Keep Your Rifle By My Side: A Cyberpunk ATF Quest

Thin black tablet computers marked with the friendly bright-red sticker BUREAU PROPERTY are what makes up dossiers in the modern age, after the government passed the Paperless Act twenty years ago when the San Fran lobbyists finally got their way. Poking the damn touchscreen, signing in as it takes your biometrics and swearing at it when it informs you that it needs to 'update Windows' before displaying secure information keeps you occupied on the way to your desk – it also keeps you from getting bogged down in a bull session with some other poor bastard stuck here on desk work. Side benefits, you guess. Better than irritating Special Agent Choi for 'dawdling at work on the federal dime'.

You snort as you reach your cubicle, bitterness mingled with amusement. Federal dime. Yep, you make a dime when a PMC man makes a dollar, and you're not quite sure why you're still here with a badge and a gun when you could do a hell of a lot better outside.
Eh. You'll introspect later. Save it for the midlife crisis.

Your chair creaks a little as you sit down and stare at the desktop system with its VR hookups – purchased with government 'decency' blockers installed, thus rendering half the Network unusable for intel – and the single picture on the cubicle wall, a perp walk in black and white. You've won a single case in all your time here, a single time you pinned arms trafficking. Langston Hughes, executive for Kalashnikov Concern USA. All that the victory cost you was any chance of getting informants or even a friendly hello from the Russians here in San Fran.

Good thing your dossier is all about the Russians, then. The Tambovskaya Mafia. The biggest Russian gang in the West Coast, running arms from the Siberian arms plants and the Busan Special Economic Zone to San Francisco for the corporations to use. U.S. law forbids milspec arms for civilian use – that just means that the corporations register a PMC and smuggle in the arms. Forge the registration stamps. The ATF is too damn underfunded to care.

The local Russian leader that your dossier – that Choi, you suspect – has fingered is someone named Vyacheslav Ivankov, alias Yaponchik. Sometimes called Second Yaponchik. You don't know why, and the somewhat psychotic eyes staring out at you from a mugshot tell you that you don't want to know why. The ins and outs of the Russians are not the main concern.
The main concern is what they're here for.

A soft ding jerks you out of your thoughts and tells you that coffee's ready, right on schedule. Ten AM coffee, four hours after waking up and better than you can afford at home. Getting up is a pain but is rewarded by a fresh coffeepot and the realization that you don't have to clean or refill it. Lovely, lovely frabjous day. Mug in hand – some old chipped souvenir that says I LOVE SAN FRANCISCO (you don't) – work calls once more.

Work meaning the same black tablet dossier with its sociopathic Russians. Just to delay the joys of reading about the mafia a little bit, you take a moment to say hello to Hiram Johnstone in the neighboring cubicle. He's tooth-achingly chipper this morning, telling you that he's here 'on-call' and bored, at which point you tell him that he damn well ought to appreciate it. Johnstone is young and too damn enthusiastic, a big, blond and earnest flyover country boy who thinks that being a Government Man is a good career.

Well. It is. But mostly to get into corpo work afterwards. You really need to start sending out resumes one of these days. If only just to prod Special Agent Choi into pulling together funding for your promotion, seeing as you're the only field agent here who's nailed a major case. Other than Choi.

The Tambovskaya Mafia has been classed as a group of National Security Interest as of 07/08/2065. That line jumps out at you when staring at the dossier and scrolling through almost makes your eyelids close from boredom. National Security Interest.
Amazing. This case might actually see resolution then. That's the one phrase that's managed to get the federal government off its ass.

The next question, then, is Why?

The answer to that is the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB. The spooks, who by the brief unclassified description that pops up aren't half as scary as Google's Repossession Teams. You know better, but what you know is unofficial. Better to see what Uncle Sam can give you.

What you get is a soft ding and a friendly voice in your augs informing you that further information is classification-locked and would you please verify your law-enforcement clearance. That in turn takes five minutes of hunting through a dropdown box before you find BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS somewhere halfway down the list beneath every single other relevant agency. Beneath the EPA, even. Goddammit.

"Thank you for verifying your credentials. Please hold…" Your augs relay that message to you in clipped tones reminiscent of the San Francisco Metro at rush hour, probably the same voice actor paid to get enough words together for a computer to mimic them.

