The Eyes of the Rigger

by Unknown

  Jessi clambered purposefully over the trash to the corner of the building and pulled away a tarpaulin, revealing a hole the architect had not envisaged in his plans. The ceiling of the floor below had been broken through. A ladder, consisting of nylon ropes and aluminum rungs, dangled from the opening. Down below, it was just as dark as up above.

  "This is the way down," said Jessi. She waited until the men had clambered over the junk and then climbed down the ladder. " The stairs don't meet safety norms, though." Pandur complained. "Same old story. No bastard was thinking of senior citizens and runners on crutches."

  "Courage, fellah," Festus said. "For all runners over thirty who make it down, there's an emergency team of doctors waiting to give highly-effective rubs for rheumatism."

  "I'd prefer a lovingly-performed massage from some pretty, blond nurse." Pandur started to climb down.

  "Careful, chummer. Pretty, blond nurses can be darn nasty." " And some men talk a bunch of shit when they've been given a put-down," Jessi commented from below.

  Pandur took it that this was meant for both him and Festus. He wondered if the rigger had made a pass at Jessi and been given his come-uppance. Had the same happened to their Schmidt?

  She's too young and pretty for the shadows. Not surprising if she arouses wishes and desires in the men around her. It's no different for you.

  When Pandur arrived below he looked around. Apart from the fact that there was no junk lying round, except some rubble that had fallen out of the ceiling, the room seemed identical to the one above. As Jessi was heading for the left-hand wall, in the beam of her flashlight he caught sight of a solid steel door in a seemingly equally solid frame. There hadn't been one upstairs. Unlike the makeshift manhole, the door and its frame looked sound and as if they had been installed professionally. The gleaming steel showed it must be of recent date. Battery-fed code lock, Pandur registered. Kienzle's Black Range. Good make and one that would drive even seasoned burglars to despair.

  The blond girl drew out a codechip and opened the door, let the men step through, and then closed it, making sure that the lock had really connected.

  The room lay in darkness. There was the low gurgle of water. The beam of Jessi's flashlight danced over packing cases piled up along the walls, skimmed over steel blinds that filled several empty window sockets and sealed the room. The gurgling noise came from outside. That was plausible. They must be on the floor that was just about on the waterline.

  Jessi looked for, and found, a powerpack on a case and switched on two low-freqency lamps connected to it. Matt light filled the room. Pandur saw he was in a room of about thirty square meters. There were three smaller rooms adjoining. The large room was used as a storeroom. Two other rooms were furnished for comfort. Both contained several folding beds and places to sit, more lamps; one had a dining recess. The last room was a bathroom. A relic of better days that could only be used if you brought water with you and carried it away again. The hideout obviously served the GreenWarriors as fairly comfortable emergency quarters, in which a squad with the appropriate supplies could hold out for a while. There were clear indications that other visitors had stayed here just recently. Pandur discovered a bricked-up opening. The hideout could only be reached through the camoflaged manhole they had used. And, on the side to the water, through the windows.

  Pandur had already imagined the place was more than a temporary base for the Warriors. You didn't set up an underwater depot for a submarine and then leave the boat to its fate without protection. Presumably Warriors would soon be stationed in the depot again. Probably the squad that had launched the diversionary assault on Chilehaus. Or would the Warriors, for security reasons, decide to abandon the base and deploy the Delphin elsewhere? Although he had worked with GreenWar years ago, he had not been integrated into the organization. He had had no insight into the eco-terrorists' logistics. The successes of the Warriors, however, proved their logistical efficiency.

  "The steel blinds are a weak point," Pandur remarked. " Anyone seeing them from outside could easily imagine that they conceal something interesting."

  "Wrong, chummer," Jessi replied. "There's old, flimsy scaffolding in front of the windows that shields the blinds well. Also, the Warriors coated them on the outside with a paint that makes them look completely rusty."

  "Well, okay," Pandur conceded. "But the plastic curtain outside the access room upstairs would arouse suspicion."

