Run Hard, Die Fast

by Mel Odom

  "Trust me." Argent said. He powered up the electromagnet in his palm again and flexed it at her. "The current generated won't be enough to stop us from falling, but it should slow us."

  The look on Archangel's face told him she didn't like having to depend on him. But she didn't argue. She slipped her belt off and ran it through his, making a loop she could hang onto.

  Argent stood at the edge of the shaft and let Archangel stretch out, hanging over the abyss as he took her weight. Grimly, he stepped over the edge, clapping his hand against the plastisteel wall. At the mercy of gravity, they fell.

  The trip lasted only seconds, faster than Argent would have wanted. He was aware of Laveau levitating herself after them, her dress furling around her legs. Then they hit bottom. Argent's move-by-wire system and strength kept him on his feet, but Archangel went rolling away with a groan of pain.

  "Archangel." Argent called, disengaging his magnetic hand.

  "I'm fine." She forced herself to her feet shakily, her pistol still gripped in her hand. "You're wasting time."

  Argent dropped through the hole and into the underground garage, landing almost five meters below with some effort because the debris of the floor and the elevator cage lay scattered across the garage floor. He started to reach back for Archangel, but she had already lowered herself from the lip of the hole, then dropped carefully to the floor.

  Laveau floated through with no problems at all.

  A few of the hotel's guests were moving among the parked cars now, talking anxiously. Argent didn't see anyone who looked like they worked for Asian Fuchi. The big shadowrunner led the way to the parked rental.

  In minutes they were outside the building, on their way back to the airport. Argent breathed a sigh of relief when they were in the air, but his thoughts were already turning to Atlanta, Georgia.

  39

  Miles Lanier paced behind his desk, trying to exercise away some of the tension he was feeling. In his experience, it would have been better to be in front of a group and have to mask those feelings. Being on-stage was where he excelled at duplicity. Being alone with the tension was much worse.

  And having Argent out there roaming while the shadow op team sat like a ticking nuke in Pueblo was increasingly nerve-wracking.

  "What is it, Miles?" Richard Villiers asked over the telecom.

  "Argent was just spotted in Quebec City less than an hour ago." the security chief reported. "One of the moles we've got in with Yamaha informed me that Nakatomi's people tried to close in on Argent. He killed four of their people and escaped."

  Villiers leaned back in his chair behind the desk. "What was Argent doing in Quebec City?"

  "Seeing a fortune teller named Antoinette Fontaine according to my source. She had an expensive SIN, but once we started investigating, we found out it was pure sim."

  "Argent's recruiting." Villiers announced.

  "Yeah, and at the same time there's been a new problem added in Pueblo." Lanier went on. "Ironaxe just hit Nakatomi's scouting party in the warehouse district. Our spotters in the area confirmed that Ironaxe is now in possession of the DNA samples Pendleton Frost got to Nakatomi."

  "I know." Villiers said. "Ironaxe was tipped off by his espionage teams."

  "And who tipped them?" Lanier asked, not liking it that their control over the op seemed to lessen with each passing minute.

  A half-smile flirted with Villiers lips. "Why I did, Miles."

  "Why?"

  "To get the DNA samples out of Nakatomi's hands. Argent had to know they existed because that would have been one of the first things Sencio would have told him. Getting the DNA samples from Nakatomi's group would have been hard because he'd have had to find them first. Finding Ironaxe once Argent knows the man has them, will be easier."

  "We could have taken the DNA samples off the board and left the way clear for the exfiltration."

  "Not without showing ourselves." Villiers pointed out. "Also as a result of doing things this way and exposing the Asian Fuchi team covertly in Pueblo, Nakatomi's position has gotten soft. He's put on a front of being honest with Ironaxe. Now he's had to admit that he was hiding things as well. Ironaxe will have no choice but to realize believing in Nakatomi could be very dangerous."

  Lanier considered the implications. "If Ironaxe has the DNA samples, he's going to figure that Sencio and her crew are hiding out in Pueblo-Under. You've just cut the safety margin on her."

