Born to Run

by Stephen Kenson

  "You earned it." Liada replied with a smile.

  "So what are we waiting for?" G-Dogg asked the others with a grin. “Let's party!"

  Chapter 11

  Dante's Inferno was not only one of the finest nightclubs in the entire Seattle Metroplex, but also the largest and most impressive nightclub Kellan had ever seen, dwarfing even the industrial splendor and glitz of Underworld 93. G-Dogg led Kellan, Liada and Silver Max up to the front of the usual long line of wannabes waiting to get in, ignoring the jeers of those who considered themselves better candidates for admission. Neolux signs proclaimed the club's name in ten-foot-high flaming letters, announcing nine circles of action! inside. A massive troll, looking dapper in a tailored black tux, guarded the door.

  "Newt, my man." G-Dogg said to the troll, who stood behind the velvet rope across the entrance of the club. "Zappinin'?"

  The troll smiled broadly, showing blunt lower tusks and one gold-capped tooth.

  "Hey, G-Dogg." he rumbled in an improbably low bass. "Same ol' same ol', you know? How 'bout you?"

  G-Dogg produced his credstick with a flourish and a wicked smile. "Score!" he said. "Business is good and I'm lookin' to share the wealth." The two metahumans exchanged what appeared to be a stylized handshake, but the gesture actually allowed G-Dogg to unobtrusively slide his credstick into the reader Newt wore around his wrist, mostly hidden under his jacket. There was a barely perceptible beep, nearly drowned out by the music pounding inside the club, and the troll rubbed his hand across his chin, glancing briefly down at his wrist and then smiling broadly.

  "Always a pleasure doin' business with you, Dogg." he said, reaching for the rope. Then he nodded at Kellan. "Who's the new kid?"

  "Newt, this is Kellan. Kellan, this is Newt, the second-best bouncer in all of Seattle, right after me." G-Dogg winked at Kellan as he said it.

  "Nice to meetcha." the troll said proffering a huge hand that entirely engulfed Kellan's as she shook it.

  "Likewise." she said.

  "You ever get tired of hangin' with this ugly trog and want to see where the real action in the plex is, you come talk to me, 'kay?"

  "Thanks." Kellan said with a smile. "I'll do that."

  "Have fun." Newt said, pulling aside the velvet rope for the shadowrunners to enter, ignoring the complaints of the people waiting in line.

  "Pipe down!" Kellan heard the troll yell above the noise of the crowd as they passed by. "Don't make me get physical with the lot of ya!" Then they stepped through the doors and into the Inferno.

  In addition to the traditional words, abandon every hope, all ye who enter here, written in flaming neolux above the main entrance off the foyer, Dante's Inferno clearly held to the motto "nothing succeeds like excess." Everything about the club was clearly designed to be as over-the-top and impressive as possible, and it spared no expense to make one man's vision of the perfect sinful playground a reality. Kellan did her level best not to gawk at sights designed to provoke exactly that reaction. None of the other shadowrunners acted like they even noticed anything unusual. They'd clearly been here before—many times, if G-Dogg was any indication. Kellan was impressed by their casual attitude and tried to compose her own face into a cool, jaded expression.

  Past the foyer, the club was a giant cylinder, partitioned into nine levels. Kellan could see at least seven levels looming overhead. The floors were made of transparex, allowing you to look all the way up (or down) through them. Ramps wound along around the outside walls of the building's interior, and a massive spiral staircase speared up through the open shaft that ran through the center of each level. Engulfing the staircase was a holographic display of flames, apparently roaring up from deep beneath the nightclub, filled with ghostly images of mostly nude figures writhing in what looked far more like passion than torment.

  Fantastic murals covered the walls of the level they were on, depicting green gardens spread over rolling hills, and trees filled with golden fruit. Kellan noticed many of the trees had snakes curled around the branches or peering out from between the leaves.

  "Envy." Liada said into Kellan's ear.

  "What?" she asked, startled and a little embarrassed to be caught rubbernecking.

