Wolf and Raven

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Kid Stealth would have questioned the wisdom of bringing my Fenris within a nautical mile of the Barrens, but then he thinks he’s traveling in a kiddie-kar unless the vehicle is armored and has a .50 caliber machine-gun mounted in a turret on top. I parked right in front of the crib that had been my temporary home and set the anti-theft system on “maim.” With a stack of pizzas precariously balanced on my left hand, I used the other to knock on the door of the ramshackle townhouse.

  Kyrie answered the door and didn’t recognize me by what little of my face showed over the top box. “You’ve got the wrong place. We didn’t order any pizza.”

  I lowered the boxes and smiled at her. “Not to worry. This is Dominion’s new service. We drop pizza off and you pay for what you eat. You’re a test market.”

  She laughed lightly and I saw true happiness in her face for the first time. “Smile like that more often, Kyrie, and I think you could convince Dominion this service is more than worth it.”

  Her dark eyes glowed with a more mischievous light. “I’m sure Dominion would just love to give me an endorsement contract. We eat pizza fairly often, and it’s usually theirs.” She stepped back away from the door. “C’mon in before the neighborhood catches a whiff of that stuff.”

  Albion met us halfway to the kitchen and I dealt him a box off the top. Sine splashed a bucket of water over a soapy collection of plates and glasses in the sink, then wiped her hands off and took a box from me. With one broad swipe of the box, she cleared some old paper plates and styrofoam soyburger cartons from the table and onto the floor. When that earned her a reproving glare from Kyrie, her next pass was less swift and more silent.

  Cooper came clumping up the steps from the basement and shut the door behind him. He looked at me and smiled. I presented him a box with all the ceremony of Seattle’s governor bestowing a citizenship medal on someone, and his smile broadened to show me all of his teeth. He scrambled up on a stool beside Sine and pried his box open.

  I handed Kyrie the next to last box, leaving one for me. “Help yourself. Raven doesn’t often cater his jobs, but when he does, the food is good.”

  She smiled and looked down timidly. She started to say something, but Cooper’s surprised shout cut her off. “This isn’t pizza!”

  “Sure it is, Cooper. I just got it myself from Dominion. Eat it and you’ll grow up to be big and strong like Jimmy Mackelroy.”

  The little guy shook his head adamantly and jammed tiny fists against his hips. “Nope, it’s not pizza. It doesn’t have pizza stuff on it.” He glared at me, his lower lip thrust out defiantly.

  I frowned and looked to Kyrie. “Pizza stuff?”

  She blushed. “You don’t want to know. We do most of our food shopping in dumpsters.” She set her pizza down on the kitchen shelf and squatted beside Cooper. “Listen, Coop, this is special pizza, that’s why it doesn’t have pizza stuff on it. You don’t have to scrape it off, see?”

  Cooper’s eyes flashed warily. “Special?”

  Kyrie nodded emphatically. “It’s birthday pizza. Today is Wolf’s birthday and he’s sharing his birthday pizza with us.”

  Electric excitement lit Cooper’s face with neon intensity. “Weally? It’s yuwa biwfday?”

  I tossed him a wink. “You bet. That’s why I have this flower on. Now eat your pizza so I’ll have a good birthday, okay?”

  “ ’Kay.”

  Kyrie walked back over to me and glanced at my lapel. “A carnation. You went to see Roberts, didn’t you?”

  “Sure did.” I started to reach for some pizza, but the worry in her voice cut my hunger. “I tried to explain to him that you wanted to be left alone, but I don’t think he got the message. Still, his bodyguard will be recovering from a test of faith so we might have bought some time. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

  I wanted to reach out and take her in my arms just to reassure her, but she held herself back and I instantly knew why. Accepting a hug would have showed weakness, and that she could not allow. Albion styled himself the leader of the little band, and probably did motivate them to get lots of things done, but Kyrie certainly held the group together on a daily basis. If she gave him any opening, he would lead the group to ruin because of his bitterness and anger.

  Cooper hopped down off his stool and came over to take her hand. “Don’t wowwy, Kywie. Mista Wolf and Hawse will protect us. I pwomise.” As if that affirmation had set all right with the world, he smiled and returned to smearing more pizza sauce over his face.

