›››››[lt's been continually reported that Daviar has some connection to the Polish intelligence community, though no information beyond that has ever surfaced. I'll bet that Brighton would pay mucho dinero for that kind of paydata.]
– Ex-Pat 03:02:09/3-12-54
The dragon began the semi-annual program the year following Brighton's retirement from media and has produced over two dozen editions of the program. Topics range from trite celebrity interviews and profiles to frighteningly insightful commentary on culture and society. The dragon's current program is overdue, and word from the production studio is that Dunklezahn remains undecided about its scope or subject. However, no one on the production staff even knows the topics the great dragon is considering. Regardless, the choice and result will undoubtedly be fascinating on some level, as well as a ratings bonanza.
›››››[I'm on the production staff for "Wyrm Talk" (yes, you could see my name on the credits if you knew where to look) and "undecided" is an understatement for the Big D's (as he's referred to in the studio) state of mind these days. Angst-ridden is more like it. At the heart of who and what Dunklezahn is is his fascination with humanity, specifically human interaction. He's amazed by how we relate to each other, or don't. The whole VR setup in Lake Louise is designed so that he can observe people reacting to things and each other. What's got him upset (though that may be too strong a word for a dragon) is that he knows something he thinks everyone (read: humanity) should know about. Why doesn't he just say? I don't know. Will he say? I don't know either.]
– More Than Best Boy 07:17:16/3-10-64
›››››[Maybe he's silent because others don't think humanity is ready to know everything and have warned him against it. If so, just who out there is powerful enough to tell a great dragon what to do? Think about it – it'll keep you up at night.]
– Frosty 05:10:12/3-12-54
THE DUELISTS
Written by Diane Piron-Gelman and Robert Cruz, based on stories by Jonathan Szeto
› Sysop: You are in the War Stories room.
› Sounds like one helluva run, Jo.
› Hellcab
› Buy me a beer and I'll tell you about an even better one.
› Josie Cruise
› (pop/fwsshhh/gluglugluglug) Bought and poured, Jo-girl. Spill.
› Hellcab
› I'll trust you for one in the meatworld (fool that I am…). Okay. I was in Calfree last spring, part of a team pulling a job on Yamatetsu. The corp had a hush-hush R D compound up in the Northern Crescent, not far from Blue Lake. Our Johnson thought they were up to something biogenetically questionable (to put it nicely), and wanted us to get two kinds of proof: data and a sample. Get in, snatch the goodies and get out again-my specialty.
So we headed out from Redding, got as near to the compound as we could by off-roader, then bailed and started hoofing. I'm not going to bore you with the rigger's-eye-view of the ride up; half the folks on this board know what that's like, and anyways nothing happened. The fun stuff all came later.
Our Johnson was amazingly well-informed about the place she'd sent us to hit, so we had a pretty fair idea of where its defensive perimeter was. Yamatetsu had built the place in a little hollow between two hills-half inside the northernmost hill, to be exact. So we hunkered down just shy of the top of the southmost hill, and I called up a couple of Condors to go have a look-see.
You gotta love a Condor LDSD-23. Especially when it answers to a cranial remote deck. I got to try out almost all my new toys on this run… but I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyways, for those few of you who don't know, the Condor's damned near the ultimate stealth drone. It soars up on its little balloon and sleazes right by a whole mess of sensors and radar, and not one of them sniffs a thing. My remote deck let me see the world through the drone's eyes, giving me as clear a picture of the compound's perimeter defenses as if I'd walked straight up to the fence and stuck my nose through it. Better, actually. The naked meat eye doesn't give you thermo or infrared unless you're the right metatype, and the metahuman nose can't chemsniff half as well as the chemical sensors my Condor was packing.
The Condor showed me about what I'd've expected from a hush-hush R D compound-security was tight enough to safeguard the important drek inside, but nowhere near impossible. In a place like the Northern Crescent, if you're setting up secret shop and don't want to attract attention, you really can't afford to dress up the outside of your research playground with every single bell and whistle ever thunk up by Ares Macrotech and Knight-Errant and other purveyors of paranoiac pacifiers. You have to pick and choose, and layer your defenses. So I knew that getting the team through the perimeter was only going to be half the battle. Once I'd managed that, I'd have to take over the building's systems if I could-which meant going head-to-head with the security rigger we'd been told was there, probably. I was looking forward to it; things'd been kind of slow lately.
But first things first. The compound had a fence around the three sides that weren't under the hill, with tall skinny pillars spaced intermittently across it that I recognized as sensor posts. Motion and infrared, most likely. Through the fence I could also see Ferrets and Dobermans and even a couple of Guardians crawling along, patroling the perimeter a lot more tirelessly and efficiently than meat guards would've done. (Cheaper, too; a drone doesn't need pay or health benefits and never takes personal time.) There were also gun emplacements, on the two fence corners and lined up across the roofline of the building. Sentry guns; I could tell by the shape. Not the mobile kind on a track, though. Likely they'd reserved those and the Sentry IIs for inside.
So I had my work cut out for me. I had to take out the sensor posts, drones and Sentries all in one shot, so the rest of the team could get up to the fence and through it without getting cut down by a hail of lead. Also without being spotted. The sec-rigger would know something was going down the minute I started to muck with his system, especially considering the level of mucking that was clearly going to be necessary-but the longer we could keep the opposition from knowing exactly what they were up against, the more time we'd buy for ourselves. And our job wouldn't take us that long.
I called my eye-in-the-sky back and whistled up three more drones. These had special jobs to do. Two of them were remote-adapted Artemises loaded with Jabberwockies, primed and ready to fire. The third drone, which I sent in first, was my favorite new toy: a Hedgehog signal interceptor, the very latest in seeing-eye techno-beasts.
›
› Where in the name of the Great Ghost did you get a Hedgehog?! I thought the Azzies put a tight lock on distribution. They went to a lot of trouble to develop that puppy; they sure as drek don't want street scum like us getting ahold of them. What'd you do, sell your soul to Old Scratch or something?
› Nissan Barb
› Fell off the back of a t-bird, my fixer said. When somebody I trust offers me a new piece of wizbang tech, I don't ask too many questions. The important thing is, I got it, and I used it when I needed it. Now don't interrupt my story; I'm on a roll here, 'kay?
The Hedgehog's a terrific piece of equipment. No rigger who can afford one should be without it, I don't care who you have to frag over or go to bed with. What this pup does, it tells you the signal strength, protocols and encryption that a system is using. In other words, the Hedgehog gave me the key to the compound's entire electronic security system just by reading the kinds of signals flowing through those sensor posts. Giving me the shape and smell and taste of it, so to speak. (Not literally-but sometimes it's hard to put what a rigger gets from a drone into words that ordinary people can understand.) All this stuff was vital information that'd make the second half of my job-taking over the building system-that much quicker and easier.