  "It's bristling with sensors that report intruders immediately," Jessi countered. "There're explosive charges among the junk up there. If the wrong people show, that floor goes up. At the same time, direct access to the Delphin is blown clear. Convinced now?"

  "Sounds like someone used his brains," Pandur conceded. He was surprised Jessi knew these details. He wondered if she belonged to the Warriors' command level. He found it hard to imagine that a senior Warrior would be used for a shadowrun.

  She had likely only been entrusted with the details so that she didn't blow the base up by mistake.

  Still, someone had made a mistake. The submarine could have been handed over to us in the warehouse district and handed back there. Why are the Warriors risking their base?

  Festus had discovered a heat-sealed pack of soyburgers and devoured one after the other till the pack was empty. Pandur counted twelve.

  "Gonna hit the sack till Patrick. . . I mean that Herr Schmidt gets here," the rigger announced, stashed his artillery under one of the beds, stretched out his limbs and, minutes later, was already snoring.

  Pandur tried to figure out why the rigger had given away Schmidt's real name and why this Patrick didn't stand very high in his books. Because he had ignored him in the Kropotkin? Or was it the other way round? Did Patrick treat him with contempt because something stood between the two men? He remembered the sarcastic disdain Schmidt had shown Jessi.

  "Feel like a beer?" Jessi asked. "There's a crate of Veltins next door." She looked at her multitimer, which, like Pandur, she wore on her left wrist. "Schmidt won't be here for another hour or so."

  "Any time." Pandur followed her into the next room. Jessi switched on the light, closed the connecting door, fetched two bottles of beer and sat down next to Pandur on a sofa-sized bean bag. Pandur opened the bottles. They both drank and relaxed.

  Pandur was aware of the physical nearness of the young woman. He felt more than ever attracted to Jessi. He wondered if it was the same for her. But he didn't think he saw more than a certain curiosity in her glances. He sought her eyes. She smiled fleetingly, but then looked away.

  "Festus sure seems groggy," Pandur said finally.

  "When he has those attacks, his body uses up as much energy in a matter of seconds as somebody in a ten thousand meter race," said Jessi. "And he had two of them, as you'll remember... Afterwards he alway eats like crazy and then crashes out. We'll need a bucket of water to get him awake when Schmidt comes."

  "You know each other?"

  "Who d'you mean?"

  "You didn't meet Festus for the first time today."

  "Right." Jessi didn't seem to want to go any deeper into the subj ect.

  "And Schmidt... Patrick?"

  Jessi gave him a sidelong glance. "None of your business, chummer. But okay. You're pretty observant, huh? Patrick and I were once lovers. Satisfied?"

  Pandur nodded. Yes, it figured. Schmidt treated her like a woman he had ditched. Or she him. Pandur took a swallow of beer. It really wasn't any of his business.

  Jessi seemed to have changed her mind. She suddenly had the need to talk. "We were together for a while. Was a lot of fun at first. We seemed made for each other. Had a whole lot of fun in the sack, had the same ideals, fought for the same aims, were in the same Warriors squad. D'you understand? Theory and practice, love and sex. Discussions, action, danger, tenderness and wild screwing. All together and all at once..." She seemed to lose herself in her thoughts, but then got a hold of herself. "It was too much, I feel. All too close together, too compressed. What other peo
ple don't find in a lifetime, we had in a few weeks, a few months. Again and again, faster and faster, the highpoints, the orgasms... Not only when we were screwing. Mortal danger's also a kind of orgasm. You'll understand me, chummer, you must experience it as well..."

  Pandur wasn't sure if he felt it exactly the same way. But at least he knew what she was talking about. "For some it's a sex substitute," he said.

  "Yeah, but we had both, everything together, all the time, a chain that never ended, a carousel that turned faster and faster... Know something, chummer? At some point you stop seeing the individual highpoints, you're on the top level and you never come back down. You can't enjoy it anymore. It comes to be boring to you, while all the time your body's burning out."

