun tech milestones and dates, if common sense says that a certain bit of atmospherics should by all rights logically have existed earlier then it's going to exist earlier, even if that means I'm giving basic augmented-reality BattleTac capabilities to people who are currently in 2nd edition Shadowrun and that only came in late 3rd/early 4th. Because even before the full Wireless Matrix existed and you couldn't do full-on decking except through a hardline, OTL's wireless capabilities still more than existed in Shadowrun too.

 

And, time for a database entry on which megacorporation our MC is working for.

Ares Macrotechnology

Ares Macrotechnology is (as of 2057) the fifth-largest corporation in the world, one of the seven founding members of the Corporate Court, and one of the only eight AAA-rated extraterritorial megacorporations currently existing. Since the eight AAAs that form the Corporate Court collectively control over half the wealth-producing assets of the world between them, its wealth and power are obviously immense. Without the cooperation of the megacorporate system - as set up and ruled by its ruling council of AAA megacorporations, the Corporate Court - the planetary economy simply does not function. This has obvious repercussions as to what kind of power and influence the large megacorporations have... and how cold-bloodedly they are willing to compete with each other for power and influence.

As an extraterritorial megacorporation Ares is, literally, a sovereign nation. It can grant or deny citizenship to anyone it pleases, operate its own currency, declare its own sovereign borders and guard them with deadly force, conduct its own international trade and foreign policy, and both write and interpret all of the laws on Ares territory. As per the Business Recognition Accords as ratified by the Corporate Court, extraterritorial territory is defined by three things - corporate territory must be continuous and contiguous (that is to say, it must be a single volume of space that is intuitively and obviously declared separate from its surroundings), it must be declared (that is, its status as extraterritorial megacorporate turf must be publicly posted, along with a disclosure of the ultimate owner's identity), and it must be in lawful possession (that is, the megacorporation must have purchased or leased the land from its original owner, or otherwise obtained it by duly recognized process of law in its native jurisdiction, before it can then sever the land from that jurisdiction to claim it as corporate territory).

Ares Macrotechnology began as a loose conglomerate of aerospace and defense technology firms put together by the corporate raiding of Nicholas Aurelius Sr., a senior shareholder in General Motors and an aggressive investor and futurist, at the beginning of the 21st century. A key part of the American military-industrial complex from its inception, Ares was in on the megacorporate extraterritoriality phenomenon from its very beginning. Always willing to gamble big in order to win big, Aurelius never stopped his bloodthirsty pace of corporate acquisition even during the several economic collapses and crises of the early 2000s, to the point that he was able to buy the remnants of NASA away from the failing United States government and refound it as the private space technology corporation AresSpace.

In 2024 Nicholas Aurelius reorganized his mass of corporations underneath the umbrella holding company "Ares Macrotechnology", and through luck as much as skill managed to bring it intact through the worldwide Matrix Crash of 2029. Finally growing old enough to retire, he passed his crown as CEO and chairman of the board to his son Leonard Aurelius and finally passed away of a heart attack in 2033.

Less than a year after the elder Aurelius' death, his family would lose control of Ares Macrotechnology when a previously unknown corporate raider named Damien Knight burst onto the scene out of nowhere. On January 24, 2033, the East Coast Stock Exchange suddenly received an incredibly rapid and complex series of buy/sell orders and futures trades, the legendary "Nanosecond Buyout", which over the course of sixty-three seconds of highly advancd expert-system transactions somehow resulted in Damien Knight acquiring a full 22 percent of the voting stock of Ares Macrotechnology before anyone could even realize what had happened, let alone how. Backed by a further 12 percent that was held by a shadowy front company named 'Gavilan Ventures' and swaying a crucial margin of swing voters his way via his sheer audacity and charisma, Knight was able to challenge the board of directors and be voted in as the new CEO and Chairman of the Board of Ares, displacing Leonard Aurelius to the ranks of the minority stockholders.

Proving himself to be an even more aggressive and brilliant financial genius than the elder Aurelius, Damien Knight led Ares Macrotechnology on a new wave of economic expansion that catapulted it up from the bottom ranks of the AAAs to solidly in the mid-carders, narrowly challenging such venerable giants as Renraku and Fuchi for primacy of place. Ares Arms became far and away the greatest weapons manufacturing corporation in the world, both in volume of sales and in the sophistication and power of its defense technology product lines. Ares Space challenged both Yamatetsu and Saeder-Krupp's space technology divisions as a worthy rival in the fields of orbital industry, satellite technology, and even deep space exploration. And Knight Errant became the foremost PMC in the world, larger than many national armies and an industry leader setting the standard in everything from full milspec field units to military advisors and trainers for foreign military forces to all varieties of corporate security, executive protection, and privatized law enforcement.

In mid-2057, the death of the Great Dragon Dunkelzahn would change the situation on the Ares board of directors. During the probate of Dunkelzahn's estate it was revealed that he had been the owner of the shell corporation Gavilan Ventures, and was thus the holder of the percentage of Ares stock that had given Damien Knight the critical margin to outvote the Aurelius family in the first place. Moreover, Damien Knight had managed to negotiate a deal with the Draco Foundation that gave him uncontested proxy rights to vote the Gavilan Ventures shares as he saw fit, giving him an unassailable control of the Ares board of directors for at least the next decade.

In addition, former senior Ares executive Kyle Haeffner, who had left Ares to become Dunkelzahn's running mate, had succeeded him upon his assassination to become President of the United Canadian-American States. Ares' already close relationship with the UCAS military-industrial complex is predicted to only become even closer with a former Ares senior executive now in the chief executive's chair.

Ares Macrotechnology has a major presence in every continent in the world, but its global HQ is located in Detroit, Michigan.

Major subsidaries of Ares Macrotechnology include Knight Errant Security Services, Ares Arms, AresSpace, Ares Global Entertainment (which also owns NBS, one of the three largest trideo networks in North America), and General Motors. In addition, several smaller and more obscure private security firms such as Hard Corps and Wolverine, commonly believed to be competitors to Knight Errant for the smaller-scale corporate security and local security contracts, are actually indirectly owned Ares subsidiaries.

Knight Errant Security Services

Originally founded as a private security firm that specialized in corporate site security and executive protection for larger and higher-end clients, Knight Errant has expanded to become the largest and most versatile paramilitary force in the world. Its services include municipal police contracting, urban crisis management, counter-insurgency operations, special forces operations, training and consulting, military logistical consulting, and extermination of dangerous Awakened wildlife, all for sale to any legitimate client willing to pay Ares' tab.

While all of these services are lumped underneath the overall 'Knight Errant' umbrella a Knight Errant trooper can potentially be anything or anyone from a well-trained night watchman to a beat cop to a rapid-deployment assault trooper to the deadliest type of Tier One special warfare operator, all of them wearing the same uniform and ultimately answering to the same chain of command. An opposing force can never be entirely certain about exactly who or what they'll be facing when Knight Errant takes the field against them, they can only be certain that whoever they face will have been well-trained, equipped, and prepared for their intended role. And that is quite often Knight Errant's deadliest weapon indeed.

FireWatch

While Knight Errant keeps with its corporate-military theme by having lots of fancy names for various units, FireWatch is its most elite and selective special-operations branch. Like Delta Force for the US Army, they are the most highly-trained of spooky troops and handle all types of 'black' operations ranging from conventional battlefield work to urban infiltration to whatever other missions the highest echelons of Ares see fit to trust them with.

Damien Knight

"I own this city. My technology built it, my will keeps it going, and two-thirds of its citizens work for me, whether they know it or not."

Lex Luthor talking about Metropolis? Damien Knight talking about Detroit? No difference, really.

Damien Knight is a ruthless, manipulative, powerhungry genius who is one of the most famous people in the world and yet nobody really knows who he is. His background is so scanty that it's almost certainly false, and no one will admit to knowing his actual birth name or is able to credibly prove that they have a personal acquaintance with him predating his first public appearance immediately after the Nanosecond Buyout. While it's generally surmised that Dunkelzahn and his top aides must have collaborated with him on the Nanosecond Buyout, that has also never been publicly confirmed - or even addressed - by anyone involved. The most persistent rumor is that he was actually Major David Gavilan, one of the very first neurally-interfaced 'deckers' in the world as part of the original Echo Mirage project that stopped the Matrix Crash of '29, but of course there isn't anything even remotely solid backing that claim up regardless of how many conspiracy theorists have dug into it over the decades.

The finest gene therapy and biotechnology that money can buy allows Damien Knight to maintain the playboy-handsome physique of a twenty-something Olympic-tier decathlete while being at an actual age of God Only Knows. If the theory that he actually was David Gavilan is true then the man must be pushing sixty, but he clearly isn't showing it if he is. Unmarried and with no children, Damien Knight eschews the usual 'family friendly' image of a megacorporate CEO and the accompanying desire to breed a dynastic heir and instead lives the life of a super-wealthy playboy, routinely titillating and scandalizing the glitterati with his latest affair with this supermodel or that simstar - or politician, or artist, or noblewoman, or a wide range of others. Although he has access to the finest cyberware, bioware, and genetech that many can possibly buy, and of course can afford to hire any number of magical specialists as subordinates, Damien Knight is himself 100% mundane and unAwakened.

Damien Knight is CEO and chairman of the board of Ares Macrotechnology

Roger Soaring Owl

Roger Soaring Owl, originally a citizen of the Sioux Nation of the NAN, has been the CEO of Knight Errant since its inception in the mid-30s.

A competent yet undistinguished bureaucrat, even his military experience in the Sioux forces was largely as a logistics and procurement officer. His chief qualification for remaining CEO of Knight Errant is the ability to keep Knight Errant financially solvent and free of administrative snafus and his uncomplaining willingness to put up with the micromanaging of Damien Knight, who regards Knight Errant as his personal pet project to tinker with at will.

 

Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
January 5th, 2058

"I'm surprised anyone is still alive in here." I said as I linked my HUD into the feed of the surveillance drone several thousand feet overhead to look down at our convoy as it drove slowly down what was left of Interstate 90, and at the rows of crumbling, overgrown buildings the expressway was passing by.

Riding buttoned-up in an APC always sucked - in a lighter vehicle you'd have a gunport or a window to shoot back out of, as well as your choice of doors to exit through if you had to unass the vehicle in a hurry. In a Citymaster you rode in an armored box, with only the driver and the turret gunner able to actually respond to anything. And a Citymaster's being armored enough to ignore small arms fire only guaranteed that the enemy would dedicate his supply of anti-vehicle weapons to you - assuming he had any. But if he did then you were left with your only option being to pray that the Trophy counter-measures worked, because you wouldn't have time to wait for the ramp to drop so you could bail. And if we hadn't had the drone overhead to link to then we wouldn't even have been able to see anything, because the UCAS' Citymasters didn't have the external camera pickups or internal smart-display walls that ours did.

"Official estimates are that the approximately seven million people trapped in the quarantine zone have suffered 90% casualties over the past two years." Rebecca said quietly as she sat next to me, the HUD in her helmet and her retinal implants synced to the same display that I was. "I'd guess that it's more likely 95%... minimum."

