Taz: Unleashed

The cab accelerates through rain-slick streets toward the airport, privacy glass sealed against the neon blur. The route display accepts the destination without question.

Taz interfaces through the passenger console, keeping the isolated ocular buffer separate from the cab’s public systems. Eighty-four percent of the archive remains intact.

His intrusion wakes an obsolete partition buried beneath fare management and vehicle diagnostics. Old transit protocols begin reconstructing the corrupted archive description in fragmented text.

The reconstruction produces partial terms: route authorization, remote vehicle control, Specter access. Then the handshake flags his interface and closes the visible process.

No alarm sounds. No warning appears. Beneath the cab’s routine telemetry, a silent corporate trace leaves the vehicle and disappears into the rainbound network.

The archive description remains incomplete, but one recovered identifier continues pulsing in Taz’s ocular display while the cab carries him toward the airport.

Taz threads his cyberwarfare routines through the cab’s transit handshake, probing fare logs, route authorization, and the dormant Specter partition while the airport countdown shrinks.

The hack reaches deeper than the public console, but the recovered archive refuses to resolve. Its usable data is stranded in a remote vehicle-side cache, not inside Taz’s ocular systems.

He pivots to the passenger door, forcing the emergency release through the same compromised channel. The cab recognizes the command, then locks every door and reroutes control to transit authority.

The attempt leaves a sharper consequence: the cab’s trace shifts from passive telemetry to active containment. Repeating the override would broadcast his position instead of hiding it.

But a maintenance submenu survives beneath the lockdown. It exposes a brief dead-zone route through an elevated freight interchange, where the cab can be redirected without opening the doors.

The route display recalculates. Ten minutes remain to the airport, while the freight interchange offers a narrow opportunity to abandon the trace through infrastructure rather than the sealed passenger compartment.

Taz plants his cybernetic hand against the passenger door and drives outward. The reinforced lock screams, buckles, and tears free while the cab still surges through rain-slick traffic.

Wind detonates through the cabin. Taz catches the frame, swings his mass through the opening, and drops onto the elevated freight interchange’s maintenance shoulder.

His cybernetic legs absorb the impact in a shower of sparks. He rolls once across wet composite plating, rises under the freight gantry, and leaves the cab racing onward without him.

The forced-open failsafe broadcasts a transit maintenance packet before the vehicle vanishes into traffic. Taz’s ocular implant captures its route token and the remote cache’s exact relay address.

Behind him, the cab’s containment trace continues chasing an empty vehicle. Ahead, a maintenance stairwell descends into the freight interchange, shielded from the airport’s public surveillance.

Taz takes the maintenance stairwell two steps at a time, keeping beneath the freight gantry where Pride surveillance loses clean line of sight. Rainwater streams from his coat.

At the interchange floor, he ignores the public cargo concourse and cuts through a locked signal junction. His cybernetic hand opens the panel without triggering its local alarm.

His ocular overlay maps three viable systems: an exposed loading kiosk, a maintenance dispatcher, and a hardened routing console inside the exchange control booth.

The kiosk broadcasts to Pride eyes. The dispatcher carries enough authority to reach the cache, but its diagnostics would expose his interface. The control booth offers isolation and deeper permissions.

Taz crosses beneath idle freight lifts and reaches the control booth through a service corridor. Its door opens to a dark room of dead monitors and one armored terminal still drawing power.

He settles at the hardened console, isolates its maintenance bus from the exchange, and routes the captured relay token into the terminal. The remote cache answers, and the archive resumes decryption at eighty-four percent.

Taz shuts out the dead monitors, the rain, and every peripheral signal. His cyberwarfare routines narrow to the relay token, the remote cache, and the archive’s fractured military cipher.

The hardened terminal rejects the first handshake, then accepts Taz’s reconstructed authority chain. Encryption layers peel apart under his control without touching the isolated ocular buffer.

Files resolve across the terminal: the transportation route was altered forty-seven minutes before the crash. The override bears a Specter Division credential, not a corporate signature.

A personnel authentication log identifies the approving node as SPECTER BLACKSITE 09, with Colonel Marcus Vale’s command-level credentials attached to the alteration.

The final directory opens beneath a project index marked BERSERKER. It contains Taz’s biometric profile, implantation notes, and a remote compromise protocol linked to his current cybernetics.

A live transfer window appears beside the records, offering a complete encrypted copy before the cache expires. Beneath it, one newer access request carries Viktor Soren’s signature.

Taz locks the transfer into a read-only evidence container and begins with the complete encrypted copy. The terminal records a clean cache snapshot before interpretation can alter anything.

He opens the original route data next, then the authorization records. Forty-seven minutes before the crash, Vale’s command credential redirected the transport route into the fatal corridor.

The personnel log confirms the credential was accepted through Specter Blacksite 09. A secondary signature trail links the approval to a sealed BERSERKER deployment channel.

Taz opens the BERSERKER index after securing the murder evidence. His biometric profile appears beside implantation notes and a remote compromise protocol keyed to his current cybernetics.

The cost arrives in the timestamps: the ordered review consumes four minutes, and the live cache begins expiring before the compromise protocol’s deeper attachments can fully render.

One fact remains clear despite the truncation. Viktor Soren accessed the cache after the archive was staged, making him a later handler of the evidence, not its original author.

Taz clamps the cache snapshot inside a read-only evidence container and severs every write permission. The complete murder archive copies cleanly, preserving route data, credentials, timestamps, and signatures.

A cryptographic hash resolves against the remote cache before expiration. The terminal confirms an exact match, then duplicates the sealed package across Taz’s isolated ocular buffer and a hardened local drive.

The verified records remain readable without altering their provenance. Forty-seven minutes before the crash, Vale’s credential redirected the transport route into the fatal corridor.

A second validation confirms the Specter Blacksite 09 authentication chain and the sealed BERSERKER deployment signature. Viktor Soren’s later access remains separately tagged as post-staging activity.

The hardened terminal refreshes its control screen, exposing the surviving BERSERKER attachments and a live audit trail beneath the sealed evidence package. The control booth stays dark around him.