  "Drastically, I hope." Villiers stated.

  40

  Argent abandoned his initial plans for getting a nearly straight flight to Atlanta. Having to dump the cover ID after Laveau had mentioned it to the Asian Fuchi corp-exec meant having to activate a backup ID. That wasn't hard because he and Peg kept a number of them active for him. He'd also had another set up for Laveau. But outfitting Archangel for another proved time-consuming.

  He'd paid for tickets at Quebec City only minutes before the flight out to Cleveland, Ohio, but they'd left the plane at Buffalo, New York, dumping the SINs they'd been traveling under before they cleared the airport.

  They also gained back an hour in crossing the time zone. Just after midnight, they were dossed down in a motel near the hub of the plex under other names. Argent paid for a suite of rooms, then spent twenty minutes talking at the table in the center room. He filmed the conversation, having already primed Laveau and Archangel for the subject matter. Their cover was investments and they' d studied financial screamsheets on the plane, learning a number of the current markets and the pro/con index on them.

  He found two button cams in the room with an overlapping field of view of the table. Using two mini-cams from his duffel, he wired them into the hotel cams, mirroring the fields of view. He keyed the RECORD function on both mini-cams to shoot him as he approached the table where Archangel and Laveau were. He cued the mini-cams again after he sat.

  Then they talked investments for twenty minutes, all of them professional enough to put their fears at rest while they finished the performance. Argent figured the only glitch in the plan was if the sec-team monitoring the room actually listened to more than twenty minutes of conversation coming from the room.

  But he didn't know anyone who' d want to listen to talk about over-the-counter trading stock.

  When he finished the twenty minutes, he used the remote control again to cut his mini-cams into the hotel's system. When the sec unit checked their monitors, all they'd see was the conversation continuing at the table. It didn't offer the security of a safe house, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

  "Okay." Argent said as he pushed up from the table, "as long as we don't move from this room or into view of the main hallway we should be fine."

  The two women stretched and got up from the table as well.

  "You realize dat de bathroom, it be down dat hallway as well." Laveau complained.

  "You had your chance." Argent said. He glanced around the suite. The rooms offered nothing extravagant in the way of decor, just the typical couch, desk, table and chairs. A wet bar was in the corner of the room, but the shelves were barren except for no-name brewkaf. He started a pot, then dragged out three disposable cups with the hotel's logo on them.

  Activating the commlink inside his head, he placed a call to the number Peg had set up to run this part of the op. It was answered on the second ring, and a recorded uni-sex voice informed him that Glatenstatt's was closed for the evening, he should call again at ten in the morning. He disconnected, then heard the telecom line jangle again immediately when the call-back feature Peg had programmed into it kicked in.

  The original call went through the Albany LTGs, lighting up the hotel on their mainframes. But when the call came back from the Glatenstatt number, the call was piggy-backed through the LTGs so it was almost impossible to trace. Even if someone decided to check it out. The call was also encrypted.

  "Argent." Peg said, "I heard about the biz in Quebec City. Are you all right?"

  "Yes." Argent replie
d. "We all are." He brought her up to date quickly. "How much of the news is already out?" He tuned the hotel's telecom, bringing one of the 24-hour news stations on-line, setting it for closed caption. He scanned the news as he talked.

  "Nothing in the regular media." Peg told him, "but your name has been bounced around some in the shadow-boards."

  "Who's doing the bouncing?"

  "Asian Fuchi. I tracked back two of the entries and found they originated in Quebec City and in Tokyo."

  "Nakatomi's staying involved."

  "Yes, but they don't seem to have anything definite. Other than one of their corpexecs IDing you."

  "Getting our travel plans back together is going to set our schedule back a half day or so." Argent said.

  "Call the others and let them know when we finish this call."

  "I will. I'm still working on getting the Pueblo maps." the decker said. "Some of those are locked up tighter than I'd expected. There were clandestine military ops in that area before the NAN took over."

  "How many of the terrain maps do you have?" Argent asked.

  "Above ground I've got all of them. Old maps as well as new ones that have been shot from the air and ground. I've got a cache Archangel can retrieve for you."