  She was silent for so long that Pandur thought the subject was closed for her. Then she said quietly, "I finished with everything from one day to the next. It wasn't until I came down from the trip that I saw everything was turning in a circle. We hadn't let anything near us, we were feeding off our own selves, couldn't savor it anymore, couldn't listen to other people anymore. When I was out of it, I realized it had all been intoxication. And I realized something else. Patrick could have gone on playing this game many more rounds. He got a kind of added satisfaction from it. Actually, Patrick is selfish and vain and arrogant. That became clear to me when it was over. I thought it had been our game but really it was his. I joined in, played according to his rules. By denying myself, I enjoyed it for a while. But that's over now."

  "D'you still love him?"

  "No." It sounded matter-of-fact. "I admire him, yes. He's intelligent and believes in the Warriors' aims. He's a good strategist and can carry things through. It's good for the Warriors that they have people like him. They've just got to watch that Patrick and those like him don't take over the whole operation. He loves himself too such to love other people."

  She seemed to have been working through her experiences for some time. Her sober, balanced assessment of the man matched the fleeting impression Pandur had gained of him. That time in Munich there had been people like Patrick - a touch too fanatical, a touch too uncompromising, a touch too inhuman -who had sacrificed him at the crucial moment, had been ready to contemplate his death, although there had been alternatives. When he survived despite that, he had broken off contact with the eco-terrorists. But he had only been on the fringes, had helped them a few times, not a real activist. With Jessi it was different.

  "They just let you go?" he was surprised.

  "They don't kill anyone who wants out - if that's what you mean. I was... released. For special assignments. I still do the occasional operation, like this one. It's a slow growing apart. At some time the information I have will be outdated and the Warriors can let me go."

  And you're looking for a new task, Jessi. Right? A new man, too?

  As if she had been reading his thoughts, she went on, "I've joined the Klabauter. The aims are almost the same, but the means are different."

  "How did he take it?"

  "Patrick? Quite cool, at least outwardly. Perhaps a bit taken aback, a bit sore that I had the strength to free myself from his embrace. I don't think he's fully grasped yet that it's over for good. He probably thinks I'll change my mind and come crawling back to him."

  Pandur was silent.

  "Tell me about yourself," the girl said, "before I talk myself silly." Pandur hesitated. Patrick would be coming to give him his credstick, maybe give him a ride and drop him off somewhere. It was improbable he would ever have any dealings with Jessi again. Their paths would never cross again in the shadows, much less privately. He liked the girl. He didn't want to repay her trust with silence, not least with lies. But he didn't want to tell her too much about himself. Too many people knew too much about him already. A shadowrunner should belong to the shadows and not to the ears that listened in on the shadows. He decided not to reveal any concrete information. She had a disappointing love affair behind her. It would interest her to hear about another disappointed love. He told her about Natalie.

  He confined himself to the essentials, leaving out the names of Renraku and AG Chemie, speaking of opponents, of pursuers. Jessi listened closely, looking him in the eyes as she did so. He had the impression she was really interested in the story.

  When he came to Natalie's death and so to the end of his story, she gave him time to collect himself again.

  "I think you're wrong about her," she then said gently, softly, almost tenderly. "She loved you and didn't want to betray you."

  "I stick to the facts. She tried. She wanted to buy her own life with mine."

  Jessin shook her head. "I don't understand her but I'm sure she didn't really want to. You're lacking some information she had. That's why you can't see how it all fit together."

  "There's no point in driving myself crazy thinking about it. She's dead and that's the end of the matter."

  "Have you had a woman since then, Pandur?" Jessi wanted to know.

  "I'm not a eunuch."

  "I wasn't asking whether you'd screwed a woman since but if you'd been in love with a woman."

  Pandur shook his head mutely.

  "Then it's not the end of the matter," said Jessi. "You've got to realize that she didn't really want to betray you. That's the only way you can lose the fear of letting yourself get involved with someone again."

  The store of wisdom of a girl that's only just grown up Pandur thought. He didn't say it out loud. He didn't want to hurt her feelings.

