Music to get you in the right sneaky mood:
Chapter XI
“Now or never, let’s move out!” You tell Oskaras as you open the van’s door. He follows you eagerly and without question.
The street is filled with shadows cast by the streetlights, they are your only companions here. An ever present orange glow emanating from the lamps engulfs the neighborhood, their brilliance is staving off the darkness of the night. The target is just in front of you, a simple two-level small house with a hydrogen scooter chained to the fence surrounding it. No noticeable entry alternatives to the main door.
You remain vigilant, all it takes is one mistake to cause somebody to call the local police. Silently and gracefully you get over the fence, Oskaras just a step behind you. Despite his obvious body mass he manages to remain stealthy, at least for now. The door is in front of you.
Oskaras watches your back as you grab the locksmith kit. Carefully you manipulate the mechanism of the mechanical lock, you feel you’re just about to open it. But like Sisyphus of ancient myth, just when you are about to open it something goes wrong every time.
“Fucking cat, get off the damn stairs!” Somebody shouts from inside the building, it must be your target, it’s walking down the stairs probably alarmed by your attempt at picking the lock.
“Quick, hide behind the corner I’ll ambush him if he opens the door down.” You whisper to Oskaras, he does as you command.
The door opens, a woman in her mid-twenties appears dressed in a night robe, long black curly hair nearly covering her entire face and the neural-linked spectacles on it. A thin data cable runs between her glasses and a neural port somewhere on the back of her head, hidden beneath a mass of dark hair. She pushes her hair aside just as you jump at her, noticing you at the very last moment.
“Crazy bitch!” She yells as she shoves you away and runs inside leaving the door open, you and Laukaitis follow her.
“Fuck you crazy people, I’m calling the cops!” She yells again as she frantically runs up the stairs.
You nearly trip over a black cat as you chase her, the feline seems rather fond of this part of the house. A loud sound echoes in the house as she slams a door somewhere on the upper floor. Even more noise fills the building, as she shoves some furniture in panic to barricade the door.
“Police! Somebody has broken into my house, Calle de Allemania 191! Please come quickly, this crazy lady wants to kill me!” You hear her terrified plea for help as she calls the cops.
Another loud sound, this time of the wooden door and the shelves she put behind it breaking apart under the force of your ArmStrong limb. Splinters litter the floor in the locked room.
“Go away you fucking cyborg! I did nothing to you!” She yells again from behind the still locker door.
You and oskaras push, shoving the ruined furniture away. She sits curled up in a corner, clinging to a top of the line Xin-Zheng phone with her hands, absolutely terrified of what has transpired.
“Leave me alone, please!” She begs as tears run down her cheeks.
“Gag her and get her out, I’ll get the data!” You order.
“Germans? Fuck! Fuck! Please, it was just a job I failed. I couldn’t do it, the system…” Her words turn into incomprehensible gibberish as Oskaras gags her.
Quickly you plug in the uplink and turn it on. You get a call, Adam’s augmented face appears.
“Look for data devices fast. The police knows you’re here, they’re en route.” He tells you.
A coffee mug flies, propelled by your cybernetic arm, and shatters against the wall. Other objects cluttering the desk next to the hacker’s computer soon meet a similar fate, as you frantically look for any kind of memory device. Meanwhile McKay is copying the computer’s contents via the uplink.
“
Scheisse!” You curse, as you just barely hear the wail of police cars in the distance. You grab what you can, brutally unplug the uplink and run.
“Did you get everything?” You ask the ECK SysOp.
“Of course not! I am not that efficient! We have partial data, not sure if any of it is useful, not yet. This requires further analysis.” He tells you as you jump over the stairs and the same damn cat as before. As you land your knee hurts a bit. However you ignore the pain, you experienced far worse after all.
The wailing gets louder and louder, the adrenalin levels in your blood get proportionally higher and higher. They’re near, luckily their sound is coming from the other direction of the street. You jump into the van’s back door, Oskaras and the tied up hacker are already there. A blue and red glow reflects of its inner walls.
“Drive!” You shout as you slam the rear doors of the van. The wailing gets quieter, but it is still there. Muller hits the gas pedal as hard as he can, the sudden acceleration makes your shoulder collide with the van’s doors bruising it a bit.
“How many of them are there?!” You ask.
