In any case, I still try to contact Stadt’s office. I send him a message explaining everything. I call his office, try directly calling the few other people I know in Europe. Talk to a few of them. They tell me they’ll do what they can to reach Stadt. After a while of that, I feel that I’ve done everything I can to reach him. What can I say—one does not reach the Director of Renraku Europe on a whim.
With that side of things done, I switch gears and go check out the team’s preparations.
Everyone seems to be chilling out. Irish is crashed in a corner, arms crossed over his chest, snoozing. Zoë is in the Matrix. Angel is having a phone conversation, pacing the empty warehouse. Vanity is sitting in a corner, watching AR trideo. I go sit next to her. She’s watching a Casablanca remake from like twenty years back.
“I love this movie,” she says distractedly, enraptured by the images, as I plop down next to her.
“Have you ever seen the original?” I ask her. I sure as hell haven’t, but she’s a fan, so who knows.
She speaks slowly, like someone just waking up from a deep and pleasant sleep, and looks a little vacant, so I think she’s tripping on a moodchip to complement the flick. “No. This is the only version I ever saw. First time I saw it I was like fourteen. It inspired me. It relaxes me now. Brings me to another place. It’s like a fairy tale for shadowrunners.” She adds a vague little chuckle at the end.
“Fairy tale? Doesn’t it end with heartbreak?”
She stares at the images for a moment. “It’s not about how it ends. It’s about the setting. The going. It always ends in heartbreak, or else it wouldn’t be called the ending.”
I blink. That may have been profound.
“So, no plan revision, or training?” I ask.
“Nah, not this close to the mission. We all try to relax now. No matter how many times we do this, we all get the jitters. We try to distract ourselves. It makes Irish sleepy. Me too, a little. I kind of just cocoon up and wait for it to pass.”
I consider a life where you make your money going up against odds stacked squarely against you with fair odds of having your flesh split by a bullet. It’s a crazy life. I’m reminded that despite my time spent with Vanity and her team, I will never understand why they do this. Professionally speaking, I don’t need to understand them, so that’s okay.
We sit in silence, watching the trid. After a few minutes, Vanity seems to notice me out of the corner of her eye. She suddenly turns to face me. “What? What’s the matter?” I say slightly alarmed.
She leans into me and gives me an open-mouth kiss, her lips gently forcing mine apart, giving me an intense and quite pleasurable mouth exercise. She pulls back slowly and settles back to watching the movie.
“What was that for?”
She shrugs. “We might be dead tomorrow,” is the only explanation she offers. I’ve had some chicks from the corporate life I’ve hooked up with tell me that as an excuse for cutting loose and doing it with a bad boy like me, but it never had an actual true meaning like this.
We don’t get to see the end of the movie. Before it’s done, Angel walks over to everyone and shakes them out of their thing. Vanity turns it off, denied the famous ending, without complaint. They all wordlessly get busy equipping up, getting into body armor, picking up their guns, hooking on electronics, checking everything.
Irish tosses me an armored vest, which I don’t catch because I’m not expecting it. As I look at it at my feet, he hands me a pistol grip-first. I raise my eyebrows at him. “I’m not going.” It’s a statement.
He smirks evilly and Angels answers for him. “Yes, you are. You’re with Zoë. You’re coming in with us.”
“I have no training for this. I’m a Johnson. I talk. It’s all I do.” I say this very plainly. The obvious insanity of his crazy words must be apparent. Maybe I misunderstood him.
“You’re coming in. You won’t be where the shooting is. Zoë will keep you safe,” confirms Vanity. I stare at her open-mouthed. Et tu, Brute?
Zoë gives me a wink. “You’ll be safe with me, honey,” she says, greatly amused by her role as my protector. “Don’t worry, Ta and Irish do all the shooting; Vanity will run backup for us all, and you and I are going to squeak by like little mice.” She uses her fingers to mimic little mice ears. I stare in disbelief.
