She checked her own expensive clothes for splatters, then left the warehouse and went into the front office. There, she used a pair of tweezers to remove a macroplas business card from a glassine envelope. It bore the name of a rival warehouse firm presently at street war with this one. As if these small-timers even understood what the word meant. All business was war. These single-owner operations merely argued and squabbled like petulant children. Gingerly she placed the card in the middle of a small puddle of water directly under a leaking water cooler.
Then she moved swiftly into the hallway and opened a panel in the wall, with a simple yank tearing loose a wire to deactivate the old-style thermal fire alarm. She thanked the gods the owners had yet to spend any serious nuyen on updating the system. Chipped sensors were a lot more difficult to beat than this prehistoric piece of street drek. As she strode for the front door, Johnson pulled a cigar from the pocket of the livid security guard sitting limply in a chair behind an armor-plated desk. A swollen tongue protruded out of the dead woman’s mouth, her neck dark purple where the garrote bit deep into the flesh. Her machine pistol was still tucked uselessly in its belt holster.
Puffing the imitation Havana cigar into life, Erika made a disgusted face as she set the smoking leaves halfway into a puddle of paint thinner on the linoleum floor. A trail of the clear liquid reached across the room and under the door of a utility closet jammed full of rusty paint cans and oily rags. All lovingly stacked in a nice pyramid just for tonight.
As the glowing tip inched downward toward the fire trail, Erika patiently reviewed everything she’d done so far. Satisfied that all was well, she departed, locking the front door behind her and sliding the access card back inside through a crack in the plastic window pane.
A nondescript Chrysler Nissan Caravaner was waiting at the curb. She climbed in, and immediately the windows mirrored for privacy. That wasn’t a standard feature for this make and model, but she didn’t think anyone was watching. The green paint job was badly scratched, the simwood panels peeling with the typical rust spots of a car that spent a lot of time near saltwater and wasn’t washed regularly. Nobody in his right mind would bother to steal the molding tires off the wretched piece of Detroit drek.
She put the multiple security systems into passive mode, then touched the ignition. The onboard computer accepted her fingerprint, and with a gentle purr the oversized 400 horsepower motor was activated. Soft halogen headlights flared on, and the powerful car effortlessly pulled smoothly away from the curb and tooled off silently into the darkness. Only its bullet-proof tires sighed on the old macadam street.
Make Your Own Justice
1
Pain.
Agony filled her world, a swirling burning universe of searing sizzling pain beyond imagination. Millennia slowly passed with glacier speed, and the agony faded to mere throbbing in her arms and left leg. As the overload of physical sensation receded, Laura Redbird felt the world return about her as if the stygian fog surrounding her body was being gradually dissipated by a warm and gentle sun.
She was on a table ... no, the beach? Her meat body was sprawled on the sand, the taste of sea salt in her mouth, her clothes in horrible bloody tatters and every limb beating with blood as if they were living balloons ready to pop. Her wrist-watch seemed an excruciating band of thorns encircling her wrist. But each thundering heartbeat seemed less terrible than the one before. A ragged cough tore at her throat, and she rallied enough strength to turn her head and vomit brine forever. Could a human hold that much water inside her lungs, and still live? Must be. She was here and kicking. But where was here?
Memories returned like an explosion, and she suddenly jerked upright, screaming and flailing with her baby-weak arms at the great white sharks as they chewed at her helpless body. White-hot pain beyond bearing, beyond the range of the human mind to encompass, had seized her as the Biscayne waters roiled red with her blood and she was pulled from the sweet cool air and into the cold salt depths by the monsters. Then came a heart-wrenching memory of BlackJack swimming away from her, and anger flashed at his betrayal. He left her to die!
Then her fury faded as logic told her that, no, he’d left her when she was already dead. Beyond saving. Her heart ached at the sadness on his face as he turned to swim away from her savaged corpse. And that was the word, wasn’t it, chummer? Corpse. Stiff. Fish food du jour. She’d been chewed to chum. Or rather so freaking fragging near death that she now knew what hell itself was like. It stank of despair and helplessness.
