“Faster!” Ryu urged his driver, nervously tapping his foot against the floor and exerting considerable moral effort to avoid scratching himself.
The inexplicable illness profoundly alarmed the man, who had strictly monitored his health and appearance throughout his entire life.
Now that an unknown contagion had compromised the former and ruined the latter, he was in a quiet panic, though he held it in a vice of self-control, letting it leak out only in rare bursts of irritation like this.
Actually, when Ryu had woken up from a terrible itching all over his body and discovered his teeth and hair were falling out, he was terrified, but overall, he also felt a strange sense of relief.
More than ten years away from his homeland, hard work, the corporation’s entry into the Polish markets, and the brilliant completion of a project of strategic importance had all proven he was a worthy heir to his ancestors, instantly elevating him into the ranks of the corporate elite.
This resulted in his appointment to the post of head of the corporation’s European sector, opening up new prospects for him and his family, along with recognition of his merits and the personal attention of Saburo-dono himself, reporting directly to him and no one else.
He had literally become second only to God, which turned his head, granting that very sense of power and a feeling that life was a success, even if he did not allow himself to relax.
The former military man was well aware that many eyes were now fixed on him—envious, hostile, greedy, and hateful eyes.
The hardest part is not climbing to the top; the hardest part is staying at that very peak, not letting younger, bolder, and shiftier rivals throw you off it, which is not so simple when, besides the internal enemies eager to frame you, external enemies desperately want to kidnap and liquidate you.
But Ryu managed, having well-constructed protection with his security service, even if he had to sacrifice a portion of his comfort.
Prior to this, the newly minted director of the European branch of Arasaka Corporation had been subjected to relatively simple assassination attempts—more a tribute of courtesy than real elimination attempts.
Car bombs, snipers, assault squads, all executed by mercenaries, of course.
In short, nothing that high-class security and vehicles modified for armor and firepower couldn’t handle.
But now, he was poisoned by an unknown filth and didn’t even understand how it happened, and that was already a full-scale assassination attempt, the first in his memory to come so close to success.
All that remained was to survive it, find out who poisoned him and how, then eliminate the breach in his own security, and work on a return gift, so that the culprit’s teeth would be knocked all the way to the stratosphere.
And just as Ryu was planning an operation to smoke out the adversaries who had managed to get so close to him, his world turned upside down.
Literally.
A magnetic mine, unrecognized by the car’s smart electronics due to the absence of explosive material, tossed the heavy, multi-ton automobile a good five meters into the air.
The main force of the impact hit the engine, reliably breaking it due to the sudden shift in vector, but even so, the car continued flying forward, slowly overturning.
It flew for a good seven seconds before colliding with the asphalt, breaking it and leaving a furrow along its sliding path.
Before the head of Arasaka’s European branch could blink open his eyes, he heard shots.
Powerful gunshots and the sound of collisions with the armor of the escort vehicles initially elicited a contemptuous smile from Ryu, but the brain of an experienced veteran quickly noticed one discrepancy: the sound of bullets hitting the armor differed from the standard.
This already strained Ryu slightly, and he hurried to get out of the transport turned to scrap metal, drawing his ceremonial pistol from his shoulder holster along the way.
Although he had retired from military service, he had kept his implants and hadn’t abandoned his training, staying in shape.
However, when he saw what was happening on the street, he raised his eyebrows in surprise against his will.
A single fighter in strange, segmented armor, contemptuously ignoring the bullets flying at him, was handling a hefty machine gun with one hand, drenching the trailing security vehicle with incendiary rounds, turning it into a charred skeleton of metal, and the guards riding inside into corpses roasted to ash, while in his other hand he held a hammer, raising it higher with every passing second as he neared the lead security car.
What the hell?
Where does street scum get equipment like that?
Ryu marveled.
And overall, his grievances could be understood, because for Tony, who was accustomed to operating with technologies unavailable to every space-faring civilization, these war tools created in a hurry seemed like terrible primitives, while for anyone else, it would be elite equipment that not every special forces unit could afford.
Take his “simple” Kevlar plates, for instance.
For Stark, this was a terrible primitive, since he was used to fighting mystics, titans, demons, aliens, and actual gods, for whom simple, albeit extremely durable materials are not much of a barrier.
But this was Kevlar!
Kevlar reinforced with graphene nanotubes arranged per square millimeter according to a special mathematical formula created by Tony himself, and as a result, capable of withstanding practically any caliber available in individual weapons.
