to talk about what's going on instead of doing anything about it, and that leads to a sort of paralysis that is not helpful in this kind of situation. Which I suppose it's what happening now, as I'm blathering on and not helping the situation.'
'It's all right,' Carruthers said. 'There's somewhere we can go.'
'Really? Where?'
'Follow me.'
Lochinvar's part was proceeding smoothly, so Vitriol decided to watch his own ass for a bit. Since the staircase was becoming a bit crowded for his tastes, Vitriol pushed a door open and ran into a hallway on the building's fourteenth floor. It was freeing to be able to intrude into a corp building without worrying about setting off an alarm. It's quite possible that he set of three or four additional alarms as he ran across the burgundy-and- green carpeting in the long hallway, but the thing was, none of them after the first one mattered.
Ahead of him, doors opened and guards came out, weapons lowered and ready. There were two of them, and they'd be shooting to kill.
Harpy was ready, though, and she was faster than them. Vitriol didn't see what got them, he didn't feel it, but he saw what happened. One of the guards went down immediately, falling like his spinal cord had been abruptly severed. The other staggered, wobbling and weaving on rubbery legs, his gun firing but not until he had dropped his arm so that all the rounds went into the floor in front of him.
Vitriol was on him quickly, laying the small blackjack he always kept with him alongside the guard's jaw, dropping him like a punch-drunk boxer.
He waved to Harpy, who was lagging a little after casting her spell.
'Come on,' he said. 'We can stay on this floor for a little bit. There's plenty of room to wander.'
Most of the floor looked like it held conference rooms, which made it pretty benign. If this floor had restricted areas, it would already be crawling with guards. Vitriol glanced in several rooms and saw they were all about the same-black, enameled tables surrounded by white, pod-like chairs. The walls of each room had half a dozen screens, and all of them were off. Any one of these rooms would be as good as another, so Vitriol picked one at random and walked in.
He wouldn't have much time-as soon as the guards in the hallway had fallen unconscious, there had likely been an alert sent out to all the other guards, and they'd be converging here.
Then he heard Lochinvar's voice in his ear. Vitriol hadn't changed the volume, so that meant Lochinvar was forcing his way through to get Vitriol's attention.
'I can tell this is a room for executives,' Lochinvar was saying. 'You don't let the wageslaves sit on this kind of furniture. But what if you're here for a while? Do you just have to sit and wait?'
Carruthers laughed, clearly pleased to be showing off. 'Of course not! This room is fully equipped with everything we need to work. You don't think we'd spend any of our time not working, would you?'
'I don't know,' Lochinvar said. 'These couches appear to be quite comfortable for things other than just sitting around.'
Vitriol could almost hear Carruthers blushing.
'They're in,' Vitriol said. 'Once Lochinvar gets the jack ready, we'll be set.'
He hadn't even finished speaking when the node access point appeared before him. It was a black disk, maybe half a meter in diameter, with an ivory inlay that showed a mighty, muscled man chained to a cliff. He had manacles around his ankles and wrists, pulling him into a spread-eagled shape, and he had a terrible gaping wound in his abdomen that, since it was depicted in ivory, seemed clean and sanitary despite the visible intestines.
This was the access point to the Prometheus Engineering executive LAN. It was a network entirely without wireless access-if you didn't plug into it, you couldn't access it, just like the primitive networks of the '60s. Lochinvar, though, had now plugged in a wireless transmitter into the LAN, and now it was up to Vitriol to make good use of it.
The disk in front of him looked so hard, so unbreakable, that Vitriol wished he could take it head on, throw a bunch of agents and maybe a custom mook or two at it and shatter the sucker into a million little artsy-fartsy pieces. But he didn't have time to screw around, and he also had access codes Lochinvar had lifted from Carruthers. Too easy.
He threw the codes at the disk, and it reacted immediately. The wound in Prometheus' abdomen healed, he stood straight and pulled the chains attached to his arms. The edges of the disk pulled in with the chains, then the whole black disk collapsed on itself and was gone. Behind it was a floating circle with a thousand smaller white circles, like little aspirin tablets, hovering in front of him. A thousand files with nothing to identify any of them. And if he was lucky, he had two minutes to find what he needed.
Now it was time for the agents. He let them loose, a swarm of flies buzzing around the little pills, sticking their proboscides into the hard white surfaces, probing for anything that might tell them what was in the files. They left little bits of fly saliva on the pure white surfaces-an uncharacteristic programming flourish by Vitriol. He kind of hoped Harpy would glance over and notice.
She didn't. She was too busy watching the hallway outside the room, waiting for the inevitable approach of the guards. She looked nervous, which reminded Vitriol that he should probably hurry.
He looked back at the open disk with its thousand pills and saw that the opening was getting smaller. Something was wrong.
'Lochinvar!' he said. 'You didn't let Carruthers log in, did you?'
Lochinvar didn't reply. He didn't hear any noise from Carruthers, either. Whatever was happening in the room the two of them had retired to, Vitriol was pretty sure it wasn't good. And now his access was collapsing.
'Stupid corp bastard should just unplug the transmitter,' Vitriol muttered, then focused on his flies. They were moving fast now, black blurs skittering over the pills, until all at once they faded away except for one, and that one had a white pill gripped in its six legs and it was flying toward Vitriol as the circle around it collapsed. It darted out just before the entire disk vanished and Vitriol's access was gone.
'Got it, Harpy! Got it!' He turned toward the door. Harpy was down.
'Oh,' Vitriol said. Then he started running. • • •
At least he hadn't been nabbed by contract cops. Places like Knight Errant and Lone Star were all about wrapping up as many cases as possible, and forced confessions were a great way to put a 'CLOSED' stamp on a case file. They used torture like plumbers use a snake-they knew it was usually the fastest way to get the job done.
Come to think of it, Vitriol was pretty sure that Knight Errant sometimes used actual plumber's snakes in their interrogations. He shuddered at the thought.
But the people that had him were internal security, Prometheus Engineering's own people. While they wouldn't mind a confession (it would come in handy when they were justifying why they had to kill him), they were more concerned about the truth, a commodity Knight Errant officers tended to hold in low esteem. These guys needed to know what was actually going on, which meant that, if they were smart, torture would be off the table for a while. Torture was good for a lot of things, but getting an accurate story wasn't one of them.
They'd overrun him soon after he noticed Harpy lying on the floor, and everything had been confusion for a while. They had jammed most of his equipment, and he had to go for a few harrowing moments looking at the world as it really was, without AR overlay. Drab and grey, dull and lifeless. He could have slept with his eyes open-the unaugmented world, as far as he was concerned, provided no interesting visual stimuli.
His equipment was working now, but it wasn't doing much for him. There was only one available node here, and all it did was throw up some AR designed to weaken his resolve. The overhead lights got a little harsher, the table edges looked a little sharper, and there was a slow drip-drip-drip of water coming from an unidentifiable place. He thought about shutting off his AR perception, but he didn't want to give the Prometheus bastards the satisfaction.
There were two big guys standing near the only door to the room, armed and cybered to the teeth. Vitriol briefly experimented with hacking into one of the guy's arms, but he was rejected with extreme prejudice. He was not on his home turf, he didn't have access to outside nodes where he had all sorts of tools and agents stored, plus these guys could probably take his head off with a single backhanded swipe, so he decided to leave their equipment alone for the time being.
Then the door opened and the show started. The guy that walked in was a by-the-book corp security drone,
