She half-listened to him as she prepared the Shinobi for flight, and moved everything into position. Clockwork was angry at Kazuma, so she guessed he’d knocked the hobgoblin off the host. Or did something worse. He’d bruised Clockwork’s ego, and if the others didn’t get into the hangar and give her a hand, he planned on taking that rage out on her.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Contagion UV Host
Delaney dug the heels of her boots into the somewhat pixelated ground near the hole MoonShine had half-fallen into. To her, it looked like a bottomless pit. A hole in the code that appeared to want to eat the big, white panther.
She had a solid hold of MoonShine, hands locked together around his chest, but whatever had hold of him was not letting go.
Kazuma tried to help, but she noticed his persona moving slower than before. It flickered in and out, and she knew from her study of technomancers that he was fading. He’d used several programs already, which meant he’d been compiling a lot. She’d watched him the first time when he’d created that fairy that ate—wait!
“Kazuma, can you make another one of those sprites that sharpened the pixelated grass?”
He looked at her. “Is that what you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, but I’ll fade.”
“What’re you talking about?” MoonShine said as he strained to pull himself out of the black pit. He wasn’t going further in, but he wasn’t coming out either.
“It’s okay. Moon, Kaz made a sprite earlier that got him out of a hole just like this. If he can make another one, then I can pull you free.”
The panther paused his attempts to get out. “Kaz, let me do it!”
“No.” Kaz put his hand to the side of the panther’s jaw and closed his eyes. “You just concentrate on getting free.”
Delaney watched as a light appeared in front of Kazuma…then two lights. Those two became four, and then eight, and then sixteen. Those points of light sharpened into tiny little monsters with wings, who dove down as a unit into the hole around MoonShine’s persona. Within seconds the ground folded out as pixel grass began to regrow, and the panther was slowly pushed out of the hole.
She backed up and let go of his torso as he scrambled out and half-staggered, half-crawled to the side. Delaney left the host and ported to her own commlink before logging off. She took a deep breath before opening her eyes and looking into the face of Mack Schmetzer.
“Welcome back.”
“Kazuma, is he—”
“He’s offline, but not awake.”
“Moon?”
“I’m…here…”
Delaney pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked at the white-haired young man. “You look like hammered shit, to quote a certain someone.”
“And I feel like it. I’ve got about a second before I pass out.” He pushed himself upright and managed to leave his bed. Holding onto the wall and the side cabinets, he moved to where Kazuma lay.
“He did a good job with those little lawnmowers or whatever they were,” Delaney said. “They lifted you right up.”
“It wasn’t just Kaz.” A half-smile played on his lips as he looked from Kazuma to her. “He left the first one open, made it easy for me to compile one like it, once I was free enough. I wrote a subroutine to reproduce after so much code was repaired. I joined my compile with his. It was like we wrote a program together.”
“What?” Mack said. “What’re you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is something I’ve never done before. It’s probably been done by somebody before, but I haven’t…” He looked between Delaney and Mack. “We co-created sprites. He had the forethought to make his sprite open code specifically for me.”
Mack frowned. “And that means…what?”
An alarm interrupted MoonShine as he was opening his mouth. Mack turned and summoned his AR, visible to Delaney. That’s when she realized she was still connected to her commlink.
“Drek!” He grabbed his bag with his deck and his gun from a side table. “Someone hit the alarm at the warehouse. They know Slamm-0! and the others are there.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Powell’s Office
How many times had Powell faced death and won? Even he had lost count. Regardless, with such a record as to have forgotten the number, facing the hacker’s Manhunter gave him very little pause. The troll that followed the blond kid in was another matter.
“Raoul Renault.” The dwarf shook his head. “Now this is a reunion, isn’t it?”
“Hello, Draco.”
The blond hacker looked from Powell to the troll. “You know him?”
“We’ve…met. And no, I never told Delaney who the dwarf was.”
Powell leaned forward on his desk, his own Fichetti in a hold-out holster fastened to the underside, waiting for him to grab it. “So tell me, Raoul, did you know I’d eventually approach Wagner?”
The PCC officer shook his head as he circled the desk. Spotting a colorful paperweight on its surface, he picked it up, hefting it from hand to hand. “Not at first. We kept an eye on you, though, after we linked you with the Contagion buyout. Radcliff was good to you after the Arcology hell, and you betrayed him.”
“I never betrayed him.” Powell narrowed his eyes as he stood up in his chair and reached for the paperweight, but failed. Renault was just out of reach. “He betrayed me.”
“By becoming a technomancer? That was it, wasn’t it? All four of them did, except you. You were the only one who wasn’t online that night. The only one that didn’t change. You do realize the fact it happened to all three of them was just a freak of nature, Draco. Even if you were online—there’s no guarantee you’d have changed, too.”
“But I was an otaku!” Powell jabbed his finger into his chest. “I should have had that kind of power.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Slamm-0! raised his weapon. “And turn that damn alarm off.”
