by Lisa Smedman
Strange Eyes had been leaning forward, straining to hear her. Still speaking, Night Owl whipped the duster across the space that separated them. The shuriken's points jammed up against the back of his hand, and should have bitten deeply into his flesh. Instead they merely bent, and the knockout drug inside the shuriken's hollow center flowed out onto Night Owl's fingers, wasted.
Strange Eyes knocked the duster aside with a sweeping motion so fast that his hand blurred. His other hand shot out and found Night Owl's throat.
"That was foolish," he hissed.
Night Owl tried to swallow, but couldn't.
"Where is the coin now?" he asked aloud. Then he added a mental command: Tell me.
As magic forced her lips open, Night Owl knew she was a dead woman. His spell would prevent her from lying. Her right eye began twitching furiously. She had no choice but to speak the truth. "I don't have—"
From somewhere outside the limo came a tremendous explosion. The rear of the vehicle bucked up with a creaking of twisted metal, and Strange Eyes tumbled forward into Night Owl's lap. He sprang away from her as the rear of the car slammed back down onto the ground, and he twisted to look out a window. Even though the glass was heavily tinted, he stared at it as if he could see what was happening outside.
When he threw himself flat on the seat, Night Owl followed his lead. A second later, the side window bulged in and then shattered as something that sounded like a jackhammer hit it. A shower of tinted glass sprayed into the back of the limo, dusting them both like black snow, and then the window on the other side of the car exploded outward. With both side windows gone, the sound of a machine gun outside was suddenly very loud. The armor-piercing rounds that had taken out the windows chewed into the interior of the car, shredding the fabric in the ceiling. Other bullets punched into the sides of the limo, sounding like hammers on steel.
Peering up through a shattered window from where she lay on the seat, Night Owl could see traffic lights and street signs sliding by. The limo was still straining forward, even with its rear wheels blown out. She could hear the thwack-thwack-thwack of shredded rubber, the roar of exhaust through what was left of the muffler, and the shrieking of metal on cement as the limo dragged itself along the street by its front wheels.
The bullets were hitting the rear of the vehicle now, no longer chewing up the inside, and Strange Eyes' attention was totally focused out the back window, which was still intact. It was now or never.
Night Owl launched herself forward, grabbing the window frame and hauling herself out of the vehicle. She flipped out the window, bending at the waist, and then tumbled forward and out of the car. As soon as her hands touched the pavement, she tucked into a somersault and rolled away from the limo. Cars veered around her, horns blaring, and then she jumped up onto the curb.
Her luck had changed: she'd bailed in an intersection. The limo was screeching away to her right, and whoever had been shooting at it was to her left. Night Owl sprinted toward a side street, turning her head left at the last moment to see who'd been tossing all the lead. She caught a glimpse of a familiar face: it was the ganger who'd been in the Saab.
Adrenaline pumping. Night Owl pounded down the block and around another corner. She heard the wailing of a siren close by; it sounded like the TPs were only a few blocks away. Behind her, the gunfire suddenly stopped. She heard the scream of tires on cement and an engine accelerating. It roared away in the opposite direction from where she was headed.
Night Owl ducked into the shadow of an alley and stopped to catch her breath as a Tribal Police cruiser flashed by.
It looked as though she hadn't needed to stir the pot: the Red Lotus and whatever gang Strange Eyes was from had already started mixing it up. But Night Owl didn't hold out the hope that either side would forget her any time soon. The Red Lotus had seen her coming out of the limo and would assume she'd tipped Strange Eyes off about Chiao and his interest in the "Coins of Luck"—whatever those were. They'd want their kilo of flesh as payback. Strange Eyes, meanwhile, would assume that Night Owl knew where the coin was. He wasn't about to just let her go, either.
Night Owl pulled the SkyTrain token out of her pocket and tumbled it across her fingers, trying to decide what to do next. It looked as though she'd jumped out of the crucible and into the fire. A coin flip wasn't going to do her much good now. No matter which she chose—heads or tails—she'd get burned.
