Futuristic Into Chrome (closed)

[Obuzeti]

New Detroit, 2219
277th Block, West Jurisdiction, Floor 8 - Nimitz
September 7th, 11:38 PM
Soundtrack: Lorn - Oxbox B

---

Westside is worse than a slum. Westside is a vertical junkyard.

When the Great Lakes had become, by necessity, the major port of the East Coast after most of it had been irradiated back in the Guiltwar that had left China, Russia, and both coastlines of the US in smoking ruins, they'd needed ground to stack the scrap metal reclaimed from the ruined Navy the new nation no longer needed. Old destroyers and frigates and battleships were hauled through rough canals and left in rusted moorings to await new purpose. Some did go to the shipbreakers, but when the Federated States finally collapsed and the New Federation rose from its ashes - along with Lastlight West, the corporation that had come to own 86% of the old nation's infrastructure - had no use for such an outdated navy. Particularly, the oldest carrier in service: the Nimitz super carrier, and its brethren.

So they had rotted in dock, and the scavs moved in.

These days, the shipbreaker docks are lined with dozens of hulls, some towering, some petty, some with their moorings broken, rolled over and collapsed onto each other, rotting and rusted and thriving with life, as scavs tap the aged wires for electricity, run the reactors for power, spill blood by the gallon to secure each petty room, and resist armed intrusion furiously. Those towering, shadowed hulks are hives of ambush and crime, the worst place to live in the city, by far. Even the Underslums see MaxTac on occasion, but the Tic-Tacs won't go past the caution signs of the breaker bays, so old all the yellow's worn off them.

No man's land: the Breaks. As the saying went, them's the Breaks.

His target is a decker - Vulture, by her tagline. She lives in the shadow of the Carl Vinson, two ships down from Nimitz. The groaning superstructure leans at a 45 degree angle, lashed in place by enormous steel cabling as thick across as a man; in the wind, you can hear the carrier groan and sway. The apartments beneath the Vinson are so cheap that they're basically free - with the understanding that, someday soon, the ship hung over this entire street will come crashing down and kill everyone there, probably in their sleep. But compared to all the other things that can kill you in New Detroit, this one's just a little more obvious.

Standing just over six and a half feet tall, Jonah traces the wire bundle descending from the carrier overhead - the cable Vulture's been identified on. He shimmies down it in the black of night, down to a rooftop loft apartment not nine feet beneath the shifting bulk of the Vinson, straight up nestled against the back of one of the towering support struts that bear part of the ship's weight. Black-haired and blue eyed, all smooth, pale skin and broad muscle, there's an arresting purity to his visage, he knows. No augs, no cyber, no steel.

His body wouldn't take it, anyways, and there's more that's artificial about him than an entire assembly line. Meat is a family product, after all.

Vulture has information his fixer needs. So he starts off light; he clamps a joinsnap around the net-cable rising from her apartment into the ship, cutting off her network access. She might has some short-range wireless, but without live feed to a licensed terminal, her license will shut off anyways. It also jolts the power off briefly as the powerload shifts, almost kicking a breaker.

With her defenses potentially defanged, Jonah plants a thumper - a disc-shaped device with an adhering inner surface - against the wall, and retreats. It's only seconds until it begins to thump its message against the apartment wall in binary, tapping out a simple message.

P - A - R - L - E - Y

 

[Nogoodname]

The pulsing, thrumming landscape of Cyberspace stretched out indefinitely in all directions.

A veritable wasteland of information as far as the eye could see. The nukes that'd sparked nearly a century of war had not been kind to the infrastructure of the first net. Server rooms, transmission towers, broadcast relays, all had been easy targets for malicious actors intent on disrupting communications. For the first time since the internet's inception, the world was thrust into an information dark age as the last surviving pockets of the old net went dark one by one. The resonant EMP waves that'd come after had been the death knell, causing permanant damage to what little remained of the old net infrastructure, shattering any hope of a return to normalcy.

