[SquirrelDude]

Slobbertooth nodded in agreement. "Good thought. Krestov. Up for taking point?"

[SgtBoomCloud]

Krestov paused at the ritualistic display, a large hand steadying the nauseated bnc on the shoulder.  While not very knowledgeable with magic practices, the nature of this murder denoted one thing all runners and street sprawlers were aware of: blood magic.

Taking a second, he nodded to the other two.  "You read mind.  Turret not problem" Patting the hacker on the back, he stepped up and took point, his shield in front of him as he stepped cautiously ahead, proceeding into the server room.

[Jack_Spade]

The door was closed but had not locked. Krestov carefully shoved it open, ready to duck away from a sentry gun.

But the hail of bullets did not come. The smell of blood was accompanied by the smell of ozone and a small smoke trail showed that the ceiling mounted LMG had been fried either through a lightning strike or through some other source of high current.

More important was the rest of the display: A dwarf, probably the security spider had dragged himself inside, despite his guts hanging out. His datajack was still connected to a large console. His wounds were fresh and spoke of a very sharp blade. The ammount of blood pooling around him made it pretty much a guarantee that he was dead.

His AR tag identified him as Kyle Fisher. Krestov noticed that the dwarf wore a modified helmet compared to the other guard. Not only had he easier access to his datajack, but there there seemed to be additional stuff in there too.

[Volker]

bnc swallows, wipes her face and takes a second look at it. As with the vomit she had somehow spat out her fear, her eyes get crystal clear and focussed again. Then she swallows again as she nods slowly.

"That's mojo, da. And if I'm not dull as a football, one of the vilest kinds there are: blood magic."
She seems absorbed, the disgust somehow moved to the back of her head, like an archeologist who discovers his very first tomb. "If I'm not mistaken - and I tend not to be - these are Aztec scripts. The Aztecs have a very long history of sacrificing human and animal bodies. Some reputated researchers like Angelico Caranto or Dr. Susan van Bleeck assume that this roots in an even older history of blood magic."
She shakes her head as she realizes that she trails off. "Anyway. I'll bet my low-fat ass that somebody summoned a bloody blood spirit."
She takes in a deep breath of air.
"We are screwed. Mucho malo."


Frightened, but determined, she follows her group into the room, her gun at the ready. As she sees the spider, she closes her eyes, breathes through, but maintains more courage than some might have expected.

"This is bad, real bad."
She approaches the disemboweled spider and frowns. What was it that made him drag himself here? What did he intend?
Silently she kneels beside the spider and takes his commlink. She plugs herself in and analyzes what data she can find: What did he do the last minutes before his death? What did he record since things got amiss? Ah, and maybe one security code or another, while she's there...

[Jack_Spade]

The dwarf had indeed left a message, composed via his DNI:
"Help, we have been attacked. Tom Preston came to me and Roger and asked me to bring him into the server room. Something was wrong with his eyes. I think she must have used some kind of magic, because I can't remember what happened after that. My bio monitor tells me, that I am as good as dead. Only Crash and Kamikaze keep me going for the moment. It seams I have locked myself out of the system and changed the code while I was blacked out. The kerberos agent system is active, but I'll try to stop the jamming signal anyway. At least in VR the pain will go away..."

The time code confirmed that his login attempt coincided with the short reactivation of the base matrix, followed by it's deactivation shortly after the bio monitor confirmed the death of the dwarf.

[SquirrelDude]

Slobbertooth kneaded his forehead, sighed, and then showed a small toothy smile. "And everyone thought I was crazy for being so against this job." And the little girl who was so confident and sure of herself was puking over the sight of a body.

"Nothing for it now, though. The only way out is through."

[Sabato Kuroi]

Blood spirits?Torrent had faith in his team but he knew none of them were experts in countering magical threats.


This damned helmet..it itches...

He never cared much for justice.In the streets you were  predator or prey.He knew Raven's tricks danced on the edge of cruelty but what had happened to that poor dwarf was...sick.


Right.Our employer is waiting.

[SgtBoomCloud]

Krestov gave a bit of a nod at the explanation, what little information he had learned on maleficar and such during training coming into his memories.  "Magiya krovi.  Figures.  KE has one procedure for them: wide area destruction.  Normal rules on civilians voided to remove threat.  Last time blood spirit in Seattle, KE almost leveled a whole sector before bounty hunter stepped in."[/color]  He trailed, realizing that this wasn't the best time for a lecture.

"Time is not on our side then.   Pressing on.  bnc, can you restore Matrix function quickly?"  His tone denoted not that of someone questioning her ability, but of one suggesting to weigh the time spent bringing them to full versus finding their main objective.

Another thought crossed his mind then, his expression going grim as he turned to Torrent and Slobbertooth while bnc did her thing.  "Aztlani mercenaries.  Aztec blood magic.  At facility of two AAAs, and neither the one we angered.  You know what I mean.  Coincidence is...troubling..."  He let them fill in the dots as he pulled out his Crusader, swapping out the mag for a clip of regular rounds with a short series of clicks.

