by Mel Odom
I took a scrambler-equipped Sony telecom from my duffel and plugged it into the wall outlet. Once it was operational, I tapped in the codes for the MishiMoshi commlink program and the Roller Coaster relocate program Peg had installed in the unit and let them run along with the self-driven compatibility diagnostics. Even if anyone out there happened to be listening and managed to trace the call, they'd show the origination point as being down in Tir Tairngire, and no one in Seattle was going to traipse down into the elflands easily.
Reaching into the duffel again, I dug out the battery-operated motion detector wand set. The monofilament ends of the wands sank into the floor without a problem. They extended sectionally to a height of under one meter, hidden in the shadows draped across the room, covering the door and the window. When they were switched on, an overlapping field of fire surrounded the interior of the room, including me. If anything moved in that area, a high-pitched warning screech would sound that my cyber-enhanced hearing would detect.
Lights flashed across the front of the telecom as the programs cycled through. When they finished, I punched in the LTG code that Peg was using this half-hour.
She came on at once. "I was getting worried. You're calling later than I thought you would."
I gazed at the blank face of the telecom even though I knew she wouldn't broadcast vid. Peg didn't like people to see her. Fourteen years ago, when she was sixteen, she'd had an accident on her bike. She'd lost.
When she came out of surgery, barely alive, she'd been a quadriplegic, with the injury so high up her spinal cord that cyberlimbs were never going to be an option. Even before then, from the bits and pieces I'd been able to put together about her life over the years, she hadn't had a good relationship with her parents.
They' d liked her even less as an invalid.
After awhile, her parents wanted to put her in a clinic, get her out from under foot. It had been a hard decision for a sixteen-year-old kid to make, but she'd agreed. For a price.
Peg had always been good with computers. In return for accepting the exile to the quad clinic, they'd paid for her first datajack. She took to the Matrix immediately, spending hours every day in there, learning from anyone who would teach her, hoping to find skills that would allow her to live her life on her own terms instead of being dependent.
She'd hoped to get enough education that a corp would hire her. Maybe she would have made it. Except that she discovered shadowrunners. Slipping through black IC on datasteals gave her an adrenaline rush like nothing else.
In all the years I'd worked with her, I'd only seen her once. Then she was being kept in a clinic in San Francisco. I didn't know for sure where she was now. At the time I'd seen her, the paralysis had wasted her body away, leaning it down to skin over bone, putting premature gray in the thick red hair she wore cut short.
But I never felt sorry for her. If I had, she would have known about it and been gone. A woman like Peg, you accept her on her terms or else.
I shifted on the bed, feeling myself grow tense. "What's the skinny on Brynnmawr?"
"He wants to meet with you."
"Where?" I tried to figure out how old Brynnmawr must be. He'd looked ancient when I'd first met him, a frail old man who'd proven to have a mind as sharp as a monofilament edge.
"In the Matrix." Peg answered. "I can take you there."
"Did Brynnmawr say what this was about?" I asked.
"No."
I heard the frustration in her voice, knew she was taking my reluctance to talk personally.
"Who is this joker?" she asked. "I ran him through every database I know. I turned up zilch."
I wasn't surprised. Of course, Brynnmawr wasn't his real name. I didn't know his real name, so he was one up on me, which I never had liked.
"A man we're going to have to deal with." I opened the duffel again and pulled out the trode rig. Lying in my hand, the rig looked like the latticework of a helmet waiting to be finished. I pulled the rig into place on my head, then inserted the plug into the telecom beside the bed, shifting to make myself feel comfortable.
Without another word, Peg reached out for me and yanked me into the Matrix, funneling my conscious mind through the trode rig.
I didn't go willingly. I never did.