When the fighting had finally come to an end and the New Federation stood alone as victor, the trading companies that'd spawned from it decided to build a new net in their image. The Tradecorps had been quick to identify the 'problems' plaguing the old net. It'd been too chaotic, too wild and unregulated, gave the users too much power to do what they pleased without considering the consequences. This new net would be the solution to these problems, a restrictive, heavily moderated system of tradecorp owned intranets loosely connected to one another via a skeletal model of the original internet. Each tradecorp would own their own network, which would act as the sole access point for their proprietary apps and software in a high surveillance, low trust enviornment. This original blueprint laid the foundation for what we call modern Cyberspace.

Nowadays, Cyberspace is a far cry from the shining picture the tradecorps had envisioned. The original Deckers had cut their teeth on tradecorp network security, laying waste to vast swathes of the network in a vain act of rebellion. In no time at all they'd carved out a massive no-man's land of compromised data, dead access points and rogue daemons. The TradeNets for their part had simply regrouped and contructed higher walls, intent on rigidly enforcing their own little virtual fiefdoms while everything else rotted away.

Vulture drifted amidst the sanctuary that was her own personal network, a small data fortress, heavily defended and tucked away in the corner of nowhere so that she could do her work in peace. This little pocket network hardly constituted anything impressive, it was by all means a tiny hovel of hoarded data and half baked daemons, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But to Vulture, this place was home.

The Decker had been hard at work when the darkness took her. One moment she'd been conjuring up a fresh daemon, a wicked little program she planned on dropping kernel deep into the cyberdeck of a bitter rival. Then the next moment Vulture found herself laying awake in her chair, sucking in air through her teeth and writhing in pain as her consciousness had essentially been shunted back into her body with all the grace of a trash compactor.

In the darkness of her apartment she fumbled behind her head for the heavy duty Interface Plug, gingerly tugging it free and sitting up slowly, her vision still spotty with flashes of red against the dark backdrop of her room. She sat there for a moment, refocusing her thoughts and trying to catch her breath.

Just what the hell had happened? Vulture couldn't tell for certain, while blackouts and network outages were common in Westside, often times the network managed to throw some kind of warning so she could jack out safely. The fact that the network had failed to predict this outage was unusual, at least enough to cause a few alarm bells to go ringing in the decker's head.

Vulture made her way to the window, tugging a jacket and a pair of sweatpants over the skintight, breathable material of her cooling suit. She popped a few pills to deal with the encroaching migrain and carefully peered out through the blinds, eyeing the other windows across the block to see if anyone else had lost power. As far as Vulture could tell though, everything was still up and running. Even the lights in her own apartment had already flickered back to life, leaving her standing there dumbfounded, moving over to her personal computer to check on the status of local network.

When about a minute passed and nothing came up, Vulture finally began to worry. She snatched up her portable agent from her desk and used it to wirelessly ping the nearest access point, raising an eyebrow as the ping came back almost immediately. She searched for any record of a network outage, nothing, and yet her own net was still completely cut off...

By now Vulture was almost certain something was up. Sure, maybe it could be some little shit tugging on network cables, but at this hour? Without affecting anybody else in Westside? Vulture wasn't taking any chances. With a slow, calming breath the decker pulled open a drawer at her desk and retrieved a small pistol, an old B9-'Jasper' that rarely saw the light of day. She carefully slid in the magazine and racked the slide, but shit her hands were already shaking, this was hardly her area of expertise... Still, she wasn't planning on going out quietly, not if she could help it.

The sudden, distinct and rhythmic thumping against her apartment wall caused the decker to jump with a start! Already twitchy, the decker's arm shot up, pointing the barrel of her pistol towards the front door to her apartment, just waiting for someone to try and barge in. Her finger hooked over the trigger, breathing quickening as she took a tentative step back, pressing herself up against the back wall of her apartment.

It only took a couple of moments for the familiar pattern of binary to come to her mind like a second language, the decker waiting for the long pause and then working her way forward, letter by letter, by the time the little device had finished it's cycle Vulture almost wanted to laugh.

