---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Start of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!
Chapter 199 - Shards has just released on RR with no major changes.
For the Fixers, this chapter is new.
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Anyone ever heard of fucking InfoSec around this place?! Damn!
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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/
I hope you will enjoy it!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the link to the chapter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BPnbI0OIqUomrw75BQEZZxq3vj3Ai_58qR7WKjpRiLM/edit?usp=sharing
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Chapter 204 - Precursor
I handed the shard over. "The important parts are all in the attachments. Misha can skip the diary entirely—just import the attached files directly. The log itself is… honestly kind of boring and mostly useless."
"Mm."
Misha eyed the shard for a long moment, turning it over once between two claws, all four eyes narrowing at it like it might do something untoward if unobserved.
Abruptly, she vanished in a blur.
Off the stool and around the nearest merchandise mountain, her pitter-patter footfalls receding rapidly into the depths of the store.
A few moments later she came pattering back, carrying a deck under one arm—an older, well-worn unit, clearly not her primary work machine. She hopped back onto the stool, set the deck down, and slotted the shard into it while muttering under her breath.
"Never too careful with handed-over shards. Never. Even from friends. Friend Ela could be carrying something nasty and not even know—" she paused mid-mutter and shot me a look, "—not about trust."
'Fair,' I thought, quietly appreciating the OpSec on display.
An air-gapped junker deck for unknown media. Basic Runner hygiene—the same instinct that had made me spool up a separate partition before slotting the thing myself.
‘I should get myself a junker deck like that… once I have some more Creds to spare. Shouldn’t be more than a few dozen, I’d imagine.’
The deck, meanwhile, chewed through the import for a few seconds.
Misha pulled her goggles back down over her top pair of eyes—apparently just preference for reading—and started working through the attached files.
I stayed quiet and watched her.
For the first minute or so, her expression was pure professional neutrality—the flat, assessing face of a merchant appraising inventory.
Her eyes tracked in small, quick sweeps, claws occasionally tapping the deck to advance a page, and a low, absent-minded stream of Gryplik commentary started leaking out of her the way it always did when she was concentrating.
{“Standard conductor alloys… bulk order… ceramic composite substrate, fine, everyone buys this… mm, high-density polymer feedstock, large quantity but nothing strange, VD makes weapon housings, this is what housings are made of…”}
Page tap. Another sweep.
{“Flux compounds for industrial welding… acceptable… ballistic-grade aramid weave, again in bulk… ah, precision servo assemblies, third-generation? Someone is building something with moving parts… generally fine, this is all just… manufacturing…”}
Her head tilted slightly. The muttering slowed.
{“…Hm. Cesium-doped ignition catalyst? That is… far less boring. Burn-rate acceleration for propellants, essentially… Legal, but only just, and only with permits… quantity is… hm. That is a lot of required permits.”}
Page tap.
Her ruby-crystal eyes—the two not hidden behind the goggles—had begun to widen, the warm facets of them catching the workbench light as they moved faster across the data.
{“Micro-encapsulated thermite slurry?! Who is selling them—no, no, keep reading… shaped-charge liner stock, refined, milled?! So not dual-use… that is single-use… making things that make holes in very armored things…”}
Her claws had stopped tapping leisurely. They were stabbing the page-advance now.
{“Restricted… That one is restricted… That one is definitely restricted… That… that one’s on the Concordance list?! Misha has seen the list, Misha had to sign the list to get the fabrication license—}
And then she stopped dead.
Every part of her went still at once—the ear tufts, the claws, the constant ambient fidgeting that was as much a part of Misha as her voice… Instead, she stared at one specific entry on the deck's display with all four eyes, the goggle-magnified pair looming huge and unblinking.
The warm ruby facets of her lower eyes changed.
I'd seen Misha's eyes do a lot of things—sparkle with merchant glee, go soft with affection, blow wide with fascination.
I had never seen them do this.
The gentle, rounded shapes sharpened, narrowed, compressed into hard, angry triangular slits, and her brow ridge dropped low over all four of them at once.
{“How dare they,”} she hissed, and there was nothing even remotely absent-minded about the Gryplik now. {“The audacity. The sheer audacity! Via a standard procurement pipeline... Through a single shell vendor… Like ordering cleaning supplies—!”}
"Misha?" I ventured carefully.
She didn't answer.
Her claws flexed against the workbench, scoring faint lines into the surface, and she read the entry again—I watched her eyes track across it a second time, then a third, as if the text might correct itself under sufficient scrutiny.
{“…No mistake. It is exact... Nomenclature, purity grade, stabilization requirements—whoever wrote this sheet knew, they knew precisely! You do not specify a cold-chain requirement like that by accident—”}
Abruptly, she pushed the deck away from herself, like she needed physical distance from its contents.