  In a quiet voice I asked, “Hawse?”

  Kyrie licked her lips. “When we scavenge we sometimes have to leave Cooper here all by himself. Harse is his imaginary friend. He says Harse is guarding the house and it helps keep Cooper calm, so we don’t discourage him. Everybody has imaginary friends when they’re young. He’ll outgrow it.”

  “Or write simsense scripts about it and get rich. Listen, Raven wants me back at headquarters so we can figure out what we’re doing next. I’ll take a look around the area just to make sure nothing strange is going down, then I’ll take off.” I folded one piece of pizza over on another and saluted the assembly with it. “Thanks for sharing my birthday pizza, gang. See you later.”

  * * *

  The second I stepped from the slice of multiplex that housed the kids, I knew something was wrong. The Old One kept a growl simmering in the back of my mind and the hackles rose on my neck. The Barrens is, even at the best of times, a lawless battle zone that makes all but the irredeemably insane feel insecure. This time, however, it felt malevolent.

  I bit off some pizza and chewed as I started a circuit around the block. I reached inside and demanded that the Old One lend me his heightened senses. He did so, but the garlic in the pizza quickly erased any advantage the Old One’s olfactory abilities might have given me. Still, his increased night vision did help me pierce shadows, and his hearing made audible everything from rats scrambling inside walls to lies whispered passionately in one of the upper-floor apartments across the street.

  I definitely heard something out of the ordinary. It started with the slushy, muffled, sucking sound that a boot would make when slowly drawn out of mud. Along with that came the crunch of beer-bottle glass being ground against stones and a metallic clinking like links of a chain striking a post. And yet, as clearly as I heard what I have described, I heard much more as those sounds played in concert with others.

  Above and beyond that I knew two other things. Had I tried to point those sounds out to anyone without hypersenses they would have thought me crazy. The sound had no rhythm or repetition and thereby it avoided classification. It could have been a figment of my imagination, but given my other realization, I was uncomfortable in dismissing it as much.

  It was stalking me.

  That’s not a conclusion I drew without benefit of experience. I’ve been stalked by some of the best. Two of the elven High Lord’s Paladins had come after me during the Full Moon Slashings. Back before he became one of us, Kid Stealth had done his best to put my head on his trophy wall. Each and every time the uneasy feeling coiling in my guts tells me I’m one rung down on someone’s idea of the food chain and I don’t like it.

  I swallowed and the pizza spiraled into the knot that had once been my stomach.

  I turned toward the place from which the sound was coming, but I saw nothing huddled in the piles of debris between two buildings. I tossed the pizza away and drew my Viper. I hunkered down behind the burned-out hulk of a Ford Americar and suddenly found an acrid, bitter odor dissolving the garlic and carnation scents from my nose. Whoever or whatever was coming after me had bizarre ideas about personal hygiene.

  Waiting behind cover irritated the Old One no end. Do not slink here like a coward, Longtooth. Let me help you. I will destroy this thing that hunts us. Leave it to me.

  I shook my head. Though the scent had grown strong enough to be completely distracting, I concentrated beyond it. I heard a different sound: running feet. They were approaching from
my back. I whirled and jammed my Viper toward the car’s rear bumper.

  Cooper stopped short and looked at me with eyes full of innocent hurt. “Mr. Wolf?”

  I swallowed hard. “Cooper! What are you doing out here?”

  His smile cracked caked tomato sauce at the corners of his mouth. He extended a newspaper-wrapped bundle bound with string. “Biwfday pwesent.”

  Somehow, as if his words were a magic spell, the sensation of being hunted vanished. I slid the Viper back into the shoulder holster and accepted the little, pencil-thin package. I carefully tugged the string off it. “Did you wrap this yourself?”

  He nodded proudly.

  “You did a good job, Cooper. Why, what is this?”

  As I peeled the paper away, I knew exactly what his gift was. The slender item was a credstick. They came in one of two flavors. A personal or account credstick has a microchip in it that can be encoded to take care of credits and debits—as convenient as cash and no problem with arguing about whether a corp’s scrip is good this month or not.