“I see two cars, regular cops! Nothing fancy, about 8 or 10 year old Maibatsu Striders turned into cop cars.” Sven answers.
“Can we lose them?!” You yell into Paul’s ear, he doesn’t seem pleased by it.
“Depends on how persistent they are, we’ve got enough fuel for at least 200 kilometers.” Paul says.
“We could try to ditch them, they don’t have drones or sats that could track us. If we get out of sight and they don’t call in a chopper or VTOL from Madrid before that, we should be safe. Apart from cops and soldiers looking for a similar van around the damn country.” You comment.
“Can’t we slow them down somehow? Shoot their tires or something?” Sven suggests.
“That would probably just piss them off more, not to mention hitting tires isn’t that easy!” You explain. “You watched too many damn movies.”
“Hey, I could try!” He replies confidently.
“McKay! You got any ideas?” You ask the hacker who is still on an open channel.
“We could exploit the backdoor we left in the Toledo network.” He mentions.
“Why didn’t you do that yet? I thought you were efficient!”
“It was set up in anticipation of an investigation into the affair, should one ever happen.” The SysOp explains. “The assumption was you get out of there with the target, the local law enforcement gets notified of the person’s disappearance somewhere in the future, they investigate and we cause a sudden memory failure if they find anything causing them to lose everything. It is a singular use resource, if we opt to use it now any signs of your inefficiency discovered in the future won’t be annihilated.”
“And they’ll probably figure out that this was more than just a hacker flame war gone offline?”
“A good assumption, however we prefer more efficient methods of solving petty disputes. Like locking somebody in an infinitely looping braindance of tween idol’s
Suz33! latest *hit*
For3v3r Wu8! xoxo , after reprogramming their neural interface to effectively paralyze them. Which lasts until they expire out of lack of hydrogen monoxide.” He coldly explains, you can’t help but feel that he’s talking as if he did something like this in the past. Another reason never to get an actual neural port and "get interfaced" allowing you to connect to external devices.
“
Scheisse! Wait, there are some rough *roads* nearby.” You say as you look at the SatMap via your Netlink. “More like dirt paths actually, we could ditch them in one perhaps.”
“You think this car is rally-worthy? It’s a damn van!” The Unteroffizier comments.
“Do you think theirs are? They’re city cops!” You add.
“So? We’ll both fall apart, how will that help us get to the extraction point? We would have better odds in narrow urban streets.” Paul suggests.
“And probably reinforcements on our ass, along with road blocks.”
“You think they’re funded well enough to have cops ready to block us in the town in the middle of the night? There’s only one hundred thousand people living here, and it’s fucking thirldworldia! These assholes are probably the only cops in Toledo that aren’t sleeping now! Better than trying to lose them on the main roads if you ask me.” Muller adds.
You have two old Japanese-made squad cars on your tail. You will…
A)…try to ditch them along the way to your target.
B)…go off-road, there is a nice forest or something close to that nearby. Try to ditch them on the dirt path there.
C)…go off-road, there is a bunch of fields nearby. Try to ditch them there.
D)…go urban, see how the Spanish like those shitty narrow streets they’re so fond of building when they need to chase somebody.
You may use additional *resources* to aid you in losing your pursuers.
1) Shoot their tires, engines or whatever. Anything to slow them down.
2) Tell McKay to use that backdoor, block their digital communications, feed them false data or orders, anything that will get them off your ass.
3) Do both of the above.
4) Don’t bother, the risks are too high even if it would help you ditch the two cars on your ass.
The extraction point is…
I) …at the end of path 1.
II) …at the end of path 2.
III) …at the end of path 3.
IV) …at the end of path 4.
V) …at the end of path 5.
The same risks apply as the last time, in addition to further risks caused by the cops being called. However neither path choice affects your chance of losing the cops now, it is for the future assuming Ida has one that isn’t behind steel bars or six feet under as a result of the current chase.
Consult the end of Chapter VIII for details if you need them, see the map below for visual reference.
You have lost a Fate Point: The female hacker’s descent down the stairway would have been too silent for you to notice, if it wasn’t for a certain annoying habit of her cat. This gave you the opportunity to try to ambush her. Unfortunately all things must be in equilibrium and somehow, despite overwhelming odds, your ambush utterly failed. Fate works in mysterious ways indeed.