"That's over six and a half million people who were left in here to starve, or freeze, or get torn apart by the bugs." I tried to wrap my head around it. "Even with all the food drops in the world-"

"It's a tragedy." Sinclair agreed from where he was sitting across from us on the other row of seats down the inside of the APC's flanks. "But all we can do now is avenge them by helping kill all these damn bugs once and for all."

"It wasn't the bugs that put up the Wall." someone- I couldn't tell exactly who- murmured discreetly. "It was the UCAS."

A disapproving snort came from the side of the compartment where the APC's turret gunner was standing with his head up in the cupola.

"There was a legitimate reason then to be worried then about possible refugees possibly being full of bug infiltrators-" Sinclair stopped and swallowed heavily. "But in hindsight, yes... maybe they made the wrong call."

"Shit was ice cold." one of the troopers - his ID tag read Merrickson in my HUD - from the other five-team riding along with us today broke in. "What they did with that phony VITAS outbreak-"

Sinclair firmed his lips even as his eyes remained sorrowful. "We're losing our concentration here, people." The interior of the APC fell silent.

"Task Force Agile, this is Guardian." the call came over the operational freq we were sharing with the UCAS Army today. 'Guardian' was the call sign for the battlefield controller sitting back at their HQ watching all the feeds, including the intel take they were split-screening from us. "No changes on plot. We have you on the scope as ten mikes from jump-off."

"Guardian, Agile One-Actual confirms." the CO of our little combined-arms expedition replied. "No contact yet."

"There's no way they don't know we're coming." I observed quietly, as the convoy slowed and began to take the off-ramp at Kedzie. "We're practically holding a parade right down the street at high noon. Anybody with a good pair of binocs on any rooftop around can tell the whole city that the armored cav is rolling in."

"I hate this combined-ops stuff." Adamson groused. "The host force always gets to make the plan, but then they throw us in head-first and expect us to bleed to unfuck their fuck-up."

"We're PMCs, Nick." Jeffers said sardonically. "The clients don't pay our premium because they think they can do the job themselves." Everybody politely ignored the angry muttering coming from the front of the APC at that one.

"Everyone double-check their gear." Sinclair ordered, and we all started doing our final weapons checkout and comm sync tests as the convoy drew within several minutes of our destination.

In the first month I'd been here I'd seen action three times, not counting our first night's excitement or routine patrols. Nobody was interested in explaining to grunts like us exactly how our targeting priorities were generated - even Sergeant Sinclair only knew what was passed on down to him from the officers, and that wasn't much more substantial than a plan-of-the-day. The rest of our time we spent doing the usual routine - training, maintaining our gear, studying background datafiles to keep fresh. But now, for the first time since I'd checked in, our whole platoon was going in on a straight-up daylight assault. And not just our platoon but also a detachment from the UCAS Army's armored cav. It was their APCs we were riding in right now, actually, even if Ares had built and sold them.

And in less than ten minutes we'd be knocking on the front door of one of the largest concentrations of bugs anyone had found this month.

"All Partner forces, this is Agile One-Actual." the UCAS task force commander interrupted my woolgathering, using the call sign our platoon of Ares augmentations to his mission had been given. "We will be arriving at final assembly area in two mikes. Be advised that we will be met by local partisans who scouted this hive for us in the first place, so do not, repeat, do not, fire on unidentified metahuman targets."

"Partner One-Actual acknowledges. All Partners, disembark as soon as the column halts but weapons tight until I give the call." Lieutenant Menendez's voice immediately followed. Sinclair's voice joined the quiet wave of acknowledgements from all the team leaders, and slightly less than two minutes later the APC came to a halt and the rear ramp began to lower. We all got out of the Citymaster as quickly as we could and quickly oriented on the target building less than a block to the south. A ten-story glass-and-metal tower, the sign out front was a discreetly anonymous street number and a small logo of whatever real-estate corporation was renting out the various floors to small tenants.

"All right, you've already heard the briefing but while we wait for our native guides I'll go over this one more time!" the Lieutenant called out. "Intel is that there's at least a hundred Roach spirits in the Kirkman office complex, laying low and digging in! That many roaches means the possibility that they're gestating a queen in there. Unfortunately roaches are good at burrowing so the simple solution of knocking the building down with an FAE is not an option in this case! We're going to have to burn them out floor by floor, bottom to top!"

Everyone turned to look at each other, but nobody talked. There really wasn't much you could say to that.

"But before we go in, we'll roll in the ANVAR-TFM canisters to soften them up! Do not forget that commercial pesticide in that high a concentration is a lethal nerve agent even to metahumans, so if your armor breaches containment you will need to immediately call away that you're compromised, inject the antagonist, and get your damn helmet off and your backup filter mask on! Then fall back to the casualty collection point outside if you can! The UCAS troopers don't have chemical protection gear as good as ours, which is why they'll be staying outside and buttoned up in their vehicles to hold the perimeter! Any questions?"

I swallowed my butterflies and raised a hand. "Sir, last month I saw an entire team go down to maybe six to ten bugs in the open, and now we're fighting a hundred-plus in tight quarters?"

"That's right, rookie, your team was on the SAR op near the stadium wasn't it?" the lieutenant glared at me. "For your general information those were mantis spirits, individually the deadliest type of bug in close quarters, and from all indicators fairly powerful specimens of the breed at that! These are roaches, quantity over quality. And they should be reduced to a fraction of their normal combat power by the pesticide in addition. Any further questions?" he glared at all of us.

"Right, then-" he continued, only to be interrupted by one of the lookouts calling away "Contact! Contact inside the perimeter!"

Everyone turned to face that direction, our weapons half-raised, just as a tall thin-faced woman with narrowly-cropped dark hair faded into view from where she'd just dropped an invisibility spell and we all relaxed on seeing that it wasn't a bug or someone with their weapons out. Her voice rang out clearly to all of us, tinged with knife-edged scorn. "Ares? I called the UCAS Army, who invited you into this?" A sudden motion in the corner of my eye drew my attention as I realized that Sinclair had reflexively taken half-a-step forward before checking himself, his expression visibly shocked to see her. What, was that all about?

"The UCAS Army." Lieutenant Menendez said pompously, striding briskly over to face off against our arriving guest escorted by the first sergeant and a couple of the guys from Team One. "Ares has greater specialized capabilities and equipment for-"

"Spare me." she continued, shutting him down instantly by sheer force of personality. Incongruously she wasn't dressed in the usual ragged clothing or looted protective gear of Zone dwellers but instead wore a suit of advanced combat armor similar to ours, but beaten and scuffed with what looked like years of abuse without an opportunity to get it to a repair center for proper refinishing. If it had ever had identifying markings or logos of any kind they'd long since been painted over or dissolved.

"Okay, recognition code Lima Seventeen." she continued, and we relaxed even further at hearing the code phrase we'd been told to expect from our native guide. "I'm from the Wrigleyville sanctuary community about three-quarters of a mile north of here. We found this hive, and I scouted it out for you. These damn bugs are too close to us to be allowing them to raise any new roach mothers to maturity - one is enough! - and they're also sitting too close to the main trade routes to some of our food suppliers south of here. I'm a mage, and a veteran bug-stomper, and I'll be going in with you to burn the place." She spoke right over the Lieutenant as he tried to interrupt. "I've already been through several of the lower floors and haven't found it, so the damn roaches are keeping it higher off the ground. Which is not usual behavior for roaches, so there's something in there they really don't want disturbed."

"But you're not certain there's a new roach-mother gestating in there." the Lieutenant pressed, visibly wrinkling his nose in digust at the idea of working with someone who looked to be as much of a hardcore shadowrunner as any antagonist-of-the-week from an action trid.

"Unusually large cluster of bugs, lots of foraging expeditions bringing in extra food, highly sophisticated defensive behavior beyond their usual standard. Maybe they're just hiding their collection of Pop-Cracks prizes in there, Lieutenant, but I doubt it." she scoffed. "And however long you've been bug stomping it isn't a tithe on how long I've been doing it, so don't even try."

"Arrogant know-it-all indig-" Jeffers began, only for Sinclair to turn to him and shut him down with the harshest glare I'd ever seen him use. He didn't even have to speak, his expression said it all.

"Team leaders over here, we'll debrief our expert." the Lieutenant answered with heavy sarcasm, and Sinclair fell out with the other fire-team lead NCOs to enter the huddle. After a couple of minutes they broke up, and my eyebrow raised as I noticed that the native guide had attached herself to Sinclair as he returned to us.

"I volunteered us to escort our local scout." he answered before anyone could even ask.

Lieutenant Menendez went over to the command track to coordinate final details with the UCAS senior officer before we entered the building. Two of the other teams started unloading the gas canisters and escorting them into the lobby. The other teams started setting up and preparing for entry, and for a minute nobody was looking at us.

"Lieutenant, what are you doing here?" Sinclair asked her with quiet urgency, literally snapping to attention as he faced her.

"Captain." she corrected him. "And seriously, you trust them all that much?" she probed.

"They're my team." he answered her as matter-of-factly as a man saying The world is round.

"Fair enough." she nodded back.

"Captain Ravenheart was my platoon commander during my first year in Rapid-Response." Sinclair hurriedly explained to the rest of us. "But ma'am, you-"

"Team Three, get on the mark!" Lieutenant Menendez's voice snapped out, and we all started to hustle.

A curt "We'll talk later." was Ravenheart's only reaction.

For all that we were sweating going straight into the depths of a bug hive, for once the operation actually was as much of a roach stomp as the brass had promised it would be. The roaches really were notably smaller and weaker than the mantid spirits that I'd seen shred the old Team Five so easily last month, and made weaker still by the part where we'd flooded the building with enough pesticide that anyone not who wasn't wearing sealed hardsuits like ours or been implanted with chrome lungs would die in under a minute.

Of course, 'smaller and weaker' was still a relative term. We were still talking about man-sized giant bugs, with at least most of the proportional strength and toughness that implied. Even a small roach spirit was superhumanly fast, as strong and tough as the average ork, and had an armored carapace that could stop pistol fire. The bigger ones were worse. And they were stealthy as hell, effectively impossible to sneak up on without magic due to how sensitive they were at picking up vibrations in the air and ground, and goddamn fast. Anybody who'd walked alone into this building - except Ravenheart, apparently - would have gotten shredded to pieces before they could stop to scratch their ass.

Without the pesticide weakening them even we'd have needed a full company to do this job and would have taken respectable casualties in the doing, and that was despite us being decked out in Ares' top-of-the-line milspec combat armor and tricked out with large-caliber battle rifles loaded with APDS and semi-automatic 20mm assault cannons for heavy weapons for popping holes in hardened roach hide. And with plentiful magical support riding along besides, as well as us being a cut above the usual line grunt in both training and experience. There wasn't a militia in the Zone that could have hoped to get this job done without getting an entire horde of themselves wiped out in here. Even the UCAS Army was staying outside for a reason - their spec-ops teams could have matched our skill and had at least some of our gear, but the troops waiting outside would have gotten ripped to pieces in here even if they wouldn't have been taking their lives in their hands trying to fight bugs in close quarters while wearing relatively fragile chem suits and in an atmosphere pumped so full of nerve agent that even with our NBC protective systems we still had to attach internal oxygen tanks to affoid suffocating. Which is why they were staying outside turtled up in their APCs and limiting their contributions to keeping us from being interrupted by anyone else, as well as using their chaingun turrets to pop what few roaches decided to try leaving by the window.