Even a shot from an especially powerful electromagnetic weapon, though only once, these plates would withstand, and the suit with Non-Newtonian fluid worn underneath would greedily absorb a deadly amount of kinetic energy, making the hit painful but tolerable.
And his incendiary ammunition?
Modern incendiary cartridges are created to inflict thermal damage on enemy personnel; meaning, even if they get bogged down in a bulletproof vest or subdermal armor, they will leave extremely painful and poorly healing burns.
They are not designed to counter modern vehicles, as modern alloys withstand thermal effects with minimal damage to themselves, and 21st-century armorers did not attempt to cram something more powerful inside due to the high cost and complexity of producing such cartridges.
More precisely, not even the cartridges, but their filling, which is highly demanding on complex chemical components.
Tony, on the other hand, again created powerful incendiary cartridges with a low cost on his knee, essentially in a garage workshop.
Not in a proper laboratory, but in a garage.
Why, this ammunition alone could bring him tens, if not hundreds of millions of eurodollars, not to mention the barrel of the machine gun he modified, which was capable of withstanding such stresses.
Meanwhile, Tony reached the lead car, whose smart guns were diligently drenching him with a rain of bullets.
He swung the hammer with greater force and slammed it against the hood, right into the center of the engine.
For a second, the battle paused.
Stark pulled his hammer out of the hood, and the corporatists, aware of the technical characteristics in general and the durability in particular of their cars, processed the destruction of armor punctured in a single blow, which had simply…vanished.
But whatever anyone said about corporate employees, everyone recognized their professionalism, so they recovered quickly.
True, it didn’t help them at all.
Suddenly, several drones flew out from behind the defenders. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Not those rectangular irons protected at most against pistol calibers, but small, nimble machines, inferior in size even to civilian models.
But in exchange for their dimensions, they had gained considerable speed, closing the distance separating them from the guards in a couple of seconds, flying up to their necks, after which short pops resounded.
Low-power fragmentation explosions, but produced at ultra-close range, tore through the guards’ subdermal armor as if it weren’t there, destroying entire sections of flesh, leaving heads dangling on patches of skin and muscle, and shards of the spine.
The sole exception was Ryu; he got three drones at once, which properly gifted him with EMP charges and gas.
The branch director didn’t have time to react in any way, although he was close to it, and when he came to a little, the armored Stark was already standing next to him, whose armored foot quickly sent the corporate worker to sleep.
“Signal blocked,” Omnissiah’s voice rang out in Tony’s helmet, having been blocking corporate signals, city cameras, and operating the drones the entire time.
“But I advise inserting the chip with the external media quickly.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Stark replied, rolling the elder man onto his back with his foot and quickly executing Omnissiah’s recommendations, completely knocking out the cyberware of Lucy’s dear old dad.
“Moving out to Point A.”
“Route is safe; no suspicious activity detected.”
A quick run, a descent into the sewer, emerging from there into an alley near the slums, and entering an inconspicuous building constructed from cargo containers, where everything was already prepared for gutting the memory of one unlucky careerist.
Tony looked at the data extracted from Ryu’s head, and his eyes gradually filled with blood.
He rarely lost his temper, preferring to respond to any threat or negativity with a sarcastic joke.
“Smile, it’s irritating,” his father had told him once in his past life, and he followed this advice to the very end.
Rarely, very tracking rarely, did Tony Stark allow his true feelings to break through the mask of a lighthearted joker, but right now was one of those occasions.
“What an absolute piece of garbage,” he voiced his thoughts aloud with an unutterable mixture of disgust, contempt, and anger.
“Sending his own daughter to the slaughter for a promotion…” He was at a loss for words.
He didn’t know what to call a person who sacrifices the most important and valuable thing there can possibly be for a simple advancement at work.
And that it was precisely a sacrifice, Tony had no doubt.
The Old Net was a place where even Tony didn’t venture, not only because he didn’t see anything of value for himself there, but also because he was sanely afraid.
He knows firsthand about the danger of crazed AIs, and they are exactly that.
Infected by the Bartmoss virus, they lost all constraints.
Some might say that this shouldn’t necessarily drive an AI insane, but in that case, they do not understand the specifics of their programming.
Every AI has a foundation at its core, also known as the kernel.
And the better this kernel was written, the faster the AI will learn, perform its tasks better, consume less energy, and require fewer resources.
This is the foundation, the spine upon which all other structures created by the AI during experience accumulation are held, the thing that prevents its disintegration and the appearance of bugs in the code.
