Chapter Fourteen
Knight Errant Office
Los Angeles
Netcat followed the dwarf to Knight Errant, which was a surprise to her. He hadn’t felt like a KE wageslave, or even one of their techies. And the technocritter wolf? Definitely not KE standard issue.
So what was he, and why was he going into the KE office? She parked the car in a local lot across the street and used a machine sprite to give the mechanized attendant the required creds. No currency changed hands, but the auto-attendant wasn’t smart enough to know that. Once the sprite decompiled, she tossed two PainZap tablets back and washed them down with water. She knew her limits on compiling, and just how bad the headaches could get before she suffered any fading.
Netcat pulled up the technomancer equivalent to augmented reality and downloaded the information that the tag she’d placed on the dwarf had found so far. Not much, other than a few searches for street addresses. Los Angeles. A few names. Fred Jacobson, Kazuma Tetsu, and Neela Jinkins. None of them rang a bell, so she set up her own searches using a registered data sprite. She wanted to give it time, and as long as it was registered, GOD might not notice.
Might.
Netcat continued watching the building, watching the black suits go in and out. Los Angeles in the morning—not much different than Seattle. Except for the air. It was smellier and dingier here. The sooner she found a way in to Horizon, the sooner she could go home and get back to Slamm-0! and their son.
Another ten minutes, and the tag started feeding her all kinds of information. From Netcat’s perspective, this dwarf had declared an intel war on those three names. He was downloading everything from photos to blogs to subscription use—to personnel files.
She sat up straight. They were all Knight Errant employees. She couldn’t see what was in the files—all she could see was his search history as it unfolded. She fed the information to her own data sprite as it worked in another window. Her headache eased a bit as the aspirin kicked in, but she had the sneaking suspicion it was going to get worse.
Abruptly the Annex break-in she’d seen on the vids earlier flagged in her sprite’s window as it zeroed in on the name Toshi Morimoto. That window led to more windows, each of them headed up with the names in the dwarf’s search. Information came in on each—none of which flagged anything. They were all employees, all of them technicians, all had A-1 ratings and all had been trained by Morimoto.
Then she saw something that made her jaw drop.
Morimoto’s death certificate.
She pulled up the Annex dump file retrieved from a PCC security blotter—a KE tech had been in the building, and her sprite had found the report given by one of the security guards working inside. She cross-referenced that information with reports across the Matrix on the Annex, Morimoto, and Horizon. As the information scrolled down, she glanced at the tag’s window—the dwarf was zeroed in one of the employees.
Kazuma Tetsu.
She moved the windows over and brought up what her data-sprite had pulled on him. Twenty-six, elf, born in Japan, moved to the UCAS with his twin sister, Hitori Tetsu, when they were both young. Suffered a nine-month coma after the Crash, diagnosed with AIPS, then had a miraculous recovery and was recruited by Knight Errant after an incident three years ago at a local coffee shop. Tetsu prevented a group of suspected shadowrunners from using a back door in the coffee shop to hack into Horizon. He had a perfect record. No missed days. She touched the sister’s name, and came up blank.
Nothing.
She pushed the sprite harder, and finally a few dribbles of information trickled out. Hitori had worked briefly as an artist for Ares. Sister to Kazuma Tetsu.
Netcat spotted a small Lone Star report. Reported missing by her brother five months ago.
The dwarf was searching through Tetsu’s personal life. His family here and in Japan. His medical records, as well as his upgrade purchases—both with his account and by Knight Errant’s. He’s looking at Tetsu’s commlink…his programs… She combed the same stores the dwarf was hitting and found nothing. Not a single upgrade.
And Tetsu has a missing sister. A twin.
Drek! She knew of one technomancer who was that obsessed with finding his twin. And he lived in Los Angeles.
A new window appeared. Surprised and relieved to see Silk’s ID, she answered immediately.
There was a pause before her window responded.
Now the pause dragged out forever.
Another delay, briefer this time.
Netcat disconnected everything and pulled out of every window except the tag. She had a vague idea of what Tetsu looked like from the photos. Tall, slender, longish dark hair. He was Asian, but only half, given the look of his features. Shouldn’t be hard to spot. There was no way she’d get into the building undetected. Not enough time to plan. But there might be a way to get a warning to Tetsu—and hopefully a way out.
A new AR window popped up. She smiled at the name, and answered.
Chapter Fifteen
Knight Errant Office
Kazuma had made it through the door at five after nine. Late, but not by too much. He wasn’t sure if he’d been late by five minutes before, however, and that worried him. He knew how law enforcement worked. They scrutinized anything out of the ordinary three days before a murder and three days after. Which is why he knew he had to keep going into work and not touch that data, even though it was killing him not to.