She pulled the goggles up off her eyes, pressed both clawed hands flat against the workbench, and took one long, slow, deliberate breath—in through her nose, out through her sharp green teeth.
When her eyes came back up to me, they had returned to their normal shape—mostly.
The warmth hadn't fully made it back yet.
"Okay," she said, in common, her voice carrying a controlled evenness I'd never heard from her before. "Misha will explain what Ela is carrying. And then Misha will tell Ela what Ela is going to do about it, and Ela is going to listen."
I nodded slowly, swallowing heavily. "Ela is listening."
"Most of it," she began, gesturing at the deck, "is nothing. Boring. Vorpal Dynamics is a weapons manufacturer, and most of these sheets read exactly like a weapons manufacturer's shopping list. Alloys, composites, polymer feedstock, servo assemblies. If this were all of it, Misha would tell Ela the shard is worthless and to use it as a coaster."
"But it's not all of it…" I ventured the obvious guess.
"It is not all of it whatsoever." Her ear tufts flattened. "Several entries are restricted. Big-time restricted—Concordance-list materials, the inter-corporate non-proliferation registry! Things like milled, shaped-charge liner stock. Encapsulated thermite slurry in production quantities. Ignition catalysts at volumes that no permit structure in Neo Avalis would ever approve. Misha can only guess at the end use, but the honest truth is that these materials do not have many uses… A handful each, at best. All of them bad. Very bad.
“High-yield explosives. Armor-penetration munitions. Area-denial weaponry—the ones where nobody makes distinctions between a soldier and a street full of civilians, because the distinction doesn’t matter anymore."
She shook her head once, sharply.
"This alone would make Misha tell Ela: This shard is dangerous. Get rid of it. Quickly, quietly, and forget it ever existed. If VD even catches the most miniscule of hints that Ela has ever been in possession of this information, Ela is going to die."
"Okay," I said, nodding profusely. "Ela can make sure—"
Misha's hand came up, flat, cutting me off.
She took another one of those long, deliberate breaths. And when she spoke again, her voice had dropped—quieter, and older, somehow, than I'd ever imagined possible, coming from her.
"There is one entry that makes this non-negotiable.”
She raised a single, long finger, before emphasizing, “Not a recommendation. Not advice. Non-negotiable. Friend Ela does not keep this shard one hour longer than absolutely necessary." Her claws curled slowly against the workbench, leaving surprisingly deep marks in the surface. "Technical sheet zero-zero-nine-seven lists a compound called Vitraxin-Beta. Stabilized form, pharmaceutical purity grade, with cold-chain handling specifications."
The name meant nothing to me. My face must have said so.
"Vitraxin-Beta has exactly one application anyone has ever found for the quantities listed," Misha continued, each word placed with care. "It is the primary precursor for a weapon called Greywake. A biological agent. Genetic-selective." Her eyes held mine, steady and hard. "It does not care about armor. It does not care about walls. It is keyed to bloodlines, if the designer wants it to. And it was used—extensively, street by street, city by city—during the eradication war against the Gryplik people."
My breath stalled in my throat as my eyes went wide—and the backroom fell so utterly, completely quiet that I could hear my own heartbeat like a drum pounding away inside my head.
"Misha's grandmother did not survive Greywake," she said, into that quiet. "Grandmother’s sisters did not either. So Misha will not discuss what it does in detail, and Ela will not ask, and Ela will understand why Misha's answer here has no flexibility in it whatsoever. Yes?"
"Yes," I said immediately, and my voice came out lower than I intended. "Ela understands. Completely."
And I did. Truly.
Whatever calculus I'd been running about the shard's value—resale potential, information brokerage, leverage—all of it had just been rendered utterly irrelevant in an instant.
This wasn't just a corporation cutting compliance corners.
This wasn't even illegal weapons manufacturing in the ordinary sense.
This was somebody, somewhere inside Vorpal Dynamics, sourcing the precursor for a genocide-grade weapon through a fucking shell vendor, and not even bothering to appropriately cover their tracks in any way.
'That's not "minor breach of conduct" territory,' I thought, a cold weight settling somewhere behind my sternum. 'That's smuggling weapons-grade uranium into a megacity levels of bad. Even worse, probably, because at least uranium doesn't pick its victims by fucking bloodline.'
Which also settled, in about two seconds flat, the question I'd been idly chewing on all morning—OPN broker or Valeria?
An information broker was fine for corporate dirt.
Contract disputes, embezzlement, affair footage, standard leverage material… But this?
