I also apparently didn't know how to spell check or proof-read. -----------------------------------------
Jack slowly crept through the offices of Conner, Inc., an Ares subsidiary that he had been hired to do a datasteal on, moving as silently as possible so as to not alert the guards that roamed the hallways. He looked around, saw that the coast was clear, and motioned for the rest of his team to follow.
Meggan, the teams decker stealthily followed Jack, her nimble elven feet making no sound. Then came Teeth, a Filthy little dwarf that was a demon behind the wheel of any vehicle. He also managed to cross the office without a sound.
Finally came Boner, an enormous Troll. He took two steps, and immediately all thoughts of stealth were blown out the window as he tripped over a power cord, launched a desktop computer across the rooms as he tried to pull his foot free from the cord, and them fell, crushing close to a half dozen cubicles in the process. Cheap cardboard walls and pressboard desks crumpled under his bulk, and he fell among cushy wheeled office chairs and the shattered remains of several computers.
"Shit, Boner!" Jack cried, pulling his Predator from it's holster, the rest of his team pulling weapons and crouching behind the few remaining cubicles, waiting for the guards to come running. Boner picked himself up, pulled out his Combat Shotgun and likewise crouched behind a half demolished cubicle wall.
"Sorry boss." Boner whispered back at Jack.
Several tense minutes passed, and when no guards showed, everyone began to relax slightly. Everyone glared at Boner, who grinned sheepishly and shrugged helplessly.
Jack shrugged. "It's ok Boner. We know you didn't mean it."
The team made their way across the office, and after a quick reprogramming of the security locks by Meggan, they snuck into the main lab, where their paydata awaited.
Once inside, the team split up and started rifling through filling drawers and computer files. After close to 10 minutes of fruitless searching, Meggan let out a curse.
"What's up, Meg?" Teeth asked in his rough voice.
"They have the file in hard storage." She replied, her fingers flying across her keyboard.
"Where?" Teeth asked.
"Hard storage." She said, giving him a look that said she thought he had rocks for brains. When he still looked confused, she snorted with disgust and pointed to a large metal door towards the back of the lab. "It's under lock and key back there, halfer. Use what brain ya got."
"Bah. Like I'm supposed to know that, Weedy." he replied back, staring angrily at her. "So how do we get in there?"
Jack went over to look at the door, then sighed. "Damn. It's on a time lock. No way to open the door manually before whenever the time lock goes off."
Boner scrunched his face up as he thought for a second. "There is one way."
Jack looked up at Boner. "Boner, you didn't bring..."
Boner grinned and patted a small pack he wore strapped to his waist. "Yuppers, boss. I had the feeling we'd need it."
"Great. Explosives." Teeth grumbled. "I thought we were supposed to do this quietly!".
"Well... Unless you want to wait until after everyone shows up for work in the morning..." Jack said, leaving his sentence unfinished, he didn't need to finish it.
Meggan unplugged herself from the console she was using, and moved back into the office. "I'll keep skimming the system, and see if I can find anything else useful in their systems. I can also hold off the alarms for a minute or two, hopefully, so that we can get our hoops out of here."
Jack nodded and sighed, then motioned for Boner to come over by him. "You know what to do here?"
"Yup." Boner said with a grin. "If there's one thing I knows, it's how ta blow things up."
Jack nodded and knew that to be true. Boner was a genius when it came to blowing something up. He could use Plastic to blow a fly off a car windshield without leaving a scratch on the glass, or take out a building. Of course, his fascination was such that Jack and the others wouldn't let him touch the stuff outside of a job where it was necessary. Last time Boner played with his c4, he damned near blew up the apartment building he and Jack were living in, taking the both of them out with it. Fortunately, Jack woke up in time to catch Boner before he detonated around 20 kilograms of the stuff.
"Ok. We need you to blow the time lock on this door off, so that we can open the door." jack said, pointing to the lock.
"Ok boss. gotcha." Boner mumbled, pulling out his explosives kit. Jack carefully handed a package c4 to Boner.
"Now, just enough to destroy the lock, Boner. We don't want to destroy the building." jack cautioned the big Troll.
Boner nodded and bent down next to the door to get to work. After several minutes, Boner rumbled "Done boss." And everyone stepped back and took cover outside the door of the lab as Boner set the last charge in place.
Outside the lab, Meggan continued to strip through layers of security as the rest of the team set the explosives. She blasted some heavy IC, then entered a small datatstore. Immediately, she knew she had found something big.
Her matrix Icon, a Golden Eagle, fluttered into the data store, and was immediately hot by several pieces of IC. Her fingers flew across her deck as she deftly dodged and counterattacked the IC. The battle was fast and furious, and over in nanoseconds, though it seems to last much longer.
She activated a browser program and quickly skimmed the files, downloading anything that looked valuable. One file was flagged as "Top Secret", so she immediately scanned it while downloading it. It appeared to be the plans for designing some sort of Ultra High Explosives. She started to close the file, then noticed a note tacked onto the end of the file, dated yesterday.
"This new explosive, code named Debby, is, in it's current state, highly unstable and extremely dangerous. It has almost 5 times the explosive force of c12. Use extreme caution when handling Debby. The slightest jostle could cause the Debby compound to explode. Until such a date as Debby can be made more stable, it is being stored in Lab 22, under heavy security."
"Lab 22?" Meggan wondered. "Isn't that..."
Back in the real world, Jack nodded to Boner. "Blow it."
At the same instant Meggan jacked out of the matrix and looked up at the group. She saw Boner's finger plugging toward the detonator and screamed out "NO!"
Across town, Allen Byers, a low level exec for the Ares Corporation sat in his 75th floor office, working late on a presentation. Suddenly, there was a flash of light and a loud rumbling sound. Allen looked up in time to see the entire top 14 floors of Conner, Inc's Corporate offices explode outward in a huge gout of flame. Allen shuddered and decided it was time to go home for the evening, to his safe, warm bed.