7
Small Accomplishments
Alma boarded the SkyTrain and sat down. The advertisements that lined the platform slid away as the elevated train pulled out of the station, electric engine cycling through its distinctive pattern of three rising whines. She stared at the cellphone in her hand, contemplating the message the rogue Superkid had left on it. Like the I Ching reading she'd cast earlier this morning, the message was disturbing. Her nemesis not only knew about Alma's difficulties at PCI but seemed also to be hinting, with the "sound sleep" crack, that she knew about the beta-test cyberware inside Alma's head.
Alma had thought that knowledge of the REM inducer had died with Gray Squirrel. Now she wondered if this woman had tortured it out of him before slitting his throat.
The message had been on her cellphone when Alma first checked it at 7 a.m. She had reread it twenty times in the hour and a half since then.
HI AL. HOPE YOU SLEPT WELL. BUT THEN, YOU AND I BOTH KNOW HOW SOUNDLY YOU CAN SLEEP, DON'T WE?
WATCH YOUR HOOP TODAY. THE RED LOTUS MAY COME GUNNING FOR YOU. AND KEEP A HEADS-UP FOR A GUY WITH WEIRD WHITE EYES—HE'LL FRAG YOUR MIND UP FASTER THAN YOU CAN BLINK.
SO . . . HAVE YOU GUESSED WHO I AM YET?
Alma cleared the screen, finally erasing the message. She took a moment to compose her reply and then spoke into the cell. "I know that you're a Superkid from Batch Alpha. What I want to know now is what you want. Meet with me. Leave me a message where you'll be, and when, and I'll be there."
She watched as the phone translated her message into text and stored it as a memo. The next time the rogue Superkid accessed Alma's cell to leave a taunting message, she'd see it.
But that was the strange thing: this morning's message didn't have the same tone as the others. It hadn't been a taunt but a warning—albeit one that Alma didn't fully understand. She'd heard of the Red Lotus: they were one of the more notorious gangs in Vancouver. Presumably the man with "weird white eyes" was one of their members. Obviously the rogue Superkid had angered this individual and now faced some sort of retaliation. Because she was a dead ringer for Alma, the gang members were liable to take a shot at Alma if they saw her. The rogue Superkid wanted to warn her about them.
But that begged a question. Having gone to all that trouble to frame Alma and get her suspended from her job at PCI, why did the woman now want to keep her alive?
Alma pondered her options. If the rogue Superkid agreed to a meeting, there was no point in going through with Kageyama's extraction. But if the woman wouldn't agree, then infiltrating the shadowrunner community would be the only way Alma could get closer to her.
She decided to wait and see what happened in the next hour and a half. If a reply message appeared on her cellphone before 10 a.m., she would abort the extraction. If not . . .
Over and above the disturbing message on her cellphone, this morning's I Ching reading was also cause for concern. The trigrams had been water over fire, two elements that opposed each other. Together they made up the hexagram Small Accomplishments. While the reading indicated that her day would begin well enough, it hinted at trouble to come, if balance and flexibility were not maintained: What begins auspiciously may end up in chaos. Hope was offered, however, by the fact that four of the lines were either changing yin or changing yang. Later, the hexagram would change into the one for Great Possession. The I Ching seemed to be indicating that if Alma could maintain a balanced and flexible course, then disaster and chaos could be averted long enough for her to gain a "great possession": Akira Kageyama, perhaps?
As the SkyTra
in slid quietly along its elevated track, Alma stared out the window. It was raining; the clouds that had hung over the city for the past week like a wet gray blanket still stretched from one end of the city to the other. Watery daylight filtered through them, washing all color from the city. The graffiti on the buildings below, obscured by the rain that drizzled down the window, looked streaky and blurred, a pale shadow of its usual defiant colors.