With a shrug, Powell complied. It wouldn’t matter anyway. He knew Blackwater and Clockwork were offline, and both were going to protect their own interests now. Whatever rescue plan Schmetzer had cooked up would fail. “What we’re talking about—Slamm…Oh, is it?” He smiled, almost pleasantly. “Is about taking what’s yours. Or in this case, what’s mine.” He held his hand out to the troll. “Please be careful with that. It’s been with me since my time in the Renraku Arcology.”
“That kind of power, any kind of power, isn’t automatically yours, Draco.” Renault said as he walked over to the dwarf’s desk and handed the paperweight over. “You worked for Deus and were promised power, but he never gave it to you, did he?”
Slamm-0!’s eyes widened. “This piece of drek worked for that monster?”
“Oh, yes. He certainly did. Rounded up targets, specimens as he liked to call them. I was there. I saw what he did. And I survived and waited, and watched and followed him.”
“Damn troll’s been on my ass since the whole thing collapsed.” Powell glared at Renault before he resituated himself back in his chair and kept the paperweight close. “You’ve been a thorn in my side for far too long.”
“But I never stuck in your craw, did I? Not the way your friends did. See…Draco here had three accomplices in that Arcology. Four metahumans who wanted to survive just as much as he did, and who were just as willing to give up their souls. Jesus, Morion, and Radcliff. Former third-rate shadowrunners who gained privilege and notoriety under Draco’s leadership. But when the Arcology was saved and Deus was…eliminated, though that’s still highly debated…Draco and his team split up. But they stayed in touch.”
Powell leaned back, keeping the resin paperweight out of the troll’s reach as he positioned his hand on his thigh, ready to grab the weapon when he wanted it. He could take out one of them, but he knew he couldn’t take both of them. He was going to need something special for that. And if he pulled up his AR, they would see it, since he knew the hacker had control of the warehouse’s host.
<
br /> Best to let Blackwater and Clockwork find their way here once they disposed of the others. “You think you know the whole story, Raoul? Yes, we stayed in touch because we built a small fortune utilizing what we learned from Deus, what we learned from having to fight to survive.”
“Yes.” Renault said. “Except—your partners all changed. The Crash came and went, and you learned they were all technomancers now, able to use the datasphere in a way you could only dream. Because you’re addicted to it—to hot sim, to the reality inside the Matrix, not the one out here. They came through with new powers, and what did you get, Draco?”
Powell gritted his teeth. “I found an AI.”
The troll nodded slowly. “Yes, you did. You called it Caliban, the son of Sycorax. And when I found the umbrella company of Prospero, it didn’t take me long to put it all together. You continued to be their friend, you lied to them, helped them create a small gaming empire so you could live out your Matrix fantasies in your world, and then you betrayed them.”
Slamm-0! narrowed his eyes. “That stuff you showed us, the stuff you showed Delaney, you already had that. You just brought it out when you were sure.”
“Yes.”
Despite his annoyance, Powell had to give the troll credit for being as tenacious as a bloodhound. “You know some of it, Raoul, but not all of it. I knew you were there, in the Arcology. Working behind the scenes to thwart me and every other agent of Deus. But once we were free, unlike you, I forgot about the troll in the shadows.” He gave a short sigh. “You’re mostly right. After the Crash, I found the AI and I rescued it. Nurtured it and gave it a home host. I gave it that name just after the others contacted me and shared what had happened. Technomancers were just coming into the public eye, but their reception was less than friendly. Tolen wanted to change that. He wanted to make a game, an experience so others could see the Matrix the way a technomancer sees it. He and the others had a dream of showing them the resonance realms, the streams, the pools, all of it. So they hired me to find the right coders, the right talents, and the right system to use to achieve this dream.”
“So, you put your AI into the game’s system.”
Slamm-0! stepped back. “Drek…”
“Yes, I did.” Powell smiled as he remembered Caliban’s initial joy. The freedom the new host and its game interface gave him. “And he did such a good job, for a while. They were happy with me, with what I’d achieved, and gave me full administrative rights.” He fixed his gaze on Raoul. “In everything.”
“Even their own estates.”
“I created Prospero to shield their assets under one umbrella. To protect them. And I was the king again.”
Renault took a step around the desk past Slamm-0!. “Until Radcliff Tolen realized what you’d done.”
“He was the first to see the AI for what it was. And he didn’t tell anyone. He was a brilliant programmer. He’d been a hacker before the Arcology, and a damn good one at that. Instead of raising a red flag, he hacked the code. He broke into my AI’s home host, and embedded a kill switch.”
“That thing has a kill switch?” Slamm-0! said. “And you’ve never used it?”
“Why would I? Caliban is my son. When I leaned what he’d done, I told Caliban and we plotted our revenge. By that time the game had attracted a little-known populace of technomancers called dissonants. They showed Caliban what they could do to the code. We can’t see it, Raoul, what their poison does to the resonance and the host environment. We can only see the code. But it horrified Rad and Jesus and Morion. So they came up with the idea of combining their power to stop the dissonants and to stop Caliban.”
“What about Miranda? Where did she come from? She wasn’t in the arcology with us.”