Handing this to some anonymous middleman meant losing all control over where it went—and the genuinely horrifying possibility that it would simply be sold to the highest bidder, which could very well be Vorpal Dynamics itself, buying back its own exposure and burying it.
Along, quite possibly, with everyone who'd ever touched the shard.
A list that now included Daven Ouli, his wife, me…
…and Misha.
There was no question left in my mind.
'This goes to Valeria.'
Valeria, who had the corporate standing to know exactly which channels something like this should move through and who had the protective self-interest to make sure none of it ever traced back to her daughter.
"Ela has a high-level corporate contact," I said. "I’ll hand it off to them right away. They’ll know what to do with it. They’re… very deep corporate."
Misha studied me for a long moment—until, finally, some of the hardness drained out of her posture. Her shoulders came down.
Her ear tufts lifted back to something like their normal angle.
"Good," she said, and ejected the shard from the deck, holding it out to me between two claws like something mildly radioactive. "Then Ela takes it, Ela goes now, and Ela does that. And then—" she exhaled again, and a faint, tired echo of her usual brightness worked its way back into her voice, "—then Ela comes back soon, with no business at all, and eats Misha's experimental snacks, and tells Misha about boring things. Normal things. Misha would like some normal things after today. Maybe even bring Credits."
"Deal," I said softly, taking the shard and moving to stow it in the DuraPack—before stopping myself mid-motion.
'No… That's not safe enough. Not for this.'
I considered my pants pocket instead—the T1 pants were probably the most protected part of my entire body, all things considered—but even there, the risk of damage or theft sat too high for my tastes.
Pockets could be picked. Pants could be torn. Bags could be snatched…
So instead, I reached up and slotted it directly into my free neck-slot, deliberately choosing not to initialize it.
Just for storage, nothing more.
'If somebody manages to steal a shard out of my fucking neck, I probably have much bigger problems than the shard.'
"Ela will come back," I promised. "Hopefully soon enough today that Ela can still act as a snack test-subject. But if not—then in the next few days. Guaranteed."
Misha nodded, but the tension didn't leave her frame the way it usually did when I made promises like that. Her ear tufts stayed low, her four eyes lingering on the spot at my neck where I'd stowed the shard.
"Ela will be careful," she said—it wasn't a question. "Ela goes straight to put the shard away. Ela does not stop. Ela does not detour."
"Promise,” I confirmed.
She walked me to the very front of the store—which she practically never did—and bid me farewell at the entrance, still looking tense and deeply concerned.
I really couldn't blame her for it. I felt more or less exactly the same.
Because it genuinely felt like I was walking around with a damn nuke slotted into my neck.
Which, in a way, wasn't even an exaggeration.
'How the fuck has nobody gotten wind of this yet?' The question kept circling as I quickly made my way back toward the elevators, keeping my Ela-persona alertness dialed up despite the crowd. 'That absolute moron Daven wrote everything down in plain-text. Names, IDs, addresses, technical sheets, the whole paper trail. Just—sitting on a shard with rudimentary encryption, in an apartment that got taken over by Scavs. How has this not blown up already, if that’s the level of security they got?'
It didn't add up at all.
A biological weapon precursor—a genocide-grade one—being sourced through a shell vendor on a standard procurement pipeline, and the only person who'd apparently noticed was a low-tier procurement coordinator who then got scared and left the evidence behind in an apartment for just about anyone to find.
Either the Corporations were genuinely that bad at enforcing their own non-proliferation agreements against each other, or something else entirely was going on that I couldn't see from where I was standing.
'And the Concordance-list. Whatever that actually is.' The way Misha had said it made it clear it was beyond serious. 'One more thing to ask Valeria about, probably… Or Misha, whenever I find the time.'
By the time I reached the elevator, I wanted nothing more than to simply be rid of the thing.
To hand it off, transfer the weight and the risk to someone equipped to actually carry it, and go back to worrying about normal problems like cracked ribs and a damaged Anima Network.
‘You know, completely normal, average teenager problems…’
I definitely couldn't leave it at home and hope it worked out. I couldn't sit on it "until later."
This needed to move to a secure location, and get as far away from me—and thus from Misha, and from the apartment, and from anyone I cared about—as soon as physically possible. Preferably fucking yesterday.
Which meant messaging Valeria... During her work hours…
Something I had never once done before.
I opened the message composer in my cerebral interface and stared at the blank field for a moment, a genuine flutter of nerves running through me.
Our relationship had improved—a lot, honestly, over the last few weeks—but there was still a formality to it, a carefulness, a set of unspoken boundaries neither of us had fully mapped yet. And "interrupting Valeria mid-workday to demand she physically leave the office" was firmly in uncharted territory, to put it as lightly as I possibly could.
The bigger problem was conveying the seriousness without saying anything I could actually be quoted on.