Despite the rain, the streets below teemed with life. This branch of the SkyTrain line looped above the Downtown Eastside. where BTL dealers, pimps and gangers swam like sharks through milling schools of chipheads, prostitutes, street people and illegal immigrants. Back when Vancouver was still part of Canada, the area was known as "Canada's poorest postal code." During the forty-four years that the Salish-Shidhe Council had been responsible for it, the Downtown Eastside hadn't fared much better. Like a mold that grows back, no matter how powerful the cleaning solution, it resisted every attempt to scrub it free of crime and poverty. Hundreds of thousands of nuyen spent on social programs disappeared into the Downtown Eastside without a trace, like water into a sponge.
Rising out of the middle of this desolation, looking like a bar of gold that had been stood on end in a garbage heap, was the Woodwards Arcology. Twenty-two stories tall and four city blocks wide at its base, the self-contained city within a city was a rectangular slab of gold-tinted glass and concrete. The windows on its lower stories were thick enough to prevent even a T-bird from smashing through, and the only doors at ground level were heavily monitored emergency exits. The only two legitimate points of entry were the helicopter landing pads on the roof and the SkyTrain station tunnel that pierced the arcology's third story.
The Woodwards Arcology had been named after a department store that had once stood on the site—a building that activists had sought for decades to turn into housing for the Downtown Eastside's homeless. Like those dreams, the original store was long gone. The only thing that had been salvaged was the enormous "W" that had stood on top of the original building. Five meters high and illuminated by red neon, it had blazed like a beacon over Vancouver for more than a century. Urban legend had it that if you could climb the arcology's ice-slick glass to the rooftop and touch the W, you would become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, but the only people who profited were the vultures who waited on the streets below to pick over the flattened corpses of those who fell to their deaths.
Alma looked up at the helicopters that buzzed around the rooftop of the arcology. In one hour and fifty-eight minutes—assuming he was on time—Buzz, the shadowrunner who was providing tactical support on this assignment, would be landing his sky cab on the roof. Assuming that she didn't abort the extraction before then, Alma would need to get Kageyama to the roof at 10:30 a.m. on the dot.
As SkyTrain slid into the station, Alma rose to her feet. Smoothing her silk Zoe skirt, she waited until the doors of the train car slid open and then walked with the other disembarking passengers toward the security checkpoint. She firmly resisted the urge to make sure that the yellow square of plastic that was Jane Lee's resident ID permit was still pinned above the breast pocket of her suit jacket. Secguards were trained to watch for nervous gestures; she'd be singled out for extra scrutiny unless she appeared relaxed and self-assured. As she passed a mirrored wall—probably a one-way window for visual surveillance—she pretended to be checking her appearance. She patted the neat bun that she'd rolled her hair into that morning and glanced down as if making sure her jacket wasn't creased. The ID card was still there.
The SkyTrain passengers funneled between twin plastic pillars tall enough that a troll passing between them would be bracketed from the horns down. Inside the pillars were scanners that could be calibrated to penetrate anything from cloth to inch-thick steel. The scan would reveal any weapons, explosives or hazardous materials, regardless of whether they were merely carried on the body or were built into cyberware.
Alma had hidden her two "weapons" in the spot that was most likely to be missed: inside the heels of her stylish, spike-heeled shoes. With luck, the secguard at the console up ahead would get sloppy and wouldn't scan her all the way to the ground. If he did spot the injectors, however, she had a story ready: they were part of a patented new shock-absorption system.
As she passed between the pillars, Alma held her breath. A moment later, she was through the checkpoint without any questions being asked. Curious, she angled across the station to a spot where she could see the monitor where the secguard sat. She saw the answer immediately: the scanner had been set so that it penetrated cloth only—it hadn't even scanned the interiors of her shoe heels. Naked blue-white figures walked across the screen, oblivious to the fact that the scanners were electronically undressing them.
By sheer luck, Alma had managed to smuggle her injector into the Woodwards Arcology completely undetected. She decided that it must be the first of the small but significant accomplishments the I Ching had predicted.
* * *
Dr. Silverman leaned an elbow on her desk as she studied the three-dimensional rendering of Alma's brain that hovered in the air above the projection pad. With a slight frown, she sent a signal along the fiberoptic cable that connected her to a cyberterminal on her desk, commanding the projected image to rotate and sectionalize. Like pieces of sliced bread falling away from the main loaf, slices of the image separated, fell to the horizontal plane and then vanished, allowing the cybersurgeon to look deeper into the brain.
