Milk Run, pt 2

As quick as I could manage, which was pretty quick considering how much cyberware was lining my nervous system and musculature, I snatched Drex by the arm and hurled her in front of me and away, towards a large statue of a Greek warrior goddess that stood on the left side of the office we were in. I dove after her, hiding my bulk as well as I could behind the relatively small hunk of stone.

"What in the...!?", she shouted, before slapping at me ineffectually, "Are you totally whacked? What happened!?"

I grunted and reached into my coat, pulling out a small device, a round, flat thing about the size of a human palm. Like a hockey puck with buttons.

"They had Black ICE, Drex," I explained, pressing a few buttons on the device and sliding across the floor behind us, towards our attackers, "Intrusion countermeasures, the highly illegal and really, really nasty kind. I almost didn't manage to jack out in time."

I pointed to the back of my neck, where my cyberdeck, now ruined, would normally be plugged into the base of my skull. Wires still dangled from it, from where I had simply ripped them out of the deck instead of my head.

Johnson had told us this job would be simple. A smash and grab. A milk run. Go in, take out a few guards, and extract a file marked "Rutherford". He'd claimed it wouldn't be well protected, and we'd believed him.

"You're supposed to be the hot drek Decker, Gavin," Drex said, inspecting the cables briefly. I pushed her away idly, closing my eyes and switching to Augmented Reality.

"Not now, Drex," I muttered, opening my eyes and focusing on the picture-in-picture display that popped into the left side of my vision, taking up a quarter or so of my total view, "I have to concentrate."

The disk I had hurled at the guards behind us, two mundanes with machine guns and a wagemage, sprouted eight little legs and an eye stalk, then stood and scuttled over to our attackers unnoticed while they continued their assault. On the end of the eye stalk it had a small, but excellent, camera that was feeding into my commlink and filling the picture-in-picture display of my AR. I grinned and directed my little spider-bot towards the wagemage.

Our attackers finally took notice of us when the spider-bot leaped up a full eight feet and wrapped it's legs around the mage's head, enveloping it. The mage screamed and stumbled backward, reeling and spinning his arms, shouting for his allies to get the thing off of him. I allowed myself to finally laugh out loud when I sent the command to flip the kill-switch, shorting out the drone's systems and sending a several thousand volt shock through the wizard.

He dropped to the ground and shook violently, his body seizing. Drex took that as an opportunity. Smiling, she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stood, her whole body glowing as she dropped into a fighting stance.

PART 3 TOMORROW...