  The second type, of which this was one, is a bearer stick. It has a set amount of credit burned into the chip.

  When that is transferred into a banking account or into a person’s credstick, the chip melts. Some corps mass-produce them for petty funds expenses, but those sticks are generally of low credit value. The chief benefit of the bearer stick is that it can be used to transfer large amounts of funds without their being immediately traceable. Bearer sticks are small, unmarked bills in a much handier package.

  The bearer stick Cooper gave me had been broken in half. The break, which rendered it useless, was jagged so I assumed it was an accident. I fingered both halves but couldn’t make heads or tails of the coloring scheme on them. I looked up to see an expectant expression on Cooper’s face. “Thank you very much, Cooper.”

  His voice sank into a whisper. “The othews look fo the longa ones, so I decided to give you two of the small ones.” He clapped his hands. “You and Hawse will keep us safe.”

  I tousled his blond hair. “You got that right. Harse will have to watch you right now, because I’ve got to go talk to Raven. Thanks again for the present.”

  The little boy beamed, then turned and ran off into the shadows. I noticed he headed straight for the area from which I had earlier heard the sounds, but he disappeared before I could warn him away. Using the Old One’s ears, I heard him giggle happily and I envisioned more pizza leftovers peeling off his face.

  Hopping into my Fenris, I made a quick circuit of the area, then left the Barrens to ward their own.

  V

  The scowl on Valerie’s face meant only one of two things. Either the Seadogs were losing, or she’d not been very successful in collecting data concerning the Right Reverend Roberts. “What’s the score?”

  She shrugged. “Roberts one, me zippo.” Her frown darkened her cafe-au-lait skin, but only intensified the azure fire in her eyes.

  Raven came down the stairs and gave Valerie an encouraging smile. “I’d not say that, Val. You’ve pulled plenty of data on all the Andrew Coles who’ve ever lived in Seattle.” He tapped the hardcopy report in his hands. “This stuff on the kids is very complete. You’ve also given us a rundown on Roberts’ empire. As soon as your other search knowbots report back, you’ll have everything you set out to get.”

  Val shrugged. “I know, but something is wrong with that report on Roberts. I know it’s been tampered with.”

  “Mycroft?” I asked, naming another wiz decker I knew.

  Valerie wrinkled her pretty nose. “No, if it were Mycroft I’d have to dissect it with a scalpel. For this one I need a chainsaw. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s got a government mask running over a transcription program.” Raven’s head came up. “Assuming you’re right, how tough would it be for Roberts to find out the government is tapping his accounts to keep track of him?”

  “Not that hard.” Val half-closed her eyes as she concentrated. “Jack could spot it, and maybe the Glass Tarantula. And maybe a half-dozen other deckers in the sprawl, but the preacher’s network goes all over. He could have deckers from New York or Dallas checking his stuff.”

  Doc nodded thoughtfully. “Wolf, did you learn anything from the children when you went out there?”

  I seated myself on the edge of a chair. “No, not really. Most of the food they eat is scavenged, but I think I knew that all along the way.” I plucked the carnation from my lapel and tossed it into the trash. “Wait, I did get something.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out both halves of the broken credstick. “Cooper gave this to me as a birthday present.”

  Raven took the two halves and fitted them together. Wetting the tip of his finger with his tongue, he washed away some of the mud and got a clear look at the colored markings on it. He stared at it for a second, then turned to Val. “Cross-correlate Cole, Andrew with Kensington Industries.” He studied the stick for another second. “Backdate the search from fifteen years ago to 2005. When you get a match, give me resident data for the house the kids are squatting in for the month on either side of Cole’s death date. I’ll also need a full file on the house’s resident at that time, starting with Lone Star data.”

  I managed to pick my jaw up off the ground by the time Raven looked back at me. “What are you looking for?”

  “I scanned the Cole data earlier and I seem to recall an Andrew Cole working for Kensington Industries. The color coding on this credstick is the type they used for a period between 2005 and 2035, before their merger with Saeder-Krupp.”