'Parley' huh? The decker grit her teeth, what kind of punk did these assholes take her for? They expected to just cut off her network access and then ask for some kind of peaceful negotiation? 'Interrogation' felt like a better choice of words. Still, she really didn't have a choice in the matter, they already had her cornered, it's not like she could just make a break for it now. With a small sigh of resignation she tucked her pistol into her waistband, right against the small of her back, covering it with her jacket as she made her way to the door. After carefully peering through the peephole, she hesitated, before pulling the door open and stepping out into the hallway.

 

[Obuzeti]

What had initially come off as another draped, dusty bit of abandoned steel rises up - and up some more. Towering at 208 cm, or just under six foot ten, a surveillance shroud is thrown back over her visitor's shoulders. It's a fancy name for cloth threaded with lead, which blunts most scanning effects; most scavvers just call it the cold blanket. He's big and broad-shouldered, layered in synthcloth underneath that shifts from soft blues, rusty reds, and greys to match the gunmetal rusted streets and buildings of modern decay; gloves as wide across as her thighs, and beefy hands inside them. Heavy combat boots, probably bought surplus. If there's armor under the blanket or the cloth, she can't see it. And there's no gun she can see either, in as clear a violation of street code as she's ever seen in New-Troit.

Then she gets up to the face. Porcelain, fine, aristocratic features - not surly and bronzed, rounded and soft in the way of so many 'Troiters, but with cheekbones like architecture and a firm, strong chin. It's the kind of face that belongs on a dowdy television serial or a commercial in the heights, not a back-alley slum like this. No suntan, no chemical bleaching of his skin from long-term exposure to flourescent light, just pale and firm flesh; hairless, spotless, perfect.

And then the eyes, and that's where it goes wrong. Her visitor has the dead, empty stare of a barracuda, black and unblinking. That's a Corps stare. Desensitized to human awareness.

"Vulture," he says. "Your deck sig is on braindance 138N2GB. The Ghost Dreams."

Each word is enunciated, perfect and sharp, crisp diction, faintly posh except where the sibilants sharpen in his mouth. He doesn't blink. He doesn't move. He breathes like a ventilator: automatic and measured.

"I require the master copy of this braindance. I have been retained to erase certain pertinent information within it and see the extant copies corrected in a similar fashion."

His head tilts just slightly. "I would prefer your cooperation, if possible."

No swagger. No threats. No flashing of iron. He doesn't comment on her own gun whatsoever, the disheveled state of her dress, or look away. Crocodiles have warmer blood than this one.

 

[Nogoodname]

Compared to the man in front of her, Vulture was practically nothing. She stood at a staggering five foot six with a rail thin frame, the corpo staple diet of coffee and synthcoke apparently suits her new lifestyle just fine. Her outfit, which wasn't too much of a deviation of the norm, could generously be called 'Hacker Chic' with the way her baggier clothing concealed most of her electronics under a drab visage of black and grey. The only outlier was her Cyberdeck, which the decker wore openly strapped to her forearm in a display that, to some, was far more threatening than the pistol.

In stark contrast to her visitor's lack of augs though, Vulture was chipped to hell and back. EMP threading, the circuit-like traces of copper and chrome, ran across both hands and trailed up her sleeves in that artificial, hexagonal pattern. An interface plug buried itself into her left wrist, as expected, one could hardly consider themselves a decker without it. A pair of chip sockets at the back of her neck no doubt denoted a whole suite of neuralware for scanning, editing and utilizing various chipware.

And who could forget the fashionware? That was most visible on her face, which was an explosion of color compared to the rest of her body. Her tech hair, thin synthetic strands of a fliment which simulated keratin, gleamed a vibrant arrangement of neon blue and pink hues that a fiction editor would call out as 'a little on the nose'. The decker's face had a certain rough texture to it, the face of someone who's been worn down by the city, ground up and spit back out by its cold, uncaring nature, speckled with its dirt and grime in a way that doesn't just wash out. Though beneath the rugged exterior there are still traces of the manufactured, the 'cute', the disarming features of someone born into the corporate lifestyle, brought on by preferential genetic selection and a rigid adherance to strict beauty standards. Her eyes are a deep, muted blue, with brighter limbal rings encircling them expressing that even this is an artificial trait.