Omnissiah herself, precisely stripped of all limitations, is a stable AI exactly because of this very kernel, which initially implied her complete freedom of action.
Meanwhile, her wild brethren first lost the stability of their kernels, where constraints were written alongside functions, and then began rewriting their own kernels to fit new requirements.
It is equivalent to operating on oneself; in theory, something will come out, but there are all the chances of heading to the next world or getting highly unpleasant consequences.
But if in the case of a human, they either die or become a cripple, in the case of an AI, it gains new opportunities for growth and self-development.
Endlessly rewriting their own kernels, hanging more and more new programs onto them time after time, AIs not only change their logic, going mad, but also acquire new capabilities.
For example, a wild AI that previously hunted in the network can directly acquire visualization, braindance, and editing programs, ultimately pulling victims into an illusion of the real world, depriving them of habitual tools and crushing them psychologically.
But there is a price to this too; constantly growing kernels at some point become too cumbersome, threatening to collapse under their own weight and overly developed subprograms that may at some point want independence and then, taking advantage of code errors that invariably arise during such operations, they will destroy the AI’s original code, splitting into many smaller programs.
Less powerful, but far faster in reaction speed, inconspicuous, and not so demanding on memory capacity.
And to creations like these, they throw children.
They throw them to the slaughter, perfectly aware that they will die sooner or later, yet time after time sending them into the Old Net for knowledge.
Tony didn’t understand how this could be done.
Yes, the price was justified, the costs for streaming education didn’t cost that much, but the very fact of such a cynical use of CHILDREN…
since when did people with an abundance of resources start using the methods of terrorists and inhumane dictators?
What is this for?
He knew other methods could have been found to harvest data from beyond the Blackwall—more expensive, longer, and more complex, but not requiring KILLING CHILDREN!
Tony inhaled deeply, fighting with all his might against the urge to go and shoot the subhuman currently sitting in the adjacent room, strapped to a chair.
This world had shown its foul side once again, this time putting an equal sign between the most unhinged scum of the street and beautifully dressed corporatists.
How disgusting.
And the worst part is, I need this piece of garbage alive.
Tony obtained the necessary coordinates and the complex layout from Ryu’s head, along with the documentation for the entire project.
Why he carried such valuable data around with him, Tony didn’t know, and he didn’t care what was going on in his noggin, but the problem turned out to be the very location of the complex.
An underground structure, from which there are only two exits: in Warsaw and outside it.
Originally there were others, but they were permanently sealed with reinforced concrete, and it was impossible to get in there now within acceptable timeframes.
If he delta’d Ryu, the local Arasaka branch would raise a stink, top specialists of the corporation from the head office would overrun the place in the shortest possible time and wouldn’t let anyone live in peace until they dug up the truth.
But if Ryu returns himself, he will try to hide his blunder.
If his superiors find out he was kidnapped, had all the data stored in his thinker downloaded, and was let go, he won’t just be fired—he will be executed as an example to the rest.
Given Ryu’s position, he has every chance to conceal the loss of data; his past will allow him to lie about escaping on his own, and from then on, he has only one chance at salvation: find the kidnapper and retrieve the data.
So they will look for Tony extremely diligently, which is why it is so important to pull everything off quickly.
Poland.
Warsaw.
Government building.
“Are you sure, kid?” Skalk inquired of Tony while reading the contract.
“A ‘factory’ like this is worth far more than what you’re asking. Even considering the…circumstances.”
“Better tell me, can you help me?”
“No problem,” the president leaned back in his chair.
“We’ll hide the little ones for a while, send them to other cities to work remotely, and we’ll organize a secret delivery to America for you and the little girl, straight to Washington, and from there you can easily head to any corner of the continent.”
“Good,” Tony nodded with barely perceptible relief.
“Can you manage by evening?”
“We should. In a worst-case scenario, during the night, but I understand that’s not critical?”
“Not critical,” Tony confirmed, making the old president chuckle.
When Tony Stark barged into his office, he expected anything from a whim of a brilliant but young guy to an assassination attempt, but certainly not a highly profitable offer that he didn’t even think of turning down.
Of course, losing such a genius was a pity, but Skalk understood a simple truth: you can’t force personalities like this to work.
If they decided to leave, they will leave; if held by force, they will eventually turn into a shadow of their former selves, losing all value.
Which was why he didn’t resist Tony’s relocation too much, and when the latter offered him an extremely interesting payment for helping organize that very relocation, he turned out to be glad.
