Just Compensation

by Robert N. Charrette

  The synth view on the monitor showed the Yellowjacket banking hard to come around for another pass. Andy goosed the Concordia, and the car’s engine raced faster, the Cougar-6200 interface revving Andy’s heart and pumping up his adrenaline. Such was the link a rigger shared with his machine. But fear was damping Andy’s usual high-performance high. It would take more than gas and adrenaline to get away from the hunter. This Concordia was armed, but she was strictly a streetfighter; she didn’t carry ground-to-air weaponry.

  If it had been his Concordia—

  But wishes were as good as fishes right now. They Y-J passed overhead, trying to line up again to blast them as Andy put the Concordia back on the pavement; she wasn’t built for going cross-country at their current speed and the last excursion had hurt her. The road was snaking and Andy was hugging the edges and swerving erratically, doing his best not to offer the Y-J pilot a decent firing run. The Yellowjacket banked away, the chopper grabbing sky to prepare for another run. Andy had managed to avoid giving the Y-J pilot any shots on that pass. He was relieved. Real rigging wasn’t as easy as virtual rigging.

  He tweaked the interface to bump up the air conditioning. He’d been sweating so much, he was starting to stink.

  “Nav update shows the Roosevelt Bridge still closed.” Markowitz said. It had been their chosen crossing. Markowitz’s voice was so calm he might have been commenting on rush-hour traffic as he griped, “Hell of long time to clear out a traffic accident.”

  “Then how the frag are we supposed to get across the river!”

  Andy wanted to know, and soon. They were running out of road. So far the trees shading the northwestern part of the George Washington Parkway had been offering them some cover. That would be gone once they hit Arlington—in about a minute. The Roosevelt Bridge offered the fastest route across the Potomac, and if they didn’t take it, they’d have to go further south; and if they went further south, they’d be running over some seriously open ground near Arlington Cemetery. They’d be easy meat for the Yellowjacket.

  Which was back. Nerves stretched, Andy sought cover. Not enough. He swerved. The Y-J stuck to them. It fired. Andy swerved again. Slugs hammered the starboard rear quarter-panel, but the Concordia’s armor didn't care.

  Unfortunately, at least one slug caught the right rear tire. Feedback stung Andy’s right leg as he fought to keep the Concordia from fishtailing. It hurt like hell, but it wasn’t crippling. The ReFlate system kicked in, foaming the tire. Response came back up. They’d be running a while yet as long as the Y-J’s pilot didn’t improve his aim.

  “What about Key Bridge?” Markowitz asked.

  “Not with him so close on our tail.” Andy was having trouble finding enough air to breathe and talk at the same time. “Besides, if we made it across, we’d get snarled in Georgetown.”

  “Okay, okay. Cut into Rosslyn.”

  “Streets will slow us down.”

  “Won’t help him either.”

  Andy did as Markowitz suggested. Working the streets and dodging the Yellowjacket didn’t leave time to find a route. “Come on.” he urged Markowitz. “Give me a vector.”

  “Cut back north on Military and head for Chain Bridge.”

  Markowitz said. Andy’s map shifted, highlighting Markowitz’s suggested route. “Should give us enough cover to lose him.”

  “We’ll be slower on the other side.” Andy pointed out. “At least the bridge is open to traffic. Latest update shows nothing else crossing the river is.”

  Andy couldn’t argue, but he had another thought. “The Y-J pilot will know that. It’s a lot less important than the other bridges. What’s to keep him from splattering us?”

  “Nothing but timing. We’ve got to cross when he isn’t looking. So lose him already.”

  “Whatever happened to shadowrunners staying in the shadows?” Andy asked.

  “Don’t ask me, kid. I’m not flying that bird.”

  Andy tried to hide while the Y-J pilot sought. He’d played such games in virtual runs, but this was no game, as the lingering pain in his leg reminded him. Fortunately for them, the pilot seemed more reluctant to fire at them in the residential areas through which they moved. A trash fire near the Glebe Road overpass offered them their break. Hitting it at a moment when the Yellowjacket had overflown them, Andy halted them under cover, right at the edge of the blaze, and bled the Concordia’s heat into the flames. Their IR signature blurred into the fire’s. Finally judging it safe, he edged the Concordia out and sent the radar looking for the copter. He found it patrolling over the Potomac, scuttling back and forth between bridges, trying to make sure it would be wherever they attempted to cross.