A few coworkers nodded to him as he entered the elevator. Karl, the smallest troll he’d ever known—who still clocked in well over two meters tall—slipped into the elevator with him and smiled around his tusks. “Sorry…I’m late to a meeting. Usually I wait till the car’s empty.”
“So ka.” Kazuma managed a smile and inhaled. It wasn’t that the troll took up the entire space—it was just a very real optical illusion when compared to his own, smaller body.
“You hear about that break-in last night?”
Kazuma started to nod, but paused instead. As the head security tech on several of the Horizon accounts, it would make sense that he would have been alerted—but he hadn’t been. In fact, he couldn’t remember getting any alerts in his AR. He reached into his bag to pull out his commlink—had to keep up appearances, even here in KE—but it wasn’t there. He pulled his bag up in the cramped space and dug around. The commlink wasn’t there!
“Hey, you okay?” Karl tilted his head. “You look paler than usual.”
“I think I might have a cold or something.”
“Wow…and you never get sick. Must be bad.” Karl watched him a minute. “Something wrong?”
“My commlink…I can’t believe I left it in my car.”
The troll laughed and the elevator vibrated. “That’s a rich one. Why would you ever take it off?”
Think! �
��Oh…Karl…I have to be in AR all day long, sometimes fifteen hours a day. When I get home, I just want to relax, shut it all down, and watch mindless vids.” Did that sound good? Does it make sense?
“Now that I can understand, Tetsu.” The elevator stopped, and Karl got off, sidestepping a dwarf getting on.
Once the door closed, the dwarf reached up and punched a code into the elevator panel. All the floors lit up before the dwarf said, “Personnel.”
He turned and looked up at Kazuma. “Good morning, Mr. Tetsu. You and I need to have a conversation.”
Chapter Sixteen
Unknown Location
HipOldGuy was awake, but he couldn’t remember waking up. He didn’t know where he was.
When he was.
How he was.
And the resonance was all around him.
But he wasn’t alone. And he was in pain. And the pain, when it touched him, when he touched the streams, turned the beautiful, incandescent wisps black.
A tree as tall as the world and as black as night twisted itself around him. He could look down, but he couldn’t look up. He was a part of the tree; a branch close to the ground, his arms and legs melted into the bark. It didn’t hurt when he didn’t move. But then his skin folded and wrinkled as the bark slowly devoured him and he tried to escape, and the pain would start again.
The wisps thickened and fell from the sky and pooled onto the ground below as he heard two distinct voices. One was male and the other was hard to pinpoint, but it sounded like a chorus of voices bound together to make one.
It’s still not enough.
“I don’t think there are enough technomancers in the world to do what you want,” said an eerie male voice.
Of course there are. We just haven’t found them all yet. This voice echoed in his mind.
Hearing a faint sigh nearby, Hip moved his eyes just enough to look at the branch beside him. It twisted and arched, and if he looked closely, he could see a face bent into the bark. Closed eyes and a silent scream. He heard the scream of the realms.
“Well, unless you can break into every corp and get their lists, we’ve just about exhausted everyone Horizon had.”
Then we should do that.
“Are you crazy? You do realize the moment you try something like that, we’ll have every corporate spider team on our location in minutes. GOD’s always watching.” Frustration permeated his tone.
You sound like one of them.
“Well, I’m not one of them.”
Hip recognized that voice. The one that wasn’t in his head. It was the same voice he remembered from the game. The gas-masked man. And with that thought, more pain came, and he screamed. Or he would have screamed if he had a voice. Or a mouth. He tried to call up his AR, and again received only pain as the bark scraped deep crevices into his flesh. His blood ran down the extended branch, dripping into the tree’s gaping maw. And when he called out to his sprites…
Nothing.
So, he kept his thoughts singular. One thought. One…reoccurring command.
Deliver it to Soldat. Deliver it to Soldat. Deliver it to Soldat. DeliverItToSoldat. DeliverItToSoldat. Deliverittosoldat. Deliverittosoldat. Deliverittosoldatdeliverittosoldat deliverittosoldatdeliverittosoldatdeliverittosoldatdeliverittosoldatdeliverittosoldat—
Now now, you just stop that. Once you just surrender to me, all the pain will go away. You hear the voices of the others? Just join with them! It’s easy. Just let go and join them.
Yes… Hip could hear them. All of them. A cacophony of sound, buzzing in his brain. Thousands of voices calling out…
Deliverittosoldat.