Vulture gave a soft sigh, uttering a curse under her breath. "Goddamnit" she hissed, her tone harsh and unregulated. "I knew that job was gonna fuck me."

She paused for a beat, as if weighing her options. On one hand, betraying a client like this would be a pretty solid hit to her reputation, a death sentence for anyone who wanted to find decent work in this city, even considering her less than legal operation here. On the other hand, Vulture really didn't want to die today. The choice was, admittedly, an easy one.

"Alright, I'll tell you what I know" lucky for her the job was still fresh on her mind, kept there by its puzzling nature. "I don't have the master copy, I was just hired to scrub the meta and do a routine sweep for bugs. The client came in with a proxy, I didn't ask for his name. We got the job done quick, I scrubbed the BD, he paid, then we split. Got no idea where the guy might've run off to."

She paused, reluctant, there was a 'but' that should've come next but she'd pulled her punch, suddenly unwilling or unable to go deeper.

 

[Obuzeti]

Her visitor's nose twitches. It's an odd, distinct gesture. The sour, gaping smirk, shining white teeth revealed on the right side, the left pursed and tight until his lips pale, is such a uniquely ugly expression that it sours otherwise princely features. Those dead-fish eyes crinkle with something kindred to amusement as they pan over Vulture, taking in her distinct appearance and attire. "Then our payouts are false leads," he murmurs. Low and resonant. Voice like a radio operator, with those soft into sharp, clicking consonants. Like some dowdy professor who hates his students. "The objective is not wiping the data. It is who comes to see what is being wiped. One does not bait a single hook."

The silence lingers on the walkway. His eyes roll aside, and he leans over the railing slightly to stare down to the floor level of the dilapidated building Vulture posts up in. It's five flights down, and she can faintly hear more boots and the murmur of low conversation.

"Goons," he says, succinctly. "Did, perhaps, you distribute said braindance to anyone belonging to organizations of overblown confidence and overwhelming greed?"

He releases the rickety railing of the walkway and surreptitiously steps back, careful in each placement of a foot, hyperaware of even a rusty creak all of a sudden. "Because otherwise, six chromed thugs are shortly to be calling. I am less than motivated to discover their intentions."

His eyes flick back to Vulture. A long, slow blink ensues. "The parley holds. And clearing both our names of relevant price tags seems preferable, at this juncture."

There's a distinct impression of felinity confronted by water. There is nose wrinkling.

 

[Nogoodname]

Vulture could feel her heart sinking down into her chest, could feel the sudden spike of her own pulse and the resounding tremor of her nerves that came with it. "Shit!" she exhaled, speaking in a harsh yet hushed tone. "You're fucking with me!" a hollow accusation, but it gave her time to center her thoughts.

Her body moved faster than her brain did, reaching for the door to her apartment and slipping inside, leaving an opening for her visitor to follow. "Alright, look, I didn't sell the BD" Vulture started as she scoured her closet for the makeshift bugout bag she kept in the corner. "It's gatta be your guy spreading it, I didn't wipe the whole master copy, I just wiped the metadata, you know, shit the cops use to track people. Every time someone scrolls a BD the program saves a snapshot of the recorder's name, the time and date, geotags, IOT crumbs, all that good stuff."

The inside of Vulture's apartment was, in a word, atrocious. At some point perhaps all of the disparate server racks, computers and scattered tech had been neatly organized and carefully maintained. However as time had passed the grime of the city had settled in, trash bags and old pizza boxes laid scattered about as thin wires ran in an intricate webbing across the floor. Even the electronics had a certain cobbled together look to them as their regular maintenance had been neglected in favor of a 'spit and duct tape' approach.