UPLOAD TO CONTINUE
5
"Sorry to keep you waiting, but I had something working that couldn't be put on hold." Richard Villiers walked through a seemingly solid wall. Actually, holos covered the room's three separate exits, and those exits moved, creating new corridors to other sections of the NovaTech executive suite and making it harder for anyone to penetrate any further into the rooms. None of the doors were opened except by Villiers himself. Once inside the suite, Villiers's guests were essentially prisoners. Villiers was dark and handsome, and moved with grace and razor-edged self-confidence. The pin-striped Vashon Island three-piece suit draped him like it had been surgically fit. "This unscheduled visit is about Sencio?"
"Yes." Miles Lanier was a tall man with an average build, his chestnut hair styled to look like he was a week late for his next appointment. He looked ten years younger than he was, old enough to demand automatic respect, but appearing young enough that someone who didn't know him might make the mistake of thinking he wasn't as good as he was. The dark maroon Armante evening suit fit him well.
As Villiers's security head, he knew that the biz they were doing, trying to shape NovaTech up from the gutted remains of Fuchi Industrial Electronics, required huge risks and tremendous forethought. Until the recent dissolution of the three entities that had made up Fuchi, Villiers had been viewed by the other megacorps as a gifted player in the economic market. Now he worked to recoup that image, and increase his holdings. "It appears she's gotten a message out."
"To who?"
"I don't know." Lanier replied.. "I've got agents in the field trying to find out."
"But it wasn't us?" Villiers asked.
"No."
The NovaTech CEO gave a half smile. "Then I guess we've about worn out the trust she had in us."
Lanier shrugged. "The only chance she has of getting out is us."
"I saw your reports this morning. Ironaxe hasn't given up pursuit of Sencio and her team."
"Ironaxe has taken this piece of industrial espionage personally."
"A pity. And after all the bribes were in place with his staff, too."
Some of those bribes, Lanier knew, were in the form of blackmail. Extortion always carried more weight than a credstick. "We knew at the outset that Sencio and her team might be compromised."
"We did." Villiers agreed. His face showed concern. "But she didn't. She may choose to hold this corporation at fault. Sencio can be a vindictive individual."
Lanier knew that was a definite understatement. Coupled with that was that fact that if Clay Ironaxe managed to capture Sencio alive, the woman could be a death sentence for them both. And for the fledgling NovaTech corporation.
6
Clay Ironaxe switched his commlink over to the frequency his team was using, then curled his left fist around the butt of the Seco LD-120 combat pistol. When his palm made contact with the smartgun link, his cybersystems came on-line. Cross hairs formed in his vision as he scanned the Albuquerque sprawl from the safety of the metallic silver Rolls Royce Phaeton limousine.
At something less than ten minutes after midnight, the plex's red light district was still in full swing. A mixture of corpgeeks and execs socialized on the wild side, while the night predators went to work.
The address was in Martinez Town, east of Highway 47. The limo rigger handled the expensive luxury vehicle with accomplished ease, propelling it off Grand Avenue NE onto John Street.
Ironaxe watched the dimmed lights of Saint Joseph's Medical Center coming up on the right as they headed north. The hospital stood as one of the few remaining bastions of civilization in the area.
When the Treaty of Denver settled the dispute between the North American federal governments and th
e Native American Nations, part of the agreement had been to force any non-natives to leave the region.
Albuquerque had become a business force to be reckoned with in the Southwest before the Awakening and the Ghost Dance, and many of the non-natives had been defiant about being forced out.
The fighting had spilled out into the streets, and Martinez Town had been one of the hardest hit. When the dispute was finally settled, no one had cared enough to rebuild the areas of the sprawl that didn't directly contribute to profits. Martinez Town, like a number of other areas, had ended up with nothing except a ghetto of broken buildings filled with squatters, native and non-native, as well as metahumanity of both kinds.
The area had also picked up a contingent of low-rent mercenaries who fought for all sides in the border skirmishes between other members of NAN and UCAS. Base camps for shadowrunners tackling the corporations scattered across the Pueblo Corporate Council lands were built and shifted as quickly as rats' nests.
Clay Ironaxe was on a rat-killing spree tonight.