I wasn't going to be like Daven. I wasn't nearly naive enough to assume the communication systems weren't monitored by somebody—corporate, or otherwise.
I couldn't plain-text write out “hey, I'm carrying a genocide-weapon precursor's paper trail in my neck, please come get it.”
That was Daven-tier stupidity.
So I needed to thread the needle… Somehow. Urgent-sounding enough to actually move her. Vague enough to be meaningless to anyone reading over either one of our shoulders.
I thought about it for a few floors, drafted and deleted three separate attempts, and finally settled on something.
["Mother.
I apologize for reaching you during working hours—I would not if I felt it could wait.
It cannot.
While handling the arrangement you funded this morning, I also had a certain item analyzed that I obtained during my last outing.
Having now had it properly assessed by a knowledgeable and trustworthy party, I am convinced it falls drastically outside my depth, and outside the depth of anyone I could reasonably hand it to on my own, barring yourself.
I do not feel comfortable leaving it unattended, with anyone else, nor carrying it around longer than absolutely necessary.
I would very much appreciate it if you came home to collect it personally—at which point I will gladly brief you about the analysis—at your earliest possible opportunity.
I understand this is a significant request and that your schedule is not mine to disrupt.
I would not be making it if I saw another responsible option available to me.
I'll be home shortly and will remain there until you arrive.
— Seraphine"]
I read through it four times, channeling [Deception] the entire way to make sure I was hiding as much of the actual intel as possible without gutting the message's substance.
It flagged the one thing that mattered most—”drastically outside my depth, and outside the depth of anyone I could reasonably hand it to”—without ever naming the actual contents.
Valeria was, at this point, undoubtedly aware of my connections to the OPN.
Which meant she'd be able to pick up on the implied severity immediately: If I wasn't comfortable handing this off to an OPN broker, that said quite a bit. Their reputation was downright spotless—discretion was the entire foundation of their business model.
If even that channel wasn't good enough for me, Valeria would know this was something extremely serious.
While anyone else reading the message would be unable to make that connection at all—since they'd have no idea about my OPN ties in the first place… Hopefully.
It was about as good as I was going to manage.
I took a breath, and sent it.
The moment I arrived home and the apartment door sealed shut behind me, I felt a genuine, physical fraction of the stress finally slide off my shoulders.
The shard was still sitting in my neck-slot like a lead weight, but at least I was no longer carrying it through public thoroughfares surrounded by strangers, any one of whom my newly paranoid brain had been quietly flagging as a potential corporate asset the entire way up.
'Straight home, no stops, no detours. Promise kept, Misha.'
I dropped the DuraPack by my bedroom door, made my way to the kitchen, and sat down at the table—the same table where, this morning, three innocent little datashards had kicked off what was rapidly becoming one of the most stressful days of my entire damn life.
Which, given my recent life, was genuinely saying something.
And then I nervously waited.
My leg started bouncing under the table almost immediately, and I didn't bother stopping it.
I checked my cerebral interface. No reply.
Checked again forty seconds later. No reply.
Got up, poured myself a glass of water, sat back down, checked again. No reply.
'She's in meetings. She's always in meetings. It could be an hour before she even sees it. It could be—'
Finally, the interface chimed.
Roughly five minutes—that had felt like forever, honestly—after I'd sent the original message, Valeria's reply came in. I opened it so fast I nearly fumbled the mental command.
["Do not leave home. I will be there soon."]
That was the entire message.
I stared at it, honestly a little stunned.
No follow-up questions. No request for clarification. No “what exactly is this regarding, Seraphine” or “is it really important enough for me to leave work”.
Not even a token probe for more information before committing.
Just an instruction, a confirmation, and—reading between those nine words—Valeria Vildea apparently walking out of her workday on nothing more than the strength of my deliberately vague message.
'Was that seriously all it took…?'
Although… the more I sat with it, the more it made some sort of sense, actually.
I had never once messaged her at work.
Over the past weeks I'd built up a pretty consistent track record of trying to solve my own problems first—sometimes to a fault, sometimes to the tune of cracked ribs and a damaged Anima Network, which, yeah, she didn’t know about—and only escalating when I genuinely couldn't handle something alone.
Which meant that when I did finally reach out like this, flagging something as far beyond my depth, the request carried actual weight in her mind.
'Or at least that's what I'd like to believe just happened,' I thought, turning the glass of water slowly on the tabletop. 'The alternative is that she simply read my words and her corporate instincts somehow managed to do the rest… Probably some of both, honestly.'
Either way, she was coming.
All I could do now was wait—nervously, leg bouncing, glass of water slowly going warm in front of me—for Valeria to arrive…