It's soon pretty clear as to why the FSB page took so long to load, though. The data page is more than three times as long as the pages for every corporation PMC that you've seen, incident after incident neatly subdivided into different categories. Everything from election hacks and bank transfer intercepts to pharmaceutical fraud – why would the Russians be tampering with Viagra doses?

Shit. This is going to take a while, then. A thought towards your augs gets your cell switched off and your office status set to 'Occupied', and the whine of aircon along with all the other office noise suddenly vanishes as you hit the dated noise cancellation feature.

The issue is that this also cuts off all hearing. You hope to God that Choi doesn't want you in their office anytime soon, 'cause you won't be able to hear them call. 'Noise cancellation' isn't really that, but you wanted to avoid listening to the neighbors every date night and the 'net was a useful tool for that.

Scrolling down while at peace and not having to hear Hiram Johnstone in the next-door cubicle lets you find a subsection in the FSB page marked Tambovskaya Gang. It's big, though. The Tambovskaya are one of the main ways the FSB gets arms into the U.S. and one of the major ways the FSB manages onsite hacks, by compromising personnel. It's very easy to compromise someone when there's a big bearded Russian gangster holding a knife to a family member's throat, it turns out. Who knew?

What your dossier tells you about their current operation is thin – something about working in conjunction with Yukos Petrochemicals, a formerly defunct Russian oil corporation that's since rebranded into 'petrochemical products and specialized software'. Your tablet helpfully notes that this translates to scamming Germans on Nord Stream gas by citing carbon-regulation costs, and the old standby of augmentation hijacks en masse using ransomware. That, and augmentation repo work in Central Asia.
Fine, upstanding people. Truly. You'd almost think they were from San Francisco by the way the dossier talked about them.

There's a tap on your shoulder at that point, and you give a start of surprise that gets suppressed as much as possible when you see who it was that tapped you on the shoulder. Special Agent Choi's face glares at you from your cubicle's entryway, and you make damn sure to switch your hearing back on before you miss what they're saying. Choi likes it when you listen to the lectures and the haranguing, it makes them feel as if they're commanding something other than a bunch of FBI rejects. They glare at you again, "So, you've read the dossier then?"

"How did you know that?" You hesitate before adding, "Sir."

Choi smiles, all artificially white teeth and cold, cold eyes. "I know how long you take to read something. What sort of boss would I be if I didn't accommodate my subordinates?"

"You bugged the tablet."

"Yep." They reply with relish, amused at the fact that you'd expected this. "Standard stuff, new federal efficiency mandate calls for use of workplace monitoring measures. So I bugged the briefing docs." Choi pulls a chair out from Agent Abdoulaye's cubicle across the hall and sits down with the chair reversed, raising an eyebrow and asking, "So. What d'you think?"

"I'm thinking this is a spook job. CIA or something. This is a Russian intelligence agency and their catspaw. We're the ATF. We don't have the money for this, we make our mandate by shaking down preppers for automatic Kalashnikovs." You gesture at the datapad, with its long, long list of Russian intel operations and photographs of people who aren't very nice. "You want me to track their staging area, sure. You want me to interrupt them as they bring arms into the FTZ? Hell, no. I'm not an idiot, I've already made sure the Russians want me dead."

Choi snorts, "You know Agency policy on dead personnel."

"Yeah. Find who did it and nail 'em to the wall. National security and all that." You're aware of that, because the last time it happened you were the one that led the team who brought the perps in. Dead. "I get a nice picture in the lobby of Training HQ in Maryland, I get known as another martyr for arms control and that's that. You then put the fear of God into the Russians. I'm still dead."

"Yep." Special Agent Choi is a cynical old bastard, and they know that you know that. "But what else d'you want, Agent? If we wait for them to bring the arms in, we get to see what happens when Kalashnikov Concern's finest go up against Merrill Lynch's mall cops."

"Merrill Lynch?"

"Y'know, I thought I told you about that." Choi scratches at their neck for a moment, the telltale scarring of nerve replacement running up from under their shirt along their neck. "The Tambovskaya are here for another ransomware op. They want to hit the Merrill Lynch secure database. Client data, investment details, you name it. Whatever Merrill is doing in the FTZ, at least for their retail investment clients."