Laura trembled slightly in the chemical wafting of the shoreline breeze and glanced around. She was on a remarkably clean area of white sand, on a pristine stretch of beach near the industrial sections of northern Miami—a beach otherwise covered with rotting seaweed, rusty cans, broken glass, spent shell casings, and the limp latex remains of safe sex. From the number of same, there were a lot of happy chummers tonight.
Gingerly reaching up to brush the wet hair from her face, Laura felt strength returning to her arms and then paused in wonder. She could see that her tattoos were gone. Well, most of them. The go-gang insignia from her juvie days as a gofer for the Slammers had vanished from her right bicep. And the fake yakuza designs on one entire thigh were simply not there. Now, how the drek was that possible? They’d been done by a self-taught ork artist in the Seattle sprawl, and Laura sure as drek remembered the needle full of ink going in thousands of times to permeate her skin. The yakuza stuff had been a work of art that fooled her assigned prey long enough for her to blow their nasty operation to drek. Afterward, the tats were much too lovely, and potentially useful, to be removed by lasers or acid. However, like all art, it was never fun in the forging. Where the hell were her shoes?
“Healed flesh is always cleansed,” said the empty air before her in a vaguely familiar voice. As Laura recoiled, a shimmering vision of ethereal beauty swirled into being above the cresting waves hitting the shore. A male with long flowing hair and a full figure, no, a woman of ageless loveliness and indeterminate race supported by flowing mana rippling with every color of the spectrum. Not norm, or elf, or any metahuman race Laura could identify. And that made the identification all the easier.
“Savoriano,” she muttered and bowed the best she could make her weak body do while sitting in the sand.
The astral vision hovering before her smiled at the attempt, and a wave of warmth took the chill from Laura’s bones and the last of the pain from her tender flesh.
“I greet you, Laura Redbird,” the vision said.
The decker almost fell down again trying to get to her naked feet, but she finally managed. The two looked at each other for a few minutes. Or hours. Time was difficult to measure in the presence of the astral being. How long had it been since Laura had last seen the spirit in that top-secret lab of fragging Fuchi Industrial Electronics? Sealed and trapped behind wards while a team of dumbhoop scientists attempted yet again to fuse magic and technology by linking the spirit into a mainframe computer composed more of runes than chips and wires. Didn’t work, of course. Never would. But the megacorps just wouldn’t stop trying. Everybody knew magic and the Matrix didn’t mix. Those brainiacs were dumber than dirt.
“I told you that someday I would repay the great debt I owe for all that you and your associates did for me that bloody night,” said Savoriano, her words echoing slightly above the muted sea. Laura heaved a sigh, feeling better and better by the second. Yes, that had been the worst run of her life until tonight. And the financial repercussions of the matter were still, even years later, shaking the higher echelons of the megacorp world back in Japan. It was reason numero uno why she and Blackjack had come to Miami, here in the Caribbean League. Even the long arm of a megacorp like Fuchi sometimes found it hard to find a wedge into this association of local governments, pirates, cartels, corporations, and anyone else who happened to own land—mostly islands—in this part of the world. Everyone with the least bit of power always seemed to be struggling for power over everyon
e else, and the only thing they all seemed to agree on was hatred of Aztlan.
“We did what seemed right,” Laura demurred, not wanting to take credit for some selfless noble action. The deed had taken only a moment and seemed a good idea at the time. The enemy of my enemy and all that good ol' drek.
“You did it alone,” beamed the spirit—literally, almost blindingly so. Gulls near the shoals shrieked in response and flew away with more loud screams of annoyance. “And so I have watched for these many years to find a way, any chance to return the great releasing.”
Ah, her stomach went icy even as Laura felt a flush spread over her face. “The sharks.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact. Brought back from the dead? Reassembled like a model car? Holy drek.
