by Mel Odom
Chapter 7
Welcome to Hong Kong—Now Die!
At the end of the alley, light poured in from a vendor stall to our right. Standing behind Duncan, I surveyed the area and didn’t spot anyone. The lack of local populace still bothered me. I tried to remember what the Asian people I’d known had said about the area, but I hadn’t known many who were that familiar with Hong Kong. Before boarding the suborbital, I’d reached out to a street sam I knew who dealt with the triads. Perrin Evans-Ehricht had squared away some of the info I had, updating me on current events and giving me a couple names he thought might help out, but it wasn’t all that much to go on.
A patched awning over a vending stall waved in the wind and rain, and other makeshift stalls stood around it. The area butted up against the seawall, and beyond it the ocean rolled endlessly under the onslaught of the monsoon season. The waves slapping against the concrete echoed around me.
“Let’s take a look around,” I said.
Duncan pushed out a breath. “That’s the opposite direction from the plaza where we’re supposed to meet Raymond.”
“With the way our luck is running, I’d rather know what’s behind us before we head into whatever’s got the old man tangled up.”
Surprising me, Carter said, “I agree.”
I led the sweep through the area and found it was deserted, which still left a hinky feeling in the pit of my stomach. Once I was satisfied, Duncan took the lead again and we walked toward the plaza. I wondered if the old man would meet us there. I wondered if the smugglers or go-gangers had buddies who would be looking for us.
Tonight was slotted. I hadn’t been in town more than an hour, and already people would be looking for me.
After a few minutes, we reached a large street intersection. I stood beside Duncan and studied the lay of the land. Except for the helicopter sweeps above us and the rain, the sprawl was quiet. Way too quiet for my liking.
“This is where the old man is supposed to meet us?” I asked.
Duncan nodded. “Yeah. We came by before we walked out to the pier to meet you. Raymond wasn’t there then, but we were early. Maybe he’s there now.”
I stared into the darkness but couldn’t see anything. “Only one way to find out.” I loosened my pistol in its holster and checked the HK-97 I’d appropriated that now hung under my arm by its sling. Then I stepped out into the intersection and walked toward the plaza.
Before I got halfway across, I spotted the four people waiting for us. Judging by the size of one of them, I knew he was a troll, almost three meters tall and decked out in body armor. One of the others had to be a dwarf, because she looked tiny next to him.
As I approached, they spread out and stepped toward potential defensive positions behind parked cars and raised concrete garden beds with professional skill. We were walking into a potential battlefield.
No slouch at finding cover myself, I angled my approach to the raised parking wall in front of the group. They noticed, but didn’t do anything. They were waiting too, and they weren’t certain we weren’t who they were waiting for.
That was interesting.
This close in, I saw that the group consisted of the troll male, an elf male in combat armor who wore swords, the female dwarf carrying a deck, and an ork woman. As groups went, the mix told me they worked together, and that social circles hadn’t brought them together. They were armed to the teeth, and that was only the weapons I could see.
The big troll focused on me. “We’re strapped. Mind your manners.”
I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what would set them off. I scanned the parking area, but there was no sign of the old man. Unless they’d already gotten him and stuffed him in one of the cars. I didn’t much care for that idea, and I was thinking way too dark to know as little as I did.
When Duncan squared his shoulders and smiled, I knew we might be in trouble. Whatever happened to that calm boy I had known?
“Evening, folks,” he said. “You got permits for those bazookas?”
The big troll grinned. “Permits? Hmmm. Gimme a minute.” He patted his pockets and shrugged. “Nope. Guess not. I must’ve dropped mine into a dumpster—along with the last idiot who stepped up to us.”
I took a breath and gripped the Guardian. It was Duncan’s play, and I was going to back him. Carter stepped over to Duncan’s other side, making her intentions known as well.
Still Officer Friendly, Duncan smiled broader and nodded. “Is that right? Well then—”
He moved fast, faster than I expected. He almost caught me off guard. He spun his rifle up from under his coat in a practiced move, but the four people in front of us were just as fast.