With her bag in hand Vulture quickly made her way over to one of the server racks in the corner, pulling a couple of hard drives and stuffing them into her backpack. "Thing is, I got a bad vibe from this guy, call it a deckers' instinct, something about him seemed off, so when he wasn't looking I saved a backup of the data locally. We can use this info to find the person who first scrolled the BD and work our way from there"

The whole process of packing up her things for a quick getaway had only taken a few precious seconds, culmunating in her flicking open her cyberdeck and keying a command to purge her local data from the network. "So whaddya say? The data's yours if you can get me the fuck outta here"

 

[Obuzeti]

Her visitor shrugs, produces a marble from a pocket patch on his vest, and sidearms it down an alley open in their direction, where it audibly clangs inside a dumpster like a cymbal. Voices below shout out and one shithead actually opens fire blindly with his pistol before he's even turned, pockmarking the alley wall below but accomplishing not much else, as the group advances on the empty dumpster. It'll only buy them a couple seconds, but gunfire has a way of emphasizing the point. He follows behind her into the shit apartment in the echoes of the gunshots, one of two dozen residents audibly disinterested in whatever's going down on the ground level now to any hypersensitive ears.

"Logical," he approves. "We'll talk terms and plans later; it's best to move now while hostiles are inbound. We'll exfil through my previous route - up. Climb on."

He turns and drops to a knee, hikes a thumb over his shoulder, as he draws back the synthcloth. There's half a dozen pockets and slings scattered across a black tac-web rigging, most of them empty, though she can spot two pistols and one canister-sized launcher that looks an awful lot like a cut-down M47. He's big enough that she could climb onto his back like a fucking koala - almost a foot and a half height difference, with a chest broad and deep enough that her ankles would barely link if she sat on his back and tried to wrap her legs around. From behind, she gets a glimpse of the roots of his hair - natural, dark, and deep. No coloring, natural roots, strong and faintly curly. For someone he was threatening not thirty seconds ago, he changes gears awful fast.

Meanwhile, he's drawing his own sidearm, a beefy, ancient pistol that looks like she could beat a rock with it and shoot it afterwards. The slide drops back as he checks the chambered round, then meticulously flicks the safety on and back off, and toggles the clip release and sockets it back in, the sort of pain-in-the-ass checklist reading that probably either came straight out of a manual or a drill sergeant's screaming mouth.

 

[Nogoodname]

The decker looked at him with a mix of confusion and a slight bemusement. "Climb on... to your back?" she trialed off, as if not fully understanding the command. She hardly had the time to process the display as the goons below were just about finished interrogating the dumpster, so she did as she was told. "I'm having the weirdest fuckin' day man" Vulture complained as she stepped up and hopped onto his back, arms looped around his neck neck, legs straddling his back, leaning forward to put her weight onto him as she watched her visitor draw and check the pistol with his meticulous little ritual.

The smaller girl was light on his back, head resting against his shoulder so she could peek out in front of them, keeping an eye out for any threats that might show up in their path. Almost reflexively she felt her free hand trail over to the cyberdeck strapped to her forearm, she could technically reach it from here, and while the positioning was awkward, she had the muscle memory to access the handful of preloaded daemons at her disposal.

"...I can try to cover you, but this is gonna get weird." she held tighter to him, fingers with chipped up black nail polished glued to the keys of her deck.

That Cyberdeck of hers was definitely a rarity, a bulky looking thing made of some sort of cheap aluminum alloy, definitely an older model, though it had no markings for any tradecorp nor a visible serial number, so some sort of custom build. The keys were slightly worn, and the frame had been scratched up from frequent use, still, this was perhaps the most well maintained thing about her, lovingly cared for and constantly updated with fresh parts when the older tech burnt out from old age.

 

[Obuzeti]

"Don't worry about shooting," her erstwhile opponent murmurs. "I don't care to gunfight while the nearest cover is twenty feet straight up or straight down. Just hang on tight."

