Shadowrun 46 - A Fistful of Data

by Stephen Dedman (v1. 0) (epub)

  “Edit how? I can get rid of your name, but I can’t replace the truck or the drones, and somebody’s going to notice them missing eventually. If they find out what’s happened, you could end up being transferred to Campeche to run informants.”

  The Hatter thought for a moment. Campeche was still a trouble spot for the Aztlan government, and being posted there was regarded as a death sentence, especially for intelligence and security officers. “Change the record to say that Morales booked them. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, but it won’t stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny if they’ve made offline backups.”

  The Hatter nodded, his expression still grim. “Do it anyway, and find out when the file is backed up. Then I want you to update the dossiers on the shadowrunners who Sumatra told us were down there. I don’t think he was lying about that. I know 8-ball was down there, and I’m fairly sure about Ratatosk and Lankin. And keep looking for Sumatra, too. I’ve invested too much in this scheme to give up now.”

  Lankin’s apartment was approximately half the size of Crane’s garage, but it offered more privacy and had much better security. Lankin’s chair had been custom-made to comfortably fit his angular 2.76-meter frame, and it dominated the huge living room by virtue of its position and the lighting as well as its size. Ratatosk assumed that there were weapons concealed in the arms, and that the high back was well armored. There were other chairs and sofas in the room, some broad and sturdy enough to accommodate giants, others small enough for 8-ball and Zurich to sit in without needing to dangle their feet above the floor, all strategically placed so that no one’s head was higher than their host’s. Ratatosk sat between Yoko and Mute, and tried not to stare at what seemed to be an original Degas sketch on the opposite wall. “I’ve found the files on Project Balcony that I decrypted for Mandy Mandelbrot a while back,” he told the group. “They’re a couple of years old, but there’s stuff here that you wouldn’t normally find on a personnel file. The stuff on the Hatter’s routine isn’t much help—according to this, he rarely leaves the Pyramid except for work, and has a habit of leaving all social engagements after about four hours. Apart from that, he seems to delight in being unpredictable. Extremely status conscious, not a team player . . . nothing we couldn’t have worked out.” He shrugged. “The schedule from the Aztechnology garage confirms this, for what it’s worth. His car’s left the building only once in the past four weeks, and the only others he’s signed out were the Step-Van and the Nomad. The schedule ends on the twelfth, and there’s not enough data there for me to predict when he might leave again.

  “On the bright side. Hare actually seems to have a pattern. The psychoprofile says he likes to go to the casino once a week to play blackjack. He picks up two women if he wins, one if he loses. Doesn’t lose often, but can lose badly when he does. The schedule seems to confirm this: he leaves the Pyramid every Monday night between ten and twelve, in his own car, returning four to seven hours later.” . “Which casino?” asked Lankin. The theft of the Federated-Boeing Commuter had gone off without a hitch, enabling him to pay off some of his more insistent creditors and relax for a while.

  “The file doesn’t say. Do any of you have any contacts in the casino biz?”

  “I know a few people at the Gates and the Seward Club,” Lankin replied.

  “Escorts?”

  “No, of course not,” said Lankin, sounding wounded. “Hat check and bar staff.”

  Yoko sighed. “I’ve heard how you blackmailed your contact in Aztechnology. I don’t believe it’s the only time you’ve pulled that scam. You must know some madams, at least.”

  “Yes, but not the ones who work the Gates; they’re all run by the Finnigan family. Or any based near the Seward Club.”

  “What about the others?”

  “No, but I might know somebody who knows somebody. I’ll see what I can do. Do you have a photo of Hare?” “No,” Ratatosk replied. “I’ll try to access his personnel file, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be well protected.”

  “What does he drive?”

  “A Jackrabbit. believe it or not.”

  “White?”

  “Silver. Electric, three-door, fifty-nine model. The files say that the Hatter goes with him occasionally. But here’s what I don’t get. The Hatter has a Toyota Elite. Even unmodified, it has enough headroom and legroom for elves. Why wouldn't they take that?”

  8-ball shrugged. “So if we hit the place any night but Monday, we know the Hatter’s likely to be there, and so’s his car. Sounds good to me.”