“Dead is dead, beyond even my abilities,” answered the fading being. “But wounds can be healed, no matter how terrible, as long as the holy meat and the precious spark of life still remains.”
“Wounds?” barked the bedraggled decker, in sudden fury. “Those fragging goldfish ate my legs!”
“Your flesh was shredded, but not removed,” whispered Savoriano, the ocean vista behind her slightly visible through her form. The mana was as bright as ever, but the shape inside was dissolving. “Energy is matter, even as mana is life. You have been healed. Now I am free even of you, blessed liberator.”
The light brightened, and the spirit was gone. The nimbus of magical energy hung empty in the air. Sea spray from the waves passed through the glow unhindered, wetting Laura’s face.
“Farewell, my friend,” whispered the winds even as the light dimmed with the coming of the dawn. Alone on her clean patch of sand, Laura Redbird opened and closed her perfect hands, watching the scarless fingers flex and move as if she really was a newborn discovering for the first time what those things were at the end of her wrists. Torn into soyburger and then healed by an act of kindness inspired by something that had happened over a decade ago. Life was too strange for words.
Waves crested over her bare feet, bringing back the chill and a metacrab the size of a salaryman’s hat scuttling out of the froth to see if she was alive or dead. Blasted tide was coming in. The pale orange crustacean snapped its twin claws about in the air, its bulbous eyes supported on ridiculous bouncy stalks. It was a silly-looking thing, and fooled a lot of newbies. Its claws could cut steel, its mouth chewed concrete, and they liked to eat the damnedest odd things. And once they got hold of you, you either blew their heads off or died. They never let go. Only good point was that the crabs seemed to be especially fond of devil rats, which brought them a lot of goodwill from the locals.
Kicking at the ten-legger, which sent it scuttling off to find easier prey, Laura turned from her birthing spot and began to stride across the beach. Out here, beyond the great adamantine ferrocrete barrier that separated the luxury resorts from the public beach, the local prison didn’t use prisoners to hand-clean the sand every night so that the tourists had a nice place to lay down their fat bodies and get tan in the free sun. The only fragging thing free in this town. The locals could fend for their own amid the corporate filth. Off in the distance, she could see the shining towers of downtown rising high above the rainbow neon ribbon of the monorail that encircled Miami proper.
Reaching a battered wooden ramp that led to the boardwalk next to the elevated road, Laura started climbing. Reaching the boardwalk, she headed southward for downtown and the nearest cab stand. First things first. She had to get to the rendezvous point at the old warehouse and locate Blackjack. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see her!
* * *
Dawn was tinting the horizon pink as Erika Johnson drove the Caravaner along the Miami canal toward downtown. She maintained the speed limit religiously, despite the many blast craters and pot holes. Just as she rounded a curve near the desalinization plant, a barricade of overturned cars momentarily slowed her, the hungry gang awakening to the possibility of fresh meat.
Calmly, almost amused, Erika radically shifted gears and wheeled into an alley. Garbage, both human and food, lined the passageway as one of those groups frantically jumped out of her way. A single shot hit the rear of the Caravaner and musically ricocheted off the military armor plating hidden by the artistically bad paint job. No further rounds came her way, the locals merely shouting their displeasure at the unseen driver’s rank callousness.
Rejoining traffic heading to the west, she rode along with all the other various vehicles—limos, sports coupes, rusted wrecks looking like her own, and lots of remote-controlled semis, some with, but most without, their lights on. This was supposedly an industrial section of town, but from the reports she’d seen the prime activity here was smuggling. Several go-gangs of norms and trolls roared by on their gleaming bikes, talismans and scalps flailing in the wind.
Streetlights lined the road, the twenty-meter posts topped with wire-reinforced quartz lenses that offered only feeble illumination down from the sheer distance so necessary to keep the locals from shooting out the lights. The weak glare was tinted gray by the inner-city smog and general miasma of the decaying streets. The pink of the dawn was slowly turning yellowish when all of the streetlamps winked out, officially heralding the city’s declaration that day was here.