  Glancing across the room, Argent saw that the elven decker had already jacked out of her meat body and into the Matrix. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall, her deck across her knees. A cable inserted into the data-jack on her temple connected her to her deck.

  "The underground maps are the ones I need most." Argent said.

  "I know. I'm trying. I've got a friend who knows a source who has a number of pre-Awakened World documents, but you know how hard some of those can be to come by."

  Argent did know. When magic had returned, followed by the killer computer virus that caused the Crash of 2029 and succeeded in toppling world governments, a lot of knowledge had vanished with those political bodies. Part of it was wiped out when the computer systems went down, but the physical records were destroyed in the fever of independence that swept around the world. Some runners, though, had discovered several small fortunes in documents they'd been able to find. By then, most of them were hard to find.

  "Pueblo's records should be easier to locate than most." Peg said, "though Mary Hawkmoon and Pueblo's Underground-Awakened have gone to considerable trouble to eliminate those records. Luckily, Pueblo didn't have much industry go into it even before the NAN took over."

  "I need them, Peg." Argent said, "if I' m going to make this work."

  "I'll have them for you." the decker promised. "I've got Archangel's new SIN ready. At least, it will be by morning."

  "Thanks. I'll call you then." Argent broke the telecom connection inside his head and walked to the nearby window looking out over the front of the hotel. The streets of the plex were still alive with movement.

  "Cher."

  Argent turned around to face Laveau. He knew it was bad from the look on her dark face.

  She licked her canines hesitantly. "Man I know, he does biz with Asian Fuchi. Leetle things dat require a deft hand, you know what I'm talking, but his loyalty, it can be bought. Well he, dat man be doing some checking as a favor to me. Said dat scuttlebutt he hears along de way is dat VaulTek discovered an Asian Fuchi covert op in Pueblo."

  Argent felt his stomach tighten, thinking maybe he was too late to help Sencio after all.

  "Not dat woman you be after, cher." Laveau went on hurriedly, "no, not dat one at all. Dis be another group, one holding de broom, you know what I mean."

  "They were the ones who had the DNA samples." Argent stated, getting the feel for the op. The Asian Fuchi group had been a sweeper team, designed to tidy up potentially embarrassing situations by whatever means possible. "Nakatomi had them in the area trying to run Sencio and her group down."

  "Dis man I talk to, he don't know what dey be doing dere, but I dink you're right. We both right, cher.

  Nakatomi, he get ambitious, dink maybe he can get some leverage over Ironaxe, maybe de man figure he owe Nakatomi a big favor. Instead Nakatomi, he gets caught fisting his own wanker, you know."

  "How?"

  Laveau shook her head. "Dis man I talk to, he don't know. He lucky to know what he know."

  Argent silently agreed, but part of him thought maybe the knowledge getting out to the shadowboards that Laveau had access to was deliberate. Nakatomi wouldn't have sold out his own team—unless there was a profit in it.

  That line of thinking only left Villiers to be at the root of it. The NovaTech CEO wasn't going to quietly sit on the sidelines. Argent hadn't expected it anyway.

  "Dis thing going to be a nasty bit of biz, ain't it?" Laveau asked.

  "Having second thoughts?" Argent asked.

  "Fifty dousand nuyen still fifty dousand nuyen, cher. And you talking to a woman, she ain't got no home no more." The ork shaman looked up at Argent. " 'Course, dat's a foolish thought. People like us, we ain't never going to have no home because we be thinking somebody done come along and snatch it from us."

  Quietly, in the still part of his soul that still remembered Andi Sencio and what life could be like at times, Argent fervently hoped that wasn't so.

  41

  Argent left the rental car in the huge parking lot in front of Rebel Hell. The parking area covered acres of black-topped countryside, and he'd been forced to park near the outer perimeter. They'd flown into Hartsfield International Airport from Albany after a brief layover in Memphis and driven straight out to the bar in the plex's Southtown district.

