Mata cuts the link at her reply. "Slotting Slitches!" he says under his breath, his ire now up. Mata walks to and in front of HammerJack. "We have extended every courtesy to you in this, now its time to return the courtesy. On the matter of the ransom....." Mata begins to channel his mana between a natural respiratory pause, harmonizing his vocal cords to the right pitches as his eyes quickly dart over HammerJacks pulse points and involuntary movements.".....Tell us, you or not?"
Mata's hand is on the lighter, the lie detection software running, but he feels confident his pitch was right.
The suit hadn't strong mental backbone to begin with. Under the force of Mata's voice it has broken like a rotten match.
After his glitch no further rolls are needed
The empty storyBest Served Cold… is how de la Clos described revenge.
The suit's name is HammerJack or Void as he is calling himself lately. He had spent the last seven years of his life trying to find the best way to eat that dish. Jaron Falcone had ruined his life. An easy run he said - get in, grab the data and get out. The fixer never mentioned anything about another team and an armed response from Knight Errant.
It started out as a data extraction, his own team disabled the security forces while he peeled off layers of encryption and IC that would make running the core host of Deus look like a cake walk. Then everything went south.
A second team showed up, moving with military precision. The newcomers loaded a worm into the first computer they crossed and began a sweep through the complex. The worm was meant to bypass and shut off every piece of security in the host. Instead, it set off every alarm and unleashed tidal forces of IC. By the time HammerJack was able to get free of the security grid and jump to the next tier, the system had begun the process of self-corruption since the ports had been jammed wide open and shutdown was impossible. Smart-frames reported back to him that they were unable to get a clear readout from the security cameras and his radio frequencies had been jammed.
All he could do was wait for the end to come or cut his losses and run. The decker ran. He remembered fleeing for his life through a rabbit warren of hallways, cubicle farms and programming labs. When HammerJack finally got to the elevator shaft, the doors had been blown open and the zipping sounds of rappelling gear could be heard.
Power was cut to the building except for emergency generators and the backup power supplies.
A Knight Errant tactical squad had responded to the call since they were unable to raise any local security forces. Using their helmets’ night-vision, they moved through the near blackness without noticing. Within minutes, the team had subdued the facility, incapacitating him and the rogue team that had sought to poach their glory and paydata.
HammerJack was plugged back into the system at gunpoint, his deck removed from the link, it was his bare mind against the system. The Knight Errant team was under orders to plug any survivor who had a datajack into the black box. Psychotropic IC assaulted his mind even as their mage began laying down new programming and excising pieces that were non-compatible.
He woke up hours later at home in his own bed, not knowing how he got there. He couldn’t remember his teammates contact info either. So he got dressed and decided it was probably best that he went to work. Pulling on clean clothes, he caught the subway over to Ares HQ in Bellevue and reported for work.
For months he had a feeling like something was missing. Then he ran into Falcone and everything began to click. Slowly and quietly, he began to see a street-doc who handled scorched mind victims. It was a grueling, painful process but he got his own life and memories back.
Far too many times recently he had gotten lost in the deeper recesses of his own mind and needed the reminders of where and when he was. His internal bio-monitor was connected to a smart-frame which monitored his condition. The frame would cause an external stimulus if he began daydreaming.
The stimulus wasn’t caused by the smart frame. This time, one of his agents had come back with some talk scooped freshly out of the Denver Nexus boards. Someone was hitting the ranch, Jaron’s ranch.
He wrote the ransom note. If he played his cards right and swung the timing perfectly, it could work.
Or rather it could have worked...
The time now is 2:00 am