The Forever Drug

by Lisa Smedman

  With all of the hype surrounding this latest success of the Magical Task Force, Dass had been pretty busy. My only chance to talk to her had been when she took my statement about what went down on board the freighter. I had impressed upon her the need to ask the smugglers about Jane. But I didn't know yet if she'd had the chance to follow through.

  The delays were driving me crazy—all that time spent staking out the freighter and taking down the bad guys, and I was still no closer to finding Jane. I thought I'd been hot on her scent, but it had turned out to be a dead end. Unless the smugglers we'd arrested had told Dass what they'd done with her...

  I finally located Dass. She was coming out of the corridor that led to the sending room—a specialized area of the police station used for ritual magic. I've never seen the place myself—it's off limits to anyone but DPI members, and even cops from other divisions aren't allowed past the magical and mundane security systems that guard that part of the police station. I hear the room is filled with hermetic circles studded with precious gems, and fetishes that date back several centuries, and all kinds of weird drek...

  Dass looked tired but pumped as the door clicked shut behind her—she was enjoying every minute of this investigation. She was in an animated conversation with two male detectives—presumably also from DPI, since they had been in the sending room with Dass. I'd never seen them before, but one sounded like he was from Boston and the other one spoke with a thick French accent. The investigation into paranormal animal smuggling was obviously expanding, if detectives from other jurisdictions were getting involved. From their body language, I could tell they were deferring to Dass in the investigation. She was clearly moving up in the hierarchy of the Lone Star pack.

  I thought I saw a flash of irritation cross Dass's face as she spotted me in the corridor. But her greeting seemed warm enough and she smelled friendly.

  "Salamu, Rom. How's it going?"

  Except that she didn't wait for my answer. Only when I caught her arm did she pause.

  "What about the smugglers?" I hissed. "Did they tell you anything about Jane?"

  Dass glanced at her fellow mage detectives, who had stopped to wait for her. "Go on ahead," she called to them. "I'll catch up with you at the evidence room."

  She seemed reluctant as she watched them leave, but she answered my question.

  "Sorry, Rom," she said. "The smugglers didn't say anything about her."

  "Did you mind probe them?" I asked. "What did they think about when you asked them about Jane?"

  "I was using a mind probe, yes. But all I got were brief flashes of a small coastal village. I could see it clearly, but I didn't recognize it. There was no landmark—nothing to make it stand out from the thousands of other towns that dot the coast."

  I let out a small growl of frustration. Dass was my friend—pretty much the only one I had at Lone Star—and yet I sensed that she hadn't made much of an effort. She was too distracted by her case, by the recognition she was receiving.

  "Where do the smugglers live?" I asked. "What address did they give as their place of residence?"

  "You know I can't give you that information, Rom. It's part of an ongoing DPI investigation. Ndivyo ilivyo—that's how it is. You're not part of ..." Then she stopped. Whatever she'd been about to say, she thought better of it. She pulled her arm away from my hand.

  "Sorry, Rom," she said firmly. "Omba radhi."

  I winced. I felt like a puppy who'd just been smacked across the nose.

  "Dass," I said slowly. "Is it because Lone Star doesn't want Jane back in circulation after what they did to her? Is that why you won't give me anything that will help me find her?"

  Dass's dark eyes stared at me for what felt like a full minute. Then her voice dropped.

  "I don't want to get involved with that, Rom," she said quietly. "I don't know what is going on there— and I don't care to know. I have to focus all of my attention on the smuggling investigation right now."

  She sighed. "But I can tell you this much. The smugglers listed an apartment in the North End as their place of residence. We've already checked it out, and we didn't turn up anything there that would help you find Jane."

  "Give me more, Dass," I urged. "I want to find her."

  "Why, Rom? Why not just let her go?"

  I couldn't answer that. The reasons were all snarled up, like a tangle of fur. Jane had been frigged over and needed help—and if the data we'd scanned on her under the name Mareth'riel was correct, she didn't have any next of kin to take care of her. Meanwhile, people kept kidnapping her: first Galdenistal, then the smugglers. The only one who'd tried to stand in their way was me. And I'd failed. Spirits only knew where the frig the smugglers had taken Jane, what they were doing to her ...

  I couldn't sort out my natural instincts to guard and protect Jane from my physical attraction to her. And I was still dealing with the fact that Lone Star— the people I regarded as my pack—had been the ones to damage Jane's mind. I somehow felt that it was my obligation to make up for that, to put things right.

  I just stared at Dass. "I can't let it go," I said at last. "I have to help her."

  "You could be getting into some deep drek, Rom," Dass cautioned. "I wouldn't want to see Lone Star lose its finest tracker—to see you get hurt. But I can tell you're going to keep trying to track her down, no matter what. You might as well not do it blindly. I'll give you what I've got."

