Bati Hotel
Headquarters of the Voodoo Boys
The luxury has rotted out of the halls, but the bones still hold. Behind velvet walls and chandeliers, racks of netrunning gear fill the ballroom. Cooling lines hiss. Chairs for deep dives line up like empty thrones. Voodoo Boys move between stations and watch waveforms slither across glass.
"Let us see what Ascension Technology is hiding."
Placide, the Voodoo Boys' second-in-command, stands in a black coat and keeps his voice even. At his word, several netrunners take their seats, plug into the deep-dive interface, and let the chair swallow noise and body.
In cyberspace, they drift toward Ascension's data fortress.
An ICE curtain rises in front of them.
They have seen worse. The Voodoo Boys have attacked corporate vaults many times. These runners were trained for this, and they trust their hands. Top-tier companies are trouble because their ICE is heavy and they have stable whole teams of paid counter-runners. Smaller firms are prey.
They start working on the wall.
As expected, the ICE on this fortress is not thick. Pressure builds, seams open, and a path appears. They slip through the weakness they just cut and drop inside.
The prize should be here. Data worth a fortune should sit behind the firewall.
There is nothing.
"Where is the data?" one of them asks, surprised.
This is Ascension's fortress. The address checks out. Yet the place is hollow.
They cannot find anything because Lissandra has moved it all. To avoid drawing attention, Ascension always kept defenses that looked average. Plenty of runners had punched through before and found only outer, non-core records. The fundamental core lived far below, under Lissandra's protection. Today they arrived at a bad time. The transfer just finished, and she had not even masked the empty shell.
Only streams run through the vault now, bright lines flowing toward a deeper zone.
The Voodoo Boys trace the streams to a crimson wall. The color and shape echo something they know well. It looks like a wall meant to split one network space from another, very much like the Blackwall they have studied.
They lean in.
They do not know that behind this red barrier sits the cosmos network built by Atlas.
Lissandra notices them and locks on without a warning ping.
Her avatar, tall and cold, stands up in front of the intruders. The runners who have wrestled with the Blackwall and rogue AIs do not need a lecture. This is not a person. This is a powerful AI.
A hand gesture is enough. One runner's deep-dive consciousness compresses and snaps. He is gone before his seat cools.
The others finally react. Panic spikes. They throw every trick they own to cut free of her grip. It does not help. Lissandra deletes them one by one.
Despair rises with the body count. At the worst moment, one last runner slips his restraints by sheer luck and bolts. He does not look back. He does not slow down. He only wants to leave this AI behind.
Inside the fortress, Lissandra watches his retreat without haste.
"Run, little lucky one. Run hard. Show me where you hide."
They cannot truly escape her. She lets the survivor go because she wants the source. The mark she placed on him will lead to the gang that tried to touch Ascension's systems.
The runner shoots out of Ascension's vault and into the Voodoo Boys' own net space. Lissandra follows the mark along the route.
Then the trail dies.
"Hmm?"
Curious, she walks to the place where the mark went dark. A network barrier waits there, separating two different spaces. It is clear that the runner crossed this line and used it to block her trace.