“Hey!” the bartender shouted. “Somebody’s gonna pay for this damage; I don’t care if you are a mancer.” He had balls, making demands of a technomancer, I’d give him that. It wasn’t my fault the ogre had tried to pound my head into a lumpy paste—okay, maybe it was a little—but I decided it wasn’t really the barman’s either, so I flicked a finger at his POS screen, which dinged as a large sum of credits scrolled onto the display.
“Thank you, sir,” he called as I left his dump of a bar.
“Paige,” I said as I briskly traversed the halls toward the nearest lift, “those credits came from the ogre’s accounts, right?”
Do you think we’re running a charity here? Of course they did. Mostly.
2
My apartment was an inconspicuous walk-up in Lower Foreton, a working class part of the ship. The door slid open soundlessly as I approached, but I knew better than to accept its disingenuous invitation. Even the most thorough biometrics could be duped. Locks were there to keep the honest, well, honest—my wards were what would keep out the dishonest.
I ran a hand up one jamb and down the other, releasing a series of shortwave radio pulses and hypersonic bursts. If anyone crossed the threshold without properly dispelling, for lack of a better term, my added protections, they would be met with an unfortunate series of mishaps. I wasn’t a complete barbarian; the slavering monster, wreathed in flames and coming out of a vast darkness to greet their arrival, was merely an illusion. The burning, star-bright wash of plasma it would emit if they didn’t run, however, was quite real.