  Liada smiled. "Envy." she repeated, nodding toward the murals. "Each of the top seven levels of Dante's is themed on one of the seven deadly sins. There's Envy, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Gluttony, Wrath and, of course, Lust. The club is supposed to be modeled on the nine circles of Hell, but I guess our modern-day Dante didn't find as much to work with there as he wanted, so he mixed his metaphors a little. I think he made Envy the entrance level as a sort of joke on all the people waiting to get in. You can bet those poseurs out there envy us right now."

  "There are two more levels below this one," G-Dogg chimed in, "which makes nine altogether, although there's actually ten."

  "Which are Kellan asked.

  "Purgatory, Perdition and Hell." G-Dogg replied, counting them off on his fingers. "That's where the real biz gets done around here. But we're not here for business tonight. C'mon, let's party!"

  Her companions clearly enjoyed introducing Kellan to the myriad pleasures of Dante's Inferno. Most of the upper levels of the club featured dancing to various sorts of music, ranging from the violent speed-thrash on Wrath to the slow and sensual sounds on Lust. There was unlimited food on Gluttony, including outrageously indulgent desserts. There were also what Liada called "glamour snacks"—illusory food created with magic. The food had fantastic flavor and texture, but no actual substance. You could eat it forever and never feel full or absorb a single calorie. Kellan tried an amazing piece of cheesecake with "strawberries from the garden of Paradise." that was the best she'd ever had, even if it wasn't real.

  There was a near-infinite variety of drinks, as well. The Inferno's bartenders knew their business, and could not only mix up whatever their customers wanted, but did it with flair. For the indecisive, they suggested concoctions Kellan considered to be the extreme of exotic. G-Dogg bought the first round for everyone on Envy, and they toasted the success of their run, and to more of the same in the future.

  Though she was enjoying the company of her newfound friends and the pleasures of the Inferno, there was something at the back of Kellan's mind that prevented her from throwing herself wholeheartedly into the celebration. When they were drinking a round on Pride, Kellan finally decided to say what she was thinking.

  "What I don't get," she said above the pulse of the music, "is why that Johnson paid good cred for us to lift a bunch of cheap electronics, only to turn around and give 'em to us. And what was the point of us working with Orion?"

  "Frag if I know." G-Dogg said, taking a sip of his drink. Kellan had laughed when she saw that the big, frozen concoction was served in a coconut shell and decorated with a tiny umbrella. "Johnsons do some strange drek sometimes. It's all smoke and mirrors, corporate infighting and politics 'n' stuff."

  "Doesn't really matter why." Silver Max chimed in. He was on his third imported ale, which he drank with considerable relish. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand as he set down his empty mug.

  "As long as the Johnson's cred is good, who cares why he wants it done?"

  "Just seems weird to me, that's all." Kellan said.

  "Get used to it." Liada replied. "Because you're going to see a lot of weirder things in this biz than an employer asking you to do stuff for no good reason."

  "But sometimes, don't you want to know why a Johnson wants something done?"

  Liada shook her head. "Not as long as it doesn't put my hoop on the line. Most of the time you're way better off not knowing. The employer is paying for discretion, and that's what he gets."

  "The trick is to know when you need to know, if you know what I mean." G-Dogg said with a laugh. "And to know when and what you don't need to know and not know it."

  "I definitely need another drink." Max said. "G-Dogg is starting to make sense." The dwarf pushed away from the table. "It's my round, what do you a
ll want?" Max signaled for a waitress by waving his credstick above his head.

  "I still don't see why we needed Orion on the run." Kellan persisted. G-Dogg shrugged, hooking the miniature umbrella on his tusk as he tipped up the coconut. Liada made a face.

  "I don't either," she said, "but he was on the Johnson's tab and he did his job, so I don't care. I'm just glad he's gone. Fraggin' Ancients." she muttered, tossing back the last of her drink.

  "What about them?" Kellan asked.

  "They're an embarrassment." Liada said. "They put on airs about how they're so much better than norms, than everyone else really, like they're the exiled nobility of Tir Tairngire, or something." The name of the elven homeland rolled off her tongue with an almost musical lilt and an accent Kellan couldn't place. "But they're really just ganger punks, no better than any other gang."

