Turning around and finding a woman in your chair is bound to surprise just about anyone, even a twenty-percent cybered middle manager like Jamon Dralfi-2C, a nameless drone working for Kadalfi Production, Ltd, a maker of specialty metals and pre-fab molding for high-end starcraft.

A nymphal! What was a nymphal doing in his office? How did she get in? She wasn’t cybered, and her Band was... his connection to the office Boole was gone? Did some of the boys... no, impossible, she had to be here for some other reason, she wasn’t dressed appropriately for that, and...

The thing that looked like an undersized crossbow, and the bolt that was glowing with a very disturbing light, made his blood run cold.

“Jamon Drafi-2C, do you know just how much trouble you are in?” the woman asked calmly, as she placed a small disk on his desk.

Shadows whirled and spun, and the image of a crescent moon with a dagger through it rose above the Seal. Psi-active fear touched on the edge of his awareness, and his pale face went completely bloodless.

“N-no, I have done nothing to draw the attention of the Umbrans...” he stammered, very unconvincingly.

The Seal flared in front of him, and he swallowed.

The scarlet-tressed woman’s eyes rose from the same sight. “Now, now, trying to lie under the Seal is a very, very bad idea, you know? And you don’t have anywhere near the tech to foil it. You’re just a small cut-out protecting the big fry. Now, I know you value your job and you didn’t want to be fired for no reason, but congratulations! The Umbrans are here to save your job, and help you not commit treason for sabotaging their war efforts.”

---

The subsonics had their effect, and his knees gave way as I watched. He felt into the cramped seat in his office, visibly shaking. “I-I just did what I was told...” he whined, completely aware of the general fate of traitors.

“Of course you did,” I assured him soothingly. “However, the only fingerprints on that data entry relaxing the tolerances of the materials being made for Rantha Corp are yours. We caught the very first shipment, of course, and they are being returned to Kadalfi for not being built to spec. Someone is going to find a patsy, and lo, look who got volunteered for the position.”

He was looking rather ghastly, and that was without the side effect on skin pigmentation of the cheap immunanites that facilitated his body tolerating his cyberware. “I was set up-?” he managed to whisper, and suddenly his loyalty to the company and his position was taking a sharp nosedive.

“Yes. I’ve already gone into your systems and reset the tolerances back to their original settings, so certain individuals can’t use the findings as an excuse to triple-check the system, reset their machinery, and so forth, shutting down and delaying production.

“However, your fate is sealed. You’re to be offered up as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of Unimportant Flunkies Can Just Die, and some contrived connection to a relative killed, removed, or accidentally slain during an Umbran purge is certain to suddenly pop up in a datafile somewhere to provide motivation.” He shuddered as he looked at me, but behind the fear was a rising strain of anger at the company for betraying his many years of thankless, loyal service.

“So, here’s a one-time deal for you. The Green and Gold are looking for competent managers to help run their production department, and while they are Downspire, it also means that Jamon Drafi can comfortably disappear into the morass, and the silencer teams sent after you aren’t going to have an easy time of it. You’re going to have to lose your cyberware, but that’s no great sacrifice if you want to live, is it?”

“N-No...”

“Excellent. In return, we’re going to make it difficult for the company to come after you, because we’re going to go after the ones who want to make their problem, you, disappear.” My hair rippled hypnotically, and his human eye was already glazed. “So, tell me who gave you the order to make that change, and I’ll go wandering up the ladder and see what I can find.”

“It was Supervisor Krystal Necta-55. She said she wasn’t rated for engineering specs when she passed on the order...” he trailed off.

“Mmm.” My eyes flickered as I accessed the personnel files of the company and brought her up in my head. “Younger than you, and already your boss. An ambitious woman,” I noted for his benefit. “When you leave work today, head for Peniplex Station Violet, and to the Green and Gold office nearest that to the south. There’s a nice dorm waiting for you, and you can start your new job tomorrow.

“As for your last paycheck, I’ve already approved your vacation time bonus and a fat severance check, and your resignation is approved and already filed, with the flags attached to you not notifying anyone. Make sure at least a third of what you do today is unfinished and will get routed to your subordinates tomorrow, would you?”

“Y-yes.” His color was starting to return, eyes flickering as he began to make plans to live and run... and maybe get vengeance. “What are you going to do to the Supervisor?”

“Well, that all depends on her,” I smiled. “Take care, Mr. Drafi.”

---

There was a pop of air replacing her position as she was abruptly gone, whisked away by some psionic effect, no doubt. Jamon Drafi stared at this empty chair, beckoning him to sit there as he had for six days a week for the last thirty-two years, and suddenly thought it looked very much like an executioner’s seat, the worn neo-leather more like boils on the skin, rotting away to reveal the filth below.

He had been betrayed by his superior... who likely had been ordered to do what she did by her superiors. Going public and claiming all of it would gain him nothing, as there was no proof behind his words, and it was likely he was due to be silenced before any such words could come to light.