So 1st Platoon of Bravo Company, Ares Containment Zone Task Force methodically cleared their way deeper into the heart of the bug nest, room by room. BattleTac linked all of our suits' and weapons' sensor systems into a single unified grid much like IVIS did for the Army's AFVs, so between that and generous onboard computing power in our commlinks the HUDs in our helmets let us effectively see through walls. A simple command thought into our datajacks or helmet 'trodes would let us put digital waypoints or target markers up on the readouts to do callouts and warnings for the entire platoon or any selected subgroup of it, automatically outline both us and anyone the software could identify as hostile in green or red target auras respectively, and several other nifty tricks besides.

So what would for other troops have been an incredibly tedious hours'-long evolution of clearing the zone by searching one room at a time, then posting security detachments behind us to hold corner and chokepoints and keep the bugs from flowing back in behind them, with every step having to be called out audibly to keep people from running into each other or shooting each other, could instead be done by us in a fraction of that time. We could press on multiple axes simultaneously without worrying about friendly fire, secure our rear flanks simply by dropping some sensor buoys at the relevant intersections to watch for bugs while we all moved on ahead, and use a whole variety of high-tech sensors to see straight through the darkness and interior ruins to spot the roaches lurking under the rubble before they went off on us like so many insectoid land mines. We stacked up every possible unfair advantage we could and used it to murder our enemy in their own homes as thoroughly as we could, no matter how unsportsmanlike or drama-free our behavior had to be.

In other words, we were soldiers.

"Would you explain something to me?" I asked 'Captain' Ravenheart as our team was held up at an atrium on the sixth floor, waiting for two of the other teams to finish sweeping side of the building before we resumed our advance upwards. "About the bugs." I continued when she turned to glare at me suspiciously.

"If I can." she conceded, relaxing a bit.

"The corpo briefing we got was all full of technobabble, but if you've logged serious time as a street mage then hopefully you can dumb it down for me. Aren't bug spirits supposed to be spirits? Y'know, magical critters from the astral plane? Shouldn't you and the other mages here be the only thing we've got that can even touch them? I mean, I know spirits can temporarily manifest as solid so even mundanes like me can see and interact with 'em, but even when manifested they can just basically ignore physical trauma and fade back out at will." I shrugged.

"That's accurate as far as it goes." she conceded. "But seriously, Ares didn't even explain 'true form' versus 'flesh form' to you guys?" she rolled her eyes, and I noticed Rebecca moving in closer to us to fascinatedly eavesdrop on the convo. She hadn't gotten to be our squad techie without having a fascination for all kinds of technobabble. Plus she was just one of those naturally nosy people, even if on her it looked cute.

"Not in any words that made sense." I agreed. "Or if they did, went over my head like a red-balling panzerjock."

"Right. OK, the sixty-second version is that it really is 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' with these fucking things. Bug spirits that are still fully spirits are 'true form'. But insect shamans can not only summon bug spirits, but use a ritual to invest them into a human captive. A permanent spirit possession, where a bug spirit eats the soul of whoever lived in there and walks their carcass around as a 'flesh-form'. Most of the time they're barely able to use the flesh as an anchor at all, and it doesn't remotely retain the human shape." My blood ran cold at the sheer matter-of-factness with which she described this fucking Lovecraftian bullshit.

"You're telling me that every fucking bug I've put a bullet in since I got here used to be a person?" I almost shit my pants.

"Yes." Ravenheart replied quietly.

"You said 'most' of them don't retain the human shape." Rebecca chimed in softly. "That implies-?"

"If it's a 'good merge' - which thankfully doesn't happen often - then yes, you can get a bug walking around inside a human skinsuit." Ravenheart agreed. "Worse yet, they assimilate the memories of the host too, so they can walk and talk and emulate human behavior. Make no mistake - the human's spirit, the anima is still as gone as if they went full cockroach. Every flesh-form you see, no matter how human, is not still not a person - it's a thing that murdered a person." She stopped and visibly wound herself down from an oncoming rant. "But memories have a physical component in the brain that they're now using, so they can still pretend to a humanity they never had. There were bug infiltrators walking around years before the Zone went up, even if they had to work a lot more slowly and subtly. The whole Universal Brotherhood mess alone-" She shook her head. "Getting the Chicago hive together was supposed to be their big invasion kickoff, and we barely-." She quietly slammed one palm on a nearby wall in frustration. "Fucking bugs!"

"Fucking bugs." I breathed out heavily in horrified agreement. "So despite the part where it makes 'em more vulnerable, the bugs are still taking and 'flesh-forming' as many people as they can so they can stay here? Permanently? Instead of having to go back wherever spirits go to when the summoning runs out?"

"Exactly." Ravenheart nodded at me briskly. "And that's why we're all here wading through this nightmare."

We resumed the advance, and finished up on the ninth floor about an hour later. Ravenheart and the two combat mages our platoon had from teams One and Four just volley-fired the Roach mother spirit and its gestating daughter to death with as many manabolts as they could pump, which saved us from having to bring in a demo charge and take the top two floors off the building. The platoon stopped to take a breather while we went back down through the building and made sure to do our mop-up, which gave Ravenheart and Sinclair a chance to finally go off into a quiet corner and have that talk she'd promised him. Apparently she still wasn't willing to share her story with the rest of us.

However, despite her experience and magical powers she'd entirely underestimated both the curiosity and the talent of our team's hacker, and so despite her and Sinclair having gone off-net to talk privately with their helmets touching Rebecca had used her maintenance backdoor to discreetly re-open Sinclair's helmet mike anyway, only she kept it isolated from the rest of the platoon tacnet and just over our own intra-team circuit to us. Or, rather, to me and her, because Adamson and Jeffers visibly didn't want to risk it and both volunteered to go down the hall and secure that corner while we did our thing over here.

"-two survivors of my FireWatch team besides myself." her voice sounded in our ears, and both Rebecca's eyes and mine went wide at realizing that Captain Ravenheart had been a member of Knight Errant's single most elite spec-ops unit, the Ares equivalent of Delta Force. "Maybe twenty or more other Knight Errant personnel who got stuck in here when the Wall went up and they wrote off everyone in the city- from the security detachment at the local Ares office, here on other routine assignments, you can imagine. And, of course, all sorts of volunteers from among the civilians that we're guarding plus a smattering of veterans from other places."

"And they just abandoned your whole team inside here when the Wall went up instead of letting you report back in? They can't be worried that you're possessed, they know how to check for that now. And even if there aren't enough mages to astrally scan everyone who wants out of the Zone, there's certainly enough to verify our own high-level operatives!" Sinclair thought out loud.

"They won't even answer my radio hails when I try to share what intel we're still gathering from in here. And I'm not even going to share my speculations about why that might be happening, Gabriel. You're not cut out for this kind of spook shit and you never were. You're a good, loyal trooper- and that's all you should need to be." she shook her head at him.

"It's still not right. Look, they might be leaving you out in the cold but I can run a message-" He began.

"No." She interrupted him firmly.

"If not up my official chain of command, then maybe-" he fell silent as she held up her hand, palm out, visibly thinking over his last remark.

"That... might be useful, but I don't want to risk it at this juncture. To risk you at this juncture. Look, for right now I'm handling this in my own way. If it turns out that I really need to use that connection later-" she reassured him.

"Then you know how to reach me, ma'am." Sinclair agreed passionately.

"Now let's get back to-" Ravenheart suddenly broke off and her head snapped around to look at the both of us, as we'd apparently made the mistake of staring too visibly at the goings-on over there.

"Oh god damn it- Rebecca, switch off and forget you ever heard any of that. In fact, wipe your entire comms buffer, both of you!" Sinclair swore viciously, before reaching up to check and then click off the physical lockout switch on his helmet radio.

Ravenheart's I will hunt you down and murder you in your beds if you even breathe any of that too loud facial expression did all the talking that she needed to do on the topic, and she ghosted out of formation and headed back to wherever she'd come from as soon as we reached the ground floor again without even stopping to check out with Lieutenant Menendez. Nobody else brought the topic up all through our ride back to the Knight Errant prefab compound that they'd set up here when Ares' component of the CZ operation had really got going, and we hung up our gear and went through the post-mission debrief and checkout and all the rest of it.

We'd had what Jeffers explained to me were pretty light casualties for a bug hunt of this magnitude. Nobody had died, even if two guys had had to be medevac'ed for toxin exposure after bugs had breached their suits and they almost certainly wouldn't be back out of the hospital until Ares had paid for some new cyberlungs. Outside outside of that we had only a few guys with broken bones, lacerations and contusions, and one particularly unlucky trooper from Fire-Team Six who was still on a concussion protocol after a charging roach had sent him out a third-story window. So we already knew that First Platoon would be taken off the line for maintain-and-refit for at least a week while we waited for most of our casualties to get off of sick call, and were looking forward to some down time.

So it wasn't until me, Rebecca, and Sgt. Sinclair all decided to do a nice little jog in the late evening that we got an opportunity to discuss what had happened in private while we were busy loping up and down the now-deserted perimeter road underneath the spotlights.

"You invaded our privacy." Sinclair snapped at Rebecca, his voice audibly full of hurt.

"You're too damn trusting sometimes." she glared back at him fearlessly. "Look, it was pretty obvious from the jump that some kind of spook shit was going on, and- hell, she even said it!" Rebecca continued in an exasperated tone of voice more suited to a mother chewing out her sulky teenager. "You are not cut out at all for spook shit! You are not remotely devious enough! So as your best and decidedly more subtle friend I did what I always do, I looked out for you!"

"And you?" he glared at me.

"Not gonna lie, I was just curious as hell." I admitted frankly. "But Rebecca's got a point. This lady you haven't seen in years expects you to snap to and salute out of the blue just because she was your platoon leader once? Boss, do you even know she was still with Ares when the Wall went up? Like, for certain know? For all that she couldn't show bona fides to us today, she could have already burned her SIN and gone shadowrunner years ago."

"I-" he began, before closing his mouth. "You don't know her, you've never met her before, so you can't be blamed for how absolutely bullshit that sounded." Sinclair sighed, not even in anger but in sorrow. "But you are both talking out of your ignorant, overly suspicious - and yes, sincerely concerned for a friend and teammate - asses. Captain Ravenheart lived and breathed service to Ares even more than I do." He paused briefly and continued. "Besides, she wouldn't still be wearing her old suit if she hadn't still in Ares service when the Containment Zone was put into place. Unless it's in a no-man's-land like the CZ you can't even begin to go wearing this gear on the street any more than you could try shadowrunning in repainted Red Samurai armor. If she'd already gone into the shadows so much as a week before the Wall went up, she'd have had to ditch that suit like it was radioactive."