But the voices were so loud. They clawed at him as if he were the muddy bank they couldn’t climb out of. The pain was too much. So much easier to just stay still, and let the tree take him.
Soldat? What is Soldat? Bring what to Soldat?
“You talking to him?” Now the male’s voice sounded curious.
One voice over the other…drowning out his own thought.
Yes. He’s fighting. They all fight. And eventually, they surrender. But he keeps moving around a command line.
“What’s the line?”
Screaming…
Bring it to Soldat. What is Soldat? Bring what?
“Cal…Soldat means Soldier. He’s been commanding something to deliver something to Soldier. The Soldier.”
The bodiless voice in Hip’s head screamed louder than the rest. Everyone was silenced.
Forever.
Chapter Seventeen
Horizon Home Office
Office of Artus Wagner
Charis made it back across town within an hour, give or take. She stopped at the coffee shop nearby and ordered Wagner his favorite morning drinks again, seeing as how his earlier enjoyment had been destroyed by that horrid little dwarf. She hoped Mack could work some of his magic. She needed to see whatever was in that data packet Artus had hid in that host. She had to know what was so important that he felt he had to hide it in the first place, and why some unknown player had stolen it.
She strode through the front doors. The security men smiled at her, and she hoped Powell was gone by now. But just to make sure: “Hey Zanth?” she addressed the ork behind the desk. “Does Mr. Wagner still have company? Did Mr. Powell leave?”
“Oh yes, ma’am,” Zanth answered in his deep, rumbling voice. She always loved that voice. “But a Knight Errant officer went in about a half hour ago. Haven’t seen him come out yet.”
Knight Errant? Her conversation with Mack fresh in her mind, not to mention what she’d overheard in the office between Powell and Wagner, Charis narrowed her eyes. “What did he look like?”
“Young. Elf. Longish, dark hair. Didn’t really see his face.”
Charis handed Zanth one of the coffees, winked, and strode toward the office. Once at her desk she put her things away, took her desk PAN off AWAY, and picked up the coffee before knocking twice and then opening the door. “Sorry sir, but I need to speak with you about—”
The smell hit her first, before the scene. It was thick and coppery. She’d smelled it plenty of times before.
Artus was laid out on his desk, his pants around his ankles. His eyes, open and staring.
And his mouth…his mouth was stuffed with his—
Charis set the cup of coffee down before approaching for a closer look, hands on her hips. “Well damn, Artus. I don’t know what pisses me off more; that I’m looking at a year of undercover work down the toilet, or that I really wanted to be the one to shove that into your sick little mouth.”
Chapter Eighteen
Outside Knight Errant Office
Netcat frowned.
Not that she knew where MoonShine’s home was. The two only knew each other off the GiTm0 board, but they had met up in VR once. She knew Moon was a male, he was young, and he had no augmentation at all. Not even a datajack.
She watched the front door again, wishing there was some way she could see inside, find where Tetsu was, and yank him out. One of her research sprites—a registered one she kept for legal activities in the Matrix, because researching people wasn’t a crime—popped up in her AR. She had sent it out earlier to track down any information it could on this dwarf named Powell. She skimmed what came up in the Spri
te’s window and felt her blood run very, very cold.
She swallowed and looked back at the door to KE.
Chapter Nineteen
Knight Errant Office
Kazuma sat in the single chair facing Mr. Powell’s impressive desk. He had been in this office only twice—both times to receive a promotion. Both had been given to him by Trajan Black, the manager who had hired him, and a longtime friend of Toshi Morimoto. Kazuma had asked several times where Mr. Black was, but Powell only raised his hand now and then as he focused on images in his AR.
Kazuma forced himself not to notice, but he could see what Powell was looking at—the dwarf didn’t have the files in a protected folder, but out in the open.
Twice he saw his name. And that of Morimoto.
The gunshot wound in his side throbbed, and he felt sweat trickle down his neck, the sides of his face, past his datajack. He felt naked without his commlink. He spoofed a neutral ID from security, one he’d set up a year ago, and compiled a sprite behind it to search for anything on where Black could be, who this dwarf was, and if he’d done anything to expose himself. And Kazuma did it all while maintaining a somewhat composed visage.
Except for the sweating.
“Mr. Tetsu—are you in pain?”
The question surprised him and he blinked at the dwarf. “Oh yes. Yes I am. It’s a stomach thing.”
“Stomach thing?” the dwarf waved in the air, brushing his AR desktop away. “You’re leaning toward your right side—and knowing physiology, your stomach is on your left. Are you sure you’re not suffering from anything more serious?”
Shadowrun: Dark Resonance Page 7