"So the FSB wants to drain the accounts of whoever gambles in-app on the market and they want whatever personal information they can get." You shrug, "Not our problem, feed it to San Fran PD or the FBI. Or the SEC, if you know anyone from there." The SEC is like the Free Trade Zone's version of Bigfoot. There's a pool on in the office about when someone will show up from there. Your money's on never. "There aren't any guns or explosives involved. So not our problem."

Choi grins this time, a brief smile that vanishes as fast as it came and leaves no more than a trace of amusement in their eyes. Special Agent Choi has been here for more than a decade, and they've seen it all – it shows, sometimes. "They need explosives and arms to get through the mall-cops and get the worm into Merrill's server system. Once it's in it'll lock things down, and the bank wants us to prevent the break-in."

"Instead of getting an actual PMC to watch the server banks."

"They have one. Academi Armed Services Corporation." Choi buffs a nail on their shirt and inspects the polish on it before continuing, ostentatiously unconcerned about the name they've dropped. "A firm with a certain reputation. And Merrill is liable for collateral damage insurance."

"So either way they lose, and what if the PMC boys have been paid off?" You can see where this is headed, "The corps don't want to invest in a major fortification drive, the Russians can wait to hit a server farm once things cool off, and they have the arms in San Fran to do it. So the almighty federal government and the lobbyists on Wall Street want us to find those arms."

"I quote," says Special Agent Choi of the ATF, "It's your job, you're the ATF, why aren't you already on the case?" There's an edge of long-nursed bitterness there, "Not as if we've had funding cuts for the last eight years and no permissions or clearances awarded since you nailed that Russian exec." They glare at you, "Ever since that time, I can't hire. I can't get anyone a clearance."

You grin at them, "You have me, Special Agent."

"I'd prefer not to." Choi's dry retort stings a little, and they're perceptive enough to qualify it. "You're good, but I still wish you hadn't been stupid enough to try to ram that case through. And I wish I hadn't let you."

You shrug, still a little guilty and still deliberately suppressing it. That was three years ago, there's no use in digging it up again. But Special Agent Choi looks dead tired even with the stims and the surgery and the augs that keep them well above human, and you can't help but feel like a bit of that's your fault. They're probably taking advantage of it, too. You don't begrudge that, weirdly enough. Maybe you ought to? "We both thought that the situation was good enough, we had a good DA and someone raising hell in the government. Shit, we even had the arms lobby on board. Colt, Remington, all of them."

"And then they dropped us once the Russian was convicted and the Kalashnikovs were banned for five years." Choi's voice is tired, "But that's for another day when we're both less sober and have more time. For now, you need to get me that staging area. Wherever it might be. Arms shipments have to be stored somewhere."

"Yessir." You almost salute, well aware that your boss was a Marine and hates it when you butcher the salute deliberately. "Any help that I can get?"

Your boss stands up from their chair, reaches over the cubicle wall to the silent Hiram Johnstone, and pulls him up by the collar with a whine of arm-augment servos. "You can have Agent Johnstone." Choi turns to Johnstone with a sort of academic interest in their eyes, "Eavesdropping isn't what nice federal agents do, Agent Johnstone. Are you a nice federal agent?"

"Nosir!" Hiram's hands scrabble at Choi's before deciding that he can't get purchase and he can't get loose, "I am not a nice federal agent, sir!"

"Good." Choi drops him again and he yelps in surprise, before standing back up and staring at the two of you over the cubicle partition. "Both of you are on the Tambovskaya detail. Get me that staging area and I'll get you support to clear it out. Remember that this is classified. You're not talking about this in whatever drug dens you frequent. Understood?"

You nod, Johnstone nods, and Choi leaves the two of you alone in the knowledge that they've handled their side of things. You're just tired. One look at Hiram Johnstone's earnest curious face makes you more tired. Maybe that midlife crisis is closer than you think. You rub your face and eyes before turning to Johnstone, "Hiram. You toddle over to FBI field office and tell them that we need whatever they have on the Tambovskaya. You have a clearance, you get to be gofer on this one since I don't have anyone else."

He nods, pauses as if to ask what you'll be doing, and then remembers that you're the senior agent and he's the junior agent. Once he leaves, you fire up the desktop system, put on the VR headset, and then bypass the government decency blockers.
Time to find information in that wretched hive of scum and villainy. The Network.

Your desktop hums in agreement, and the familiar question comes up when your avatar begins to assemble itself.

Name?
[]Write In

Biometrics?
[]Gender Identity Write In

Votes are open for 24 hours.