“Trust me, most corps cannot match the performance of our brainmap enhanced system; a home-brewed rig doesn’t stand a chance.”

–Rachel Giacomin.

Things happen fast on the Net. Inconceivably fast. Runners have been known to encode duplicate minds or offload life-saving processes to secondary subroutines just to keep up with the constant barrage of data they encounter whenever they jack in.

But outside of the Net, speed can still be measured. The mag-lev delivering vital supplies from Bradbury’s Station One terminal to AgInfusion’s newest arcology still travels at a rate measured in kilometers per hour. It may be a couple hundred kilometers per hour, but its measurable nonetheless.

And in the time it takes to move people and goods outside of the Net, everything is vulnerable. In the space between the MCA’s forces barracked in Bradbury and the PriSec guarding Jinteki’s arcologies, a mag-lev carrying priceless components is vulnerable to Clan agitators, entrepreneurial Criminals, or even rival corporate interests. And as it waits for Earth-manufactured tech to fortify its defenses, an arcology is just as vulnerable to Crimson Dust attacks against its envirodome as it is to runner incursions into its servers.

Now, the sixty new cards (three copies apiece of twenty unique cards) in the newest Data Pack for Android: Netrunner, Station One—on sale today—have arrived to give Runners and Corps alike new ways to exploit these vulnerabilities!

Stalling Tactics

The Big Four corporations have all the advantages. They have more money, more personnel, and more tech than any runner could even imagine. In other words, they’re already winning. Runners need to defeat a monolithic and unapproachable corporate adversary in order to achieve victory, but corporations just need to keep runners at bay as they continue to pursue their agendas.

On Mars, this means that they just need to stall runners on the Net long enough to secure that next set of vital components shipped in from the Earth. And every Corp has its own means of stalling runners.

At HB, the minds behind Bioroid ICE and Enhanced Login Protocols (The Spaces Between, 22) have incorporated the company’s unmatched brainmap-imaging technology into its frameworks. This process—represented by the new operation Load Testing (Station One, 31)—requires a runner to spend even more time processing data before they can access HB’s servers to begin their run.

Load Testing forces the Runner to lose a click when their turn begins. For an HB player with Enhanced Login Protocols in play and a Heimdall 2.0 (Creation and Control, 15) protecting a key server, this click can make all the difference. When the Runner begins the turn with only three clicks, they cannot spend two to initiate their run through the login protocols and another two to break Heimdall’s “End the run” subroutines.

Of course, any Corp player who plans to plague the Runner with some Hard-Hitting News (23 Seconds, 16) might want to play a Load Testing or two beforehand to ensure that they don’t have enough clicks on their turn to clear all four tags before their accounts are closed (Core Set, 84)—or worse.

Move Fast

For data hijackers like Los (Station One, 25), any kind of delay can be devastating. If the information he acquires and sells isn’t up-to-the-nanosecond accurate—if the mag-lev carrying those priceless parts leaves Station One a minute earlier or a minute later than the files he accessed said it would—he risks angering some very unpleasant clientele.

And if you want to take something valuable off of the fastest mag-lev on Mars, you’ll need to build your best scripts and learn some new tricks because nothing’s easy on the Red Planet.