Leon quickly squeezed Sylvia's hand several times as the signal, and Sylvia dropped her Invisibility spell. They tiptoed around the BarrierSafe offices, and no alarms triggered when they saw the cameras. OddOneIn had done his job correctly after all.

Carefully and quietly, Leon moved all the way up to the third floor of the building, broke into the office of a vice president with his Maglock Passkey, and found the cyberterminal in the office still on. Leon jacked in, and get the Matrix part of this run underway......

~~~

Leon felt that familiar sense of vertigo again, before landing in a sparse blue and black grid, with the image of a sunrise and some trees far away in the background.

Leon had gotten his Matrix persona inside BarrierSafe's corner of the local Matrix grid successfully. No sudden brain death trap, no hidden surprises, no nothing, except the rushing feeling as his Persona was moved rapidly along the grid to interact with the node.

Within a given corporation's Matrix, there were a few different types of Nodes, which stored functions within that could be used and abused by shadowrunners to their benefit. Leon was approaching the office's primary IOP (Input-Output Port), which served as the initial gateway to the corp's Matrix, assuming you were accessing the Matrix from inside the corp itself. The IOP node was a triangle shaped block, containing an oversized sphere within that bulged out from the sides of the triangle.

In front of the node was a spinning crystal icon. This icon indicated that the node was protected by an Intrusion Countermeasure, referred to as "ice" within the shadowrunning community. Leon could presumably bypass the ice entirely, if he had the same Matrix persona of the vice-president whose office he had broken into. Since he didn't, the ice came out to deal with the unfamiliar intruder.

Leon activated a program called "Deception" from his cyberdeck's active memory. It attempted to create a mask of fake passcodes to deceive the ice into believing it was a friendly Persona, thus avoiding cybercombat. However, for some weird reason, the program failed.

The crystal icon shattered to reveal within a smoking shield icon, with a mechanical probe that resembled a bird perched on top of it.

Trace ice.

Specifically, it was an Intrusion Countermeasure known as Trace and Dump. Low-level stuff, but if the probe managed to fly far enough away before Leon disposed of the smoking shield, it would "dump" Leon's persona from the Matrix. Then an automated phone call alert would be put out to local police, telling them about the last known location of the dumped out decker.

Deception could not be used once the crystal shattered, as combat with the ice had now been engaged and Deception didn't work in combat, only before it. Leon adroitly switched to an Attack program instead. Spears of lasers and lightning erupted from the hands of his Persona, brutalizing the smoking shield in front of him before the slow-moving probe could reach its destination. Higher quality Trace IC could send the probe out quicker, but BarrierSafe threw together this Matrix grid and its defences on the cheap. The Trace IC fell apart into a rain of particles, and Leon entered the node.

Exiting the IOP, Leon had a choice between two SPUs (Sub Processing Units) to enter. He chose the one on the left, based on the loose map of the BarrierSafe grid OddOneIn had laid out for him to get to his destination.

SPUs were generally pathways to more important nodes. There were three nodes of primary interest to your average shadowrunner. The first one was SMs (Slave Modules), which controlled the functions of various equipment in the outside world. Several SMs within the BarrierSafe matrix grid had already been disabled, specifically the ones controlling cameras and hidden security alert plates, along with some other unpleasantness that Leon didn't want to risk dealing with.

Then there were the Datastores (DSes), which most runners made their money on. Various files could be found within, many of them useless internal corporate crap, but some had interesting files that were worth a lot to certain people. Security movements, internal memos on prototype items, proof of behind-the-scenes manipulation of wars...... Leon had seen a lot, sold a lot, and bought a few pieces of data over the years during his runs through the Matrix.

Finally, there was the CPU (Central Processing Unit). Every Matrix system on the grid had a CPU, and getting past its ice and crashing the system would be the equivalent to shutting off every single Slave Module a system had. This would wreak utter havoc on anything entirely Matrix-reliant in a building, which was getting to be everything these days. Leon had crashed BarrierSafe's CPU several times before, as part of his plan to kill Koki Ishimura, It was a far cry from the menacing big corp CPUs, which used high level BlackIce and some other surprises to make the Node hard to operate successfully.

Leon had no business with the CPU or SMs today, and instead hopped easily from SPU to SPU. Leon marvelled at the spaghetti-like design of the grid, as it was clear BarrierSafe threw nodes out there without any planning or regard or organization. It was about the only challenging thing to the grid, as BarrierSafe didn't have any mercenary deckers on employ that could follow outsiders activities within the Matrix. Or any real high-level, high-quality ice.

Leon kept hammering down ice with Deception or Attack, until he reached a higher-profile cluster of datastores. Leon first edited access logs in one datastore, to make it look like it wasn't actually him rooting around in the Matrix, then he hit the Press Releases Datastore. Leon beat its ice easily with Deception, uploaded the doctored file given to him by his client, and it was now mission two-thirds accomplished.

Leon at this point could jack out of the Matrix safely, and head out of the office and back home to finish the run. But he wanted some fun first. So he headed to what was supposed to be a "Confidential Files" datastore.

The Confidential Files datastore had a strong combo of Barrier and BlackIce, but both were low-level. Barrier IC was an icon shaped like a spinning barred gate made out of lightning. Every now and then, it sent an alert message data packet to the CPU, which increased the quality of all ice in the system. Once the system reached a high-enough alert level, the ice behind it took over in combat. In this case, the ice behind it was BlackIce, a shapeshifting pile of darkness that launched projectiles at an invading Persona. Said projectiles were capable of causing deadly biofeedback damage through the datajack and into the decker's brain, and had killed thousands of aspiring deckers foolish enough to try and crash ice above their skill level.

What made this combo dangerous was that neither Barrier IC or BlackIce could be bypassed by Deception. Meaning you had to slug it out with attacking programs, until they were destroyed or you were destroyed. But Leon had a nasty surprise up his sleeve for it......

Leon let loose with a program called Degrade. Yellow slime shot from the hands of his persona, and coated the ice and the datastore node behind it. The ice fizzled on impact, and Leon let loose with several more shots of Degrade. The yellow slime effects from the program were actually codes that weakened both the ice and the node behind it, and made it easier for other programs to succeed against them. The program triggered combat with the ice upon usage, so it couldn't be used to make Deception easier, but it worked when you had to use attacking programs on slippery, elusive, hard to hit ice that could make your programs fail.

After enough shots of Degrade, Leon switched to attack, and a few lasers and lightning blasts were enough to dispose of the datastores defenses.

Now to see what was inside......

Interestingly, despite the fact the "Confidential Files" should've contained nothing but secondhand news to the local decker community, Leon did find a few new files of interest. The BarrierSafe company was holding onto some blackmail material useful to one David Longmiles, and there were a few memos addressed back-and-forth between Long Arms and BarrierSafe addressing it. There was also a message from Long Arms referring BarrierSafe to a new police liasion for street crimes, named Travis Bull, who would be coming in "about a week or so". Travis Bull was said to be the Sioux vigilante coming in special for Leon, so this was good info to have.

Leon copied the files over carefully, but then noticed a new file, also added recently.

"2045_Shadowrun_Against_ChiefBear_Information"

That year happened to be the year Leon's dad had been killed, protecting Chief Robert Bear from a suicidal assassination attempt......

Leon downloaded a copy of the file, edited some more access logs to hide his presence, and calmly jacked out of the Matrix.