The Security Penetration Testing That Was Actually A Bug-Trap All Along
| The Security Penetration Testing That Was Actually A Bug-Trap All Along | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
| ShadowHaven | Ares Bugs | ||||||||
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Jane Excalibur Beartrap Basilisk Grasshopper |
Magic 9 Insect Shaman 3 Force 9 Hybrid Forms 4 Force 8 Flesh Forms 8 Ares Guards 5 Ares Machine Gunners | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Beartrap knocked out 3 separate times | The Shaman, All Bugs | ||||||||
Summary
The runners are hired by Ares to do penetration testing, but it turns out to be a trap in order to get Jane Excalibur and her companions turned into bugs. Through quick thinking, blight, and thermite, the runners ruin the facility that was set up to be the trap and manage to escape.
Background
A bug shaman inside Ares had found out about the program that created Jane Excalibur and others like her, and sought to have them inhabited with bug spirits in order to create bug super-soldiers.
The Meet
The meet takes place at a diner in Renton at 8am, where the Johnson has ordered for everyone the American Continental breakfast. He tells them he wants a new Ares facility to undergo penetration testing, and he offers the team 40k nuyen each to perform the job: get into the secure offline server room (air-gaped and faraday caged) and get out with the file on the server without killing any Ares employees. The team is suspicious, but agrees to the job after asking if Ares equipment could be obtained at a discount, to which the Johnson agrees. At the end of the meet, he has the 40k for each of them placed into escrow accounts belonging to off-shore banks. (Turns out the bank is Ares-affiliated later).
The Plan
Grasshopper performs a visual scan of the area to get the layout of the compound the building is in. The compound is built on a hill, and the front of the building enters into the second floor (the back of the building enters into the first floor). The team knows that the server room is in the basement, two stories below the entrance. He notes that there are not many people who enter or leave this particular building.
Meanwhile, Beartrap hacks into the outer host for the facility to scout for data. She gets the floor plans and a copy of the internal employee chat logs, though she is spotted by a Spider and link-locked. To escape she rips the trodes off of her head, causing dump-shock.
The team decides to jump over the 5m high outer barrier into the compound, drive the 100m to the entrance, and get in via the side entrance the building has (between the target building and a parking garage).
They do not investigate the building in question in more detail or the Johnson.
The Run
Beartrap creates a Physical Barrier or Grasshopper to stunt over the outer barrier with, which alerts the guards on the perimeter as a giant van flies over the wall. On the way over, Jane Excalibur slashes out the support struts for one of the guard towers, bringing it down. The 4 remaining guard towers in LoS lay down fire, hitting the van a couple of times, though Basilisk is able to narcoject the guards inside the towers while Beartrap causes them to drop their mags repeatedly.
As they're approaching the side entrance, Beartrap slashes through the door mana barrier (and the door), and the runners step inside to be greeted by 4 flesh forms and 8 Ares security guards, who open fire. The team manages to fight their way through these guards, and Beartrap notices that the leaders of the guards are all dual-natured. Eventually the guards are brought down non-lethally, though Beartrap is hurt pretty badly from having been knocked out twice.
At the end of the fight, the team realizes that floor plans they got were fake, as the walls are in the wrong spots by a few feet. The team uses thermite burning bars to melt their way from the 2nd floor to the basement inside the server room, and Jane Excalibur jumps down to plug in a data cable into the server. As soon as she does, giant heavy panels all along the walls and ceiling slam shut around the server room and it begins filling with a red mist. At the same time, all the runners receive a message from their fixers: "The escrow money has been pulled, abort the job." Jane Excalibur is barely able to escape the room, and as soon as she's out she's mana-bolted by an insect shaman who is frustrated that her trap hadn't worked.
Waiting above the server room at this point is the insect shaman, accompanied by three of Jane Excalibur's former team members who are now wasp hybrid forms. Though the team is able to quickly cut down the insect shaman, the fight doesn't look good for the runners until Basilisk throws down a blight grenade and removes the spirits' Immunity To Normal Weapons. This allows the runners who were still conscious (Beartrap was knocked out again) to damage the bug spirits and eventually whittle them down (Grasshopper managed to take out two of them through the use of called shots). After the fight is over, Jane Excalibur makes sure all the bugs are dead while Beartrap gathers the dead bugs over the pool of her blood and uses her last remaining thermite burning bar to obliterate the evidence. Meanwhile, Basilisk is taking pictures of all the bugs with Ares logos covering their armor with Ares logos in the background.
As soon as that's taken care of, the team beats a hasty retreat, with Grasshopper jumping the barrier again with Beartrap's help. Jane Excalibur is crashing on Accelerator so Basilisk knocks her out.
Aftermath
The fixers for the runners are very apologetic, and Basilisk's contact Captain Madeline Palermo is able to spread the word a little bit about Ares' bug infestation. None of the runners have had a good day.
Rewards
Everyone:
- 18 Karma - 18 RVP
- 2 CDP
- Perfect Time - 5 RVP
- Perceptive 1 - 5 RVP
- 2 Karma - 2 RVP
- Cyber-Singularity Seeker - 12 RVP
- Stunt Driver - 4 RVP
- Speed Demon - 3 RVP
- Instinctive Hack - 2 RVP
- Sense of Direction - 3 RVP
- Quick Healer - 3 RVP
- Deck Builder - 8 RVP
- 1 Karma - 1 RVP