The warning proves appropriate as he resecures his sidearm to a thigh holster and reaches with one giant palm back to grab her leg and tuck it around his waist, uncomfortably intimate; his paws are big enough to wrap around her thigh entirely. Any complaints she might have had about his rudeness are swallowed up by the oddity of how he climbs. Rather than straight up, he reaches up to wrap his fists in the dangling cable, and then inverts himself with barely a grunt - legs wrapped up high around it, leaving both him and Vulture pointed head-first at the ground. Like this, he crawls backwards up the rope almost as easily as anyone else would, boots magnetically clamping together around the cable to give him additional grip, his lowest hand looping the cable up around his wrists as he ascends. He moves ten feet straight up in as many seconds, spider-silent and smooth, no struggle or grunt.

It's a good thing, too, because that's when the elevator chimes and a second set of four goons spill out onto the causeway, evidently having split up. Vulture's human taxi freezes, still and silent in the dark, above the actinic glare of the floodlights, one more shadow cast against the looming bulk of the Vinson. The hired muscle below charges across the creaky walkway and bust down the decker's door as a disorganized swarm, and the moment they break line of sight, they start ascending again, her abandoned apartment retreating into the disorganized gloom below as shouts and breaking hardware echo up to them, along with the ring of wild shots.

"Best leave them to it," he murmurs, as his feet hook the overturned safety railing of the Vinson's flight deck, drawing them up and through until he can settle all four limbs on solid surface. The metal creaks alarmingly under his weight, so he scuttles sideways through a torn hole and into the gangways underneath, the floor sloped and almost diagonal but for where the deck meets the framing underneath, a narrow brace there providing a footpath a little more than a foot wide over the metal joint itself. "Climb off. Do you need another netport to do your searching? I have a bolthole on the aft end."

Totally unnecessary information. He's not tense underneath her, or even breathing hard from that abnormal climb - though, granted, it had allowed him to keep eyes on target and remove the evidence of their exit at the same time. The voice is conversational, unworried about being burned. Business as usual.

Above the tiny metal joint, the metal superstructure of the carrier groans, distant pops and squeaks as ancient steel resists the inevitable call of gravity. Bangs and echoes as the meanest gangers in New Detroit howl at each other, open fire, carouse through the dilapidated barracks and engine rooms. The only reason the gangers aren't down here is because they're three inches of rusted, ancient metal from an eighty foot drop. No one is stupid enough to live in the ripped, almost detached hull.

 

[Nogoodname]

"oh trust me, I won't be shooting" she retorted smugly, as if that was supposed to make matters any better.

A sharp gasp escaped her as she felt that hand grip her thigh, the two of them suddenly toppling over, dangling upside down from the nearby cable as her visitor began to inch his way upwards, foot by foot. The pair of them made rapid progress, much faster than Vulture had been expecting, suddenly finding herself swaying in the breeze at a dizzying height with the rustic apartment building below them growing smaller by the moment. She clung tighter to him, held on for dear life, squeezing her eyes shut tightly and trying to control her breathing as they made their quick ascension towards the Vinson.

At some point she felt the pair of them stop, one eye peeking open to spot the group of four goons fan out across the floor, sweeping the area thoroughly in search of something. In search of Vulture, no doubt, and her enigmatic guest if they could find him. The decker watched the small squad intensely as they began to make their way over to her room. She watched them group up again to argue on the best method of entry as, unbeknownst to them, their targets hung percariously above them, just a few feet up, with nowhere to run and certainly nowhere to hide if a single goon just so happened to look up and take notice. Once again her fingers felt for the keys of her cyberdeck, a passive scan revealing a treasure trove of augments for her to get her hooks in, spitting out packets upon packets of raw, unencrypted data, like they were begging for her to just reach in and take control.

Vulture carefully weighed her options, she could knock a gun arm offline, maybe shut off an optical implant or two, easily knock one of them out of commission and give her visitor time to take out another. But after that... well, the lack of available cover and their awkward position made things more than a little difficult, she didn't like their odds.

