Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome Read Free Page B

floor for a little bit. There’s plenty of room to wander.”
    Most of the floor looked like it held conference rooms, which made it pretty benign. If this floor had restricted areas, it would already be crawling with guards. Vitriol glanced in several rooms and saw they were all about the same—black, enameled tables surrounded by white, pod-like chairs. The walls of each room had half a dozen screens, and all of them were off. Any one of these rooms would be as good as another, so Vitriol picked one at random and walked in.
    He wouldn’t have much time—as soon as the guards in the hallway had fallen unconscious, there had likely been an alert sent out to all the other guards, and they’d be converging here.
    Then he heard Lochinvar’s voice in his ear. Vitriol hadn’t changed the volume, so that meant Lochinvar was forcing his way through to get Vitriol’s attention.
    “I can tell this is a room for executives,” Lochinvar was saying. “You don’t let the wageslaves sit on this kind of furniture. But what if you’re here for a while? Do you just have to sit and wait?”
    Carruthers laughed, clearly pleased to be showing off. “Of course not! This room is fully equipped with everything we need to work. You don’t think we’d spend any of our time not working, would you?”
    “I don’t know,” Lochinvar said. “These couches appear to be quite comfortable for things other than just sitting around.”
    Vitriol could almost hear Carruthers blushing.
    “They’re in,” Vitriol said. “Once Lochinvar gets the jack ready, we’ll be set.”
    He hadn’t even finished speaking when the node access point appeared before him. It was a black disk, maybe half a meter in diameter, with an ivory inlay that showed a mighty, muscled man chained to a cliff. He had manacles around his ankles and wrists, pulling him into a spread-eagled shape, and he had a terrible gaping wound in his abdomen that, since it was depicted in ivory, seemed clean and sanitary despite the visible intestines.
    This was the access point to the Prometheus Engineering executive LAN. It was a network entirely without wireless access—if you didn’t plug into it, you couldn’t access it, just like the primitive networks of the ‘60s. Lochinvar, though, had now plugged in a wireless transmitter into the LAN, and now it was up to Vitriol to make good use of it.
    The disk in front of him looked so hard, so unbreakable, that Vitriol wished he could take it head on, throw a bunch of agents and maybe a custom mook or two at it and shatter the sucker into a million little artsy-fartsy pieces. But he didn’t have time to screw around, and he also had access codes Lochinvar had lifted from Carruthers. Too easy.
    He threw the codes at the disk, and it reacted immediately. The wound in Prometheus’ abdomen healed, he stood straight and pulled the chains attached to his arms. The edges of the disk pulled in with the chains, then the whole black disk collapsed on itself and was gone. Behind it was a floating circle with a thousand smaller white circles, like little aspirin tablets, hovering in front of him. A thousand files with nothing to identify any of them. And if he was lucky, he had two minutes to find what he needed.
    Now it was time for the agents. He let them loose, a swarm of flies buzzing around the little pills, sticking their proboscides into the hard white surfaces, probing for anything that might tell them what was in the files. They left little bits of fly saliva on the pure white surfaces—an uncharacteristic programming flourish by Vitriol. He kind of hoped Harpy would glance over and notice.
    She didn’t. She was too busy watching the hallway outside the room, waiting for the inevitable approach of the guards. She looked nervous, which reminded Vitriol that he should probably hurry.
    He looked back at the open disk with its thousand pills and saw that the opening was getting smaller. Something was wrong.
    “Lochinvar!” he said.