In an eyeblink, everybody was staring down the barrels of everybody’s else’s guns. We were one bad finger cramp away from a bloodbath.
Fists shimmering with mana bolts she already had locked and loaded, Carter spoke in a quiet voice. “All right. Everyone just be cool.”
Somehow her calmness took the edge off. I took a breath, and I figured everyone else did, too.
The troll laughed. “A little late for that, isn’t it?”
I liked her style, and decided to back her play before things got really confusing. I holstered the Guardian and raised my hands, careful not to take them too far from my body.
“Nah,” I said. “It’s never too late to be cool.” I hoped I was right. If the people in front of us hadn’t acted so professional, and if they hadn’t looked like they were waiting on someone, it might have gone down differently.
For a tick, everything was frozen.
Then the troll tossed me a wink and turned back to Duncan. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot just now. Something we can do for you, Officer?” The guy even had the nerve to grin.
Duncan clenched his jaw, and I knew he had a problem with the troll’s cavalier attitude. “I’m looking for an old man. Raymond Black. We were supposed to meet him here. You know him?”
The troll nodded and relaxed a little. “Mm-hmm.”
“Where is he?” Veins stood out along Duncan’s neck, and I knew he was barely keeping himself in check. He hadn’t come here to be played with.
“Easy, Duncan,” Carter said in a low whisper.
The troll kept his rifle pointed at my brother. “That’s right. Easy, Duncan.” He paused. “Your friend Raymond never showed. We’ve been waiting for the better part of an hour.”
The news didn’t shock me after the night we’ve had, but Duncan froze, vapor-locked.
“Think everyone can put their guns down?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Duncan growled. “Not till I get some answers.”
The troll didn’t seem to take offense. His face stayed open, and he looked curious. “Like?”
“Like why a group of heavily-armed assholes is meeting a little old man in a construction site at midnight.”
Okay, it wasn’t the opening I would have gone with, but apparently that was the new Duncan. Straight ahead into things, no matter how bad it got.
The ork female stepped forward, putting herself to one side of the troll. A large black rat clung to her coat at her shoulder, its yellow eyes focused on me.
“We do odd jobs,” she said. “For money.”
I connected the dots instantly. These guys were like me, shadowrunners. And I wondered why the old man would hire a crew like them. What was he involved in?
Duncan didn’t back off the heat. He glowered at her. “What kind of jobs?”
“Odd jobs,” she said. She had a good smile, and she knew it. “This and that.”
I spoke up before Duncan could. “So…you were his tour guides, right?”
“Kinda, yeah,” the troll said. “The old man hired us to take you all on an excursion.”
Definitely shadowrunners. But that only meant we could trust them if we were putting nuyen in their pockets. I wondered if the old man had paid up front, because these people would be expensive.
That bothered Duncan even mor
e. “Hired you?” He was putting it together now, and I knew that might not be a good thing. “You’re shadowrunners.” His tone let them know he wasn’t happy to find that out.
The troll nodded. “Um-hm.”
“This is bullshit!” Duncan roared. “Raymond would never hire shadowrunners. They’re criminals.”
Like me. I guessed then that Duncan’s decision to turn Lone Star might have been just as influenced by his knowledge of what I was as much as anything else.
The troll showed Duncan a crooked smile. “We prefer ‘mercenary operatives.’”
In a shy voice, the dwarf decker spoke up. “Criminal mercenary operatives.”
“So yeah,” the ork shaman said as she ran a hand along the rat’s fur, calming the rodent, “you were right. Your buddy Raymond was associating with a bunch of hardened criminals.”
She and the dwarf were making fun of the testosterone stinking up the air, but it was a dangerous game.
“Sorry to burst your bubble, Lone Star.” The troll smirked, and the tusks just sold the sarcasm even more. “Guess you didn’t know the old man as well as you thought, huh?”
