"The triple-redundancy of the Cerberus ice is what makes it such a fraggin' pain," Jackie said. "But once you know about that, it's pretty easy to handle." She took a few steps closer to the sleeping hound and the middle head opened one eye to look at her. It snorted and all six eyes opened, its three heads rising up to look directly at her.

Jackie tossed the bones at the hound. They flipped end over end through the air, and the Cerberus neatly caught one in each of its mouths.

"There you go, boy," she said. The Cerberus immediately began gnawing on the virtual bones, hunkering down on the landing, its heads lowered. Kellan heard the sound of the dog's teeth grinding against the bones and shuddered a bit, but Jackie seemed pleased.

"That'll keep him busy for a while," she said, and then calmly slipped past the guardian hound.

"What did you do?"

"Modified a loop program that has it distracted," Jackie said. "I just had to make sure to take the redundancy of the ice into account. Now it'll be busy gnawing on that program for a while before it realizes there's nothing really there. I thought the bone was a nice touch, don't you?"

At the door of the building Jackie produced a key from somewhere in the folds of the flowing white dress her persona wore. She fit it into the lock and turned it to the right, and the door opened, allowing them to enter.

Inside the door was a foyer done in reddish marble and bronze, with a maze of corridors leading off from it in all directions. Jackie seemed to know where she was going, gliding along the corridors until they reached a certain doorway. The key granted them admittance once more, this time into a room filled with floating silvery spheres, row upon row of them. There were easily hundreds, if not thousands, arranged in perfect order.

"Personnel files," Jackie said, sliding along the rows. "Let's see what they have about our Mr. Brickman. Ah! Here he is." She stopped at one sphere and pressed her hand against it. Her hand sank into the surface of the sphere with a ripple like quicksilver.

Suddenly images unfolded before Kellan's eyes, displays with words and pictures scrolling down them. Jackie seemed to scan quickly through descriptions of Brickman's education and work background, skipping over pages of history to more recent entries in the file.

"Promotion to junior director of external resources and relations," she read out loud.

"Which means?" Kellan asked.

"It means that our Mr. Brickman is a professional Mr. Johnson. He handles shadow ops for Knight Errant, and he's up-and-coming, too, from the look of it. So it's not unusual for him to be hiring shadowrunners. He's not just a corporate suit playing a little game on the side. He works with runners a lot. Of course, that doesn't mean he isn't playing a little something on the side, but it makes it harder to tell.

"It might also be how the Street Deacon knows him," Jackie continued. She gestured and the file collapsed back into a sphere. With a wave of her hand, she brushed the sphere into the open mouth of a bag she held in her other hand.

"We'll just download this for future reference," she said to Kellan. The gesture told the host system to transfer the data to her cyberdeck's memory.

"Now what?" Kellan asked. "That didn't tell us much."

"I didn't think it would, but it's good to check out the basics. Targets rarely leave the good stuff just lying around where it's easy to find, but that first level of information is sometimes more revealing than it's intended to be. Most of the time, though, it's like diving for sunken treasure: it's a big ocean, so it helps if you know where to start looking, and you've got to watch out for sharks."

They stepped out of the room containing the personnel files and zoomed through the corridors. Kellan had no idea how Jackie knew where she was going. She certainly seemed familiar with the layout and defenses.

"Have you been here before?" she asked.

"Let's just say I know my way around the Ares system," Jackie replied, and Kellan left it at that.

They stopped just inside the entrance to a gigantic room. The ceiling was shrouded in darkness high above them, and on the floor below was laid out a collection of trucks, train cars, planes and even boats, all moving in complex patterns along a network of lines. Figures wearing plain coveralls marked with the helmeted Greek warrior of the Ares logo moved here and there, carrying boxes and crates, some of them impossibly large.

"Let's see what the shipping department has to tell us," Jackie said.

They approached one of the uniformed figures. Kellan saw that his badge indicated he was the foreman. He was ticking off items on a clipboard as other workers moved past him.

"I need information on a shipping route," Jackie requested, and the foreman didn't even look up from his work.

"Authorization?" he asked.

Jackie's persona reached into the folds of her gown, then opened her hand and blew a puff of glittering faerie dust over the foreman. It sparkled in the air for a moment and the foreman looked up from his clipboard, eyes wide, a silly smile fixed on his face.

"Works every time," Jackie said to Kellan.

"What did you do?"

"Used a spoof program that has the system convinced that we have executive access, for the time being." Then she withdrew a small, white business card and passed it to the foreman as her cyberdeck uploaded the search request to the host system. The foreman flipped through pages on his clipboard, then withdrew a similar card and passed it back to Jackie, who took it, downloading information to her deck.

The card in her hand expanded to become a floating window in the air in front of them. A map of the Seattle area appeared on it, with routes traced out in different colors. Jackie and Kellan studied them for a moment.

"That shipping route Brickman gave us wasn't the original route for the shipment we nailed," Kellan stated. "It was changed."

"By Brickman, I imagine," Jackie replied, scrolling through the information on the various shipments.

"Look at this," the decker said. "There's an upcoming shipment that uses the same route." She traced the red line on the map with a virtual finger.

"In another couple of days," Kellan said. "What's in it?"

"Let's find out, shall we?" Jackie passed another information request to the foreman and he obediently complied, shuffling through his papers before passing a data card back to Jackie.

"Guns," Jackie and Kellan said simultaneously, after glancing at the cargo manifest.

"A lot of guns," Kellan added.

"It's a shipment for Knight Errant," Jackie said, "along with more run-of-the-mill stuff for Weapon World outlets in the plex. Now this would be something worth jacking."

"Hey," Kellan said, "G-Dogg said something about the Spikes having new weapons they obviously got from somewhere. Do you think there could be a connection?"

"Like?"

"Like maybe Brickman is setting up gangs in the plex with stolen Ares guns."

"Interesting thought," Jackie replied. "I'll do one more search, and then we should get going. I don't want to hang out any longer than we have to." She passed another data card to the foreman and Kellan felt an almost electric tension from Jackie's concern. Though the decker remained cool and calm, her desire to not linger in the Ares system made Kellan realize the potential danger.

The foreman shook his head. "Further authorization required," he said flatly.

"Damn," Jackie said. "The information is restricted."

"Can you get it?"

"Of course I can get it," Jackie replied, a bit peevishly. "It's just going to take a little longer." Suddenly, a glowing cloud of symbols appeared in the air between the outstretched hands of Jackie's persona, who began manipulating the symbols as if she were assembling a virtual jigsaw puzzle.