  Andy timed it to blast across Chain Bridge while the chopper was moving south, then continued up away from the river and into the placid, tree-shaded residential zone around MacArthur. The radar didn’t yelp that the Yellowjacket was zeroing in on them. Andy relaxed. He was tooling down Loughboro Road when he learned that he wasn’t the foxy one—the Yellowjacket pounced, coming around a building and showing on radar no sooner than on visual.

  The Y-J pilot had spotted them, pretended that he hadn’t, then used buildings as cover to close in. Tired as Andy was, exhaustion was no excuse for being stupid. No excuse was good enough. This wasn’t a game, and a need for an excuse meant a need to dodge bullets. Only there was nowhere to go as the Yellowjacket started its attack run.

  The pilot had learned his lessons, directing his slugs at the Concordia’s vulnerable tires. A torrent of lead clawed away tread, sidewall, and foam. The car tilted, started to skid. Andy fought it, but between the sim pain and the loss of control there wasn’t anything he could do. The crash bags blossomed.

  The Concordia slued sideways and tipped, covering half a block on her side before a light post caught her fender. She spun around hard and crashed into a building. Andy felt like the little ball in an aerosol can that someone was trying to shake loose. The Concordia tipped back down onto her wheels and rocked to a stop. Like wannabe shrouds, the air bags deflated and draped Andy and Markowitz. The riders had survived, but the Concordia was dead. The interface was down, the windows dark, and the stink of burnt rubber and burning plastics fouled the air in the car. Andy coughed in the increasing smoke.

  “You okay, kid?” Markowitz asked.

  Battered, bruised, burned, dizzy from the ride and sudden disconnect from the Cougar-6200, and starting to asphyxiate. Oh, yeah, he was fine.

  “Kid?”

  “I’ll live.” Andy pulled the useless datacord from his jack. “What now?”

  Markowitz squirmed around and hauled something from one of the racks in the back seat area: a rifle thing with a huge-bored barrel.

  “What’s that?”

  “Capture gun. Used to use it for putting a net over unnatural animals. Iron banding on spun polycarbonate mesh, with silver-plated spikes at the junctions. Makes all sorts of things unhappy. The silver part’s not going to have much effect on this unnatural animal, though.” Markowitz cracked the door, letting in the outside air. It didn’t make the inside any cooler, but it did let out some of the smoke. “Stay put.”

  Markowitz slipped on a pair of augmentation specs as he slid out of his seat to crouch under the cover of the gull-wing door.

  The Yellowjacket was coming back. To confirm his kill, no doubt. Andy could tell from the sound that the pilot had cut in the stealth baffles. Why not? He didn’t need speed anymore.

  Andy started fiddling with the Concordia’s manual controls, trying to get the windows to polarize so he could see something. He succeeded just in time to see the helicopter finish its approach and shift to hover. A block away, the Yellowjacket hung in the air like a giant metallic dragonfly waiting to pounce. The ball turret under its chin swiveled, the machine barrel snouting about as if sniffing for prey.

  The Yellowjacket shunted sideways as if the pilot was trying to get an angle for a look through the Concordia’s open door. Markowitz gave him something to see, taking
a step out and shouldering his weapon.

  Suicide.

  But Markowitz had timed his move; the Yellowjacket’s turret was pointed away from him. As it started to rotate toward him, Markowitz fired. Not waiting to see the results of his shot, he dove back into the Concordia. Slugs chewed up pavement and spanged against the car’s armor, but none caught the audacious Markowitz.