“Let’s all stay focused.” Carter spoke in a calm tone, but she hadn’t turned off her spell yet. “No need for this to get ugly.” She turned to Duncan. “We need to find Raymond. These people can help us do that.”
“She’s right,” I said. “Let’s focus on Raymond.” I hoped that Duncan understood that killing these people wouldn’t help the cause. Not any more than us getting killed in the process.
“The old man wanted us to take him into Kowloon Walled City,” the ork shaman said. She waved a hand at us. “You, too.”
I sifted through my memories, but I didn’t recall a single instance of the old man talking about Kowloon or a walled city.
Another rat climbed out of the woman’s clothes and perched on her other shoulder. I ignored the itchy sensation of tiny claws climbing inside my pants legs. But I kept a closer watch on the ground. Just in case any more of her furry little friends happened to be lying in wait.
“Isn’t this Kowloon City?” I asked.
“Yeah, this is Kowloon.” The shaman stroked her new arrival. “But Kowloon Walled City is different. It’s a shithole. The worst slum in the eastern hemisphere. Trid clips and news stories can’t do it justice.”
I remembered the toxic dumps in the Barrens where Duncan and I had lived. I’d have to see this place to believe anything could be worse than that.
“We get it,” Duncan said. “It’s a real bad place. Now why would a little old man pay you to take him there?”
“Wouldn’t say.” The decker brushed back a long lock of curly hair that framed her small face. Her ebony skin shone under the purple highlights reflected from her scarf. “He mumbled a lot, too. Just kept rambling on and on about how he had to get in.”
“Under ordinary circumstances,” the troll said, “I never would’ve accepted the gig. The Walled City is the last place I wanna go. But the old man rolled up a truckload of nuyen, and ya gotta eat, right?”
Duncan’s hold on his rifle relaxed a little more.
I wasn’t satisfied. “Why would Raymond want to enter the Walled City? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Didn’t make much sense to us either,” the troll replied. “But like I said, nuyen is nuyen.” He shrugged. “Okay, gang, I tell you what.” He looked at his team. “We’re gonna all put our guns down—”
Before the troll could finish whatever he was gonna say, a salvo of heavy caliber rounds crashed through the silence. One of the bullets smashed the troll’s head into bloody splinters. Another took out the elf. The decker and shaman dove for cover.
“Snipers!” the shaman yelled, but by that time I already knew that, and was dodging to the other side of the parking wall because I knew the rounds had come from behind us.
“Take cover now!” The decker slid behind one of the concrete planters and pulled out a bazooka.
“Carter!”
Duncan’s voice surprised me. When I looked back, he was standing over the elf’s crumpled body—a perfect stationary target.
Chapter 8
“Put Down Your Weapons!”
I raced toward Duncan and slammed into him, barely able to move him a few centimeters.
“Move!” I shouted. “She’s dead!”
One glance at her shattered skull and brain matter smeared on the concrete told me that. I felt bad about her dying. I didn’t know her, but I’d been warming up to her. Duncan had liked her. That had meant something.
Duncan stumbled a moment, then his reflexes kicked in and he headed for the protection behind the parking wall as another shot dug a crater in the parking area ahead of us. We huddled down behind the thick concrete. I hoped it would be enough to stop those bullets.
A chunk of the concrete wall at the top vaporized in white spray that was quickly drowned in the rain. The detonation of the shot rang out a moment later.
I risked a glance around the concrete barrier just as a muzzle flash sparked atop a building four blocks away, well beyond the reach of the Guardian and maybe the AK-97. The bullet struck the wall only centimeters from my face in the next instant. I dodged back as the crack of the shot rolled over us.
Duncan sat with his back to the barrier. I knew his thoughts were on Carter, and they’d get him killed if he didn’t get focused.
“Duncan.” I grabbed him and shook him, getting him to focus on me. For a second, I thought he was going to flatten me with one of his big fists. “Are you listening to me?”
“She’s gone,” he whispered.