He shifted in the back of the Phaeton, a big broad man more than two meters tall and a meter across at the shoulders. The battle-hardened kevlar body armor fit him well, covered with brightly colored war paint that striped his arms, legs, and chest. More paint covered his broad, blocky face, teasing the flesh with highlights in white that turned his features into a skullface with black eye hollows. A beaten gold circlet with engraved Zuni markings held his long black hair back, funneling it down his back.
"Maybe we'll get lucky and the woman will be there." Aaron Bearstalker said beside him. He was a big man as well, though still dwarfed by his employer and friend. Like Ironaxe, he wore kevlar body armor bearing the war marks of the Ashiwi, their people. He cradled an Ares Alpha Combat Gun loosely, the blued steel of the battle rifle looking oily in the dim glare that filtered in from the street.
Ironaxe shook his head. He'd had his fortune read in the sand that day, and the portents indicated that his quest for honor was not going to be easily won. "No, but perhaps Korrin will know where we may find her."
The Phaeton rolled to a stop at the end of the cul-de-sac where the present section of John Street ended.
The luxury car's headlights knifed through the dark shadows surrounding the collection of shattered warehouses and apartment buildings. Train tracks gleamed white-silver to the west, only occasionally noticeable through the few open areas.
"I've got movement." one of the men in the front seats called out. The others immediately echoed him.
Ironaxe watched the squatters flee. As a general rule, they were thin and wiry, dressed in rags collected from refuse bins. But some of them brandished weapons as they retreated.
"The man we're hunting won't run." Ironaxe said. He let himself out of the Rolls Royce ahead of the others. They followed his lead, spreading out in a loose perimeter that maintained overlapping fields of fire.
7
[Chip file: Argent
Security access: ******—23:13:24/10-9-60]
UPLOAD CONTINUED Location: Everett Safehouse
Everything went black, and stillness filled the world I'd entered. I've never found another experience so perfect or so complete as the Matrix.
Then color entered that perfect blackness, shooting streamers of bright reds, greens, golds, purples, a plethora of prismatic incandescence that resembled tracer fire. The streamers created a grid around us, over us, and below us, connecting dozens of different icons to each other in convoluted patterns. The horizon in any direction was so far off it looked like the world twisted and funneled into a tight knot.
Instinctively, I tried to move, to center myself. But I couldn't. The trode rig was a hitcher device, enabling me to enter the Matrix and interact with Peg, but not to interact with the Matrix itself. It was like being wrapped in a cocoon.
"Easy." Peg said. "I'm here." Her voice came from somewhere that my mind identified as being to my left. Actually, there was no left because I had no body.
Mentally, I pulled back and dropped into parade rest. I'd learned to hold that position for hours if I needed to, and it was even easier in the Matrix because gravity didn't exist.
Without warning, the glowing colored lines began whipping past as we gained momentum. Peg controlled our movements, thrusting us through a hundred different landscapes in an eyeblink. Our destination became immediately apparent: a lambent green glass tower corkscrewed into a chunk of gigantic tree roots that were twisted together and slithered like snakes.
"Now, there's a pretty picture." Peg commented.
Her revulsion dripped in her words. "It fits Brynnmawr." I told her. "Just so you know what you're getting into."
She lifted an arm, perfectly proportioned and translucent, glowing from an inner blue fire. Peg's persona, the way she saw herself in the Matrix, resembled a liquid being, totally feminine with unrestrained curves.
Her eyes were pits of stormy blue fire, her lips tight and full, rolling waves held in restraint. Her blue-black hair cascaded around her shoulders. She went nude, but the translucent body she chose somehow didn't look naked. She'd had other personas over the years I'd known her, but this was the one she chose when she went into situations where the outcome wasn't something she could readily control. It was battledress, a flaunting of confidence and self, a mentality I totally understood.