His connection to the office Boole winked on, and he eyed the datafeed, production stats, and monitoring tools popping up inside his eyes.

He definitely couldn’t sabotage production, as that was the whole reason why the woman was here. But the information behind that production, to who and what, that could certainly have some value, couldn’t it? He could bring it along as a gift to his new employers, and let them do with it what they wanted.

The woman had hacked the personnel files... he didn’t know what level of skill that required, and certainly the company would have systems in place to make sure it wasn’t something repeated easily or continuously done.

On the other hand, his clearance gave him access to plenty of data for comparison purposes, which he could access without any surprises whatsoever.

He didn’t sit down in his chair, staying in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair as he sat there, leaned back, put his feet up on his desk, and began exacting his own version of revenge.

---

Like most cybered people, Krystal Necta-55 had rather blind faith in her own cyberware. All cyberware was made to resist outside intrusion, or it simply became a conduit for taking control of a large segment of the professional population, with dire consequences. There were psionic effects that could take control of cybernetics, true, but anything like that on a mass scale would trigger the Brain Wards to instantly disrupt them, and cybernetics were generally more resistant than human minds or flesh to such effects.

A strand of scarlet hair going into her dataport, physically removing the insulation and cipher there, jacking directly into her hardware and then spreading across her brain and taking control without her even noticing, was a bit more than her company-issued hardware was rated for.

Her hardware was convenient for accessing her software, and she had no idea I was even present as she continued to sit there, monitoring production, dreaming about the possible rewards for her help this time, worrying about the contract and implications if the faulty parts were discovered, who was going to fix the problem when it was inevitably discovered, how soon she could eliminate Manager Drafi and cover herself...

She had removed the conversation from her wetware to her hardware, where it could be encrypted, retrieved, copied, or wiped as needed. I noted the location of her private files, and had her give me access to them without her ever realizing it.

Well, no wonder she was already a Building Supervisor. She was definitely not afraid of getting her hands dirty...

I patted her false and stylish hair in admiration for her nerve, if nothing else; she simply chose the wrong party to cross this time. I considered things, and left a subliminal prompting in her memories. If things went badly south, and she could make it there, I was sure Mob Queen Valentina Rantha could use the service of an ambitious, ruthless woman like her. There were a lot of thugs who needed proper direction, and she certainly wasn’t afraid of that kind of work.

As for that message from the office of Factory Manager Sverensu, the new local Goldilocks crew’s lead senior cyberpath Charmieo was going to backtrack it properly, since it was highly doubtful if it actually originated from there. Sverensu was probably a patsy too, and even if he wasn’t, he wasn’t the one who would do something like this, risking his career and life over a move like this.

----

Technically speaking, I never got within fifteen feet of Maester Krallu Ho, if you discounted my hair. My hair, of course, could get pretty long, indeed, and when a single strand dropped down to deliver a nanite payload by stabbing into the coolant systems for his 87% cyberbody, he detected nothing.

I sat on the ceiling above him, arms crossed, neutralizing his internal security nanobots as they came in range, whereupon the payload I was inserting fell upon them, consumed them, converted them, and proceeded on their slow and merry way to infiltrate his systems.

Security impediments removed or muffled, I extended my hair up into his cyberware and remaining wetware, sectioned off parts of his meat and metal brains he wasn’t using, and set up some special fun surprises there. He probably wouldn’t be happy to find out he was sending out constant data updates to a third party, and his own subroutines had been compromised so he couldn’t even detect it.

Yeah, I had kept up with the Computer Programming Ranks, just like the pure tech. Those systems needed to be monitored by increasingly advanced programming, and just the languages that needed to be written alone were getting increasingly polyglot and multi-aspect. The higher-end Mekker coding was getting more and more transparent to me, and wasn’t I just the sort to take advantage of it?

“What?” he blurted out below me, as a message popped up on his eye.

Totally painted out of his awareness, I sat up against the ceiling and got the relay through my hair strand as he was notified that Codesifter Agliant was missing, but some cyberware that had belonged to him had been found at his workstation. The lack of organic material was probably related to the new vivus energy that had been discovered and disseminated...

“Agliant is dead? They tracked me back that far?” he muttered, and then began searches.

Up above him, I smiled despite myself. I had been a busy girl... and so had some of my girls.

The Planetary Vice-President of Kadalfi Production. Savant Kobulos. Preceptorix Harkamandal. Constant of the Hall Trigivormin. Codesifter Agliant... and Cogitator Prime Ulivestos were all off the Boole!

That is impossible; there should have been alarms, notifications, alerts! How many others were... were... his thoughts trailed off.

Quiet red notifications of one hundred and fourteen Mechanist Guild individuals who had vanished from the Guild’s Boole without setting off the slightest alarms, all within the past twelve hours, hung in the augmented reality before his eyes. UNABLE TO CONTACT blinked repeatedly as Maester Krallu Ho tried to code away the paranoia igniting in his meatware, and found himself unable to do so...

====================

Author's Note: Wetware is organic components i.e. your brain.