  Sprawled across the seat, Markowitz could not see whether he had shot true, but Andy had a front row seat. The canister that the rifle fired peeled away, releasing the net to spread as it flew. The pilot tried to sideslip and avoid the projectile. He managed to shift the fuselage clear, but the net engulfed the whirling disks of the craft’s rotors. The blades whipped the mesh around themselves, wrapping it down to their hub. The chopper’s engine screamed as it fought to do its job against the binding. Smoke began to pour from vents and the Yellowjacket tilted. Rotors frozen, it dropped from the sky like a stone. The nose hit first, splintering the canopy. The shock of impact jarred the rotors free. One blade swept into the sidewalk, crumpling and dying. The Yellowjacket bucked and flipped onto its back for a final crash into the street. A torrent of flame-lit smoke billowed out through the smashed canopy. Within seconds the dead craft was engulfed in flames.

  “You took it down.” Andy was astonished and knew he sounded it.

  “You think my street name was just empty hype?”

  He hadn’t really thought that Marksman might actually be a marksman.

  Andy hoped the pilot had died in the crash. Andy had died his apparent death in a cockpit fire; he didn’t wish the real thing on anyone. “Did you have to kill him?”

  “Like he didn’t ask for it? He was trying to kill us, remember?” Markowitz hauled the freezer case out of the back of the car. “Come on, kid, we can’t hang around here.”

  Andy had to crawl out of the passenger door, then crawled back again to snag his deck. He’d backed up the info files to his headware, but he’d need the hardware if he was going to do anything about decrypting the stuff, and the deck was all he had to do that. He’d almost lost the Sony to the ork gang when they took it from him, but he’d been lucky. After Kit had healed him and he had enough functioning brain cells to remember that Pucker Up had dropped the deck, he’d gone back to look for it and—to his amazement—had found it still lying in the alley. Too weak to carry it, he too had been forced to leave it behind. But when he went back for it, somehow it was still there. He couldn’t count on the same luck if he left it here in the car.

  By the time Andy was done, Markowitz had cracked the locks on the freezer case, extracted the box of drugs, and was slipping individual receptacles into his pockets. He seemed oblivious to the eyes watching from the houses and the edges of buildings.

  “Good thing we haven’t got far to go. This stuff won’t last long in the heat without refrigeration.” He walked back to the Concordia and ran a hand along a row of bullet scars. With a sigh, he tossed something into the back seat. As they walked away, fire blossomed in the interior of the Concordia.

  “She was a good old beast.” Markowitz said. “I’ll miss her. We’ll probably wish we still had her before this run is over.”

  Markowitz walked past the downed Yellowjacket without a word. Half a block later, he bent down and picked something up, again without a word. Andy trailed along behind him. What was the point of words anyway? He looked back at the two burning vehicles. This wasn’t virtuality. You never smelled the virtual bad guys roasting.

  Despite Markowitz’s misgivings they made the transfer of the drugs without any more problems. The medicine had made it, and lives would be saved. Kit would be pleased.

  What they had done had helped. Did it balance against the life of the man Markowitz had killed? The helicopter pilot had been trying to kill them. Markowitz had just defended them.

  It was so much easier killing the virtual bad guys. Andy could still smell the stink of the burning copter.

  “Don’t think about it too much.” Markowitz said.

  “What—”

  “It’s better that way. Trust me.” He took Andy’s arm and led him away from the meet site. “Come on, kid. I know an all-night shop not far from here. You’ll feel better if you get something to hold your stomach down. Or something for it to toss up, if that’s the way you’re going to be.”

  The all-night shop was an All Hours, a dark, quiet little place, that combined a convenience store with a sit-down food service area. They were the only customers at the tables. Markowitz made a selection at the counters and put something down in front of Andy. Andy didn’t even look at the plate, but he did wrap his hands around the cup of steaming soykaf. His hands felt cold despite the sultry night. Markowitz didn’t bother with his food either. Instead, he took something out of his pocket and began turning it over and over in his hands. Despite his mood, Andy was curious. “What’s that?”

  “A chunk of the bird that tried to scrag us.” Markowitz continued turning the debris over and over in his hands. After a while he stopped and scrubbed at a section with his thumb. Angling the piece against the light, he squinted at it. “This is military issue. We got problems with the army.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Lots of surplus and hijacked stuff gets to the street. This is just a coincidence.”