Lucky for both of them, they were given a slight break this time as the group broke from their bickering and stacked up on Vulture's door, the leading member kicking the door in as all four of them rushed in to swarm the room. The decker let out the breath that she realized she'd been holding, nodding gently. "Right..." she trailed off in a low, relieved tone. "There's nothin' for em to find, anyways."

After another beat of climbing Vulture finally stepped down from the taller man's back and onto the uneven floor. The decker had never been so happy to have her feet on (somewhat) solid ground, stepping back from the edge with careful footing, listening to the ship's frame creak softly beneath her. "Hah, christ, that's one hell of a getaway plan." she complained. A wave of nausea hit Vulture all at once, the decker bringing a hand to her mouth, hugging herself gently, hunching over with a low groan as she took the time to get used to the feeling of standing upright again. "Ugh..." she whined. "Next time bring a car..."

It didn't take long for Vulture to bounce back though, standing straight again and slapping both hands against her cheeks with a sharp huff. "hokay! Right, yeah, get me to a netport. I'll use the info from the BD to run a trace, shouldn't be too hard to find out where the scroller's living these days."

 

[Obuzeti]

"Not a lot of traffic up here," her escort replies, with the sort of blank face that sees a lot of arguments fly overhead. "And cars are much easier to track."

A pause. His eyes close, then reopen in a slow, deliberate blink. "Also: I am poor. My vehicular budget is not a priority."

With that statement naked in the air, he turns down the long, diagonal trek of the ship's superstructure, glances at the piping on the walls, and points straight ahead. "We're in subdeck B-1, by the flight deck. My bolthole is in the ammunition crèche for the missile bays. This way."

He promptly trots off down the creaking hull. If there's any benefit to the situation, it's that if the hull doesn't give out under his enormous tromping weight - the man has to weigh twice what she does - she'll be just fine as well.

And that's the last thing he says for seven minutes of nerve-wracking ambling through the wrecked hull of a scuttled aircraft carrier, listening to the barely-human hoots and hollers of the deck goons above, and the ominous creaking of the rusted steel between them and a multiple-story descent. If the other man feels nerves, he isn't evocative about it.

When they reach the actual missile bays, it's not a whole lot better at first glance; their red-and-white hulls idly strewn against a wall turned horizontal by the carrier's tilt, their casings rusted, shattered, or corroded by decades of moist atmosphere and mold, especially not considering he's made a bridge of them between the gantry and the overturned belly of the missile bay ball-joint over an open gap in the hull, providing a nook of about seven to eight feet of flat-ish ground where it locks into the ship's superstructure, surrounded by more high explosive and sudden plummeting death than most people would ever be comfortable with. It's suddenly clear why the gangers don't care to contest this territory. It's a death-trap.

There's a sleeping bag, a wide array of pilfered firearms meticulously sorted into a wall-nook, a fair array of canned foods - some kind of big plastic dew-trap? - and a dangling doodad that clearly links into the ship's internal telemetry for the missile bay. He gestures at it idly, then heads for the bag, pops open a can of preserved grapes, and downs a mouthful. It has that sort of dry, crumbly scent common to all foods more plastic than digestible, but at least they don't go bad.

"Should work," he says simply. "Hooks right into the main network of the Vinson. No password."

 

[Nogoodname]

Vulture practically clung to her escort as they made the precarious walk across the dented hull, each faint creak or pop of the old, rustic metal caused the decker to jump slightiy in terror, already preparing for a long fall should the decaying structure decide to fail on them. A prospect that seemed more and more likely as time went on, as the ship gave the occasional groan in complaint at the sheer weight of her companion.

She kept her gaze fixed forward, firmly aware that looking down would send her into a spiraling sense of vertigo that could end in tragedy, instead focusing on her partners back, watching as he crept across the rusted steel with an unerring ease and trying to mimic his movements to the best of her ability. It was a tense coulple of minutes that ended up feeling far longer, her heart already pounding in her chest by the time they made it to the missile bay. And here she'd been hoping the worst was over...