"Valid point." Rebecca conceded intelligently. "But I'm still not apologizing."

"I know better than to expect that." he rolled his eyes briefly, before exhaling heavily and nodding at her with a compassionate smile. "But you both understand-"

"What, that we have to forget that this shit ever happened? She said it herself - you staying the hell away from this whole business of hers is the best thing she can do to protect you. Which also means us. So if anybody ever asks, angry Indian lady spent the entire trip ranting Neo-Anarchist propaganda at us from the jump and never so much as hinted that she wasn't born from two SINless strangers who'd met at a masquerade ball." I agreed immediately.

"Let's just hope that anybody else in the platoon who spotted exactly what she was wearing thinks that she looted it off of a corpse." Rebecca reminded us. "But yes. The lips, they are zipped. I'll make sure Jeffers and Adamson understand that too."

"Good." Sinclair nodded at both of us, and we fell back into a companionable silence as we finished the rest of our run.

"Hey boss, you hear the news?" Jeffers greeted us enthusiastically as we re-entered the barracks after showering. "Command thinks we need some decompression after a major bug incident, so on top of the operational stand-down the whole platoon's getting a three-day pass!"

"Really?" he raised his eyebrows, then pulled out his PDA and tapped the screen to check his messages. "And- yes, that's the official announcement right there. Corporal, show Mitchell how to hit the camp intranet and download his liberty card."

"It goes on your credstick, so you use one of the hardline terminals." Rebecca walked me over, and it was the work of a moment to download the right digital encryption key to my stick. Now any MP who ran my stick would see that I did indeed have authenticated and verified permission to be off-base and in civvies, as well as a handy countdown clock utility for when it would expire and I'd have to report back in.

"Your armor and loadout got to be locked up in the armory when you're on pass, but you can take your sidearm off base even in civvies." Jeffers explained good-naturedly to me as we headed off to check in our gear. Our two team NCOs stayed behind to finish up some admin stuff before they signed out - ah, the perks of rank - so us line grunts got to go ahead. "Eagle Security's got the local police contract and they're a cooperating jurisdiction, so a Knight Errant ID is all we need for a concealed-carry license."

"Good, because you'd have to be an idiot to hit the Strip unarmed." I agreed. "You guys have a Strip here, right?"

Jeffers snorted. "You ever hear of a military base that didn't have the bars right outside? Or other entertainments?"

"Well I don't mind a strip club, but I've never liked the idea of paying for sex outright." I answered straightforwardly. "So if the upcoming tour of local attractions includes your favorite whorehouse, I'll skip."

"Any particular reason?" he probed diffidently. "I mean, shit dude, you just spent almost a whole year in the training cycle and then a month in the field, the back pressure's got to be pretty built up."

"Maybe he's married." Adamson broke in from behind us, him having caught up to us easily on his longer legs. "We don't all wear rings."

"Oh, you are?" I turned to look at him over my shoulder, legitimately interested.

"Known her since grade school." he said proudly. "What, you surprised?" he continued challengingly.

"Nope." I nodded back at him, and then turned and left it at that. We reached the armory in silence, checked in our gear without incident, and officially signed out on pass.

"So, not due back on-base until midnight on the 9th." Jeffers said with great satisfaction as soon as we'd clocked out. "It's not even 2200 yet, we've still got time to make last call at my favorite place."

"Been a long day." I demurred. "I'm just gonna head back to the barracks, fall into my bunk, sleep luxuriously until late tomorrow morning, and then go hunt up an Applebee's off-post and get myself a stack of pancakes this high. With extra carbosyrup." I smiled widely in anticipation. "No offense to the food service personnel of Ares, but whoever the corp's connection for pancake batter is should be fired. Maybe out of a howitzer."

"Yeah, that shit tastes like recycled plascrete." Jeffers agreed readily. "Weird, Sergeant usually takes the whole team out for drinks are on him when we've just finished a big one, but looks like he's staying in tonight too." he mused. "Well, that just leaves more for us. You comin' with me, big guy?"

"I could go with a few beers before bedtime." Adamson agreed, and the two of them headed off and I went to turn in.

* * * * *​

O'Hare Subsprawl, UCAS
January 7th, 2058

O'Hare Airport had at one time been the busiest airport in the world, and was still well up there on the list of global international air transport nexuses. Thousands of planes flew into and out of this airspace every day, ranging from hypersonic semi-ballistics that could touch the edge of space to slingshot you halfway around the world in less than two hours all the way down to local commuter puddle-jumpers. Keeping all the air traffic in this space from colliding with each other was a task so complex that even the best in Expert-System driven technology and ubiquitous multi-node Matrix hookups could barely stay on top of it, a task made even more complex by the part where basically everything coming from the east that wasn't a military aircraft or a semiballistic now had to reroute around to the north or south because almost nobody wanted to risk a crash landing in the middle of the Containment Zone.

Still, the westernmost edge of the Wall was over two miles from where I was standing so even though I could still see that shit from a rooftop, I didn't have to worry about Zone crazies or bugs while off-duty. The O'Hare complex was its own dedicated sub-sprawl in the middle of the outer reaches of the Chicago Greater Metroplex, and since there was a UCAS Air Force base here as part of the airport complex there'd been places for their troops to get loose and laid within an easy walking distance of the gate. Which was good, because Ares was leasing space for our task force's temporary compound from the Air Force and that meant we also had someplace nearby to get to. The Army guys stuck on the Wall had their own joints that had sprung up to service them, but not only was that a longer walk but putting us and the UCAS line grunts in the same off-duty joints could potentially prove... problematic. But the Air Force ground crews had no beef with us and vice versa, and so we got to unwind in peace.

After I'd gotten my pancakes I'd spent the next night cruising to see if I could find a young, unattached Air Force female enlisted who was feeling lonely, and I'd succeeded. It was just a one-night thing because she had to be back on duty the next day, but we were both adults and we knew it had just been to relax and with no particular feelings beyond that. Still, that had felt damn good. Like Jeffers had said, it had been a pretty long dry spell for me.

So I went into the next day not feeling any particular urgency, just tooling around a bit to see what I could get into without getting myself fucked up or on report. In the daytime I just bummed around helping myself to the Air Force's on-base rec facilities, as well as keeping up with my workout schedule. I'd already learned in the Rangers that when they gave you decompression time, you wanted to spend it doing precisely that. So I put it in neutral and drifted pleasantly around, except for the effort it took to keep up with the necessary maintenance for your body. Even after a top-end megacorp had paid to cram enough SOTA cyberware and bioware into you that you were loaded down to over 75% of your body's maximum augmentation tolerance, there was still no substitute for sweating out your reps everyday.

I hadn't seen any of the rest of the team except in the barracks to sleep or passing by Sinclair as he was sitting alone with some heavy thoughts and a bottle in one of the bars I'd been through last night. I'd made my hellos, of course, but he'd wanted to be alone to think over that load of heavy shit that his old CO had dropped on him and I'd respected that and left him to it. So I was surprised when late that evening I walked into this strip club in Rosemont and realized that the short guy in the urban-flash clothes sitting at one of the tables closest to the stage was actually a short girl, and one I was very familiar with.

"Hey there, Becky." I smirked at my teammate as I settled down in the seat next to her, and she nudged my shin with the sole of her shoe.

"Don't call me Becky." she mock-glared at me. "So, how's it going?"

"Not bad so far." I agreed, nodding towards the excellent view on-stage. "So, it seems like we've got our taste in women as a thing in common too, huh?"

"Yup." she agreed matter-of-factly. "Are you disappointed?"

"Little bit." I admitted frankly. "Not about how you're wired, of course, just about how it means I'm already friend-zoned for life." I shrugged. Rebecca had been the most interesting girl I'd met, and we'd been naturally 'clicking' together as friends all the first few weeks we'd known each other. Not that I was ready to profess my undying love yet, or even ask her out - and not just because of the fraternization regs - but it was a thing that was naturally in the back of a guy's mind when he was regularly spending time with an unattached girl he got along good with, especially a cute little looker like her. But, it was what it was.

"You're really okay with it?" she probed, surprising me a little.

"Why wouldn't I be?" I replied, letting my confusion show. "It's the mid-21st century for God's sake, nobody gives a shit about orientation anymore."

"Except for-" she stopped herself and looked down, actually embarassed for the first time since I'd met her. "I'm sorry. Never mind."

"Shit, you actually apologized for something, it must be serious." I tried to make a joke of it. "But-" Comprehension finally dawned for me. "Ohhhh, I get it. You find out where I'm from and looked up my hometown, didn't you. And the very first thing that came up on even a basic Matrix search was that episode of that damned soap opera, Until Tomorrow. Where one of the characters suddenly needed a hometown flashback about a wide spot in the road up in the Tennessee mountains that was at least half Humanis Policlub and all redneck, so as to give her a tragic backstory and all." I sighed.

"So you're saying that Hollywood was being even more fictional than usual?" she asked hopefully.

"In the sense that they didn't film on location and the place they used was actually better-looking than the shithole I grew up in, yeah. But the truth is what it is, and yeah, it's a rusty backwater barely surviving around an aging mine shaft and scratching crops off of hillsides with all that implies. Right up to the town being more than half Humanis." I finished, referring to the largest and most mainstream of the we-hate-everything-past-the-turn-of-the-20th-century hate groups, especially everything that came in with the Awakening such as the return of magic and the metahuman variants like elves, dwarves, orks, and trolls. They were like the old Ku Klux Klan of the previous century - something else my home region had been famous for in their day - right up to the point where the slicker parts of their political wing were so good at making their bullshit sound mainstream that at one point they'd almost successfully elected a Presidential candidate. Hell, if Kenneth Brackhaven hadn't been running against fraggin' Dunkelzahn, he'd have won! So I understood exactly what Rebecca was worried about.

"Here's the thing, though." I continued as sincerely as I could. "I'm from the other half of town." The wary silence remained between us, so I continued. "Here, slot my credstick." I said, reaching to haul it out for her. "You know that Ares loads the short-form of our personnel data onto those along with all our other permission and certifications, so I'll key you in to view mine." Not that Rebecca probably couldn't crack the user restrictions on her own, but I wasn't going to strip that naked even metaphorically.

She took the stick and slotted it into her PDA, then let me type in my passcode so she could have read-access to the cover sheet of my file. "Home of record... c/o Headquarters, Knight Errant. Next of kin, the same." She pulled my credstick out of her PDA's dataport and handed it back to me. "Orphan?"

"Nope. Just disowned." I said matter-of-factly. "Dad wanted me to join up with his hood-wearing buddies and start breaking legs along with 'em as soon as I was old enough. I went from hometown football hero to social outcast as soon as I told him 'I'll think about it'." I shrugged. "Caught a beating from the sheriff a couple days after that. Took the bus down the valley and walked into the Army recruiting office the next day."

"So you either let yourself get beat in or else you get beaten up. Christ, that sounds just like Auburn Hills only with different gangs." she shook her head disgustedly. "So much for healthy country living."