  "He definitely had a problem with Mr. Johnson." Kellan said, recalling the obviously hostile conversation between Orion and their employer.

  "That's his business." G-Dogg replied.

  "I think the Street Deacon knew him, too. The Johnson, I mean."

  The ork shrugged. "Coulda been. The Deacon probably worked for him before."

  "It seemed like more than that to me." Kellan began. G-Dogg interrupted by banging his cup down on the table and letting out a thunderous belch.

  "You're thinkin' about it too much, kid." he said. "It's over and done with. The Johnson got what he wanted and we made out with more cred than we planned. It was a milk run. Orion has a stick shoved sideways up his hoop like most of the Ancients and the Deacon is a fraggin' weirdo, always has been. End of story."

  He pushed away from the table and stood up, offering Kellan his hand. "C'mon. I'm up for some dancing. I'll show you some of my moves." he offered her a tusky grin.

  Liada stood as well. "Now this I gotta see." she said. Kellan glanced at Max, but the dwarf just shook his head.

  "Not me," he said, "these legs weren't built for dancin'. I'm just fine where I am." He punctuated the gesture by plucking his new mug of ale off the tray the waitress brought over. "I'll stay and guard the drinks."

  "Ha!" G-Dogg snorted. "We expect them to still be here when we get back, halfer."

  "Then you better not be gone too long, goblin boy." Max retorted, a smile splitting his bearded face.

  Kellan laughed and decided to follow G-Dogg's lead. She put her concerns away, took the ork's hand and headed out onto the dance floor. He was right. Why worry? Now was the time to have some fun.

  * * *

  The celebration lasted well into the night. Kellan didn't remember how she got back to the coffin hotel, though she vaguely recalled something about refusing a ride from G-Dogg or Max to make her own way there. In hindsight, it was a marvel she hadn't been jumped between the street corner and the sealed and locked coffin module. Probably, it was late enough (or early enough) that the nocturnal urban predators were holing up for the coming of dawn. Kellan made no effort to get undressed before collapsing onto the temperform padding and falling deeply asleep.

  In her dreams, she relived parts of their run, disjointed images passing through her mind: Orion's catlike moves and the flash of his blade in the darkness, Jackie Ozone's voice speaking in her ear, like the omniscient voice of a spirit guide, the thunder and crackling lightning of the storm spirit. She saw the shocked look on the face of the Ares shaman over and over again as she shot her in slow motion, seeing the shaman lying facedown on the deck of the truck, blood seeping out from underneath her as it hadn't in reality, until Kellan was standing in a puddle of crimson.

  She relived their escape and arrival at the abandoned garage, then peeking into the crates to discover they contained only cheap electronics.

  "What the frag do you think you're doing?" Orion said from the back of the truck.

  Kellan turned to face the angry elf ganger just as someone shot Orion in the back: Blam! Blam! Blam! Three quick shots. Orion jerked forward, exit wounds blossoming crimson on the front of his T-shirt, a look of complete shock on his face that transformed his arrogant sneer into almost childlike surprise as he tried to comprehend what had happened. He pitched forward and Kellan ran to the edge of the truck bed to see what was happening.

  Mr. Johnson stood there in his nondescript black clothes, dark shades covering his eyes, smoking pistol in his hand. He turned calmly to where Lothan stood nearby and put three shots into the troll mage, who pitched forward like a felled tree. A pool of dark blood spread out on the concrete floor around him. Turning to his left, Mr. Johnson just as calmly shot the Street Deacon before he could draw his guns. The Deacon's dark shades and hat were knocked off as he fell, and he looked surprisingly old and ordinary to Kellan without them, his artificial eyes staring blindly upward in death.

  It was like everything was moving in slow motion. The dark-clad man picked off the shadowrunners one by one, leaving them lying dead on the cold concrete floor of the abandoned garage: G-Dogg, Liada and Silver Max, until only Kellan was left. She should have reached for her own gun, or her stun baton, or tried to run and hide, but she couldn't move, couldn't even cry out. She just watched, paralyzed with fear like she'd never known, as Mr. Johnson walked toward her. She heard the electronic whisper of Jackie Ozone in her ear.