A blaze of dark violet light jumped from Peg's fingertip when she pointed, stopping meters short of touching the twisted snarl of roots at the base of the corkscrew tower. Some of the roots unwrapped from the base of the tower and shot out at us. Peg pulled us back, then formed flat shields of glowing gold and green that fit against her palms, no bigger than a buckler used by a Roman legionary. The roots bounced off her shields, then withered and died, leaving a trail of gray ash scattered across the black. A moment later a breeze gusted up and blew it away.
"The node's surrounded by IC." she said. Her persona voice fit her image in the Matrix, husky and full. "I could possibly get through it, but it would take time."
"Just knock." I said. "If Brynnmawr's expecting us, he'll let us in."
"If it's not a trap."
Attacks in the Matrix could also be lethal. A decker took his or her life in hand every time he or she went online. That world was full of predators and minefields. I knew that from military experience as well as what I'd learned from deckers I'd worked with.
"No." I told Peg. "If Brynnmawr had wanted me flat-lined, he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of leaving a message."
"It was a way of finding you."
"Going through the drop gave me control." I pointed out to her. "I could have ignored the message."
"But he knew you wouldn't."
I considered that, realizing that Peg knew me as well as Brynnmawr. Almost as well. Brynnmawr was a big reason I'd become the person I was, a big reason why I thought the way I thought. "Maybe." I used Peg's eyes and stared hard into the core of twisted roots.
"You still want to go in?" she asked.
"Yes." There could be no other choice, not and remain true to my convictions. I held a certain amount of fear of Brynnmawr, but I refused to knuckle under to it. He was a man, and men died. Sometimes.
"Give me a minute." Peg requested.
I waited, watching as a console appeared in the black ether before us. Peg's translucent blue hands glided across the buttons and dials, making adjustments.
"I'm building us an escape route." she explained. "In case this meet doesn't go as friendly as you think it will." She continued working as she spoke. "When Brynnmawr tagged the message drop, he tripped three separate trace programs I had set up on that drop. None of them got me Brynnmawr's real-world twenty, but one of them got in far enough to let me know he keeps a line open to the Wall Street stock exchange."
I listened to her, letting her talk because I had some thinking to do myself. Brynnmawr's interest in me brought up a lot of speculation, none of it with a foundation that I could reason.
"A lot o
f people keep lines of communication open to the East Coast Stock Exchange." Peg said. "They have to look after all that money. And, usually, you can bet you're going to hit some of the deadliest black IC ever designed if you try to follow them up. Assuming you get through the Stock Exchange Matrix defenses, which is as near an impossibility as I've ever found. But that black IC is set up to intercept improper incoming datastreams, not outgoing."
The root system below the corkscrewed green glass tower writhed restlessly, and I could almost feel eyes scanning me.
"There." Peg said. "That program should be enough to allow us to sleaze out if things start going to slot." The console folded swiftly in front of her, reducing in size until it became a tiny red button. She closed her hand over it, hiding it from sight. "Ready?"
"Yeah."
Peg fired another purple beam from her fingertip. The roots engaged again, wiggling toward us. "Do you have a password?" she asked.
"Prodigal." I answered. Brynnmawr had a wicked sense of humor. Everything about him was wicked. I just didn't see it when I was younger.
Abruptly, the roots stopped their approach. In concert, the section in front of us opened, becoming an ebony maw.
"Well?" Peg prompted.
"Go." I told her.
She spread her arms, the button she'd created still tight in her fist. Then she flew into the mouth. The roots closed the opening behind us.
UPLOAD TO CONTINUE
8
Ironaxe took the lead, running across the open space and skirting the remains of the convenience store. A rusted sign that announced WALKER'S STUFFER SHACK stuck up from the pile of debris. The roaring of the nature spirits and the intermittent blasts of autofire were almost deafening.
It took a moment for him to spot the stone steps leading to an underground apartment area below the building across from the Stuffer Shack. He raced down them at once, pausing at the bottom only long enough to kick the door off the hinges.