"You're from Detroit?" I said, recognizing the name of the notorious slum district that abutted even one of the most prosperous industrial centers in North America, the site of Ares' own world headquarters.

"Yeah." she nodded. "And yeah, my only way out was signing up with the corp just like you signed up with the CAS military."

"I'm sure your test scores didn't hurt." I acknowledged. Because while I had nothing to apologize for about my own IQ, Rebecca was a legitimate genius and it was impossible to miss it. I'd wondered how someone with her brains wasn't already working in corporate R&D or in one of the industrial positions, but if she'd been dirt-poor from the streets and couldn't hope to actually get into a good college on her own that would explain it. "So, did you tell Adamson where I'm from? Is that why he's been so frosty?"

"He's the reason I looked you up in the first place." Rebecca admitted. "As soon as he heard that our replacement was from the CAS military- well, he's had to put up with a lot of shit because of his tusks, even some of it from within the corp. And he likes to know which way he needs to look out in advance."

"Can't blame him." I agreed. "Although I would wish he'd at least begin to realize I'm not into that bullshit. I mean, it didn't take me long to figure out what his beef was, it was kind of obvious, but I was following the Sergeant's advice and letting him move it at his own pace." I tasted my beer and continued. "Honestly, I've got to respect the kinda self-discipline it takes for him to be that damn paranoid about someone and still mesh in as tightly as he has when we're on the clock. But watching every word I say around a guy to make sure it can't possibly be taken wrong-" I shrugged. "It gets old." I had a sudden thought occur to me. "Why didn't you have your guard up too, if you were the source of his intel?"

"Initially I did." she admitted. "But like you said, we 'clicked' right off. You're a fairly charming guy even when you're not putting effort into it, Mitchell. Plus it wasn't my trouble, except at second-hand." She thought it over. "If it's any consolation, I think Nick's about ready to realize he doesn't have anything to be worried about from you as well. He probably doesn't know how to bring the topic up, though."

"Well, you've got my permission to slide your new intel about me to him via back-channel." I agreed. "Saves me the trouble, and besides, you got me into this in the first place."

"Okay, okay, that's fair." she nodded.

"The Sergeant know about any of this?" I continued.

"About the tension between you and Nick? Obviously, it's his job to notice stuff like that." she said. "About your particular background and your hometown's reputation? Not unless he looked it up himself, because I certainly didn't tell him." She shrugged. "He's my best friend, yeah, but he's also team lead. The last thing I wanted to do was put the skids under you with your official chain of command before you had a fair chance to show your stuff."

"Thanks for that." I clinked my glass against hers, and we let the topic sit long enough to each finish another beer and wait for them to change acts up on-stage.

"Don't answer if you don't want to... but why didn't you go along?" she finally continued diffidently.

"You mean, with the hoodboys? Look, I'm no choir boy but I'm not an asshole either." I finally answered. "Beating on people who never did anything to me, that's not my style." I shrugged. "Besides, I'm no technical brain like you - anything more complicated than algebra makes my eyes glaze over - but that doesn't mean I don't pick up on what's going on around me." My voice got more animated as I got into the swing of my lecture. "You know how Humanis' whole beef is that the existence of 'impure metahumanity' supposedly does nothing but create 'unfair' opportunities blah blah blah, they're keeping us down and it's not our fault and everything would be fine if we just made all of Them go away... but the place I grew up in? Do you think we had any metahumans in town who stayed there if they could possibly get out? Nobody with tusks or pointy ears would even go near the place except in an armed convoy, and for damned good reason - and there we were, dirt poor and living in rusty trailers anyway." I snorted. "Our neighborhood's entire existence was a living counter-example against the core of Humanis' platform. I was barely into high school when I was old enough to figure that one out, but by that point I'd also figured out I damn well needed to keep my opinions to myself. Until I finally couldn't stall the old man any longer, and so here I am."

"You have any siblings?" she asked after another long, thoughtful swig.

"One, a kid sister." I shrugged. "I sent her half my pay from my first year in the Army, gave her enough to buy a bus ticket down the valley as well and a couple semesters in a vocational school so she could get a job." I shrugged. "Mom died when I was a kid - got sick, doctors couldn't help - so, no reason to ever go back."

"But your sister isn't your next of-?" Rebecca began, and her face fell as she put the pieces together. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"Caught a stray round when some turbo junkie shot up the Stuffer Shack she was in, her second year in Nashville." I nodded. "Lone Star dropped the fucker in the street right outside, but that didn't help her any." I cursed and finished my beer.

"My condolences." she repeated, and bought our next round - shots - as an apology.

I tossed it back and let the buzz deepen and mellow. "Nah, it's okay. Even if it's not fun to remember, you still-" I chewed my lip. "You've still got to take some time for the people who were important to you."

"Yeah, you do." she agreed. "You've-you've got a good heart, Mitchell. I'm glad to have met you."

"Hey, 'bless your heart' is an insult where I'm from." I teased, and we grinned at each other. "But, yeah. Glad to have met you too."
​

---

Author's Note: So, some setting development, some character development, and more MC backstory. I know that the battle scene might not have been as sexy military porn as you might wish, but our MC has a point - the corpo military style is all about as making it un-dramatic as possible.

If you're wondering at the slightly uncharacteristic over-sharing of personal details between those two at the end, remember that they've both been drinking.

Captain Anne Ravenheart is a canon Shadowrun character - readers of the Shadowrun tie-in novel Burning Bright will already be aware that it was her KE FireWatch cell that actually planted and detonated the Cermak tacnuke at the start of the Bug City crisis.​

 

O'Hare Subsprawl, Ares Extraterritorial Compound
January 13th, 2058

"You wanted to see me, sir?" I braced to attention in front of Lieutenant Menendez' desk.

He looked up at me over the several floating holodisplays of data being projected in front of him, and tapped a command into the touch-sensitive desktop to close them. "Trooper Stone. Why have I been informed to make sure you are available for an interview at the MP compound here at 1030 hours?"

Only long practice at dealing with angry, suspicious authority figures kept my face or voice from twitching when I heard that an MP Hold was apparently out on me. "I don't know, sir. There have been no incidents."

He steepled his fingers and glared at me suspiciously. "When I find out what happened, and I will find out, I will rack your ass twice. Once for whatever your offense was, and once again - and far more harshly - for lying to me about it."

"Sir. I haven't even had an off-base pass in over two weeks. We've been on near continuous op cycle." I responded, still trying to figure out what the hell was going on here.

"Don't tell me what our operational schedule has been, Trooper, it's not as if I didn't help write it." he bit out his words. "So, you don't know anything and nothing has happened."

"No sir." I said.

"And you have no idea why your favorite partner-in-crime Corporal Mierson has also been ordered to report for interview, at a separate time?"

"No sir." I repeated yet again.

"Or Trooper First Class Jeffers? Trooper Adamson? And even Sergeant Sinclair? Again, all at separate times?"

I blinked in realization. "Sir, did you say the entirety of Team Three has been ordered to report for interview, but no one else from our platoon has?"

"Do you have malfunctioning cyberaudio, Trooper?" he huffed impatiently. "Yes, I just said that."

"Then this may be counter-intelligence related, sir." I continued thinking out loud. "Off the top of my head, the only thing we have in common that that the rest of the platoon doesn't is that we'd been tasked for the emergency extraction operation of 10 December last year, to support a Priority 1-A clandestine op of unspecified nature. None of the other people that went with us that night are back on duty yet, and at least one other team from the platoon has been along on every other op Team Three's deployed for."

"And absolutely nothing happened on any of your off-duty time, of course." he said skeptically, before his expression relaxed a fraction. "Well, if it is counter-intelligence related then you will of course cooperate with any request they make, and debrief them about anything they wish to know." He thought for an instant and continued. "Make certain to ask, explicitly, what you are authorized to tell me about your interview afterward. I don't want to risk being exposed to information I'm not cleared for, but I do obviously want to be kept in the loop about what you've been up to as much as possible."

"Yes sir." I acknowledged.

"Then you are dismissed." he concluded, and then reactivated his desktop and turned his attention back to the data displays without another word.

I about-faced and unassed the Lieutenant's cubicle office without another word, and then vanished myself out of the admin building.

"Did the Lieutenant mention anything?" Sinclair asked me as I returned to our squad bay.

"I've got an MP 'request for interview' at 1030." I replied. "Outside of that, and his general suspicions, nothing."

"Sorry I couldn't give you a heads-up about that, but I only just got told myself." he nodded. "I was hoping that at least- never mind."

"Something else going on besides this? What now?" I said, throwing myself into a nearby seat.

"Your promotion order should be coming through in a few weeks." Sergeant Sinclair shocked me with a grin. "Congratulations in advance, Trooper First Class Stone. But don't pin it on just yet, you'll have to wait until after it's officially on the chip."

"I haven't even been here for two months!" I said.

"No, but training time counts so you'll soon have finished your first year in Ares. And you'd made Sergeant in the CAS Army before you separated, so after your first year in you're eligible for veteran's accelerated advancement for the first two pay grades here." he explained. "You still need a recommendation from your chain of command, of course, but I was more than happy to write you one."

"Well, damn. Thank you, sir, I had no idea they even had that rule, or that you were considering me for it." I said gratefully.

"You keep your head and think fast in a crisis, you're alert to what goes on around you, and everything you touch just seems to run a little smoother or calmer than it would have without you. You're natural NCO material, Mitchell, and Knight Errant needs to develop as many of those as possible." he said warmly.

"Every army does, sir." I agreed.

"Now let's just hope whatever this 'interview' thing is about doesn't frag it up for you." Sinclair acknowledged.

"Or for any of us." I agreed.

Today was a day for routine fatigues so we'd scattered around the compound working on our individual tasks, so I didn't have a chance to touch base with any of the others before the time soon enough arrived that I had to report for my 'interview'. I arrived at the MP post in my garrison BDUs to be sent around by the front-desk NCO to somewhere in the secured section, and entered what was clearly an interior guard post to be greeted by several large, imposing troopers in security armor almost as thick if nowhere near as fully-featured as our spec-ops hardsuits, armed with shocksticks and submachine guns and all staring at me through their featureless helmet faceplates like so many sentry turrets.

"Trooper Mitchell Stone, reporting as ordered." I said to the one with the sergeant's insignia.

"Remove your sidearm, gunbelt, and PDA and place them on the table." he answered curtly, and I noticed that the two guys flanking him already had their hands on their SMG grips as I very carefully and deliberately reached down, unbuckled my web belt, and placed my sidearm and mag pouches where I was told to. I bit back the temptation to ask them if I was under arrest- if I actually was then I was certain they'd tell me, and if I wasn't yet then I didn't want to put the idea in anyone's head.

"Check in at the security terminal." he continued, pointing at it, and I went through the full routine of slot my credstick for ID, give my palmprint, and this scan even went for retinal prints.

"ID confirmed." the terminal finally reported, as it put up a full readout of my personnel data and biometrics on a display for review.