  “No,” said Yoko. “Hitting him in the Pyramid is too risky. If anything goes wrong, we’ll have to deal with the Leopard Guards, magical security ... If we can catch him outside, we have a much better chance of getting away alive.”

  “She’s right,” said Ratatosk. “We wait until Monday night, put a tail on Hare when he leaves, see where he goes and who’s with him. It’ll also give you two more time to heal.”

  “I’m fine,” said Mute. Czarnecki had removed the bullets from her gut and dosed her with drugs, and a healing spell had done the rest. The meres had finally left a few hours before, in fair health—once Magnusson had cured their hangovers from the farewell party with a detox spell. Yoko’s skin still looked raw in a few small patches, but her wounds didn’t seem to be troubling her.

  “Then it’ll give Maggie and Doc Czarnecki time to catch up on their sleep in case we have casualties,” said Ratatosk. “And if Hare’s alone, then okay, we try Plan B.”

  “What’s Plan B?”

  “I don’t know yet; ask me after I’ve found out more about the Hatter ... his schedule, the location and layout of his apartment, that sort of thing. Anything else that your contacts can tell you will be much appreciated, because if I have to go back into the Pyramid’s system, I’d like to be in and out of there as quickly as possible: I really don’t want to have to go up against Hare on his home turf again. While I’m there, I’ll change their vehicle register so that the Nomad’s no longer listed as stolen, so we can drive it in. After that . . He shrugged.

  “We might be able to lure the Hatter out some other way,” suggested Lankin. “There’s a missing Dali bronze of Alice in Wonderland; if somebody told him they’d located it, he might be tempted. I know forgers who could fake one in a couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks?” 8-ball repeated, aghast.

  Ratatosk glanced at the Degas sketch again. “I don’t know if he’s a collector,” he said. “That’s something else to ask our contacts, but I think it’s better to move quickly.”

  Mute nodded. “We’ll need four cars. Inconspicuous cars,” she said, looking pointedly at Lankin.

  “At least one big enough to act as a roadblock, if we need it,” said 8-ball. “A courier van, or something like that.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Lankin. “I can get them from the people who bought Crane’s collection, and sell them back the next day. So, what do we need in the way of weapons?”

  Like the living quarters in the Crypt, the shantytowns in the Rat’s Nest were made from whatever materials could be scrounged from the junk—largely crates, cartons, pallets and discarded furniture, but also old refrigerators and freezers, Dumpsters too thoroughly rusted to be worth patching and vehicle bodies. A large cargo container, intact and relatively clean, was a mansion; the inverted hull of a fiberglass boat, a palace. Sumatra had managed to wheedle crash space in a corner of the medicine lodge belonging to Nicodemus, a fellow rat shaman—one with walls and a roof and a locked door that kept out the weather and other unwelcome intruders—by promising to teach him his magic fingers spell. He'd wrapped himself in a relatively clean garbage bag and used his jungle boots as a pillow: they were cheap Aztlan army issue, all rubber and canvas, but being new, they didn’t smell remotely as bad as the rest of the Rat's Nest. Unlike the Crypt, which Czarnecki and Mish had insisted be kept as clean as possible for the benefit of patients in the clinic, the junkyard reeked of rotting food, dead bodies and worse.
The devil rats and other scavengers were tolerated mostly because they helped dispose of the corpses: besides, most of them tasted so bad that they were scarcely worth the effort of catching.

  Sumatra stayed in the lodge during the day, only venturing out after sunset—usually concealed and guarded by a city spirit. The squatters who’d searched him hadn’t left him anything of his own apart from his stained cargo pants and his socks. His oversized parka, jungle boots, fatigue pants, T-shirt, underwear and new socks had all come from the load they’d extorted from the Hatter; Magnusson had given him these before pushing him out of his car on the edge of the Rat’s Nest. He hadn’t left him a weapon, a phone, or even the ration bars, secure vest and rucksack that everybody else had received. Before venturing along the junkyard’s main drag, aptly known as Ammonia Avenue because of its stench, Sumatra had found a length of metal pipe that would serve as a club, in case he ran across more scavengers than he could deter with his powerbolt and mass agony spells, and searched for signs of magic. By the time he’d found the lodge, he’d scored a handmade shiv, a Portland Lords baseball cap, a disposable lighter, a guide and a little extra confidence. The next night, he’d wandered around until someone had challenged him, then looted their shelter after leaving them unconscious, coming away with a space blanket, a water purifier, a small cache of food and a reputation as somebody not to be fragged with. He decided that after two weeks, when he'd finished teaching Nicodemus the magic fingers spell, he might be the boss of this corner of the Rat’s Nest. The prospect thrilled him not at all.