  I nodded. “Didn’t Kensington get into money trouble, so Saeder-Krupp came in like a white knight before Beatrice-Revlon could snap them up?”

  Raven smiled. “I’m surprised at your knowledge of Seattle’s financial history, Wolf.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t going to tell him the story had been the subject of a trid docudrama I’d once seen.

  “Home run, Doc!” Valerie’s enthusiastic shout saved me from any chance of Raven testing my command of mergers and acquisitions among megacorps. “Cole, Andrew, married to Tina, died 14 March 2034. He worked in their accounting and disbursement division and was under suspicion of having embezzled 500,000 nuyen in bearer credsticks. Tina died just last year, but Kensington gave her a clean bill because she never spent a dime that couldn’t be accounted for by her income. Insurance paid Kensington/Saeder-Krupp off after her death.”

  “And the resident of the house where the kids are?”

  “Thomas Harrison lived there from June of 2033 to March of 2034. The house was reported abandoned after some food riots in the area. Officials list it as ASC-1, but no one has filed a claim on it, so it technically remains in the hands of the city. Harrison himself was a small-time hood and conman.” She spun in her chair. “He has a list of bunko arrests longer than Mackelroy’s hit streak!”

  I blinked twice. “Wanna bet Harrison was the unnamed partner the good Rev claims the devil took away?”

  Raven nodded. “They went to work the Bible scam on Tina Cole after her husband died. She doesn’t buy into it, but confesses to these two obviously godly men that her husband has been stealing from his corporation.”

  “Yeah, Doc, yeah. She’s afraid for his soul, so they offer to return the credsticks to Kensington anonymously. That way her husband gets eternal salvation, and his terrestrial reputation doesn’t take any hits either. Harrison and Roberts have 500,000 nuyen in credits to split and Harrison skips with them?”

  Raven shook his head. “I doubt it. Harrison would have gone through 500,000 in sixteen years. Given Roberts’ success in that time, I would have to assume Harrison would return to blackmail his former partner. I’m certain Harrison is dead and that Roberts killed him in a rage after Harrison said he’d hidden the loot.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Raven folded his arms. “The Bible Roberts uses is left over from the scam they tried to work on Tina Cole. I suspect Harrison hid clues to the location o
f the credsticks in the Bible. The symbols you saw on the cover liner could well be a code that leads to them. The glue finally gave way, exposing the secret, and Roberts has deciphered it.”

  I frowned heavily. “I’ve been to his office. What’s 500,000 nuyen to this guy?”

  “Curve ball, wait, two curves,” Val announced as her computer beeped at her. “To answer your first question, Wolf, 500,000 nuyen is the cost of getting out of Seattle and living comfortably. The government has a lock on all of Roberts’ accounts pending an investigation of fraud on his proposed Jesusville amusement park and devotion center.”

  “What else?”

  “Second curve. Roberts has filed to take possession of the house under an ASC-1 action. He found some judge to give him custodianship of the kids in a phantom hearing, so he’s got the Abandoned/Squatter Claim filed in their names. Lone Star is supposed to be heading out there to help him serve the papers right now.”

  Raven tucked the credstick pieces into his pocket. “Val, file an ASC-1 counterclaim on the property.” He tore a sheet from the hardcopy file he’d been reading. “Use this name if the computer will take it. Otherwise file it in my name and we’ll fight it out later. Wolf, let’s move.”

  * * *

  The Fenris left two blackened patches on the floor of the garage and part of one on every curve we took as we headed toward the house. I didn’t just break speed laws, I smashed them to up-quarks. We surprised the hell out of some Ancients as I took a short-cut through part of their turf, but the elven bikers abandoned the chase when they realized by my driving that I wasn’t in the mood for games.

  Standing on the brakes, I swung the Fenris wide around the last corner and brought it smack up against the curb just at the edge of the street light’s circle of illumination in front of the house. Further up along the street I saw a Lone Star car with the driver’s door open and light strobing. Beyond that, Reverend Roberts stood in the shelter of his limo.

  The Lone Star cop looked over as Raven and I exited my car with our hands up. “Just get back in your car, Wolf, and leave. We have enough trouble without you here.”