Regardless, all said and done, I find myself dressed in black, body armor slapped on, and pistol holstered. I don’t really plan to use it. The only reason I’d have to fire it is if everyone else is dead. At that point, I’m just going to take my chances and surrender. That’s what I decided. Still, while I’m not too cool with the fact I was enlisted, I have faith in the team. I hired them, after all.
After what seems to me like mere moments, we make our quick drive to the city outskirts, and we find ourselves laying outside the facility perimeter, hunkered down in the high grass. As Irish cuts the wire, I realize there is no going back. We all get up and make a run for our next cover. We’re exposed here, so Vanity has a spirit hiding us. We check time. We’re slightly ahead of schedule. I have to say so far I’m impressed. They move as one, with an efficiency shared by top-notch Special Forces units. I’ve seen Red Samurai in action before, and Titanium’s team reminds me of those guys.
The next step is breaching the door to the main building. After that, stealth alone won’t be enough. Everyone exchanges looks, and then all eyes set on me. We’re waiting for the distraction team. Somehow, I am personally responsible for them, like they’re my kids or something. We pass the time marker. Nothing. Irish gives me a nasty snarl. “Just wait,” I whisper, though I have serious doubts. I’m far removed from my operation. Since I got canned by Renraku, it isn’t impossible they canceled the distraction team. Maybe I gave myself away when we invaded the Renraku node. I haven’t been in control for far too long. I don’t like it at all.
Suddenly, we hear the staccato of burst fire echoing off in the distance. Yells. More erratic gunfire. Then a giant fireball lights the sky. I feel a degree or two of heat, even at this distance. I smile.
“Go,” Titanium Angel softly commands, and we’re off. We get to the side wall and our intrusion point just as sirens start blaring loudly. Zoë’s mental work quickly unlocks the door, which, in a rare moment of trust in my abilities, I am left responsible for holding open as Angel and Irish roll in. They immediately fire their silenced weapons. One burst each, then another from Irish. That’s it. Once everyone else is in, I roll in myself. Angel and Irish are already moving off into the distance. I see two downed security guards and one guy in khakis and white shirt. Wrong place, wrong time, chummer. My mind vaguely registers that they probably didn’t need to shoot the civilian, but I’m so jacked up on adrenaline I discard it as non-essential to my survival and thus not important.
I focus with everything I have and remember I’m supposed to follow Zoë. Follow her where? Why? What then? I start to panic. I don’t know what I’m doing here. This is so over my head. I push it down. It’s so hard just to focus on simple instructions. But I realize that if I do what I was told, I’ll give myself a chance to come out of this alive. I close my eyes and focus, and steady myself. I follow Zoë. We branch off to the right, down a flight of stairs, then down some hallway. Zoë always stops us when we reach doors or have to turn corners. We stop, she carefully checks ahead, we proceed. We meet no one on the way. We’re in some basement. We’re going down hallways. We hit a security door. Maglocked. Zoë stares at it for a few seconds and it opens revealing a security guy, dressed in black armor and toting a submachine gun on a sling. He looks as surprised to see us as we do to see him. Zoë savagely points her handgun at him and fires four rounds into the black glass of his visor. He falls down. She looks down to dead-check him. Right at that moment, another guard turns the corner and raises his gun at Zoë. I pull up my gun. Fire fire fire fire. Fire. As I shoot, my muzzle flash is all I see. I have to stop shooting to see what happened. I hit him. There is blood against the wall and he’s crumpled o
n the floor. I blink rapidly, trying to chase off the white spots I’m seeing from the flash. Zoë takes a breath, realizing that could have been the end for her. We both look at each other and nod. On we go.
Zoë lets the rest of the team know that we met unexpected guards but dealt with it. Angel and Irish are perplexed, since those guys weren’t supposed to be there. It doesn’t matter. We hit the computer lab where the technology is being worked on. It is deserted, as it should be. Zoë hooks up and starts hacking. This should only take a minute. I wait nervously.
A man comes out of nowhere, running into the room, out of breath. He sees me standing there, and sees Zoë with a cable running from her head to the control screen. You’d think he’d bugger right out, but that’s not what he does.