[Volker]

What's going on?
Tom Preston is one of the three execs, after Dr. Schmitt himself and Dr. Malcolm. We never heard anything of a Roger, but I assume it must be a workmate. But who is she? There is not supposed to be any Awakened staff, yet the wording seems to indicate he knew her.
Well, there's nothing I can do about that right now.

"Da."
bnc plugs herself out of the commlink and shoves the cable into the control station. Before she establishes the connection she makes sure she's running silently; then her body goes limp.

Finding herself in the virtual world - the only true world - again, first she looks around. She should be inside the host already so this can't be an issue. Still, the routine that transformed the whole host into a drumstick-thrashing beast has to be find. But before that, she hast to look out for Kerberos.

[Jack_Spade]

The connection through the workstation made entering the host pretty trivial - especially since the dwarf was still logged into the station. In fact his persona icon - a small golden tortoise was still visible. She had seen something like this before: An active link lock, that ignored the fact that the owner had jacked out of his body permanently. The inside of the host looked very much like a techno disco. Light flashed everywhere and an all encompassing noise made her dizzy. The source of the disturbance was easy to identify: A single file, that seemed to be continuously updated - much like the recording file of a camera. The file seemed to connect to every other system inside the host and forced them to be send and copied at the same time, including itself. This process not only generated massive amounts of noise but did also effectively use up the available runtime of the whole system. 

If she interpreted what she saw correctly, the dwarf had tried to suppress the file through a heavy encryption, stopping the update process. This had slowed down the copy process enough to give the host a short window to operate other functions.

That's where the Kerberos program came into play: The Icon of a giant, three headed dog prowled slowly through the host. With so much of the resources bound up otherwise, it moved with a glacial pace. But even so it would only be a matter of seconds before the program became aware of bnc.

[Volker]

If I don't wanna end up like that spider, I first have to blast this god-damn agent. His tough but if I learned one thing from Kerstin it is: If you shoot somebody in the back, he's unlikely to shoot back.

Still carefully controlling the data going to and fro her deck she tries to avoid being seen while she analyzes the structure of the program, looks for weaknesses in the programming and prepares small, fine, but very dangerous subroutines.
Suddenly her persona changes. Almost all of the gadgets surrounding the bizarre figure vanish and a prominent gun rises from her forearm. With a loud bang! she unleashes a program which not only triggers the small subroutines she installed to the dog seconds before but also edits a digit here or there to cause runtime failures and hopefully turns the three-headed giant dog in a metaphorical bluescreen.

[Jack_Spade]

Getting the marks was the easy part, but cracking the agent's firewall proved to be a lot harder.
Still, the noise of of the files prevented the agent from finding bnc, so he couldn't do much more than examine himself. bnc noticed how the Agent started his self diagnostics and raised additional protections.

[Volker]

Now, finally there's a challenge.

bnc's mind is racing as she thinks of tricks how to bypass the firewall, thoughts running quickly as she responds to Kerberos' activities. Finally, bnc manages to code a really nasty piece of code which disguises itself as an interesting anomaly, bypassing the Firewall through the sensory system of the agent, where it then reveals its vicious nature: a harmful executable that rewrites relevant operational file sections and eventually causes the agent to Crash.

"Dead", she exclaims dryly but triumphantly.
"Gimme a couple o' seconds, and keep those bloody spirits off me!"

"Now, let's play the Game of Life..."
bnc analyses the structure of these files and codes her own version of it. It's a trick she learned from her medicinical studies. In Gene therapy sometimes viruses are used to infect cells in a way that is wholesome to the patient. She copies that code of one of the files on her deck, changes its behavioral pattern: Instead of copying itself and thus creating other files it would analyse other files and infect those with a similar pattern. All infected files would no longer reproduce itself but, quite the opposite, send its file name and destination to an independend file she lovingly calls Sarah.
Once this virus is on his way, bnc would create a visualisation that shows her how the maleficent files and her virus expand in the host. As soon as all files are "corrupted" she will delete all files listed in Sarah, then delete Sarah itself.
If there is time she would change the design of the programming in an adaptable way. It should learn by other file's behavior to flexibly react to different data structure design. That way she wants to go sure that no single file survives to start the goddamn process from new.

[Jack_Spade]

The cure began to work. Slowly the noise level began to fall. About 30 seconds before Schmitt's comlink would work again and ca. one minute until her own deck would be back in action: Blue Hades slowly stopped being a problem and became part of the solution.
bnc would have liked to stay and watch, but she became aware of two things:

Whoever had sabotaged the Host would send troops to shut it down once more, or - since they had killed their decker - search for the person who had reactivated the system and force them to undo it.

Secondly: Now that the host slowly regained free capacity it had begun to launch an impressive array of IC - bnc counted a Patrol, a Killer, a Black IC and a Sparky. The performance was not unlike a severe allergic reaction. And as if that wasn't enough it seemed as if the host was loading another copy of the Kerberos agent.

 

[Volker]

"Sweet Jesus, what's wrong with these guys?"
bnc does the only sensible thing she can do: unplug herself and store Sarah and the visualisation recording directly on the server so she can access it without being online for more than a second.

"Everybody go offline immediately! Those fellas are serious. There's more ICe than on Mont Blanc! Don't like to repeat myself, but we're in trouble."