Incorporated with DeepSeek
**Cold Extraction Protocol**
*A Shadowrun Noir Story*
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**Prologue: The Collapse**
By the time the Main River began to flood its banks for the fourth time in a decade, Würzburg had already forgotten what normal felt like. The climate models had been wrong—catastrophically, exponentially wrong. What the corps had promised would be a gradual shift became a runaway collapse. Harvests failed across Franconia, the Rhine shipping lanes turned to sludge, and Berlin’s orders stopped making sense sometime in ’69.
Deindustrialisation followed, swift and surgical. When the last auto plant in Schweinfurt shuttered, the region collapsed into something resembling post-war Sicily: local warlords, church-sanctioned protection rackets, and a plague of synthetic opiates flooding the streets. The Germans called it *der Zerfall*—the Decay.
Street gangs fought running battles with what remained of the *Polizei*. The virus waves came in cycles, each mutation deadlier than the last. The heat never broke; the rain never stopped.
That was when the Army SEALs arrived.
They came on a Tuesday night in October, riding the leading edge of a thunderstorm that had been seeded with enough nanite chaff to blind every sensor within fifty klicks. The first sign was not a sound—it was a sudden, unnatural quiet. Every drone, every security camera, every half-working traffic grid in the old city went black. Then the sky filled with silk.
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**Chapter 1: Ghosts Over Giebelstadt**
Staff Sergeant Marcus Cole hung in his harness, staring down through the rain-streaked canopy at the dark sprawl below. At two hundred meters, Würzburg looked like a circuit board submerged in ink—scattered lights, the serpentine gleam of the Main, and the hulking silhouette of the Marienberg Fortress squatting on its hill like a stone toad.
“Thirty seconds,” the jumpmaster’s voice crackled over the encrypted LASH. “Primary LZ: Giebelstadt. Secondary: Dom-Neumünster. Tertiary: Hubland Campus. You know the drill, gentlemen. Clean sweep. No survivors. No witnesses. No trace.”
Cole’s HUD painted a ghostly overlay across his vision—thermal signatures, structural weak points, and the glowing waypoints of his squad. He was one of forty-two operators from the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), a unit that officially did not exist. The media called them “Army SEALs”—a bastardized term coined after the Pentagon had quietly folded the surviving Green Berets into a new, cross-trained force. Every man in the stick had passed the Navy’s BUD/S course; every man had spent a decade fighting in the corporate wars that had replaced national conflicts. They were the sharp end of a very long, very dark spear.
The jump light flicked from red to green.
Cole released his static line and dropped into the storm.
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The Giebelstadt airfield had been a ghost for decades. The U.S. Army had pulled out in 2006, leaving behind a cracked runway and a scattering of derelict hangars. During the Collapse, a local militia—the *Mainfranken Freiwillige*—had seized the site, hoping to use it as a smuggling hub for black-market pharmaceuticals. They’d fortified the perimeter with scrap metal and sandbags, confident that no one would bother contesting a forgotten airstrip in rural Bavaria.
They were wrong.
Cole’s boots hit the tarmac hard, the impact absorbed by the shock-absorbing gel in his combat suit. Around him, twelve other shadows materialised out of the rain, their chutes dissolving into biodegradable slurry seconds after touchdown. The suits they wore were not standard-issue—these were **M-77 Marauder Combat Frames**, scaled-down descendants of the old BattleMech designs, built for urban warfare rather than open-field dominance. At three and a half meters tall, they were classified as “heavy power armour,” though the engineers who built them preferred the term “close assault systems.” Each frame mounted a gauss rifle in the right arm, a rotary missile pod on the left shoulder, and a cyberwarfare suite that could hack any civilian grid in under three seconds.
Cole’s Marauder hummed to life as he synced his neural link. The world sharpened: he could hear the heartbeats of the militia sentries huddled in the hangar, could see the heat leaking from their poorly insulated shelter, could *feel* the micro-tremors of footsteps three hundred meters away.
“Sierra-1, you are green,” came the voice of Captain Reyes over the comm. “Take the tower. Sierra-2, the fuel depot. Sierra-3, with me. Primary objective is the control room. We secure the runway, we secure the entire operation. Move.”
They moved.
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At Dom-Neumünster, the jump was messier. The collegiate church sat in the heart of the old city, its Baroque façade scarred by decades of neglect and the occasional stray round. The unit assigned to the secondary LZ had to thread the needle between the spires and the dense tenement blocks that had grown up around the cathedral like cancerous fungus. One operator misjudged the wind shear and smashed into a gargoyle, his frame’s auto-med system flooding him with painkillers as he crashed through a stained-glass window and into the nave.
By the time he was back on his feet, the rest of the squad had already cleared the church. The *Freiwillige* had been using the crypt as an ammunition dump; two Marauders with flamethrower attachments turned it into a furnace. The screams echoed up through the ancient stonework, mingling with the crackle of burning gunpowder.
“Dom secure,” reported Lieutenant Voss, her voice flat. “Moving to Phase Two.”
