The Forever Drug

by Lisa Smedman

  Panting, I sank to my knees beside Galdenistal. The shaft was in utter darkness; only by using astral vision could I see the elf. His aura had changed; it was a deep, throbbing purple at the back of his neck, and an angry red over the spot where he'd banged his head when I tripped over the cage. His eyes were unfocused and searching; it was clear that he did not have the ability to perceive astral space and couldn't see in the dark. But his senses were keen enough for him to locate me by the sound of my breathing. He turned his face toward me.

  He was too drained to do anything else. His brush with the corpselight had left him as weak as a kitten, and drawing his legs in over the threshold of the door had almost been too much for him. I could see the frustration in his eyes; he was a physical adept, used to being in complete control of his body. The loss of his strength was an ego-crushing blow.

  I curled my fingers under the neck of his wetsuit and lifted him slightly. His head lolled back like a newborn human's. His belly was exposed to me— had he been a wolf, this submissive posture would have been the ultimate humiliation. I stared down at him, keenly aware of the painful gash his silver bullet had torn in my side.

  "What was it you wanted to tell Ja—Mareth'riel?" I asked.

  His lips moved. I bent closer to hear what he was whispering. He was speaking Sperethiel, but I recognized one of the words: morkhan, an insulting name for humans or metas who like to frig with animals. I didn't think that was what he'd wanted to say to Jane. At least, I hoped not.

  I let go of his wetsuit. His head bounced against the floor with a slight splash. When I heard the sound I had a flash of panic, thinking that the wound in my side had bled enough to soak the floor. But then I smelled salt and realized that sea water was seeping in. I could feel cold splashes dripping down on my bare human skin. I glanced up and saw a trickle of water running under a crack in the door frame above. In astral vision, the tiny organisms living inside the water gave each drop a bright, diamondlike glow.

  The drops of water were beautiful, but their implication made my heart sink. Was the corridor above already flooded? I was certain our team would eventually find a way to pump the water out if it was. But would the air in here last that long? When the lights had gone out, the ventilation systems had also shut down. Already the air in this shaft smelled stale.

  Then I heard a clanging noise up above—the sound of metal banging against metal. Someone was trying to force the door open. It had to be Berthiaume or another member of the Magical Task Force—the smugglers would have simply unlocked the door. Whoever it was, it sounded as if they were having a tough time of it. I just hoped they'd get the door open before the flood of water into the corridor above forced them back.

  I looked down at Galdenistal. "The corridors above us are filling up with water," I told him. "With luck, my backup will open the door before the corridor is completely flooded. When he does, ice-cold ocean water is going to rush in. Even if you find the strength to climb the ladder, you'll never be able to wade out against the current. The only way you're getting out of here alive is if I carry you. And the only way I'm doing that is if I start hearing some answers I like."

  The elf gave a slight, painful nod. I didn't smell any fear on him—he was one tough frigger, and hadn't been scared by my threats. Which worried me a little, but as long as the answers made sense, I'd be happy.

  "Who... are you?" he asked.

  "Just a shadowrunner," I lied. No sense telling him I was with Lone Star. As a foreign national with diplomatic immunity, he'd expect kid-glove treatment from the police—he'd realize that my threats to let him die in this hole were just a bluff. But he'd certainly believe that a runner would abandon him here to die.

  "What's your interest in Mareth'riel?" I asked.

  "We were... close," he said.

  Close? What the frig did that mean? I suppressed a soft growl of jealousy. Then I caught myself. Whatever golden boy had been to Jane, he'd pissed her off at some point and they weren't on good terms any longer. That had been an angry argument I'd overheard at the train station—not just a lover's spat. Golden boy had threatened Jane with this Uzi, and she had blasted him with a spell.

  "Why were you trying to take her back to Tír Taimgire?" I asked.

  "The Council of Princess wants ... to talk ... to her," Galdenistal said slowly. Each word was an effort; he still wasn't up to much more than a whisper.