  “Believing in coincidence can get you dead.”

  “So can seeing conspiracies were there aren’t any.”

  “I’m here to tell you, kid, you can’t afford not to see conspiracies. Better you suspect the mess you’re in runs deeper than it does, than to think you’re jumping into shallow water and end up over your head. That Yellowjacket was current service. If it wasn’t, the serial number I found on this piece of scrap would have been laser-cut away.”

  “So it’s current service. Must have been the border patrol.

  We were smuggling.” But the Concordia’s threat database didn’t list Yellowjackets with the border patrol; Andy had checked when the chopper first showed on radar.

  “You can do better than that, kid.”

  “Okay. The border patrol can call on military assets under certain circumstances to interdict the drug and chip trade. We were carrying drugs.”

  “Not that kind of drugs.”

  “All right then. If there’s a conspiracy, what’s the connection?”

  “We can start with the Johnson who hired my team for the run against Telestrian. He must have been Army.”

  “He told you that and you believed him?”

  “What he told us was nothing, but he smelled military to me. I didn’t think a lot about it at the time; a lot of exmilitary work for the corps as part of the I-do-yours-you-do-mine symbiosis. The connections were in front of me and I didn’t see them. Geez, I must be getting slow.”

  “Didn’t you check him out?”

  “Of course we did.” Markowitz snapped. “We took what he fed us, looked him over, snooped a bit, and what we came up with was Fuchi. Made sense, I thought. Fuchi had a business interest in what Telestrian was doing, and if the Montjoy Project was as cutting-edge as Johnson claimed, Fuchi would want a jump on it. I thought the scam made sense, but something about it itched Yates. He looked harder and when he couldn’t find anything, he looked at the frame it came in. He said our Johnson used military-issue hardware for all his decking. Like an idiot, I didn’t think it was such a big deal. Like you said, the military is enough of a sieve that you see their hardware on the street all the time.

  “But when you see too much of their stuff in one place, especially a full range of stuff, you’re seeing them. Why? Because most shadow operators use the stuff they’ve got, because that’s what they’re used to and that’s what they trust. Why shouldn’t they? It’s not like they expect to get caught. I should have seen it sooner, but better later than postmortem. There’s entirely too much Army in this mess, and it stinks.”

  “But why would the Army want to kill us?”

  “Government doesn’t like its departments messing outside thei
r areas. Espionage belongs to the D.S.A. and the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. They each have their slice of the pie, but the Army’s got squat in the way of its own authorized shadow resources. Yup. All adds up to Army. All of Yates’s tie-ins were groundpounder issue, and the Army’s the only service flying attack choppers.”

  “D.S.A.’s got military staff, including Army.” Didn’t it make sense for a covert agency to be involved with undercover activities and just using Army resources? “Maybe they sponsored the run.”

  “Maybe.” Markowitz said. “But you’re forgetting one angle. If it was one of the spook shops, a shadowrun would be business as usual. There’d be no need to remove the tools.” Like a light turning on, Andy saw where Markowitz was coming from. “So you’re thinking the Army hired your team for the run, and now they want to get rid of anyone who can connect them to the operation just to keep their slate clean.”

  “I don’t like it, but that’s the way it looks to me. Sammy’s gone. Tonight they tried for the car. It should have been Kit and me in the car. A double-header for them. No runners means no way to connect them with their under-the-table work.”

  “That’s a pretty cold plan.”

  “There are some cold fish in uniform. Ever hear of Newman’s Grove?”

  “No.”

  Markowitz nodded knowingly. “I didn’t think so. They kept it very, very quiet. Likely you won’t hear about it ’less you run into someone who was there.”

  “Like you?”

  “Never said I was.” Markowitz tossed the fragment onto the table. “Whoever sent the chopper knew about tonight’s run.”

  Clearly Markowitz wanted to stay away from the topic of Newman’s Grove now that he’d made his point. Andy obliged. “How would anyone know our route or timetable? We didn’t lay one down.”

  “I got an idea that fits. Chichi Davis.”