They were wrong as usual. Or maybe just saving a few kilowatts, cheap bastards.
Standing forgotten on debris-piled corners was the occasional Lone Star callbox, the panic button showing only as dangling wires. Nobody here wanted the law; it only got in the way of making a few nuyen. And justice, like everything else in the Awakened world of returned magic, was something you made yourself or did without.
Turning onto a side street, Erika now headed south, deeper into the heart of the urban sprawl. Every window was barred or boarded. Tattooed joyboys and garish slotmachine girls called out for anybody’s trade at this hour, while grim people in ballistic dusters and metahumans of assorted types in steel-studded leather coats jostled for supremacy on the littered sidewalks. Simsense parlors and the mandatory rock bars sprouted every few meters, each louder than the one before, or so it seemed to her disgust. Graffiti tried its best to hide the filth on the walls of the buildings and few stores.
The Miami sprawl embraced much of what used to be the Million Dollar Mile along the Gold Coast, going in all the way to Coral Gables. But times changed, as they always do, and now the majestic hotels were half-empty, become hives of chippers and organleggers. Ratnests for gutterkin, squatters, and gangers who preyed upon those too hopeless or too weak from hunger to fight back effectively.
The Overtown DMZ, home of the desperate and doomed. This place should be burned to the ground, Erika Johnson thought for the thousandth time. Painful memories of her own childhood in such a demilitarized zone flashed momentarily, but she forcibly shoved them back down among the rest of her scarred youth. She was out now and never going back. Except for work, of course. Here, where the law was afraid to tread, a sharp operator could make a fortune and eventually retire someplace clean. If there was someplace clean anymore. Outside of the corporate enclaves.
Westside blackness marked the middle of the next block, where a series of street lamps were out. As the Caravaner neared, the lamps burst into life, sending dozens of denizens scurrying toward less prominent locations of visibility. Rolling the Caravaner onto the broken curb, Johnson drove straight for the closed doors of a garage. The louvered portal opened before her and shut immediately after, so fast not even an elf with wired reflexes could have followed her. A few ticks later, a sleek black Mitsubishi Jaguar rolled out the other side of the garage onto the next street over. At the wheel a raven-haired woman sporting a blue silk Majeure scarf gunned her vehicle and screeched with smoking tires off for uptown proper, classic Queen blaring from the sixteen tandem speakers.
Reaching 95, Johnson was klicks away, tooling for Opa-Locka, when an explosion tinted the horizon and orange flames tongued the night sky. A glance at her digital. Exactly on schedule. Everything was going fine tonight. Th
is had been the third attempted raid by her shadowrunner teams on the Miami complexes of the Shatogunda Corporation and was the last needed. The first infiltration had occurred via the Matrix and had sent Shatogunda troops scurrying to protect three locations: a downtown office on East Fifty-seventh Street, an underground laboratory in the swamp, and one shoreside warehouse. The second had been a magical penetration by a shaman, which sent the Shatogunda wagemages rushing to protect four radically different locations, two of them repeats from the first time. Tonight’s physical sortie relied heavily on armed guards to rush and protect five points—only one of them a repeat from the other raids. Done and done. Now she knew where the main datastore for Shatogunda was located, and she could use that information in any of a hundred different ways that would all result in her acquiring a lot of nuyen. And power. Always more power.
Sirens from firefighters foolish enough, or brave enough, to challenge the sprawl, screamed in the distance when the thundering music abruptly stopped as the telecom system of the car bleeped for her attention. She stared in mild curiosity at the communications unit below her automatically paused chip-player. At this hour? Pressing a button gave her a garbled read-out of the caller’s number on a small liquid crystal display. It was from the executive offices of the Gunderson Corporation. At this hour? Keying the access code, Erika activated the speaker unit.
“Johnson here,” she said, lighting a cigarette with one hand while steering through the thickening traffic with the other.
Shadowboxer Page 2