  What galled him most was the knowledge that it was his own greed that had landed him here. If he’d resisted the urge to take the orichalcum from that package when Genocide George and his brother Elwood weren’t paying attention, he wouldn’t have needed to hide in the Crypt. If he hadn’t tried to cut a better deal for himself with the Hatter, he could’ve snuck out of the Crypt with the virus and the data disk and gone to a fixer who would’ve gotten him the best deal possible—maybe even enough for him to buy the club he really wanted, the sort with a bar, a kitchen, some dancers, maybe some sloppy soy wrestling occasionally, and a few private rooms upstairs and out the back for business and pleasure . . .

  He looked up as the door opened. The man silhouetted in the doorway was too tall to be Nicodemus, but his blocky shape and flattop haircut were familiar. “Sumatra?” the man asked, pointing his smartgun at the huddled shape.

  The shaman looked around the lodge, seeing nothing and nobody large enough to hide behind. “Hello, George,” he said cautiously, wondering what the best move would be. Probably a stun spell; Genocide George Sequoia was stubborn enough to resist most mana-based spells, but his natural toughness was enhanced with dermal plating, bone lacing and damage compensators. The armor he wore wouldn’t help him against a powerbolt or any other spell that damaged living flesh from within, but his bodyware and constitution would. Once stunned, he’d be easy prey: if he’d been foolhardy enough to come here alone, then Sumatra could murder him at his leisure before he revived; if not, then he could take his guns (George always carried more than one gun) rather than consume energy casting more combat spells. And George was bound to have a phone, a car, and various other essentials. Sumatra could barely stop himself from grinning.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted a rat shaman,” George grumbled as his left hand moved down toward his belt, “but Elwood said you were okay, and you knew the spells we needed. He even said we should let you live if you give us back the drek you took. So where is it?”

  “Kill me and you’ll never find it.” Sumatra replied.

  “Fair enough,” said George, and fired a burst from the smartgun into the shaman’s belly. “One more question, though.” He flicked the switch on the flashpak on his belt. The flare compensation in his cybereyes kicked in automatically, canceling out the strobe effect, and he reached for the Roomsweeper on his belt. “Is it true magicians can’t cast spells at things they can’t see?”

  Sumatra gritted his teeth, trying to ignore the pain from his wounds, and peered into the astral. Genocide George remained clearly visible—he had little cyberware apart from his eyes, some bone lacing, and smartlinks in both hands—but the light from the flashpak was gone. He cast a stunbolt at George, then an invisibility spell on himself, concentrating on keeping drain to a minimum. Then he rolled away from his bed in the corner and scrambled to his feet. A moment too late, he remembered his shiv, checked his pockets, and finding them empty, looked around. The clumsy knife lay between his boots, three meters away.

  If George was startled by his target vanishing, he recovered quickly, despite the fatiguing effects of the stunbolt. He watched and listened for sounds of movement, then fired from the hip at Sumatra’s improvised bedding. When the shaman didn’t reappear, he walked a burst along the far wall, aiming low and carefully spacing the shots a quarter meter apart so that at least one or two would hit his target. Sumatra squawked as one round blasted a bloody hole in his right thigh, then another amputated the ring finger from his left hand. George drew his Roomsweeper with his left hand and looked at the filthy floor, hoping to see signs of fresh blood, maybe even footprints. Sumatra froze, and despite his wounds, managed to concentrate for long enough to cast another stunbolt.