  Calling the establishment a bar was a major understatement, the big shadowrunner knew. It was a lot like calling Southtown a bad place to be. On a good weekend night, Rebel Hell could provide sex, drugs, and southern rock and roll to forty-five thousand citizens of Atlanta's over six million inhabitants. And on the weekends, South-town only saw an increase in the crimes that were committed there on a regular basis.

  The Yakuza ran most of the black market biz in Southtown out of warehouses.

  Neon lights flashed across the front of the bar, alternately displaying an original Confederate States of America flag flying in the breeze and a cyberware cowboy mounted on a heavily cybered bull bucking for all it was worth. Strident music hammered the still, humid night around Argent as he made his way to one of the half-dozen entrances guarded by yabos and mages.

  Laveau and Archangel both wore street dress, taking their lead from Argent, who wore slacks and a loose print shirt, pulling it all together with a synthleather covered Kevlar jacket. The women were overdressed for the event, but Argent hadn't bothered to tell them. They weren't staying.

  Most of Rebel Hell's clientele appeared young and daring. Argent saw hairstyles he was certain he'd never seen before, as well as colors he hadn't thought possible. And it would have been easier to describe what the clothing covered rather than what it didn't. He also noticed that the clothing had a habit of not always covering what it started out covering.

  The doormen were hulking bruisers who looked like they'd been bottle-fed on steroids and hadn't lost the taste as they'd grown. All of them were also heavily cybered. Standing at the door, Argent felt the music hammer into him, literally setting up vibrations inside his flesh.

  He slotted his credstick when he got to the door, indicating he was paying for himself as well as the two women. "Can I get a message to Travers?" he asked.

  The doorman regarded him with heavy lids. "Which one?"

  "Doesn't matter." Argent said. "I'm looking for them both."

  The doorman smiled without mirth. "Biz or pleasure?"

  "We're chummers."

  The doorman didn't appear convinced. "Guess we'll see about that. Jesse and Jason, they're already having themselves a time tonight. Go to the main bar. I'll get a message out. Want to leave a name?"

  "Bobby Lee."

  The doorman smirked. "After the Civil War Confederate general? Think you're a flip joker, huh?"

  Argent dropped fol
ded nuyen into the doorman's hand and passed through the door.

  Tables and chairs formed a loose ring around three different dance floors that he could see. Smoke wreathed the air, and the smell of alcohol burned his nostrils. He drew several hostile stares as he made his way through the crowd to the main bar.

  More than a dozen bartenders worked behind the polished synth-pecan bar. The music made conversation almost impossible, and the unseen DJ kept spinning the tunes together so tightly there was almost no break at all.

  He placed drink orders, Tir na nOg berry water for himself and Archangel, and a Virgin Mary for Laveau.

  "Who are we here to meet, cher?" the ork shaman asked.

  "The Travers twins." Argent replied.

  "I don't know dem boys."

  Argent glanced at the crowd moving across the bar's open spaces, ebbing and flowing like a human tide to the crescendo of music. Rebel yells punctuated the noise. "Jesse and Jason are street sams." he told her.

  "Some of the best I've ever worked with. And they have a tendency to stick no matter how bad the drekstorm is when it comes down."

  "I've heard of them." Archangel told Laveau. "They're supposed to be good."

  "They are." Argent confirmed. He waited patiently at the bar, conscious of the stares he received and of the time passing. The news that Ironaxe had pinned down Sencio's location in Pueblo had preyed on his mind during the few hours of sleep he'd gotten.

  Thankfully he'd been able to keep focused while putting the plan together using the information Peg had turned up on the terrain. Detailed notes were already stored in his personal noteputer where he kept his journals.

  Two trolls shoved their way through the crowd around Argent, vectoring on the big shadowrunner with deliberation. They were both over three meters tall and nearly half of that across. Scarred black go-ganger synthleather covered them.

  "Dese be dem boys?" Laveau asked hopefully.

  Argent knew the ork shaman had scanned the malicious glint in the trolls' cybered eyes. "No." He pushed away from the bar and turned to face the trolls. They weren't the Travers twins, and they definitely looked like trouble.