Hunting Shadows
By
Fade
Chapter 2
Four hours later, Shadow and Silk arrived at the modestly-furnished, white-brick safe house where the team had been staying. The trip home had been a very tense one. During the last couple of weeks Hammer, the big Japanese troll that lead the group, had spent quite a bit of time trying to bring Silk and Shadow up to speed on the kinds of things they needed to know to know in order to survive running the shadows.
Hammer had spent quite a bit of that time talking about the importance of making sure you were clean before coming back to the base. The last thing Silk had wanted to do was let someone tail her and Shadow all the way back home. The local gangs might not be able to frag with every possible aspect of your life the way that a megacorp could, but they could still apply enough old-fashioned violence to lay waste to entire sections of your average city block. What they lacked in skill and funding, gangs usually made up for with the sheer numbers of their slightly psychotic members. Killing a careless runner was entirely within their abilities.
Consequently, Shadow and Silk hadn’t just come home like the mage would have preferred. Something was obviously wrong with Shadow, but Silk couldn’t spare the attention to talk to him about it while they were trying to evade possible pursuers. Left with no other viable options, the elf concentrated on leading the physad through the filthiest, most abandoned parts of the city. Changing cabs two or three times, traveling underground for a mile or two, and changing their appearance several times made for a good start. Not satisfied, the pair had then picked out an ambush spot just inside a decaying building and waited for someone to come after them. A half hour later, Silk returned to her body after scouting the area extensively in astral space.
There was quite a bit of discussion among magical scholars as to what exactly astral space was. The theory currently in vogue was that astral space was the manifestation of another dimension, and consequently mirrored nornal three dimensional space, but included an additional set of attributes that couldn’t be expressed correctly down into three dimensions.
Something of a magical theorist herself, Silk had carefully read some of the theories about astral space, and found them to include such a high amount of physics that they were all but incomprehensible to anyone without dual PhD’s. For now however, what was important to Silk was that only magical beings could see or enter astral space. That fact made scouting in astral space ideal for finding sneaky samurai types who were trying to kill her.
After a few additional tricks to throw off pursuit, Silk and Shadow arrived back at the modestly-furnished safe house to find that Hammer and Shiver had been anxiously awaiting them for a couple hours. Silk had given the big troll a status report as she dragged Shadow out of the bar, but hadn’t included anything more than the fact that they were both ok, and were going to evade pursuit.
Hammer and Shiver had acknowledged the update, and then watched the pair leave to make sure they weren’t being followed on foot, before heading back to the safe house. The fact that Hammer and Shiver had maintained such a low profile meant that they were able to use fewer precautions on their way back, so they arrived at the house considerably sooner than their teammates. By the time Shadow and Silk finally made it back, Hammer was starting to get nervous. Shiver was probably the only person left in the world that knew his teacher well enough to tell that the waiting was starting to get to the big troll, but the fact that the troll periodically looked at the clock on the wall was a dead giveaway to his elvish student.
He has a time readout on his cybereyes, there is absolutely no reason for Sensei to be checking the clock, but he always does that when he gets nervous, thought the elf. At that moment, Shadow and Silk arrived at the house. After a lengthy debriefing during which Hammer analyzed every action that Silk and Shadow had taken, the troll admitted that although there were several things which they could have done differently, the pair had done a good job of handling the situation.
Fairly certain that the team shouldn’t face future repercussions due to the events of the day, Hammer allowed the rest of the team to retire to their beds, as he tried to decide what the group’s next step should be.
Hammer and his protégé Shiver had arrived in Seattle from Japan just about a month previously, only to find themselves under attack by a fairly powerful group of racists. Shadow and Silk had been dragged into the conflict, and the four had nearly been killed several times over before they had been able to determine who was responsible for the assassination attempts.
At some point Peter, a fixer who served as an agent, fence, and supplier for a number of shadow running teams, had been hired to help extract the group from a bad situation. The racists had taken the fixer’s involvement personally, and tried to kill him as well. When the smoke cleared, Hammer, Silk, Shiver and Shadow had helped Peter’s people raid the hate group’s headquarters. Although Hammer still had some worries about a possible link between the racists, and a pair of vampires, there was no doubt that the raid had gone much better than the troll had let himself hope it would, they had managed to kill the rank and file members, and make off with a large number of extremely valuable items.