"Follow me." the nameless sergeant continued and the security door at the other side of the room slid open and my heart sank as I realized that I was being taken to the detention area.

"They're waiting for you in the detainee interview room." the sergeant answered my unasked question, and stood aside as we reached the room normally used for having guys who'd just been dragged in by the MPs to be sweated by the duty officer for 'What the fuck was that all about?' before it was decided to either formally write them up on charges or just boot them back to their platoon leader for less formal disciplinary action.

And as I entered to see two expressionless people in fancy suits and wearing tinted datagoggles expertly disguised as high-end sunglasses, I realized that I'd guessed 100% correct about this being some kind of counter-intelligence matter.

"Trooper Stone." the lead agent said, pointing at a chair. "Take a seat."

"May I ask for identification, sir?" I requested politely after I was seated. "They didn't tell me who I was going to be interviewed by."

"Commendably cautious." the lead agent conceded marginally, and they both slotted their credsticks into the table and let the data-display there show me that they were indeed both duly accredited and authorized employees of Knight Errant Security Services, with counter-intelligence authority and full clearances for anything at my level and quite a few things above it. No names, of course, just meaningless-to-me ID numbers.

This entire interview room was wired for sight and sound, so Agent Smooth here didn't need to do anything as dramatic as switching on a tape recorder. "This interview is about the events of 10 December 2057-" he began dispassionately, and with his partner just standing behind him doing a silent stare at me throughout I was quickly yet efficiently run through a debrief of the entire spec-ops retrieval mission I'd jumped in on for my first night here. He was smooth enough at it that my asshole almost unclenched from Pucker Condition Alpha by the end of it, except that I was dealing with the increasing suspicion that Sam the Silent back there wasn't just backing up his boss with an intimidation act but was actually a security mage and magically studying my aura to detect even otherwise invisible fluctuations in my emotions. To tell if I was lying with even more sensitivity than an advanced voice-analysis polygraph could - especially given that my trauma damper and wired reflexes meant that I could have selectively muted response to biological stress cues. Which sure came in handy when playing cards with unlucky UCAS grunts.

And a 'Did you happen to notice anything and you'd better blank it the hell out of your memory if you did' counter-intelligence debrief after even some kind of ultra-hush black op didn't quite mandate that level of subtle interrogation. Not even when I'd been on Ranger QRFs backing up the CAS Navy SEALs and in the periphery of that black-ops bullshit had something like this ever happened. Plus, that mission had been over a month ago. Paperwork did not simultaneously that slowly and still drew this level of urgency. Nobody short of Damien Knight ever had too many wage mages for their staff, those guys didn't ever stand around doing make-work when there was real shit to be doing.

So by the time that Agent Smooth over there hit the wrap-up, I was already at least halfway mentally prepared for it. I drew upon the breath control and meditation stuff they'd taught me in CAS Army sniper school to help me as I stuck to the rhythm that the whole interrogation was meant to set up in me so that the last few questions, the really important ones, could be snuck in as routine follow-up questions they supposedly just asked everybody.

"Have you during the course of your duties with Ares seen anything that you think should be brought to the attention of counter-intelligence?" the lead agent asked.

"The regs say I should report every little thing, but practically speaking you probably don't want to be bugged with routine chickensh- uh, trivialities." I deliberately stumbled so that if the wagemage over there picked up on any anxiety, they'd think it was embarassment.

He nodded matter-of-factly and asked the second question. "Have you ever been approached by anyone claiming to be Ares corporate personnel deployed in a sensitive capacity without their providing proper authentication?"

"No sir." I answered frankly, keeping myself as centered as possible. After all, Captain Ravenheart hadn't claimed to be anything to me. We'd eavesdropped on her mentioning to Sinclair that she'd been in FireWatch, but that hadn't been the question Agent Smooth had asked or even halfway near it.

"Have you ever knowingly acted against the corporate interests of Knight Errant Security Services or Ares Macrotechnology Corporation in a non-trivial capacity?" he probed.

"No sir." I answered again, truthfully, and he gave the same mechanical nod he'd given me to all my other answers and paused briefly in thought.

"I think we've got everything we need." the silent guy said, the first sound he'd made since I'd entered the room.

"Agreed." the first one replied to his partner. "All right, Trooper, that concludes our interview and debrief. You may return to your normal duties."

"Um, the Lieutenant wanted to know if I was in trouble for anything, and also ordered me to ask what about this interview was I allowed to tell him." I asked as I stood up.

"You may inform your commanding officer that the matter has been satisfactorily resolved and all relevant personnnel have been cleared, and that our debrief was related to follow-up on Operation POPCORN of 10 December. If he desires further details, he may submit his request to us through channels." Agent Smooth repeated as if he were reading off a cue card.

"Understood, sir." I agreed, and then I unassed the area as fast as I possibly could without spooking anyone.

I had to risk comparing notes with Sinclair about the 'routine follow-up questions', making like I was just the new guy to the corp wondering if that shit was usual and asking the old hand about it, to find out that they hadn't asked him the one about 'being contacted by someone claiming to be all hush-hush in Ares without proper ID'. That had been the thing I'd been most worried about - thankfully it had come to mind only after I'd left the interview room, or else no way that security mage wouldn't have noticed - because it was a question he couldn't possibly spoof on, and if our answers had been different from his then we'd be fucked. Fortunately, they hadn't bothered asking him about it.

In hindsight that was probably because they already knew that he was personally acquainted with Captain Ravenheart - it was on their service records that they'd once worked together, after all. Which would mean that there'd be no way to ask the Sergeant that question at all without a giant tip-off as to what they were really interested in, and it was pretty obvious that our 'debrief' had been staged the way it had for the purpose of gathering intel from us without giving us any clue of what they even wanted to gather.

So someone up the chain had already found out that Captain Ravenheart had met us and spent some time alone with our fire-team, almost certainly from the Lieutenant's official post-mission report and him recognizing that her armor was at one time top-line Ares special-forces issue and thinking that was a detail worthy of writing down. That got them to rush out the counter-intel team here to get us and find out if she'd tried to leak X to us, all the while using the convenient coincidence of our also having been on that Operation POPCORN retrieval to get us thinking about how the secret they were trying to bury was somewhere else entirely. Pretty slick stuff, and if Ravenheart had trusted us to actually tell us whatever they presumably were afraid she might be telling people we'd have been scragged. But again in hindsight, that must have been exactly why she'd told the Sergeant she didn't want to involve him or any of us even a little bit. Thank God.

Now all I had to do was make damn sure that a certain snoopy nose I was starting to love like a bossy twin sister didn't get her ass in a crack the size of the Grand Canyon by not knowing when to quit snooping, which is why I'd made sure to ask her to come out on a Strip crawl with me the next minute we got some off-duty time.
​

"So do you get it?" I finished, after explaining my whole chain of reasoning while we had dim lighting, a private booth, a pair of well-practiced prison whispers, and a whole shit ton of loud music off the dance floor to hopefully defeat any eavesdroppers. "Whatever the hell is going on there, we don't want any of it."

"I was starting to reach the same conclusion." she began. "Okay, you know that they told us nothing about the black ops team we rescued that night. But they still had to give us photos of their faces in case we needed to identify bodies."

"You saved their mug shots." I rolled my eyes. "We should rename you Cat, because your curiosity's gonna get you-"

"I didn't actually Matrix-search them or anything!" she protested. "I know better than that. I haven't done anything with them. They were just in a 'maybe someday this will fit with some other piece I trip over' collection."

"Yeah, well, don't put anything from today in there." I repeated. "Please. It's not just your ass in a crack, although I'd still hate that, but the entire team's."

"My point is that they data-vacuumed our PDAs while we had them checked in at the gate." she continued. "I know they did to mine, at least, according to the checksums I ran afterwards." she agreed. "And I'd had those mugshots on my PDA. Encrypted, relabeled and stuffed in a folder disguised as family photos, but still there. That wouldn't have stopped a sophisticated enough image recognition search tool, though... and those images were still in my PDA's data drive after my interview."

"And if they'd really given a damn about Operation POPCORN, or even just known who those four guys had been, they'd have wiped the photos with bit-bleach the instant they found 'em. Meaning that my theory about how that whole thing was just a smokescreen for the last couple of questions-" I continued.

"Has been 100% confirmed." she agreed ruefully. "Thank God I followed Sinclair's orders to not only dump but also data-shred the comm buffers in our helmets after our little eavesdropping incident."

"I hope to God that those counter-intel guys don't wonder why our team's helmets are the only ones that didn't save logs that day." I thought out loud.

"Oh, I understand that at least a third of trooper helmets randomly distributed across the platoon had data-log problems on that particular bug hunt." she grinned at me. "Must have been an intermittent software fault."

"Thank God your curiosity is only matched by your paranoid excess." I exhaled relievedly. "So, it looks like if we don't poke the bear any further then we'll actually get away with it."

"Yeah." she agreed. "And yeah, part of me still wants to ask What the hell?, but at this juncture I agree with you and the rest of me that's telling me You don't want to know."

"Sorry to have underestimated you." I apologized.

"Eh, fussing over your friends and checking in on them even when they wish you wouldn't is what friends do." she replied. "I can't really complain."

"Especially not given how often you keep doing it to us." I snarked back, and we both chuckled quietly.

* * * * *​

Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
February 8th, 2058

After that scary brush with some kind of high-end corporate plumber squad, things got back to normal. Adamson and Jeffers had accepted the counter-intel guy's story at face value, they'd gone especially soft on Sinclair in the interview because he'd be the easiest to tip off so he wasn't too worried, and that left me and Rebecca to be the ones who stayed a little tense as we tried to figure out if we were still under suspicion or being watched or anything. But no suspicious tracers or bugs turned up in our company-issued electronics, no new faces turned up around us on the job and nobody else we already knew had any big change in their pattern, and even the Lieutenant unclenched his butthole once he was reassured that the whole 'interview' thing was just them doing some post-op infosecurity and not anything that could track any dirt onto his clean record.

But now I was left standing in the dimly lit atrium of an abandoned apartment building at night, staring over my sidearm's sights at a scabrous, hairless, near-skeletal humanoid that was staring back at me with decidedly hostile intent. Him and all his friends had made us the instant we'd stepped in off the street, their astral sight alowed them to pinpoint me in the unlit nighttime gloom of the building's ruined interior even more easily than my advanced helmet optics allowed me to see them. Bits of rotten human flesh were still plainly visible in their mouth, still trapped between needle-tipped teeth. Only our sealed hardsuits kept the charnel smell of their breath from assaulting our nostrils. Although the bulk of my attention was focused on the mixed bag of rifles and shotguns that the squad of ghouls had aimed at us.

"Ares." the lead ghoul of the pack of guards that had come fading out of the woodwork as soon as we'd stepped through the front doors said disgustedly. "What, you finally come back to finish the job?"

"Easy guys." Rebecca pleaded as reasonably as she could, her own assault rifle half-raised. "We don't need to do this."

