[h1][color=880808]Morris Ryan Malone[/color][/h1][sub][hr][color=880808]Location:[/color] Abandoned Warehouse, Northside, Offshore St, Watson
[color=880808]Mentions:[/color] [@The Incredible John][/sub]

A flick of a thought. Ten minutes til. Fine-chrome fingers beat a tempo against his thigh as he leaned against one of the walls, unconsciously meeting the tempo of the music blasting against the walls of the warehouse, and the guy leaned his head back against the cool metal. Seconds trickled through his fingers as Morris went over the plans, again and again, one corner of his mind paying attention to what was in front of him, the rest going over schematics and timetables and reports. Militech controlled a lot, sure, and Night Corp controlled a lot more, but no-one had complete control of the city, the cameras here and there, the lights. A twitchy landlord here or there, a few eddies into the right palms, and suddenly he had cameras for his tenants…one of which always looked out at a street. A down-on-his-luck city engineer here or there, and suddenly a traffic camera has a tiny bit more wiring than it should. Data to data to data, trickling about. It was amazing what you could do with a little misplaced compassion.

Three trucks, armored Milipigs with new chrome and suits inside, with a few armored truck escorts. They’d gotten nervous, hauling ass through the city as lights gave green to em, red to everyone else. Someone had picked up on the game, somewhere, though the Maelstromer knew that it just gave him a little advantage. They were predictable, bold as they were, and he just had to up the volatility to crack through. People don’t expect things to go south immediately. A glance at the positioning…everything was set and ready to go. Things were going just as planned, all things considered. There was a speck on the outside of his vision, red lights and black metal.

“Boss?” The voice was tinny, distorted just a little in the box with no jaw to go along with it. Alphonse, that’s who that was, bald-chrome man whose limbs were like spiders. Morris grunted his response, angling his head just a little in recognition as his optics brought the guy into focus in the bottom corner of his vision.

“James says they’re good to go. Waiting on you downstairs.”

“Good shit.”

He got up from the wall, rubbing the back of his neck as he made the short way down to the basement. There was still movement in the warehouse, cargo-movers shifting crates here and there, organizing some that were inbound, others that were going to the loaders to be shipped off to rippers throughout Watson and Japantown. Little lights were here and there, though, on the walls; laser-detectors, tracking all through little lasers outside the normal visual spectrum. [i]Normal[/i]. That was a good enough joke if ever he’d thought of one. 

A little metal key into a door and down stairs…there he was. The airlock hissed as it sucked-out the oxygen, a little notification at the top corner of Morris’s vision that an implant had started up. He hated outside visitors, especially ones who liked stealing bits of this, parts of that, wholes of data. The inner door opened to the hum of servers, a dead quiet compared to the thump-thump-thump of the bass you could still hear through the walls and floors, the room lit by nothing but green and red pinpricks of light, server status markers. More green than red, it was a good day. Netrunner chairs here, there in three of the four corners of the room, a plethora of screens hung from the ceiling that showed what he’d been looking at before. 

James stared at the boss through spider-eye optics, blues and reds and greens, and the codefreak smiled his gold teeth smile, a spasm running through his arms. James was always a happy guy, it seemed. Not a thing brought him down. He spoke with a woman’s inflection, Haitian unless Morris was off it. “If it ain’t the majesty himself. Wanted to watch the party after all, yeah?”

“Fucking boring up there. Should’ve seen the guy upstairs. Keeps passing out. Sleepy, y’know.” They’d been getting information from him for days it seemed, where all his assets were. Another gonk who’d decided to get chrome too rich for his blood and needed to pay back. Morris wished they’d be smarter about it all but they never did learn. He shook his head dismissively at it all.

“Yeah, rich kids never do change. Well. He can’t be [i]that[/i] rich.”

“Allowances and inflation. Killer these days.” They both laughed at the joke. In truth, the guy’d just been laid off from whatever-which corp he’d been a part of, something about a downsizing effort. Apparently the implants hadn’t gotten him on the stay side of the list. He [i]was[/i] mentally a kid, though, got up to the position through pure favors and not much else. Who’d have thought that wasn’t keeper material. He turned to one of the already jacked-in runners as James got himself set-up in his chair.

“Truck’s all ready?”

“You’re goddamn right.”

“You can start that up…five, four, three, two, one, [i]now[/i]. Hit it.”

“Gas, gas, [i]gas[/i].”

He watched the screens as, a few blocks away, one of the big industrial trucks started accelerating up. They’d gotten a hold of it a few days before, decoupled a bunch of the engine safety systems, speed limiters, things like that. It was already flying through traffic, shifting itself up and away like a rocket. Driver was already trying to regain control, sure, but that wasn’t going to happen. A smile crept up along the corners of Morris’s mouth.

“One-fifty.”

“Keep it there. Intercept…yeah looks good. Looks good.”

A few seconds passed, the netrunners busy away and away, busy with their daemons and subsystems and monitoring. Words were barely exchanged as numbers served the purpose well enough. Then it all happened at once.

Front of the Militech convoy, poor little armored car, got plowed right though by the truck at the intersection. Car crumpled like a tin can as the brakes on the truck slammed shut, her cargo suddenly turning volatile at the sudden motion. Grain feed and ignition, never a good combination as that blew out too, a fireball at the intersection. Trucks couldn’t even stop, the first of them slamming right into the burning remains and moving it forward a few yards. Next one slammed on the brakes hard, too, smoke pouring out from the wheels as it narrowly missed its friend on the turn. The third kept on going, swerving violently to one side and violently to the other as it tried to get past…before overturning by it all, skidding along its side onto the sidewalk. The escorting trucks in the back came to a stop a lot quicker, fanning out; less weight, Morris supposed.

Car doors swung open on the escorts, lead going in before the corpos even took a step out from them. Shmucks used rifles, Umbras and the like. Morris had Grads for his needs. Trucks drove up as dazed Militech drivers got out from their trucks, trying to move out to cover. Some of his drivers just let-loose with autogun fire, while another opted to drive through the corpo as it skidded to a halt. A big-muscle figure popped out from one of the vans, an enormous hydraulic ram in his arms as he went from one back of a truck to another, slamming the gear into the armor before widening the hole out. Their own mover truck came-up and, soon enough, Militech gear started getting shifted over.

James smiled through his connection, chuckling aloud. “And they said office life was boring. Idiots.”

Morris let the smile reach him, too, as his eyes were glued to the screens, his ear glued to the Militech report channel. They’d blasted away on jamming for a lot of the usual frequencies, burnt out a lot of the cameras that weren’t solely theirs, but there was always a chance.. Yeah, James was right. Idiots.