  "I could have told you this would happen." she said sadly. Then Mr. Johnson raised his gun toward Kellan.

  "Nice and tidy." he said, and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  The bang and flash of the muzzle was the last thing Kellan saw as she jerked awake.

  "NO!" she yelled, followed by "Ow!" as her head connected with the low ceiling of the coffin module. She flopped back down, rubbing her head and trying to slow her rapid breathing, Someone in the next module yelled, "Shaddup!" and pounded on the side.

  A dream, she thought, breathing deeply, hungrily inhaling the stale, rank air inside the coffin. Just a dream.

  Or was it? she asked herself, shifting to a sitting position—tough to manage in the confined space. After all, Kellan thought, she was supposed to be a magician. Could magicians see the future in their dreams? Liada and G-Dogg had acted like the mage's reading fortunes for people with tarot cards was some kind of scam, but maybe some magicians really could foresee things. And Liada had said that her dreams might have meaning now that her Talent was awakened.

  Her fingers rubbed the cool jade of the amulet. What about her artifact? Even Lothan didn't know exactly what the amulet was except for the fact that it was magical in some way. Maybe it had influenced her dreams.

  Or maybe it was just a fraggin' dream, Kellan thought with a sigh. A dream brought on by worrying too much and celebrating with a few too many drinks. It could be as simple as that—nothing more than her subconscious working overtime after her first shadowrun with new partners in a new city. Maybe it was nothing more than that.

  "But I can't take that chance." Kellan muttered quietly. If there was even a possibility that there was something important surfacing in her dream, she had to check it out. Despite G-Dogg's advice to just forget about it, she couldn't put her questions aside so easily. She realized now that she had never even considered that the runs in KC might have been more complex than what she'd seen on the surface. She'd been naive; or maybe her team never graduated from the small stuff.

  She settled back onto the padding with a sigh. I’ve got to get the frag out of this place. But her first priority was going to be a little digging about the man Orion called Brickman. She wanted to find out why he was willing to pay to have something hijacked that he didn't want. And she wanted to know why the elf ganger had been along for the ride.

  So resolved, Kellan managed to fall back to sleep. Her dreams, if any, troubled her no more that night.

  Chapter 12

  After getting a steaming soykaf latte and a doughnut from the Stuffer Shack on the corner, Kellan settled herself in her sleep coffin, sitting cross-legged on the temperfoam padding, her hair brushing against the ceiling. She took her well-used
Fuchi dataBook out of her bag. The computer had outlasted the company that made it by a few years, and though it was nowhere close to top-of-the-line, it would do until Kellan had a chance to get something better. She'd cut her teeth on the dataBook and the shape of its keyboard was familiar to her fingers. She plugged the small computer into the power and data ports in the coffin, slotting her credstick to start the flow of energy and information. The flatscreen on the wall showed the credit slowly ticking off.

  Rolling out the dataBook's flatscreen, she booted the computer and settled down to surf the Matrix. The trouble with having access to a tremendous amount information was that there was a tremendous amount of information, most of it completely useless. The Matrix was like an ocean of data, wider and deeper than any physical sea. It took a measure of skill, time and patience to sift through the waves of data to find exactly what you were looking for.

  Like every other kid who went to school, Kellan had learned about the Internet, the precursor to the Matrix. It had consisted of a mismatched network of slow computers linked by antiquated voice communication systems. The computers required special adaptors just to send data over copper wiring never intended for such use. It was crude, slow and, from the sound of things, not all that useful.

  The Crash changed all that. In 2029, a computer virus of unprecedented virulence struck the Internet, wiping out information, corrupting backup systems and even burning out hardware. It spread like wildfire around the world, carried by the interconnectivity of the communications systems, and it devastated the network wherever it went. The virus mutated and adapted to successfully attack new systems as it encountered them. It thwarted every attempt to purge it, infecting every computer with which it came into contact. The world telecommunications system practically collapsed.

  Then the United States government activated a top-secret team of cyberspecialists named Echo Mirage. Using cutting-edge neural interface technology, they were able to directly engage and destroy the virus. Though it cost the lives of most of the cybercommandos, the threat was ended.