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Hubland Campus, once the pride of the University of Würzburg, had been transformed into a fortified compound by a coalition of student radicals and deserters from the *Bundeswehr*. They’d turned the old Leighton Barracks into a maze of razor wire and improvised explosives, convinced that their cause—some muddled blend of eco-anarchism and anti-corporate rhetoric—was worth dying for. They were about to test that conviction.
The tertiary strike team came in via fast-rope from a quartet of stealth-modified Comanche attack helicopters, their rotors muffled to near-silence by the storm. The Marauders dropped in pairs, their jump jets flaring briefly to cushion the landing. Within ninety seconds, they’d established a perimeter around the central lecture hall and begun the systematic clearance of every building on campus.
The students fought back with whatever they had: hunting rifles, homemade bombs, a single antique Panzerfaust that bounced harmlessly off a Marauder’s reactive armour. It was not a battle; it was an extermination. By dawn, the only sounds on Hubland were the hum of the SEALs’ portable fusion generators and the distant wail of the city’s last surviving siren.
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**Chapter 2: Fortress**
Marienberg Fortress had stood for nearly a thousand years, a symbol of ecclesiastical power and military might. Its walls had withstood cannon fire, aerial bombardment, and the slow erosion of time. It had not been built to withstand the Army SEALs.
Cole’s team arrived at the fortress two hours after securing Giebelstadt. They’d ridden in on stolen civilian trucks, their Marauders folded into transport configuration beneath canvas tarps. The *Freiwillige* had posted guards at the main gate, but the SEALs didn’t use the gate. They scaled the western bastion using gecko-grip climbing pads, silent and unseen.
By the time the fortress commander realised something was wrong, Cole was already in his office, standing over his bed.
The man’s name was Oberstleutnant Krause, a former Bundeswehr officer who’d gone native. He reached for the pistol under his pillow; Cole’s gauss rifle punched a hole through his chest before his fingers touched the grip.
“Fortress secure,” Cole reported. “We’ve got the high ground.”
Reyes acknowledged with a click. “Copy that. Set up the com relays. I want full network coverage by 0600.”
The SEALs spent the next three hours transforming the ancient fortress into a modern command post. Portable satellite dishes sprouted from the battlements. Drone launchers were bolted to the medieval stonework. In the old prince-bishops’ chambers, they installed a tactical holo-table that could display every street, every building, every warm body in the city below.
From that perch, they would direct the next phase: the sweep.
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**Chapter 3: The Sweep**
The Germans who had survived the initial assault did not understand what they were facing. They’d fought each other for so long—gang against gang, militia against militia—that they’d forgotten what real war looked like. They thought they could hide in the narrow alleys of the Altstadt, that the SEALs would get bogged down in the maze of medieval streets.
The SEALs did not get bogged down.
They moved in packs of four Marauders, leapfrogging through the city with the precision of a surgical instrument. At each intersection, a sniper drone would hover into position, scanning for thermal signatures. When a target was identified, a Marauder would step around the corner and eliminate it with a single gauss round. Then the pack would advance, the lead Marauder scanning for the next threat while the others covered the flanks.
The *Freiwillige* tried to set ambushes. They learned, quickly, that the Marauders’ sensor suites could detect the metallic signature of a hidden firearm from a hundred meters away. They tried to use the sewers. The SEALs flooded the tunnels with nerve gas. They tried to rally at the old train station. A pair of Comanches levelled the building with Hellfire missiles.
By noon, the German resistance had collapsed. Those who weren’t dead were fleeing the city in a ragged exodus, streaming across the bridges into the countryside. The SEALs let them go. Their orders were to secure Würzburg, not to annihilate its population.
By sunset, the city belonged to the Army SEALs.
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**Epilogue: Rain**
I stood in the shadow of the Marienberg Fortress, watching the rain wash the blood off the cobblestones. My name is Katarina Vogler, and I used to be a journalist. Now I’m just a woman with a camera and a death wish.
The SEALs had set up checkpoints at every major intersection: concrete barriers, automated turrets, and a Marauder frame standing silent guard like a steel gargoyle. They’d strung communication cables through the old tram tunnels, creating a network that could monitor every corner of the city. They’d turned Dom-Neumünster into a barracks and Hubland into a helicopter base. And they’d made the fortress their beating heart, a black tower from which they could see everything and everyone.
I raised my camera and took a single, silent shot of the fortress silhouette against the grey sky. The shutter click was lost in the rain. I didn’t know who I’d sell the image to—maybe Saeder-Krupp, maybe Ares, maybe some shadowrunner with a grudge. It didn’t matter. In this city, everyone was for sale, including me.
A Marauder turned its head—a slow, deliberate motion—and I knew it had seen me. I lowered the camera and walked away, the water seeping into my boots.
Behind me, the fortress waited, and the rain kept falling. It always did.
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*This is Würzburg, 2076. The climate’s gone. The industry’s dead. The Germans are gone. And the Army SEALs are here to stay. 1*