In 2011 the phenomenon known as 'the Awakening' had suddenly brought what even the scientific community now agreed could only be fairly termed as "magic" spontaneously into being - or, if you believed the theorists who talked about ancient lost ages of lore and stuff, had returned it into being after a long hiatus. Mankind had spent all the decades since doing their best to come to terms with all the changes that it had wrought on the world. And in addition to things like 'mages and shamans were now not only actual professions but heavily recruited by corporate headhunters' and 'a certain percentage of humanity had spontaneously 'goblinized' into humanoid sub-races formerly known only in fantasy fiction such as elves, dwarves, orks, and trolls', there had also been the spontaneous mutation/re-emergence/what-have-you of Awakened animal and plant life. You didn't just have bald eagles anymore, you had magical thunderbirds. Swimming out in the deep ocean alongside the whales where what could only be called leviathans. High-end security companies bred and trained fire-breathing hellhounds as guard dogs now, not just Dobermans.

And one strain of immunodeficiency virus had mutated into the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which upon infection a human or metahuman being would alter them even further into outright supernatural predators such as vampires, wendigos... or ghouls. And the worst part of the whole deal is that only a percentage of ghouls lost their faculties in the transition and became the stereotypical ravening man-eating monsters of myth.

The remainder of them kept their intelligence, their memories, everything that let them know and feel as if they'd once been human - and unlike insect spirit possession it was still them in there, still their own metaphysical whatever-you-called-a-soul, as opposed to being hollowed out and eaten by another spirit entirely. They could remember everything about their old lives and how it had felt to live them, still be in touch with their old emotions and sensitivies... even all the while they still kept the only partly biological metabolism, the simultaneously perceiving and interacting on the physical and astral planes both of any other dual-natured paranatural critter... and the inescapable need to consume human carrion in order to survive. Oh, and let's not forget the part where except for a brief and rapidly-aborted experiment at the UCAS trying to give them citizenship status in the early 2050s, HMHVV infectees were not recognized as legally human, or legally existing at all.

So yeah. It was no wonder that ghouls tended to be really defensive and bitter about it. For them, Chicago turning into a city full of bugs only meant that the outside world that had been ignoring them at best and trying to exterminate them at worst now had fewer humans trying to do the job, and an absence of personal malice from the bugs when they were trying it.

"I'm sure it would be a lot easier for you corpo-freaks to finish the job if we disarmed first, huh?" one of the ghoul militiamen spat back at us.

"Look, guys, we don't want any trouble." Rebecca kept talking. "All we need is to do is to get to the roof to spot from for a little while, and then we're gone like the wind."

"Spot for what, corpgirl?" the angry ghoul pack's leader spat at us. "The artillery fire you want to call in on us 'flesh-eating freaks'?"

I was more than alert enough to the vibe to pick up that the main reason they hadn't pulled any triggers yet is because they didn't like the odds. Especially since it was vastly unlikely they'd been able to score any APDS ammo in here and an off-the-rack AK-97 wasn't going to do much to crack our hardsuits without it even at point-blank range, while all we'd need to do is get a couple of grenades off and the entire antechamber would be full of ghoul hamburger. But they were clearly feeling very defensive right now, and trying to come on too soft like Rebecca was trying would only make them even more suspicious. So I played right into my expected role as a heartless corporate mercenary and decided it was time for bad cop to back up good cop.

"Guys, if we wanted to knock down this building of yours then we could have just called in the howitzers from outside the front door." I matter-of-factly pointed out. "We want to camp the rooftop today to kill someone else, or did you not notice that this piece I'm hauling around right now was not optimized for short-range work?"

The older ghoul standing behind him cast an eye at the 14mm semi-automatic anti-vehicle rifle I had slung on my back and nodded. "Sniper team, huh? You don't have LOS on the Refuge from this roof, so... Goose Island?"

"That's right, it's pirate-stomping day." I grinned wickedly. "We roll up top, I get my head count, then we just RTB and hoist some beers. Nobody's scheduled you for anything."

"You can't shoot from this building." one of the female ghouls standing standing in the rear ranks shook her head firmly. "We aren't just a bunch of savages hiding in a hole, we're building an enclave here. We've got our supplies here, a communications node- even our children!"

"The Cabrini Refuge is expanding?" Rebecca leaned forward curiously as if trying to will an answer out of the air, because we were almost two blocks from 'Ghoultown' - the site of the old Cabrini Green housing complex that had been a onetime Mayor of Chicago's attempt to create a ghoul sanctuary during the brief period of legal recognition of their status by the UCAS government - and that was a bit far out for a satellite outpost.

"Diversifying." one of them answered, simultaneously with their squad leader's curt "That's none of your concern!"

"Okay, okay." Rebecca said, raising one hand in a peaceful geature and taking a step back. "Bravo One-Actual, this is Topside Lead." she continued into her helmet comm, deliberately letting the ghouls overhear her end of the call. "This building's looking a little unstable inside, I don't want to chance using the roof here. We are relocating to the south to find an alternate setup point, estimate plus ten mikes on the timeline."

"Relocate acknowledged." Lt. Menendez' voice came back impatiently. "Pick up the pace, the whole op is waiting on you."

"Topside is oscar mike, out." she replied and then cut her mike.

"Thanks. Door's that way." the seniormost ghoul said gruffly, and we warily stepped back and turned to leave.

"Shit, that was a little tense." the designated marksman from our platoon's Team Two - I didn't even remember his name - breathed out as we set up back in the street and started moving down the block to find another building to snipe from. Two long-riflemen and two other troopers as spotters had been detached from two separate fire-teams to provide cover for today's operation against one of the most psychotic band of pirates still operating in the Containment Zone.

Goose Island was a 160-acre artificial island formed at the intersection of the north branch of the Chicago River and a canal that had been dug sometime in the 1800s right across the one side of what had been a peninsula. It was the hangout of the 'Jolly Rogers', a group of psychofreaks who had snagged themselves a couple of old harbor patrol boats that used to belong to Eagle Security - the security firm that had had the municipal police contract for Chicago and still had it for the rest of Cook County - and used them and some tricked-out hovercraft they'd scored to make themselves the uncontested kings of the water on the north half of the city. They 'subcontracted' some local groups of desperados and thugs to take tolls at the river bridges and backed up any challengers to the toll-takers in return for a substantial cut, did smuggler runs of goods up and down the waterway for those customers who preferred the risks of dealing with the Rogers to the risks of going overland in Bug City, and otherwise robbed, raped, and murdered anybody else they caught walking too close to the shoreline.

In short, they were a bunch of completely chipped-out raider skezzbags that even the cockroaches wouldn't lower themselves to puke on, and while I still had no idea how Command generated our strategic targeting priorities from day-to-day it was pretty obvious that they'd finally pissed someone off enough to get put on our ops schedule of people we needed to go shoot. But since they were chipped-out raider skezzbags that might have scored enough heavy weapons from Eagle's old armory or from Zone gunrunners to have shoulder-fired SAMs handy, as well as the possibility of captives still alive on the island, that ruled out the simple solution of just calling in the gunships to rocket-ripple all of Goose Island from end to end.

And that's why two of the best marksmen in the platoon had been issued Ares' own version of the Ranger Arms SM-3 long-distance anti-vehicle precision rifle and detached to go find a rooftop about half a kilometer away with good sight lines on Goose Island and stand by to snipe anybody trying to operate a crew-served or air-defense weapon, so as to clear the way for the rest of the platoon to come in low on the Skyhawks and fast-rope down for some good old-fashioned house-to-house cleaning. We'd had to move a little close to the Cabrini Refuge to do it, but despite our encounter with the wary neighbors it did at least have the benefit of making it very unlikely that we were also going to pick a building with a bug infestation. And since inserting directly to a rooftop by helicopter would have required getting close enough to risk waking up our targets, we'd had to be dropped off a few blocks further back and hoof it here the whole way. It wasn't any shock that the Lieutenant had been getting impatient.

"Topside One, setting up." I called away as I got into a comfortable firing position laying on my blanket, as Rebecca settled in alongside to spot for me. On the other corner of our building, the other two troopers were doing the same. We'd wedged the rooftop door shut behind us and then put a screamer alarm on it, so we were free to concentrate on what was in front of us. It was a bit thin for security but the Lieutenant hadn't wanted to divert any more troopers away from the main action, so here we were out all by ourselves.

"Topside Two, setting up." our partner team's rifleman called out on local-net.

"Bravo One-Actual, Topside is all set." Rebecca reported in to the platoon net. In addition to my spotter she was also team leader of our four-man group, seeing as how she was senior NCO out of all four of us.

"Finally." the Lieutenant acknowledged. "Topside, keep weapons tight. Start marking targets and report."

The Jolly Rogers weren't all asleep at the switch - after all, another thing that liked to pick through the shoreline were Roach and Mosquito spirits, so you wanted to keep at least a few lookouts awake - but they were anything but a tightly organized military unit. The body heat of their few sentries and lookouts shone in our advanced imaging scopes as clearly as if it were day, and while they did have assault cannons - bipod-mounted 20mm semi-auto anti-vehicle weapons even heavier than my rifle, that could only be hip-fired or shoulder-fired if you were either augmented or a troll - that could do noteworthy damage even to an armored Skyhawk if it connected, they'd first need the chopper to be doing a hover right overhead before they were at all likely to hit.

Not that we were going to let them try.

"Bravo One-Actual, we mark two sentries with assault cannons. No manpads visible, repeat, no manpads visible. Note that one sentry is a troll, so they've still got native thermographic vision capability even if we assume no cyber or optics." Rebecca finally reported.

"Our drone imagery confirms what you're seeing. We are starting our descent now." the Lieutenant replied. "As soon as you hear our rotor wash, Topside is free to execute. Bravo One-Actual, out."

I began my breath control regime and let my bioware damp any adrenaline spikes before they even started. I called and picked my first target, and let the smartlink's ballistic computer talk to my cerebellum through my neural interface as I waited for-

"Rotors." Rebecca said calmly as the thup-thup-thup of the approaching Skyhawks began to become faintly audible. "Topside, we are weapons free."

I thought the firing command through my 'link and let the electro-mechanical firing mechanism pull the trigger for me with superhuman precision and zero jostle at all, and felt nothing but recoil and satisfaction as the 14mm round ripped straight through the torso - no showoff headshots today - of the first sentry and dropped him like a stone. The echos hadn't faded before my rifle finished cycling and chambering my follow-up shot, and with the other sentry already as dead as mine from our other sniper our spotters both got into the act as they marked particular members of the Jolly Rogers scrambling out of their habitats for attention based on looking either like leaders, mages, or just holding too big a gun. Then the scope started to be cluttered by friendlies as our own helos arrived and the rest of the platoon fast-roped on down to start their end of the party, so we took the opportunity to catch a breath and reload.

"How's about we start ventilating boat engines so nobody gets out that way?" I asked. "Help keep the cork in the bottle?"