Peter had taken a percentage of the items that the team had brought out of the wreckage, but left them with some truly amazing works of art. Apparently, the leader of the organization had been an avid art collector. The team was now in possession of nearly all the works of one of the previous decade’s more popular Asian artists. Hammer hadn’t wanted to arouse any extra curiosity on the street, so he hadn’t asked around other than to find out enough to ensure that the paintings were in fact the real thing. Consequently, the team didn’t know the actual value of the collection, but estimated that it ranged between eight and fifteen million nuyen, depending on how urgently one was trying to sell the pieces.
Hammer however had no desire to sell the collection, and consequently, the team had turned to the other items in their possession in the hopes that they could generate enough profit that they wouldn’t have to accept a job that conflicted with their moral standards.
A set of magnetic door keys, and another set of vehicle keys had shown the most promise for a big payoff. The leader of the racist organization had left the keys in a bag that he apparently prepared on the chance that he would need to leave his headquarters in a hurry. The bug-out bag of a low level runner generally contained the bare necessities to insure survival on the streets. As the runner became more wealthy, transportation was included, as well as a safe house where it would be hard to be found. As wealthy as the racist had been, Hammer fully expected that the transportation would be high class, and the flop would be filled with extremely expensive gear.
A little bit of research with their newly developed contacts in the shadows had indicated that the vehicles were probably the weak link in the racist’s security arrangements. One of the keys proved to belong to a sporty Eurocar Westwind 2000, worth about $200,000. One of the big selling points of cars over 100,000 nuyen in the year 2066 was the fact that they included a plethora of anti-theft devices. Eurocar included a specially encrypted transmitter that was wired into the car’s autopilot. Should someone steal a Westwind, the owner simply needed to call Eurocar, provide proof of ownership, and then Eurocar could activate the transmitter, and track the vehicle.
The system could be defeated of course. Any transmitter, no matter how cleverly concealed, or protected can be deactivated, destroyed, or drowned out. Those options all took time however, or special sets of circumstances that didn’t occur very often. All in all, the wealthy had decided that the option provided a valuable safety measure. For someone who knew the right people though, that same feature could be used to track down a car even if one didn’t really own it.
Hammer had contacted Peter to obtain the name of someone who could hack into Eurocar’s section of the matrix, and been referred to Shock. The verbose young human had assisted the group a couple of weeks previously, so Hammer had been confident of her abilities, if slightly wary of putting himself in a situation where she could talk his ear off.
Silk had volunteered to make the call, and after an hour of talking fashion with the decker, had inquired as to Shock’s rates for the type of job they had in mind. Five thousand nuyen exchanged hands, and the next day, the team had not only the location of the vehicle in question, but also the encryption keys to and the frequency of the transmitter so that they could continue to check the car’s position.
The next vehicle key had proven somewhat more complicated to pin down. Where the Westwind’s key had been engraven with a very flashy logo, the second key was completely and utterly anonymous. A plain black magnetic cylinder similar to the type used in most economy cars, the key was only slightly larger than the average key as if it contained more information, or was somehow more important. Although the group was initially at a loss, the key’s complete ananominimity eventually proved to be how the group identified it.
Even the lowest quality commuter car manufacturer takes great pride in splashing their logo over everything they make. The only real exception to this rule involves certain military, or restricted contractors. When Shiver suggested that the vehicle to which the key belonged was probably military issue, Shock was finally able to isolate the encrypted information that they were looking for from the rest of the information on the key. Hacking into Eurocar’s site had been difficult but doable. Shock had frankly told the team however that there was no way she was even going to try and break into the military’s information. The security used by the military rivaled that of any of the mega corps, and the information that the team was after was the type of thing that could cause someone to loose a war. Things like that were invariable locked down by the blackest most deadly intrusion countermeasures, or ice, in existence. Not only that, but there was no way of telling which manufacturer had sold the equipment, or which military force or corporation had purchased the vehicle. The only way hacking into anyone would do any good was if someone was willing to hack every possible purchaser, or every possible manufacturer either of which option involved hacking ridiculous amounts of ice nearly as good, or better than that used by the military.