  "I'd like to go to bed with you, Pandur," she said quietly.

  For a moment he thought he couldn't believe his ears. But she had said it. Her eyes left him no doubt. She had not only said it but she had meant it as well.

  This time he didn't keep his thoughts to himself.

  "D'you want to play the soul doctor? You said yourself that sex doesn't necessarily have anything to do with love... " He broke off when he realized he had set a trap for himself.

  She smiled. "Precisely. I don't claim I want to cure you. I'd simply like to sleep with you. Because I like you. Because I fancy you. Because I like sex and because I need sex. Have you forgotten? Patrick and I always screwed after the moments of danger... It's real fun then."

  "But... I thought you'd broken with that..." Pandur felt as helpless as a schoolboy in puberty. And at the same time he sensed the warmth of the young woman next to him, was aware of her nearness, her woman's body.

  You've wanted her all along. Why are you trying to talk her out of It idiot?

  "I broke with Patrick and his ego trip, with the endless carousel ride. But not with sex. Not with danger either. It's a question of the right dose."

  She pressed herself against him. She didn't try to seduce him. She only issued an invitation.

  He accepted it. Not gratefully, but with pleasure and delight.

  He wanted her.

  He got her.

  It was different than the time with Natalie in the cave. Jessi hadn't lied to him. She didn't want to play the spin doctor, and she didn't want to do him a favor. She wanted to do herself a favor.

  They tore the clothes off each other and threw themselves at each other as if they had both been living under vows of chastity for years. They took wild delight in their naked bodies, confining their foreplay to just one or two violent, almost painful embraces. Their pleasure discharged itself after very few minutes in a shared orgasm. Jessi, at the climax, let out a cry loud enough to wake the dead. The rigger, asleep in the next room, seemed not to hear a thing. Or he didn't let on that he did. When they were resting, exhausted, Pandur could hear the same muted snoring tones as before.

  They made love a second time, once more wild and uninhibited. Then a final time with a more intimate exploration of the other and more tenderness.

  Afterwards they held each other in their arms for a while. For the first time, Pandur took in his partner's body consciously and lingeringly in all its detail. Jessi had an almost flawless body. She had small, well formed brea
sts, a flat stomach, narrow hips and perfect skin. She was as covered in sweat as he, but she smelt nice and her blond hair, now let down, fell to her breasts.

  As if in silent accord, they released each other, rose and dressed. They didn't want to risk being surprised by Schmidt. Pandur had work to do.

  "I copied a few files that won't interest our client," he said. For a moment he considered whether he should let Jessi in on the secret of the Africa files. It was an easier burden to bear if shared with another person. But then he decided against it. He would warn her before they split up. As a participant in a shadowrun she was already in enough jeopardy without knowing about the explosive data. If he initiated her, he might be signing her death warrant.

  "They include files that could be important for Festus," he said. He thought fleetingly about whether there was any connection between the pointers to MTC in Prague and the operations in Africa, but none occurred to him.

  He kissed Jessi gently on the shoulder before turning his attention to the cyberdeck. He wanted to keep an original chip for himself and hand over two copies containing selected data to Schmidt.

  When he switched on the deck, he couldn't help thinking of the difficulties copying had caused him last time. After the Renraku run, without his knowledge, hidden data had been stored on the original chip which then didn't turn up on the copies. This hidden data was apparently one of the motives for the pursuit of Natalie and him. Natalie had wanted to buy first her own life and then Pandur's with the original chip, finally just her own. For her the chip had become a one-way ticket. If it hadn't existed, Natalie might still be alive. Pandur would still be Thor. And Thor wouldn't know that his companion loved her own life more than anything else in the world...

  Pandur hesitated briefly. But then he decided not to forgo a ritual that had accompanied him through the shadows for ten years. There was another motive. Beyond the material required, he had copied files that interested him personally or that might be important for Festus. He was not prepared to let his client have this material as a bonus. Least of all the red-hot secret data.