“No! You can’t do this. This research is too important!” he says, angry. I assess him to be one of those top-notch R&D geniuses that don’t care about dying, only about not losing their work. I know the personality profile. We often extract them.
I point my gun at him. “We’re taking it.”
“No! You can’t!” he says defiantly. This is insane. He’s not armed, and I’m pointing a gun at his head.
“Back off! I’m pointing a fucking gun at your fucking head. You’ve lost. Back the fuck out!” I yell at him. I feel like an angry troll. I feel the power of the gun in my hand. I just killed a guy. Right outside. I did. I can do it again.
“You bastard!” he roars as he makes a charge for me. I fire; then fire again, then once more. Three rounds, into his upper back, as he comes at me head down. He instantly collapses to the floor, like a puppet whose strings are cut. He doesn’t yell anymore. A pool of blood is quickly flooding out of him. I take two steps back to avoid it touching me.
Zoë blinks back into this world. “Ho-ly crap!” she exclaims, seeing my handiwork.
“He came out of nowhere, one of the project scientists or something. He charged me, can you believe it?” I say, my voice much higher-pitched than usual.
“You couldn’t just whip him across the face?” she asks, looking at me wide eyed.
I realize that sounds pretty sane. I could have just done that. I don’t know why I didn’t just do that. My mouth opens and closes. I have no answer.
“Doesn’t matter. I got the data. We’re Oscar Mike.” she says, getting up.
“What? Who?” I say, confused.
“Oscar Mike! On the move! On the fucking move! Let’s go!” she urges. This shooting of people wasn’t part of my plan. Look what happens when you improvise. I’m all messed up. Go back to keeping it simple. Follow Zoë. Just follow Zoë.
Going out is a blur, since my brain is still catching up on processing what happened going in. It’s a slurry of hallways, flashing lights, and blaring alarms. All I know for sure is that we meet back up first with Vanity, who looks tired, her face ashen, then with Titanium Angel and Irish. There’s a little blood splatter on them. Irish moves like his ribs hurt him. Our planning—ha, who am I kidding, their planning—was solid and is holding up. We exfiltrate based on the planned coordinates. On the other side of the facility, it looks like the diversion team is still kicking. Zoë informs us she’s patched into their frequency. Angel tells her to forward to our earpieces.
I recognize the gruff voice of the man I hired in the bar, the ugly troll. His voice is tight, angry, determined. His teammates sound the same. Every time they speak, background noise of gunfire comes through. They’ve figured out they hit a wall. They are taking way too much fire. “Exfiltrate, you dumb slags!” yells Irish, though our channel is listen-only. Perhaps his ardent advice is psychically received, as right then, the troll calls it and gives the order to bugger out. I feel everyone here breathe relief. It’s like listening to a football game on the radio with a bunch of overly caffeinated superfans.
But just as we’re pretty much out of the industrial park and the other team is on the retreat, a pair of heavy-looking roto-drones, flight lights blinking calmly, buzz toward the combat scene like fat bumblebees full of pollen. They change from a transit vector to an operational one, and all I hear is a terribly loud ripping sound. Two bloated little dots in the sky rain down minigun fire below them, tracer rounds making it looks like they are pouring long streams of molten metal. Their little bloated bodies shift in a circular pattern, and the sound of metal sheets ripping resumes while more molten metal falls down below. Things grow quiet after that. We pick up whispering on the audio channel. Too faint to make out the words. Might be a prayer. Then nothing but static.
Zoë tunes out the channel. None of us speak. We get back in our van and drive away in silence.
We all quietly busy ourselves with removing gear and stowing equipment. My head is light. I feel oddly serene, but if I close my eyes I see black rolling storms. I pick up my commlink and check my messages. I have a message from Stadt, or more precisely, one of his bagmen. I clear my throat to get everyone’s attention. “I have a message from friendly actors within Renraku. They have superseded the operation. We’ll be making a delivery to a friendly agent.” I put away my commlink and meet Vanity’s eyes. “It shouldn’t change anything for you. You’re still being paid. It’ll settle things for me, though.”