Shock had instead suggested that they run a set of decryption algorithms and seek the assistance of Crack Net, a group specializing in breaking top-grade encryption. Silk had liked the idea of finding out what the vehicle was, as well as the transponder frequency necessary to locate it, but had balked at the idea of paying out nearly thirty thousand nuyen to Crack Net to get the information. Shock overcome the mage’s resistance when she had explained that any single deck working on a brute force approach would be lucky to crack the encryption before the next ice age.
Crack net on the other hand had thousands of computers set up to work on the problem in parallel. This reduced the time expected from somewhere in the range of 30,000 years to a more manageable 30 years. Of course, nobody really wanted to wait around for the next 30 years. To avoid this possibility, the deckers at Crack Net decided not to try and test every possible encryption key. Instead, the deckers set their networked decks to intelligently test only the key combinations that were most likely to work, further reducing the expected time until a solution was reached.
The team had been warned not to expect an overnight miracle, and in fact cautioned that as things currently stood the process would still probably take years. As always when dealing with the shadows there was another option if the team was willing to cough up the money. Just about every organization in existence, has a computer network. Whether you were a megacorp like Aries, or the local branch of a metahuman rights group, you had to have a server to allow people to navigate your little corner of the matrix. How else are people supposed to find out what you have to offer?
To run all these networks, both big and small, requires hundreds and thousands of servers. Servers range from antiquated machines that have a fraction of the computing power of the average deck, to powerhouses that easily surpass top of the line decks by orders of magnitude.
The difference between your average neighborhood organization and a megacorp was that the first has mostly old slow servers, while the second has an incredible number of cutting edge machines which they use to keep their networks up and running.
Over the last forty or fifty years, incredible strides had been made with regards to optimizing programs to reduce the amount of processing power required of the hosting server. Now, instead of the server having to explicitly describe everything that a user’s deck needed to display to him, it would just pass an instruction telling the deck to display a standard object. For example, a room might include two type 5 cubes, size five and six, textures seven and two with colors one and eighteen. Although this was still quite a bit of information for the server to have to push over the fiber optic lines, it was much easier than having to explicitly describe each individual curve, and color variation. Even worse, would be to individually describe each of the millions of locations that could be seen in the average matrix node.
Even with the huge improvements that had been made with regards to optimization and compression, there was still an incredible amount of computing power required to keep the matrix up and running smoothly. The corps had quickly learned that it paid to overbuild on their servers. Slow servers meant that valuable employees spent large parts of their days trying to coax information out of slow networks. Fast servers meant that those same employees could get information as rapidly as they needed it.
Of course that in an of itself might not have been sufficient to convince the nuyen-minded corporations to invest in expensive servers. There were actually two other benefits. During non-peak hours, all those idle processing cycles could be used to crunch incredible amounts of information. Good old human ingenuity was still prized, but sometimes the easiest and cheapest solution to a problem was simply to task the servers to spend their idle time testing every possible combination. The general public never realized just how many of the innovations that reached them were the product of super computers being utilized to test possible solutions. The man on the street, got new products at reduced prices, while megacorps got increased profits, and yet another edge over their smaller brethren.
The second motive for faster servers involved the corp’s ability to protect the data held in it’s computer networks. Intrusion countermeasures, IC, or ice as it is commonly called among hackers, consists of programs designed to stop unauthorized users from entering a network, executing commands, or accessing data.
Something that most people never realize is that just like any other program, ice has to run on a computer or deck somewhere. Corporations that allow the computing power on their corner of the matrix to fall behind what is needed for day to day operations quickly find that the operation of their intrusion countermeasures degrades. Of course, there are ways around this. Any set of processes can be prioritized such that when there is a crunch in resources the most important things aren’t affected. On the whole however, corps had found that it was beneficial to overbuild when it came to their servers.
The Crack Net deckers had long been taking advantage of some of the excess capacity that existed in the systems of certain megacorps. The ice and encryption algorithms protecting control of what the servers were tasked to do with their idle cycles are always some of the best that the corporation possesses. Very little however is safe from a group of dedicated and frosty hackers. A year or two ago Crack Net had managed to break into Sader Krupt’s High Speed Processing Section. Foolish deckers would have swamped the queue of jobs with their own projects, and been discovered after just a day or two.
