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Night, wet, cold, overcast. A megacorp owned warehouse in the Sprawl. At the entrance, a large black custom vehicle. Bloated beetle body of a cargo hauler, sleek aerodynamics, low to the ground, fat tires, angry whine of a too big turbine idling. A silken silence had fallen over the night since the muffled "womph" of an explosive charge, the scavengers and predators of the city's night chased off by the signs of trouble. The job had been going smoothly so far. Getting a vehicle and planning the route had been my job (a large speeder-van from the Cult and a cheap renta-truck with autodrive option). Picked up Kahn and the rest of the team, Bea had grumbled about going in something so indiscreet but Pyro and Kryo thought it had style. Shere Kahn, knowing I was worried about making a good impression on my first run with people that had already made their names on the street simply said "Let's go" (bastard bestiamorph). A nice leisurely drive to the warehouse. Once there everybody got to work; Bea handled comm and ECM, Kryo hacked the alarms (Matrix and RL), Pyro slapped the Portal(TM) charges to the large armored doors, Kahn provided the enhanced senses for locating booby traps and the firepower to take on any potential guard-bots (his gene-enhanced strength meant he could lug around a custom combo-gun he'd gotten from the Engineer). All I had to do was sit there and be ready to get us out of there ASAP if things went sour, which meant I might not get a chance (not for another 3 or 4 years) to really prove myself and move up the Street's food chain when it came to getting the really big payoffs. Angry flashes of light. Three figures come running out of the warehouse. Two shooting back at the warehouse, the third carrying a large box. Kryo jumped in with the box, Bea sat there twitching making her avatar get busy on-line, Pyro leaped in shouting "They've got Model 70s!" , Kahn paused at the van's door just long enough to let loose another 30mm AP from his recoilless before getting in. The armored door slammed shut almost catching his striped tail and just in time to stop the hail of flechettes from one of the remaining bots. At the first sign of trouble I'd gone full speed, the network of diamond fibers that complemented my original nervous system dumped my consciousness into the marble sized opti-comp neural net that ran my mind as if it were just another AI program. Neural links switch to full speed, I go from merely seeing the van's readouts to being the van. In my heightened state it takes minutes for everybody to pile into the cargo hold. I pull out at the maximum delta-V possible without loosing traction on the wet asphalt. I send the encoded signal to the rented truck, it should pull out of its parking and head for the tunnel. IR shows the bright pyre of a '70' with its drive train destroyed, guns still going full blast while we're still in range. The impacts of flechettes on our armor a slow steady dirge. Another shape speeds out of the warehouse, 4 all-terrain wheels like one of those single seat 4x4 ATVs, black hemispheric dome with two machine guns on mini-turrets, two stout arms at it sides. We race through the city at a ludicrous walking pace (actually we're well past a 100 mph on the straightways). I implement the vans ECM routines. Bea's mouth is moving with glacial slowness her voice seems to have dropped to the sub-sonic. I try to place a crosshair on the bot, since it hasn't been shot at yet it's using minimal evasions so I better make my first shot count. In the meantime I've been dispensing chaff, smoke, oil, caltrops, flares. I'm sure that by now it must be fairly certain that we're harmless. Glowing letters float up to my consciousness, the transcription of Bea's warning ['Warehouse has sounded alarm! Corp HQ sending flight of Falcons!]. I query the computer that has been monitoring our internal comm, the warehouse's alarms went off as soon as we moved beyond jamming range, their HQ responded in just 47 seconds (must have AI's on the job) .We're a minute and 27 seconds since the alarm, another two mins for the Falcons to intercept. And the tunnel I'd selected is another 50 seconds from here. The Model 70 is still on our tail, hanging on like grim death. The hail of flechettes has lowered the integrity of our hind armor by 37%. Another 2 minutes, max, and we may as well open the rear doors and get it over with. One chance only. I turn onto a deserted avenue. And keep going suicidally straight. The Model 70 on our tail takes the opportunity to close the gap. The slow dirge of flechettes hitting our armor redoubles now that we're not dodging around corners. As I set the crosshairs on the robot I notice that it is stretching its arms toward us, a small port on its front reveals a plasma torch. Computer flashes target lock. A short range missile with a shaped charge warhead blasts through the flimsy 'paper' disguising its launch tube. Minute 40 to Falcons, 30 sec to tunnel. The missile scores a direct hit. A huge fireball is left in our wake. Turn off the avenue. Turn again, there's the tunnel. Another transcription from Bea: ["Dammit! You've given our location away! The Falcons must have our image from the Automated Witness System! That explosion is a great big 'here we are'!"] I think a response and have a subsystem send it to my mouth, at a speed they can understand my voice will tell them: "Good they'll keep chasing this van's doppelganger instead of us" (We reach the mid point of the tunnel where our truck is waiting, I bring us to a stop) "This tunnel is held by a gang of fellow speed cultists, all the cameras here will show the Corp is us going through without stopping. So everybody out." I carefully walk myself to the waiting truck (it takes a while to slow down to merely human speed), as a pair of side tunnels open in the main tunnel's walls, our armored van drives itself into one as a cheap fiberglass replica of it drives out of the other, Shere Kahn actually smiles, the twins look simply flabbergasted, Bea just scowls at me as if it had all been a joke at her expense. We drive out of the tunnel in the opposite direction we drove in. Just in time to see the Falcons, 3 miniature fighter jets, fly overhead on the way to intercept a fiberglass shell filled with pyrotechnics. We drive past the smocking remains of the Model 70, through the glass littered avenue, past a Tech Support Van of the megacorp we just robbed. We are half way to our rendezvous with our employer to exchange the box of stolen secrets for the rest of our pay plus a bonus for having to deal with killer robots (as per our contract), when Bea finally confronts me. "How the hell did you know we'd have to escape a damn M70! " "I didn't know for certain. But I did my homework. GenetoMax's strengths and weaknesses are well known on the street: they're great at gene splicing, heck the location of their main gene lab is known by the same name all over the world"... "Yeah, Mengele Memorial."-Kryo ...", and they suck at robotics and weapons. But they have this thing about buying the biggest and baddest security systems available from other megacorps, specially the bad ass robots put out by A.R.E.S. for the general market. Besides changing cars is always a good idea." copyright 1997 Charleson Mambo
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