  I didn't know much about international politics— nor did I particularly care. But obviously Jane was connected to some powerful people in the Hr, if the council wanted to speak to her. I remembered the name she and golden boy had used at the train station, when they were speaking Sperethiel—the name of a man who I knew only by his picture on the nuyen bill that had been in Galdenistal's pocket. I decided to try and convince the elf that I knew more about politics and the corporate world then I really did, and tossed in a name from Jane's past as well.

  "What does Laverty want to talk to her about?" I asked. "Is it the New Dawn Corporation?"

  Galdenistal's eyes widened. My question had hit a nerve.

  "He wanted to find out... whether the rumors are true. If New Dawn really is... doing illegal drug testing ... in the UCAS. Before the Council voted on whether... to sell... its shares."

  I thought that one over as the elf closed his eyes, catching his breath. Drug testing? Was that what Jane's visits to the UCAS had been about? It was no big surprise that the Tír government owned a chunk of the New Dawn Corporation, the company that Mareth'riel Salvail had worked for until her "death" in 2057. When Tír Taimgire was first founded, it had nationalized a number of the corporations headquartered within its borders, and had purchased controlling interests in several more. If a company had done something that was illegal—particularly within the borders of a powerful first-world nation like the UCAS—Hr Taimgire would want to distance itself from that company by dumping its shares. But the transgression against foreign nationals would have to be pretty frigging obscene.

  What had Jane been involved in?

  I thought back to the memory that Dass's magical probing had caused Jane to re-experience. Jane had spoken as though she were part of a government-sponsored program of vaccinations against VITAS, yet I doubted that the UCAS had ever conducted such a program. The memory that Jane had re-lived— of talking people into accepting the vaccinations— must have been a memory of a lie she had told them.

  The thought of Jane lying to people who trusted her as their doctor deeply disturbed me.

  It must have disturbed other people, too. Was that why Lone Star had arrested Jane and kept her on ice for four years—to find out what the New Dawn Corporation was really up to on UCAS soil?

  I thought back to my conversation with Crazy John. He'd said that Jane first came to visit him because she was interested in finding out why he'd lived so long. And that gave me an idea. If I was right, Jane was lying in order to help the people of Ekwader, the town where New Dawn had done its drug testing—wherever that town was. Given the ramifications of what she was testing, it was no wonder the corp wanted to conduct the drug trials in secret.

  I took a shot in the dark, trying to prompt more information out of Galdenistal. "New Dawn was testing a drug that would expand the human life span. But what's so bad about that? A lot of people would ice their own mother if it meant getting a free shot of a treatment like Leonization."

  The treatment I'd mentioned—named Leonization after Ponce de Leon, seeker of the mythical fountain of youth—had been developed in the early 2050s. It had a limited effectiveness, and cost a whopping two million nuyen for the initial treatment. And if the poor friggers who scraped together that much credit didn't come up with the additional 100,000 nuyen twice yearly for each of the "maintenance sessions," they could look forward to the sudden and spontaneous degeneration of every cell in their bodies. Even so, Leonization was the first thing on everyone's wish list of things they'd buy when they won the lottery. And those who were wealthy enough to actually purchase Leo
nization had made millions for Universal Omnitech, the biotech firm that had developed the drug.

  Then a thought struck me. Everybody knows that elves have longer lifespans than humans. Some lab doing metabolic studies once estimated that the average elf could expect to live up to 125 years. Dwarfs were a close second in the longevity department. Bottom of the pile were trolls and orks, who could only count on living to see their fiftieth and fortieth birthdays, respectively.

  Nobody had thought to include shifters in any of those studies. I had already lived longer than a pure wolf could expect to; my mother and siblings were undoubtedly all dead by now. In a way, I understood how Crazy John felt about outliving his daughter.

  How would humans and metas react if shifters turned out to have life spans longer than their own? They were already incredibly jealous of our ability to regenerate...

  I nodded to myself. Maybe the Council of Princes that ran Tír Taimgire didn't like the idea of a drug that would allow everybody else to live as long as elves did.