"I don't see any evidence of chronically dysfunctional tissue," Silverman said. She pointed with her finger, and a glowing red dot materialized inside the left half of the image, which had been coded yellow and green and blue to differentiate between the different regions of the brain. "I would expect any tissue damage to be localized here, in the precentral gyrus, or here, in the premotor cortex, but both of those regions appear healthy.
"This is your move-by-wire system." The glowing red dot drifted toward a boxy, black shape at the base of the brain and then followed the tendrils of black that stretched down from it. The display shifted to show a marquee of alphanumeric code and what looked like a circuit-by-circuit diagram.
"It seems to be functioning within normal limits, and all of its synaptic and neural connections are intact. I don't see any damaged tissue—nothing that would induce temporal lobe epilepsy."
Alma was reclining on the examining couch with a diagnostic probe plugged into one of the chipjacks at the nape of her neck. The news that her tremors weren't TLE was reassuring and frightening at the same time. It was a relief to know that her brain tissue wasn't deteriorating and that her central nervous system wasn't about to be thrown into a permanent state of seizure. But it was unnerving not to know what was causing the tremors—not to have any data on how severe the problem would become.
Dr. Silverman turned to face Alma. She looked young: she had the muscle tone and smooth skin of someone in her early twenties, but that was probably due to age inhibitors. A gold wedding band with Native totems confirmed her citizenship: only Full Bloods were allowed to wear jewelry or clothing that depicted a clan animal.
"Have you experienced any feelings of alienation or depersonalization?" she asked.
"No."
"What about perceptual distortions? Any difficulty in determining distance or locating the source of a sound?"
"No. My cyberears and eyes seem to be in perfect order. Why? Do you think they're the source of the tremors?"
"No." The doctor shook her head. "Those are just symptoms that can crop up if the move-by-wire system creates a secondary focus in the motor systems. Other symptoms include impotence, incontinence—"
"No," Alma added quickly. "Nothing like that." Dr. Silverman turned back to the brain scan and centered the glowing red dot on a black shadow inside the pons region. Alma recognized the cyberware as the REM inducer. It had the same diameter and thickness as one of her I Ching coins and was surrounded by a series of induction wires that gave it the appearance of
a flattened spider. There was a cylindrical bulge on one side that Alma guessed must be the miniature bomb that had been hardwired into the inducer.
"What's this device?" the doctor asked. "I don't recognize it."
Alma wove together fact and fiction. If she was going to find out what was really causing her tremors, she had to tell the doctor at least part of the truth.
"It's experimental cyberware," Alma answered. "I suffer from seasonal affective disorder. I volunteered six months ago to have a serotonin inducer put in, to see if it would alleviate my depression during the winter."
She gave the doctor a convivial grin and continued on in a prattling tone. "I'm so glad I volunteered for the study, especially with the terrible weather we've had lately. Normally, I'd be flat on my back for eight hours a day, under a bank of artificial lights."
Dr. Silverman nodded, her eyes on the scan. Alma could tell that she was adjusting something; a series of three-dimensional bar graphs materialized beside the holo of the brain and then disappeared.
"The device seems to be functioning," she said. "There's current flowing through it, and your serotonin levels are high—above normal range."
"Could it be responsible for the tremors in my hand?" Alma asked.
"It has to be—I can't see any other reason for them. Given the region of the brain where it's situated, the device may be triggering pontine geniculate occipital spikes. PGO spikes typically occur during sleep; they're the cause of the rapid eye movements that occur when we dream. They can also trigger involuntary motor activity elsewhere in the body, especially in the extremities. If you've ever watched a cat or dog while it's in REM sleep, you might have noticed a sudden twitching of its paws at the same time that rapid eye movements are occurring."
The doctor paused, lost in thought. "It's strange, though, that only your left hand is affected. Why not your right hand—or your feet? Have there been any signs of tremors in your other extremities?"
