"Jackie, with me."
Rocky checks the red pin on his internal map and pulls the phase knife. He cuts the air; a slit of warped space opens from their suite straight to the hacker's location. He steps in, and the rift swallows him. The transit feels wrong, like static trying to pull muscle from bone, but his body holds. Jackie blinks at the knife, tearing a hole in the world, then jumps after him.
Security breaches the suite seconds later, staring at an intact room and two missing targets. The rift has already faded. Their requests to the network operator go unanswered; for a moment, Konpeki Plaza security becomes a headless swarm.
…
They spill out of the rift into Konpeki's network control room.
"Found you."
The Arasaka hacker is still reclined in his dive chair. Rocky crosses the floor and hits him once. Even though the man yanks himself out of a deep dive on reflex, he cannot get a defense up in time. One punch caves the skull; blood freckles the console.
Jackie steps out of the closing rift and takes in the scene. "Damn, L. Still savage."
Questions can wait. Escape cannot.
With the hacker dead, the process trapping Lucy collapses. She auto-jacks out, but stays unconscious.
"Lucy!" Rocky calls. No answer. He checks her biometrics through Deluxo's link, and it is stable. Relief lands, edged with urgency.
"She's out cold. We're on our own," he says. "Clock's ticking."
They did trigger an alarm, but it's only a local yellow, limited to this cluster. Konpeki will not broadcast a building-wide incident and panic guests over a "small" event. Still, if the hacker stays offline, the building AI will escalate.
Leaving now solves only half the problem. Without Lucy, they cannot clear camera data or intrusion traces. That will bite them later.
"Watch the door. I'm wiping us," Rocky says.
He shoves the body aside, pulls the man's net lead, and jacks it into his port. He is not a real netrunner and has no net access bay, but this interface sits on top of permissions. With the dead man's verification chip, the system lets him in. Deleting here is easy.
A minute of focused edits and their footprints vanish. No entry. No exit. No camera frames that matter.
"Done."
The building turns orange right then because the hacker never reported back. Arasaka patrol drones deploy.
"Move," Rocky says.
He uses console access to unlock the control room doors, palms a fragmentation grenade into the hacker's ruined head, and walks. The blast rips the chair and systems into shards, ending any hope of postmortem data recovery.
They reach the exterior glass line. The city falls away below; a few drones sweep lazy search arcs. The floor index says 60. Without Lucy's feed, they cannot map patrols.
"L, elevator to the garage?" Jackie asks, already suspecting the answer.
Rocky flicks a metal dart into the glass. It blooms into a hard EM burst; it cracks the pane. One more dart and the wall gives. Security on the floor pivots toward the noise, but Jackie's fire keeps them honest.
"All this heat for a window exit? We don't have parachutes, and the drones'll cut us into lace," Jackie says, still firing.
A shape rises into the opening: not a hovercar, not an Arasaka drone. The Deluxo floats level with the floor and doors ready.
"Oh, your car flies. I take it back. I'm impressed."
"Less talking. In," Rocky says.
He had already called the Deluxo using the vehicle link. It auto-navigated out of the underground garage, switched to flight, and came to this window on its own. The gullwing lifts; Rocky drops into the driver's seat. Jackie shoves the last guard back and climbs in after him.