“I know, and there’s nothing you can do about that right now.” I held his gaze with mine. “Whoever killed Carter is waiting out there to kill us, too. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Right now we focus on saving ourselves.” My breath rasped in my throat. “We focus on saving the old man. We do that, we’ll find whoever killed Carter.”
His eyes narrowed. “Then we’ll kill them.”
I nodded, not knowing if that was possible, or if I’d stick around that long if things continued to go south. “We will,” I told him.
He pulled it together then, bringing his rifle up. “Where’s the sniper?”
“South, southeast. On the tallest building about four blocks away. We’ll never reach him with what we have. So for now, we concentrate on getting out of here.” I glanced down the street, away from the way we’d come in. I pointed. “We go that way.”
“Okay.”
I got up and ran to the side of a nearby car that gave me protection from the sniper. Two rounds splintered the brick wall to my right. Duncan was right on my heels.
Behind us, the ork shaman yelled at what I presumed was one of her dead friends. “Nightjar! Nightjar, c’mon, big man, talk to me!” She paused as another rifle round struck the downed troll. She wailed, then called out again. “Gutshot! No, no…”
Since the troll was clearly dead from a high-caliber round through the head, I had to assume that was the elf’s street name. It wasn’t fitting in death because he’d gone down from a headshot as well.
“Oh shit, Is0bel,” she called out to the dwarf. “This isn’t good!”
I silently agreed with her as I kept watch to see how many snipers we were up against.
“This is the police!”
The blaring sound of the megaphone from farther up the street distracted me. I peered through the darkness and spotted flashing lights atop the official vehicles closing off the street. There was no way back, and going ahead looked almost impossible.
I guessed surrender wasn’t a viable option either. We’d been set up too well.
Duncan cursed at the sight before us.
“Lay down your weapons,” the authoritative voice went on, “put your hands behind your head, and come out where we can see you!”
There wasn’t a chance in hell that I was gonna do that.
“Duncan Wu!” the man co
ntinued. And then he called my SIN name.
They knew me. They knew us. Whatever this was about, whoever had boxed us had done a wiz job of it.
“Come out where we can see you! You have three seconds!”
“Stand down, damn it!” Duncan yelled but remained in a crouch. “I’m law enforcement—Lone Star! Lone Star!”
A hail of gunfire raked the car where we’d taken cover. The windows shattered and rained down over us.
“Save your breath,” the dwarf called to us. “They won’t listen.”
Until the cops had called out Duncan’s and my names, I’d blamed the shadowrunner crew for all the legal heat. Now I and everyone else knew we’d popped up on someone’s radar.
“Use your eyes!” the ork shaman yelled. “These bastards aren’t here to make any arrests!”
A sniper round slapped into the wall only centimeters from her head. She ducked farther down into cover.
“We need a way out of here!” I yelled. This wasn’t my city. I didn’t know the shadows here.
“Everyone pipe down!” the shaman said. “Just gimme a minute!”
I could barely see her from where I was, but I watched her slip into a trance, bobbing back and forth for a moment. The three seconds ticked by, but the cops didn’t appear ready to close in. I held my ground and told myself Duncan and I were gonna get out of there in one piece.
Then the shaman stopped rocking and turned to us. “Okay, I’ve got a way out! It’s at the end of the street! Everyone come with me!”
I didn’t know if she’d been mind-speaking to her rodent friends or a trance was what it took for her to remember street routes under high-stress conditions, but I was drawing a blank on escape routes. So I nodded and made sure Duncan was with us.
“Everyone?” the dwarf protested. “We don’t need rent-a-cops, Gobbet! We’re the only ones—”
“They’ve got firepower, Is0bel!” Gobbet replied. “I’ve got us an exit, but we gotta get past the heat, and we can’t shoot our way out of this on our own! If anything, they can soak up a few rounds for us.”
Just when I’d started to like the shaman, she had to get practical on me. Fine. No love lost at either end.