Vanity keeps her eyes locked on me, without any acknowledgement. The slanted almond curves of her brown eyes observe me with tranquility. I find it odd nobody says anything. I figure they might still blame me for the diversion squad’s destiny.
“Good,” says Titanium Angel, after a very long pause. Nothing more is said until we get back in the city.
I ask Zoë for the data files we pulled and look them over. Engineering specs for sensor-defeating material. It’s highly technical crap; but clearly enough data for any engineer to figure out how to make the same thing or even start on counter-technology. It’s just another milestone in a never-ending arms race. It almost seems pointless, but I know we’re talking billion-nuyen data here.
We’ll be offloading the paydata right away with Stadt’s agent. We drive to the meeting spot. I wasn’t clear on my orientation when I was by myself, after the hotel incident, but I recognize it again, seeing it now. We’re in the same neighborhood where I saw those punks. In fact, we pull into the large back lot of the same store where I sat for a while. I chuckle softly at the fact that I’ve come full circle.
“What is it?” asks Vanity. She must have been watching me pretty intently to notice my barely noticeable reaction, which surprises me. “Oh, nothing,” I mumble. “I was here earlier, is all. Seems odd. Fateful, maybe.”
Angel takes an odd interest too. “That is all?”
“Yeah,” I say, brushing it all off. I don’t know why they’re paying such close attention. I told them I’m fine. I think maybe they think I got too rattled. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
I see Vanity and Angel exchange looks, but they drop it.
A black sedan pulls in and parks nearby. No mistake who that would be. “Go,” Angel tells me.
“Me? You’re not doing this?” I ask.
“No, it’s fine. We trust you. You must have things to discuss with him about your situation. Just bring back our money. We’ll be waiting.” He nods at me. Titanium Angel has an intense gaze, and his speech is all business, but he certainly has a self-assured presence that commands respect. He’s someone you want in your corner. He’s a good leader for this team. I nod back and get out the van. I reach to close the door but Vanity stops me. “Leave it open, just in case. You can’t ever be too safe.” I acquiesce and leave it open, walking toward the sedan. I think again of that car ride yesterday. Vanity, sitting behind me, ready to kill me. You can’t ever be too safe.
A man gets out of the sedan as I approach. I can’t help but feel nervous. The handoff always seems so risky. I’m always tense during handoffs with my crews, and they are too. Nothing ever happens, or at least it hasn’t so far, but it’s like at this point, your at a threshold where the runners have to give you what they fought so hard to acquire, and they feel vul
nerable, and everyone thinks about what could go wrong and how anyone at the meet could decide to kill anyone else. But it usually is a brief moment of tension. Then it passes, they hand over the goods, and my side hands over the payment. Nobody pulls any guns. Everyone backs away. Everything is fine. Usually.
That tense moment is upon us now. I reach the Johnson on the other side. I know him. Young recruit. He’s dressed in a very expensive pinstripe wool suit, golden pocketwatch fashionably hanging off a fine chain by his breast. He smiles broadly at me, like I’m a friend returning from a walk.
“Jesus, Martin, you look like hell,” he says, and he flashes a perfect white-toothed smile.
“Yeah, well,” I shrug. I can’t think of a single coherent thing to say in response.
Jay—that’s his name—awkwardly looks for some words to break the silence, realizing my mood isn’t quite as good as his. “Um, yeah, yeah. Right. So, uh, your team got the data, right? You have the data?”
I nod. “And you’re getting this to …” I prompt, just to make sure. We both say “Stadt” at the same time. He nods. “Yeah, Stadt, we talked, it’s all sorted out. Nomura actually had me out here, you know. What a bastard, huh? Anyway, at the last minute Stadt swoops in and shit gets shuffled, Nomura is out, they tell me my bit. Nothing much different for me. I just do what I’m told. But, uh, yeah, I think Nomura had it in for you. It’s all cool now, though. All cool.”
Shadowrun: Nothing Personal Page 6