  George reeled, dropping the smartgun as he leaned against the wall. Sumatra considered casting another stunbolt, but the energy drain of the invisibility spell meant that he was as likely to knock himself out as the mere. Instead, he watched George’s gun as he crept back toward his boots, nearly silent in his stocking feet. The mere was wearing bullet-resistant dark glasses, which prevented anyone seeing his eyes, and his face was as expressionless as a leather mask, but Sumatra was reassured by the way the barrel of the Roomsweeper was beginning to droop, as though the effort of holding it up was becoming too much for him.

  George stared woozily at the floor, still looking for traces of blood, but all he could see was evidence of where the ork had been, not where he was now. The lodge wasn’t much more than three meters square, and at that sort of close range the shot wouldn’t spread enough for him to be sure of hitting his target. Fighting to remain conscious, he waited, and listened, and watched, and as soon as the knife disappeared from view, he squeezed the trigger. Some of the buckshot blasted a hole in the lodge’s makeshift wall, but enough hit Sumatra’s left arm, leg and chest to send the ork staggering backwards. Sumatra let the invisibility spell drop and prepared to cast another stunbolt, but even as badly fatigued as he was, Genocide George was quicker; he fired at the shaman’s head, removing most of his face. Sumatra fell against the wall, then slid to the floor.

  George reached into one of his pockets for a maximum-strength stimulant patch, peeled off the backing, then slapped the patch onto the back of his opposite hand. Cautiously, he bent down and picked up his smartgun, then returned the Roomsweeper to its holster, and sat down while he waited for the stimulants to kick in. Once seated.

  he grabbed a spare clip, reloaded his smartgun, and fired a single shot at Sumatra’s knee. The ork didn’t even flinch.

  George searched Sumatra’s corpse hastily, finding nothing of value, then quickly returned to his car before the effects of the stimulant patch wore off. He barely had time to set the autopilot before his eyes closed, and he slept peacefully all the way home.

  The building directory in the Aztechnology Pyramid’s system had been designed to look like its physical counterpart—a lobby of intricately carved stonework, with a three-meter-high model of the Pyramid in the center. Two icons—a man and a woman, both human in scale but with a distinctly elflike beauty—sat behind a counter to one side of the Pyramid. Ratatosk approached the woman, but instead of asking her where he could find the Hatter or Hare and risk alerting them, he distracted her with a deception utility while downloading the entire directory for later reading. He left the datastore and hurried along the datalines back to the Pyramid’s garage.

  Their programmers had upgraded the scramb
le IC on the sign-out sheet, as he’d expected, as well as adding tar pit IC, but it was still easy enough to cut through without triggering any alarms. Inserting the subroutine he’d written into the datafile took another few seconds, but he was jumpy enough for the wait to seem like minutes. It was a simple logic bomb, a once-only order to switch the lights in the northeast corner office on the forty-second floor on and off when Hare’s car left its bay It was harmless, and impossible to trace back to the decker, apparently nothing more than a prank, and simple enough that Hare probably wouldn’t spot it . . . but in case he did, Ratatosk had inserted another subroutine into the database, one that would periodically check to see if the first was in place, and turn off all the lights in the Pyramid if it failed to find it. If that happened, the team was to leave the area at top speed, and hope that the confusion prevented the Azzies from chasing them.

  Once the logic bomb was in place, Ratatosk found the database entry for the missing Nomad. He blinked, seeing that the record had been changed to say that the vehicle had been checked out not by the Hatter, but by a Dr. Morales—and two days earlier than on his copy of the data.

  The vehicle was still listed as missing, and there was an unfamiliar symbol next to Morales’ details. Ratatosk studied this for a moment, then made a hasty exit and headed for the recruiting office. Another woman, just as beautiful as the one in directory assistance, smiled at him as he pretended to read a pamphlet on opportunities in their security forces. He sleazed through their security to the personnel records, and looked uneasily at the IC clustered about all the files. Moving carefully to avoid a screamer program, he found the index, which was protected by probe IC and the ubiquitous scramble. He hesitated, then retreated from the datastore and looked at the directory file he’d downloaded, in the hope of finding where Dr. Morales worked. To his surprise, he found that the scientist’s contact details had been struck through, and his apartment listed as vacant.