Powell laughed. “Oh…my dear Miranda. She and Radcliff met a year or so ago. Fell in love. She sank her claws into him, and he listened to her, because she was just like him. A technomancer. She taught him how to submerge and gain more power, and he gave her stock. A share in the company.”
“But they never married.”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“They made their little pact and created a gestalt. And they nearly succeeded by implementing that kill switch.” Powell shook his head. “But Caliban had gained followers by then, and they interfered with whatever the three of them had planned. The dissonants found their bodies and locked them in the Matrix. And Miranda…she was there, too, for a while, until she was ready to follow Caliban and I pulled her out. She had the power to sell the company—but the slitch insisted on keeping a controlling interest.”
The room seemed to grow colder as shots rang out down the hall. Slamm-0! took a step back and glanced at Renault. But the troll wasn’t moving. “You could have stopped this. You could have prevented the death of innocent lives by destroying that thing.”
“He’s not doing anything wrong, Raoul. He’s just enjoying his new-found freedom.”
“He’s killing innocent technomancers. That’s not what your partners wanted the game for.”
Powell slammed his hands down on the desk. “It’s what I want it for!” He grabbed his gun as Slamm-0! and Renault stepped back and raised their own. But Powell didn’t fire. Instead he scrambled up to stand on top of the desk. “I never had the kill switch because Radcliff hid it from me. Encoded it into the programming, so that I didn’t know it was there until it was too late. Even I couldn’t remove it. And then Rad refused to give it to me. I even offered him freedom, an escape from the hell Caliban put him through. But he still refused. He hid it so deep in the Matrix I couldn’t find a trace of it.”
“Until it showed up in a Horizon Annex.” Slamm-0! said.
Powell nodded. “Can you believe it? Buried in some stupid corporate officer’s private little kill file. By that time, I’d already taken over Contagion, and Bellex was born.”
“Bellex is Caliban.” Renault leveled his weapon at the dwarf.
“Puppet of a puppet. Or so I thought. Caliban became obsessed with those game-generated resonance realms. The technomancers insist they’re real, but he can’t touch them. Caliban uses the gestalt those three fools put together to bend everything to his will.” Powell smiled. “It’s torture for them. They can see what their game is doing to others like them, but they can’t help, only be a part of that pain, and they can never leave.”
The sound of gunfire somewhere outside Powell’s office brought reality crashing in as Renault lowered his gun. Slamm-0! started to protest until the troll squeezed the trigger of his pistol and put several shots into the paperweight on Powell’s desk.
Of all the things he expected the troll to fire at, Caliban’s home host wasn’t one of them. Powell had gone to great lengths to disguise it, hiding it in a replica of the orbital station and encasing the whole thing in Lucite. To everyone else, it looked like a paperweight bought in a souvenir store.
Only Powell knew about the wire that powered it under his desk.
The thing shattered into a million pieces as the troll’s bullets destroyed it.
When Powell brought his own weapon up to shoot Renault, a volley of gunfire knocked him off his feet. Everything happened in slow motion. He saw Slamm-0!’s gun aimed at him. Saw him firing. It’d been foolish to stand on top of the desk, to make himself a target. And perhaps he was, in some way, protecting the paperweight. Subconsciously.
His head struck the edge of the desk as he tumbled off it, bounced against the chair and landed hard beneath it. Pain enveloped him as he saw Slamm-0! and Renault looking down at him.
“How…” Powell said as he felt his life seeping away. “…did you know?”
Renault answered. “It was the one thing you kept with you. Always.”
“I see…” Powell smiled as everything around him began fading to black. Let the troll believe he’d destroyed Caliban. Let him have his temporary joy. He just wished he could be there to see Renault’s face when his triumph came crashing down.
Chapter Fift
y-Eight
Warehouse
Blackwater sat up as Preacher stepped into the room. He’d worked for Schmetzer for nearly a year, and never really got to know the mage. But then, magic and machinery didn’t always blend well together.
Preacher was big, even for a troll. He held his staff at his side, nodded to Blackwater, and proceeded to the last autodoc, the one they’d put the elf chick in. The hood lifted at the troll’s approach and Preacher reached in to place his large finger at her neck. The blank dials and monitors told Blackwater the machine had been shut down. “That’s not going to get her out of the host. Powell’s got protocols she can’t hack. It’s what keeps ’em all in there.”
“Perhaps.” Preacher’s deep baritone was even, almost soothing. “But I’m willing to bet she’s going to surprise even you, Cole.” He moved slow and steady away from the autodoc until he was in the center of the room.
When he didn’t move and just stared at Blackwater, the hacker slipped off the doc and faced him. “What’re you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to make a decision.”
Blackwater made a rude noise. “Ain’t no decisions to make.”
“You honestly believe Draco Powell is going to treat you fairer than Mack would?”
“Mack’s a fool.”
The troll smiled around his tusks. “Mack Schmetzer is a good man. And he has good, loyal friends and contacts…well.” Preacher chuckled. “You just wouldn’t believe.”
Shadowrun: Dark Resonance Page 25