"Good idea, do that." Rebecca answered, and with a few quick shots we made sure nothing floating at anchor at the Jolly Roger's boat park was going to go anywhere soon, not with 14mm holes punched nearly through their outboards or their helm controls. Which turned out to be a good precaution, because less than three minutes into the assault the few surviving Jolly Rogers broke and ran, and the quicker of them actually did make it to the boat park just ahead of their pursuers - only to get trapped on the deck of a non-functioning watercraft and blasted into the water like clay pigeons off a rail a few moments later.

"Teams One Through Three, set up on the perimeter as marked and hold. Four and Five, sweep through the buildings again and make sure we don't have survivors. Team Six, secure the LZ." the Lieutenant said. "Topside, secure from overwatch and light your locator beacon, I'll send over Flight Four to pick you up."

"And that's a wrap." I said matter-of-factly as I stood up and safed and cleared my rifle, then slung it over my back and got my sidearm out.

"You two hold here and guide in our ride, we'll go pick up our trash." Rebecca said, and we both headed to go unblock the rooftop door and pick up the motion sensor we'd left covering our retreat. Our eyebrows both rose as the opening door reveal another squad of ghouls standing at the bottom of the stairwell, who turned to look back up at us when the squeal of the rusty door opening had alerted them. Apparently they'd all been facing in the other direction.

"You guys were lookin' out for us?" I asked, mildly surprised.

"The Jolly Rogers are - were - scumbags barely half a step above maggots." one of the ghouls nodded back. "So yeah, we talked it over and figured that even if you are corpo dicks it'd still be to the general benefit if nobody jostled your elbows while you were busy ventilating their skulls."

"Well, thanks." Rebecca acknowledged them warmly. "We've got a chopper ride coming for us right off the rooftop, so you guys can head on back if you want. It was nice working with you."

"All right then, we're gone." the lead ghoul nodded back at us, and our unofficial escort quietly decamped without another word.

"They say fences make good neighbors, but looks like the bugs are making some too." I observed as we strolled back to rejoin the rest of our group and watched our ride come swooping in for a pickup.

"That definitely surprised me." she agreed as we boarded the bird and rejoined the rest of the unit. "Knight Errant is really not popular with the Chicago ghoul community. When Special Order 162 was passed giving them legal recognition, KE had been the security corp hired for a temporary security contact on the Cabrini housing development because Eagle Security - the Chicago policing unit - was foot-dragging heavily."

"And then the UCAS government blamed us for Special Order 162's repeal barely two months later, claimed it was because Knight Errant hadn't renewed the temporary contract that it was 'not feasible' to continue securing Cabrini." Sergeant Sinclair broke in, as they'd happened to send the same helicopter hauling out the rest of our permanent team to pick us up too. "Scapegoated us to cover up the fact that they just didn't want to spend the money any longer to actually protect the people they'd promised to protect, let alone assign their own troops to do it."

I was pretty sure from what I remembered going in the news at that time, even if that was only shortly after I'd joined the Army, that Sinclair was not being entirely accurate about who'd quit on what job first. But then again, none of us had been there - and it's not as if the network news wasn't at least half bullshit even on a good day. So who knows, he might actually have been right that KE had been scapegoated as corpo dicks to draw fire away from the UCAS being government dicks instead of vice versa. Hey, stranger things that had happened.

"I'm just bummed that we didn't notice we were being trailed. One wasp spirit picking the wrong building to lurk in the upper floors of and we'd all have been lunch. We were lucky it was local militia and not bugs." I thought out loud.

"I went to bat for you with the Lieutenant about that." Sinclair surprised us. "You don't take a four-man team alone on foot through the Zone unless you're FireWatch, and I think even they found it rough going that one time." he almost joked. "But detaching a security detail to go with you or allowing you your own AFV to make infil and exfil with would have meant coordinating for extra assets outside the platoon, and he didn't want to-" He huffed. "The Lieutenant said the risk was minimal when he overruled my suggestion, and as it turned out he was right, but we still shouldn't have rolled dice like that just for convenience's sake."

"I could argue that decision either way if I really had to," I nodded back, "but honestly, right now I'm too bushed to try. Op-tempo's been harsh recently, and it was a late night tonight in addition."

"You're not just whistling Dixie." Adamson chimed in from his seat across the Skyhawk's passenger bay. "Us, the UCAS intervention teams, even the line grunts, we've all suddenly been working overtime. And mostly against raiders, too."

"Not that scumbags like that don't have it coming, but weren't they originally paying for us to kill bugs?" Jeffers thought out loud.

Nobody had an answer for that. But at the moment we were headed back to base camp and some well-earned rest in our bunks, and that was priority number one right now.

* * * * *​

Glenview Naval Air Station, Ares Extraterritorial Compound
February 19th, 2058

After we stomped the Jolly Rogers, things changed.

First, we got an entire week stood down, with the only task at hand to spend a day packing our unit's equipment and then a rest and recuperation leave while Knight Errant closed out the encampment we'd set up at the UCAS Air Force section of O'Hare and re-opened it at a compound we were setting up and leasing at the rebuilt Glenview NAS.

But when we got there we realized that this had been more than just a facilities move. Until now the Ares presence at the UCAS Containment Zone had largely been limited to our company of Ares Rapid-Response Troops, and our aviation and support elements, and some intel support and science teams that the UCAS was renting from us elsewhere. But when we arrived at Glenview we saw that Ares' contributions to the bug war had just been heavily reinforced. They were shipping in not just spec-ops guys like us but full-on armored cav and infantry formations normally more suited to things like the large-scale competitive military exercises in the Desert Wars or a full-on 'reconquer this Third World nation' mercenary op. Even weirder, the formations they'd shipped in hadn't brought the sort of facilities intended for a long deployment like ours - no prefab barracks, no bunks, no furniture. They were living in tents and eating out of mess trailers and maintaining and servicing their vehicles out of field shelters and hasty cradles just like they were still on campaign in the bush. There must have been almost a brigade of Knight Errant troops here, if not more, and word was that other large detachments were staging at some of the UCAS military encampments down south and west of the Wall.

And it wasn't just us. Every military runway at Glenview and O'Hare had been jammed for days with all the transport planes bringing people in from all over the UCAS. Rebecca was even able to get the word from some guys in the comm center that the entire UCAS 101st Airmobile division had been ordered to mount up and stage its ass to Chicago on 72-hour alert, and we could already see the clustered tents and field prefabs of their own encampment setting up out on ground that had been hastily commandered from the local suburban community's golf course and parkland. Truck convoys and freight trains were pulling in around the clock, and everybody was busting hump to move entire mountains of boots, bullets, and beans off of them and into warehouses, to then be repacked and combat-loaded and readied to ship out again. An entire nation as well as the world's foremost mil-tech AAA megacorporation must have both strained their rapid mobilization and deployment capacities to the limit to get this done this quickly, even if they'd started a couple of weeks ago.

And the entirety of Bravo Company had just been ordered to report to a nearby hangar, along with as many of the newcomer Ares troops as could fit in there, for a briefing.

"Jesus Christ, it looks like a base in England the week before D-Day." I swore, looking around wonderingly.

"I'm certain that's exactly what it is." Sinclair nodded to us. "They gave us a week off to rest and refit because we've been on an active op-tempo for months, and now they need us in top shape for a major operation. Add that plus all these reinforcements who are clearly here and setting up for a high-density short-term logistics train, but with that much spare ammunition being combat loaded in proportion?"

"Great, the big boys in Washington got tired of holding the Wall on attrition and think they can win the war with one big surge and purge." Jeffers swore disgustedly as we reached our designated row of folding chairs set up in the hangar-turned-improvised-auditorium. "What makes them think that's going to work any better than the last time they tried it?"

"Final call! Close the doors!" an officer's voice rang out on the loudspeakers, and the wide-open hangar doors began to slide shut behind us on hydraulics. Nobody else said anything or moved until the final THOOM of the doors slamming shut sounded.

"Everyone without prior specific authorization, deactivate your personal electronics! This room is undergoing data-seal in two minutes!" the order came out on the PA system again, and we all did as instructed. At two minutes to the second the signals intelligence and security guys lit off their short-range jammers, and did everything else they normally did to try and keep anyone from unauthorized recording and/or transmitting from a chamber this large and this packed full of strangers - or at least as much as could practicably be done.

"All personnel, you are hereby given official notice that the following briefing is to be considered LEVEL EPSILON secure material and that your presence at this operational briefing consents to your being placed under full communications blackout until the commencement of the operation." the annunciator continued. "You are reminded that unauthorized disclosure of Epsilon material without explicit authorization is punishable not only by immediate discharge from all Ares employment but also by full corporate sanctions. Unless otherwise directed, Epsilon protocols will remain in effect for a seventy-two hour period."

"They're putting us in on-base lockdown for three whole days?" Jeffers whispered from where he was sitting down the row, before Rebecca nudged him hard with an elbow.

"ATTENTION ON DECK!" the command suddenly rang out, and we all popped out of our chairs and stood to precisely as instructed. Our platoon leader was sitting with us, but all the officers in the rank of captain or above were up on stage. The only two I even began to recognize were our company commander - who I'd only seen three times since I'd reported in - and our attached aviation company commander. We also had several visiting observers, one of them a brigadier general, from the UCAS Army. My eyes noted that the seniormost officer up there in Ares uniform was a two-star general... but wait, if he was in the row of seats, then who was giving the brief-

And then my jaw fought not to drop as a nondescript man in an Ares garrison officer tunic stepped forward to the microphone, as one of the big viewscreens behind him did a close-up so we could see him more clearly from the back. He wore no nametag or rank insignia, but he didn't need any. Not only had we all seen his official announcements on Ares internal Matrix channels and training videos, but his picture was hanging in the front lobby of every Knight Errant corporate facility right next to Damien Knight's.

"As you were." the man said as he stepped up to the briefer's podium, and we all immediately resumed our seats.

"Good morning, troopers." Roger Soaring Owl, the CEO of Knight Errant Security Services, greeted us all. "You are here today to be given your first introduction to an operational concept that we have been working on for some time. This will be a joint Ares-UCAS operation underneath the overall command of General Welles, the UCAS forces commander for the Containment Zone." One of the blank viewscreens switched to a standard org-chart diagram explaining exactly who would be giving the orders by what authority, both for the client and for Ares internally - which was a fairly typical thing for Knight Errant given that we were ultimately all PMCs, but which we'd never before seen on this scale. "The Knight Errant senior officer on this operation will be Major General Tanner, who you all see off to my immediate left." The two-star I'd seen up on stage nodded his head on cue.

"And now, to the heart of the matter." Soaring Owl smiled a thin CEO smile at us, clearly visible on the viewscreen close-up. "Barring unforeseen circumstances, at 0000 hours on 22 February 2058 we intend to launch Operation Extermination. This operation will be a massive combined-arms attack on all fronts into the Chicago Containment Zone... and its objective will be the permanent destruction of every single remaining insect spirit inside the Wall."

---

Author's Note: Old Shadowrun grognards already knew that the Bug City arc would not be the entire fanfic just from the dates, as the canon date of Operation Extermination was indeed February 22nd, 2058. But the fic was never going to be just about stomping bugs in Chicago. After all, there's a whole wide world out there!