  I nudged golden boy's shoulder. "Well?" I prompted.

  "The drug that... New Dawn was testing... accelerated aging," Galdenistal whispered.

  "Huh?" That one stopped me cold. The elves were trying to shorten the life spans of other races? I couldn't see any profit in that. How could a corporation make money on a drug that nobody would buy? Except maybe, the Tír Taimgire government. They might buy such a drug. New Dawn Medical Research may have been developing the drug as a biological weapon.

  I could almost believe it. There had been rumors, back in '54, of a molecular biologist who'd fled Tír Taimgire because he refused to help develop a bioweapon containing a version of the HMHW virus that affected only humans. It was supposedly a bogus story, dreamed up by the biologist to prevent his extradition to the Tír on seventeen murder charges after his arrest by Lone Star. But even though it was almost immediately discredited, the story stirred up enough political tensions that the Hr's Peace Force was put on alert. If New Dawn really did have a drug that could prematurely age humans, the Council of Princes would want to be sure it was kept under wraps.

  Which would explain why they'd sent Galdenistal after Jane just days after she was released from prison. They would want to find out what she had told Lone Star—what the UCAS government already knew.

  I doubted whether she'd be able to tell them. Except for brief flashes, Jane didn't remember anything, anymore. If she was involved in the testing of a bioweapon, she'd have no memory of it—and no guilt.

  "Did Jane know what effect the drug would have?" I asked. It was a slim hope. Jane—Mereth'riel—was a medical researcher at New Dawn. She'd probably been involved in the development of the drug itself. But I didn't want to believe it.

  Neither, it seemed, did the elf.

  Galdenistal closed his eyes. "I hope not," he sighed.

  I listened for a moment to the clanking up above, wondering how long it would be before my backup got the door open. I needed more time, more information. But what to ask next? Then it struck me: Jane had mentioned another name, when she was talking to Galdenistal in Sperethiel...

  "What about Xavier?" I asked.

  Golden boy's eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. I could see that he wouldn't want to answer this one. But I persevered. "Who—"

  The loud wrench of metal bolts breaking came from up above. A crack of light shone through the frame of the door above and I heard the steady ca-thump of a jack being cranked. Water sheeted down the walls as a woman's voice called out from above.

  "Romulus? You down there?" It sounded like the female combat mage. That meant the hydrofoil was back. I wondered if they'd caught the smugglers and if Dass was all right.

  "I'm here!" I shouted back.

  "Hang tough. We'll have you out in five."

  Cold ocean water began to rise around my feet. Galdenistal shivered; if he wasn't lifted out of the water soon he'd be hypothermic. I could see in his eyes that he knew this. I didn't think he wanted to die.

  "Answer me," I said. I decided to stretch the bluff as far as I could. "And make it good, or I'm out of here. I know Mareth'riel was involved with Xavier. I want to know how."

  His answer surprised me. It turned out that Xavier wasn't a "who." It was a "what."

  "The Xavier Foundation ... collected ... spike babies," Galdenistal answered. His teeth were chattering, which was a good sign. He hadn't gone hypothermic yet. But he was close. "Mareth'riel helped ... Laverty to ... study ... why they had expressed ... before the... Awakening."

  I decided not to betray my ignorance by asking what a spike baby was or how a baby could "express." Instead I just asked: "Why?"

  "Research into ... magic spikes ... early examples of ... activation of ... stopwatch complex. Mareth'riel..."

  I heard a wrench of metal above us as the door was finally forced open. Ice-cold seawater crashed down onto my back, sending a shiver through to my bones. A flashlight beam spiked down into the shaft as the female combat mage peered down at me, her visor flipped up to reveal her face.

  "Romulus!" she shouted. "Let's go. The corridor is filling up." Then the flashlight beam caught Galdenistal's face. It was white as death, and his gold-streaked hair floated around him. He was shivering so violently now that his entire body was rigid.

  "Who the frig is that?" the mage above us asked.

  I knew there was no way Lone Star could arrest the elf, even though he'd shot and killed two of the smugglers. The Tír government would be all over Lone Star if we even tried to charge him with murder.