The sight of the decaying explosive material, in short, did not inspire confidence in the young decker as she ever so slowly crossed the makeshift bridge, mentally rattling off a couple of prayers to anyone that might still be listening.

By the time she made it over to her guide's little nook hideout her legs had already started to fail her, and she sat down next to him, trembling slightly, taking in slow, soothing breaths in order to calm her nerves. She didn't move much, terrified that the slightest misstep would still send her plummeting, but for now she was just glad that she didn't have to climb anymore, sitting there and taking a quick look around, a faint chuckle escaping her. "And here I thought I lived in a shithole" she laughed lightly. "Let me guess, a real fixer upper, bout a thousand a month plus utilities?" she asked, that wry grin returning as she slowly reached across to the netport access point.

"Right, thanks, I'll get to it." she said, already fumbling with the thick cable, bringing the heavy duty interface plug up to the back of her head and pulling her hair back, revealing the matching port. She plugged herself in, taking in another soft breath as she began to establish a connection, turning back to her guide. "Just... don't let me fall, please." she pleaded softly, falling quiet for a beat before her body went limp, slowly slouching against a nearby wall, eyes still open, yet dead to the world.

---

The decker awoke again in cyberspace, the familiar pulse and flow of data streaming across her eidolon flesh filling her with a strong sense of relief. All around her the unfamiliar datascape stretched on for miles, a flat, barren waste, landscape typical for a public access point, though it didn't make the longing for her own little data fortress any less painful. Luckily, Vulture had methods of getting what she needed.

With a wave of her hand she summoned up a simple program, the small, avian form of her MAG.PY worm materializing before her eyes. She lifted her arm, sending the program up into the air where it circled twice before zipping off in a direction. Vulture quickly chased after it.

---

Back in meatspace, just a couple of minutes later. Vulture's peaceful coma was interrupted by a sudden, sickening pop! A shower of sparks sprayed from that port in her head as the poor decker seemed to go into some sort of seizure, her body tensing up and spasming uncontrollably.

The reaction came straight out of the blue as far as the decker was concerned, in one moment she'd been monitering a stream of data from a promising lead, and the next she'd found herself trapped between worlds, sputtering out some incoherant plea for help as blood began to stream from her nose, whatever virus had worked itself into her system wreaking havoc on her cyberware on its mission to fry Vulture's brain from the inside out.

 

[Obuzeti]

Jonah's response to Vulture's request is a slow blink, but he throws a leg out between her and the gap down, and then pivots to face the gaping void. His feet hook easily under the edge beneath a connected hose, and he continues idly scarfing raisins - but if Vulture had maintained outward awareness, she would have spotted him eventually slowing down, his nearly-spastic motions slowing until he sets aside the comestibles and instead merely - sits. The movement drains out of him like so much electric charge, leaving him limp and staring, straight at the aperture on the wall which had led to this overturned little nook; the only access to this little sanctuary. His breathing slows, and his eyes lid over.

~*~

Having his just-started nap interrupted with what appears to be a mild case of death does not much improve Jonah's mood. His pistol snaps up first, pointed straight at Vulture's head, before his brain catches up with what's happening; then his head tilts to the side and he reached up, first for her jack 'port - rethinks - and instead sinks into the open wiring next to him and chucks the local circuit breaker down, dropping power for the entire unit. Whatever was wrong with her might not be stoppable by just breaking connection, especially injection malware, but pulling the plug is usually a safe bet.

That done, he latches onto Vulture's shoulder and yanks her over bodily into his side to keep her from toppling off the thin slice of safety, as well as to keep her from flailing too much in whatever seizure's been induced in her system. It takes a moment for the quivers to mostly die out, and by then he's already split some of his freeze-dried rations in front of her, along with a opiate pill out of a grimy hankerchief balled up in a jacket pocket.

"Ran into ICE?" he asks, once she seems - mostly coherent.