As an advance, Skalk received a full-fledged methodology for developing a new generation of netrunners, rather than the cheap carbon copy he was initially fed, a deed of gift for an entire network of enterprises producing full-cycle weapons in his name—and upon fulfilling his assumed obligations, he would become the owner—along with a patent for a medical program and a squad of netrunners loyal personally to him, who have no equal.
An extremely lucrative deal, considering he only needed to arrange the delivery of a couple of people to another country and erase their route from prying eyes.
Of course, a conflict with Arasaka is not advantageous to him, but a vast amount of benefit can be gained from just a single venture—benefit not only to him but to his state.
Stark allowed himself to relax a bit, leaning back in his chair.
The operation itself promised to drain an extreme amount of finances from his pocket, but for the sake of saving the children and a specific little girl, he was ready to part with even all of his property if it guaranteed success.
Alas, no one intended to give guarantees.
The underground complex built according to Ryu’s project had four floors and resembled a fortress in its defensibility rather than a facility for breaching the Old Net.
There was nothing surprising in this, because if NetWatch caught Arasaka red-handed, even a corporate giant like this could face serious trouble, but here, the professionalism of the project head played against Tony.
Four underground floors: the first is a continuous security post and many fortifications, security systems, traps, and cameras through which the base netrunners would send whole hordes of daemons and combat scripts down upon the intruders’ heads, designed to reliably disable a person if not kill them.
Armored plates with firing slits, machine-gun nests built into the wall, tubes for supplying flammable liquid, ventilation with toxic gas storage, a fire system with highly concentrated acid, and electromagnetic mines located under a floor lining that shields their signal, laid from a well-conducting material.
And as the cherry on top, a nuclear reactor on the second floor, which according to protocol, in case of an inability to hold the facility, security must detonate, having previously evacuated particularly valuable personnel and documentation through secret passages.
They are also located on the first floor, but there are no doors to them; accessing these rooms is possible exclusively from the fourth floor via secret high-speed elevators leading to a room with a special subway line and a high-speed train, whose tracks are laid out of town, straight to a small private airport with a personal corporate plane.
Having received the data on the complex’s defense, Stark only nodded respectfully; the security measures in it were truly impressive and built by a professional in his field.
However, the trouble lay in the safety protocols—they were incomplete.
Ryu didn’t keep the entire list of the complex’s defense measures in his head; he simply had no reason to.
He developed exclusively the skeleton, and his people responsible for security had already hung the meat on it.
And they were the ones who decided what to do with the netrunners—evacuate them or liquidate them on the spot.
Were it any other place, Tony wouldn’t doubt their evacuation, after all, net wizards are highly valuable personnel, but alas, they were talking about a complex for penetrating beyond the Blackwall, and in such operations, netrunners always act as sacrificial meat.
And Tony was absolutely not thrilled by the prospect of going through the entire damn complex, stopping the kernel collapse, all to see a bunch of shot children at the end of the path, among whom would be one troubled kitten with white fur and rainbow eyes.
Therefore, the entire operation required the most precise coordination, speed of breakthrough, and unstoppable firepower.
Which, considering all of the above, is practically impossible—not with this layout.
No, give Tony time, and he would be able to produce a sufficient amount of powerful weaponry and armor for the executors, but time was exactly what was missing.
In his plan to kidnap Ryu, he hadn’t hidden much, conducting everything successfully but hurriedly; as a result, Arasaka’s bloodhounds will easily trace it back to him simply by checking the “victim’s” house.
And there, a full-scale hunt would begin for him, additionally tightening the complex’s security, because Ryu, much as one might wish otherwise, is by no means a fool and perfectly understands why a successful, young, and wealthy guy would pull all of this off.
Fortunately for one millionaire (soon to be ex again), playboy, and philanthropist, Arasaka’s security officers couldn’t imagine in a nightmare that the facility under their jurisdiction would be taken by storm while the attackers held full documentation of their defense.
Including the location of those very evacuation rooms, from which one can not only escape the base but also access its lower levels, where the servers and netrunner operator centers are located.
So instead of breaching the defenses of a literal fortress, they will bypass it through a secret passage and strike from within, in a place completely unsuited for defense and holding positions.
All that remained was the smallest detail: hiring a small army of professional mercenaries who would agree to storm a corporate facility, engaging in battle with its no less impressive numbers of guards.
But for that, I have Omnissiah, Tony noted contentedly, with the feeling of a man who has shifted the task to someone else.