Crack Net instead had used just a fraction of the computing power, always trying to insure that their processing requests looked like legitimate jobs. In the time since, Crack Net had obtained access to the information processing sections of three other corps and proceeded just as cautiously with them. By bringing up their utilization of processing resources slowly, the deckers now seemed to be legitimate users, if users that had a history of submitting rather unprofitable requests. The most ironic part of the situation was that there was talk at several of the corps of dramatically increasing their processing power to, “meet the ever expanding need for information processing in order to stay ahead of the competition.”
The long and the short of the situation was that for an extra thirty thousand nuyen per month, the deckers at Crack Net would try and steal processing time from various computers. The limited amount processing power that Crack Net was willing to chance stealing was still more than a thousand times what they had to work with using just their decks. Even with this excess computing muscle, assuming that Crack Net could continue to steal the same amount of computing time until the project was finished, the worst case scenario for a brute force crack was something like two to three years. The worst case scenario for the non-exhaustive search the deckers had instigated was still on the order of weeks to months, but as with any decryption project, there is always the possibility that the next key tried could be the one that everyone was looking for.
Although Hammer and the rest of the team was hoping that they would luck out and that the deckers would decrypt the information fairly quickly, they knew realistically that they were going to need quite a bit of money to keep the deckers working on the decryption problem until it was solved.
Cashing in the Westwind had appeared to be the best promise for some quick cash. Closer investigation had indicated that the vehicle was parked in an underground garage. Hammer figured that the odds were very high that one of the magkeys that the team now possessed would get them into one of the middle class apartments above the garage. A little bit of luck could result in the team finding some valuables to sell in addition to the car.
Shadow had been ready to make a trip to the apartment for the last week, but Hammer had been adamant that the team investigate the situation thoroughly before exposing themselves to further danger. Another thousand nuyen to Shock and further matrix investigations revealed that the place where the car was located was actually a fairly large complex of apartments.
The first house key, it turned out, corresponded to one of the corner apartments on the second floor. Payment for the apartment was made at precisely the same time each month to the tune of 4,000 nuyen. Shock tried to follow the money trail back to the source, but got stopped when the trail went through a corporation specializing in making payments for individuals who didn’t want the payments to be traced back to their source.
The fact that the team didn’t know whether the payments would continue to flow in or not, meant that nobody was sure whether they were working against a deadline or not.
Various covert scouting missions had been executed over the past week in an attempt to make sure that nobody else was watching the apartment. The mission today had been meant to be the final one before the team actually entered the residence. The fact that the gangers had attacked Shadow and Silk were possible indicators that someone had noticed the team’s recent presence in the area, but Hammer didn’t think that was the case.
All the signs pointed to the target being clean, and in normal circumstances Hammer would have the team prepping to go in tomorrow. The big troll could tell however that there was something seriously bothering Shadow, and even if Hammer didn’t feel that he was becoming friends with the shape shifter, he wouldn’t send Shadow in at less than his best. The razor knew it was a bad idea to let a member of the team go into a run with something serious on their chest. It didn’t just put them in increased danger, it put the whole team on the line.
Consequently, instead of launching into a brief on how they were going to go into the target, Hammer dismissed the team and asked Shadow if there was anything he needed to talk about. The shape shifter slowly shook his head. “No, I’m fine. Don’t we need to prep for tomorrow’s mission?”
Hammer considered how best to answer the physad before replying that they needed to lay low for a couple of days to make sure that none of the gangers were actively looking for them. “No way,” interjected Silk. “He’s trying to sugarcoat the truth. There is something wrong with you, and you have been avoiding my attempts to talk all night. We can’t help unless you let us.”
Shadow turned towards the mage slowly then bowed. “I don’t have the words to describe what I am fighting with,” explained the shape shifter softly as he padded across the thick blue carpet and shut the door to his room.
Silk looked at Hammer and Shiver before motioning them to the other side of the room. Using hand signs, the mage indicated to Hammer that she didn’t want Shadow to be able to hear them. The troll nodded, and activated a white noise generator that would in theory be sufficient to defeat even Shadow’s magically-augmented hearing.
The troll and female talked in whispers for half of an hour while Shiver listened in. When the trio retired to their separate rooms, Hammer felt a little bit better-it was always nice to have a plan, even if it is one in which you don’t have much faith.
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