  "He's a civilian," I shouted back. "And he's injured."

  I heard the mage using her commlink. Then she climbed into the shaft. "I know some healing spells," she said. "I'll get him stabilized and ready for transport."

  I sighed softly as she climbed down the ladder. That was it for asking Galdenistal any questions. I'd have to figure out what the frig he'd been talking about on my own.

  "I guess you're out of here," I whispered to him. But then I touched the wound on my side and added in a low growl, "But if we cross paths again and you try to frig with me a second time, you'll be no more than a memory."

  The elf's eyes were closed. I wasn't sure whether he'd heard me or not.

  14

  "Four days standard pay as an auxiliary?" I asked incredulously. "Is that it? Aren't you at least going to credit me for the two days we spent on standby in Yarmouth during the stakeout?"

  Sergeant Raymond stared impassively at the bright orange credstick in my hand that payroll had issued me. He raised a cigarette to his mouth and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. Then he blew a stream of blue smoke up toward my nostrils. I wrinkled my nose at the noxious odor and wondered how anyone could enjoy breathing it in. Especially when they knew that the tobacco drug was a fatal one. Humans were so perverse, sometimes...

  The sergeant's cold blue eyes bored into mine. "Sticking around in Yarmouth was your choice," he said.

  "Detective Mchawi approved me as a member of the team," I countered. "The other members of the Magical Task Force were paid for those two days."

  "They're cops. You're a—"

  "A what?" I growled. "Dumb animal?" I usually don't bare my teeth at the sergeant, but he was really getting under my fur this time. Maybe it had something to do with what Lone Star had done to Jane—they'd frigged her over as thoroughly as the residential school had done to me, and it was stirring up old memories. Or maybe I was starting to lose respect for the alphas of my pack. Maybe I didn't want to be a cop, after all...

  Raymond ignored my outburst. "You're an irregular asset. You only get paid for the work you do— you're not paid to loaf around and scratch fleas."

  I could feel my ears straining to flatten against my head in anger—which of course they wouldn't do, not in human form. I don't like slurs against my personal hygiene. I keep my beard groomed and my bedding clean...

  A voice called mockingly from down the hall: "What's he want now, a biscuit?" Laughter followed
.

  That did it. I didn't even bother to ask the sergeant if there were any more assignments. I stormed out of Raymond's office. I'd expected a commendation for confronting the corpselights in the hold of the freighter and saving the life of an important Tír national, and I hadn't even gotten a pat on the head for my troubles.

  There had been no sign of the corpselights, of course, by the time the Magical Task Force entered the cargo hold. Just empty wicker cages. The corpselights must have fled into astral space, gone back to their native domain. I suspected that, even if the corpselights had still been in the hold, I wouldn't have been paid for their containment. The combat mages would have gotten all the credit.

  Nor was I pleased with the fact that Galdenistal had disappeared as completely as the corpselights. It turned out that the elf had taken out a platinum contract with DocWagon before coming to the UCAS. After we were rescued from the hold of the freighter, an ambulance that was waiting up top whisked him away to a private clinic in Halifax. And that was the last anyone saw of him. Even Dass had been denied permission to question the elf.

  I slunk down the corridors of the police station, looking for Dass. At least things were going right for her. She'd been flying pretty high for the past two days, ever since the bust. She'd stopped the souped-up lobster boat and arrested the smugglers without any harm coming to the four Merlin hawks. She'd even managed to arrest the shaman who'd caged the hawks, by assensing the area for his astral signature and tracking him down.

  The Lone Star public relations people had given Dass and the three combat mages all of the credit for finding the freighter, which tridcasters were referring to as "the ark." Normally, I would have just told myself that they left me out of it because they didn't want to compromise my value as an irregular asset— they wouldn't have allowed trid of an undercover cop, either. But they could have given me a mention, at least—that wouldn't have compromised me. Was it that Lone Star didn't want to admit to having a shifter on the force, even as an irregular asset?