  I gave her a wolfish grin. "Thanks, Dass."

  She nodded. Then she motioned for me to follow her. Only when we were safely inside her office did she give me the rest of what she had.

  The smugglers turned out to come from a long line of criminals—families that had been in the drug-running business for decades. One of them—the fellow with the webbed razor implants who I'd tangled with earlier—had a great-great-great grandfather who'd been a rumrunner during the Prohibition era, back in the early days of the last century.

  They were all Mi'kmaq Indians, and went by names from that tribe's mythology. The big, blubbery guy with the cyberware was Kluskapewit—Mi'kmaq for "shark." The skinny male was Wowkwis—"Fox Boy." He was the one the Weeds had said sold Halo in the Old Burial Grounds in Halifax. The woman would only give us the English translation of her name: Otter.

  I wondered, given the animal names, if any of them were shifters. The big guy's scent had smelled slightly off-human, as if there had been a shifter somewhere in his family tree. But Dass surely would have mentioned any paras in the group. After thinking about the webbed implants that "Shark" had, I decided they were probably just shifter wannabes.

  There had been no sign of the rigger who'd driven the speedboat on the night Jane had been kidnapped. He hadn't been on board the lobster boat on the night we made the bust, and Dass had turned up no sign of him at the apartment the shifters had rented. According to what Dass had been able to piece together from her interviews with the smugglers, he'd only been hired help.

  And that was all Dass was able to give me. None of it told me why the smugglers had been so keen on kidnapping Jane. She didn't seem to have any connection with them. I wondered if they might have been selling the "drug" Halo to the New Dawn Corporation. It didn't seem likely, though.

  I wasn't sure where to go next. I don't have many connections with the city's shadowrunners—as an irregular asset for Lone Star, I work the other side of the street. But I put out the word to the few contacts I had to keep an eye out for anybody matching the description of the rigger who'd been working with the smugglers: the white guy with the tattoos.

  Then I went home. Dawn was breaking, and I was exhausted. I romped with Haley for a while in the yard, working out my frustrations. At one point I bowled her over and snapped my teeth too close to her throat, making her whimper. I spent several minutes consoling her, using gentle licks to wash away her fears—and feeling guilty, once again, for having chosen Jane over her. Haley didn't appeal to me any more, except, of course, when she was in heat. Jane had engaged me on a dee
per level. On a human level.

  I changed back into human form, then curled up on my couch under the blanket that Jane had slept under during her all-too-brief visit to my garage. I pressed it to my nose and drank in Jane's scent, then drifted off into a dream in which I was chasing a woman along a foggy shoreline—a woman who turned to mist the moment I caught up to her.

  15

  Nearly a week after the Magical Task Force raided the freighter, I finally heard back from one of my contacts—the one I'd posted a message for, asking if he could dig up information on "spike babies" and New Dawn Medical Research. The return message was sent to Gem's telecom—the number I use as my home telecom address. Gem had printed it out for me and slipped it under the door of the garage. It was brief and to the point: meet me at the binary at 2100. d.f.

  That was it. No return address—no routing codes of any kind, for that matter—and no mention of what my contact had found. But he was good, the best. He'd have some answers for me.

  I jandered on down to the meeting place just before the appointed hour. The Binary is a bar, one of the quietest in Halifax. Instead of music it has soft white noise that reduces all other sounds to a whisper, and its patrons hardly ever speak to each other. Not in the real world, anyhow.

  Located on University Avenue just down from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the bar caters to decker wannabes—the university students who attend TUNS. They sit in the bar, day after night, fiberoptic cables plugged into their datajacks, surfing the Matrix on some of the hottest decks NovaTech ever produced.

  The bouncer at the front door of the Binary gave me the once-over, pointedly noting my lack of data-jacks. He was a cybergeek—a scrawny-looking fellow with a stringy ponytail and mismatched clothes that smelled of old sweat—but with a body that was fitted with some of the most lethal-looking cyberware on the market. His arms were cybered from the elbow down, with retractable spurs in the elbows. A pistol was mounted on each of his oversized forearms on a gyromount, which would allow him to swivel and shoot them with a mere thought.

  I nodded to him as I stepped inside, but privately scoffed at the bar's security overkill. The cybered-up bouncer was tough, but he'd be totally useless in dealing with the real threat to the patrons and staff of the Binary: black IC, whispering at the speed of light up through the fiber-optic cables the patrons used to jack into the Matrix.

  The inside of the bar was filled with baglike chairs made of foam that molded to the contours of the body. The patrons—university students wearing the latest nouveau pauvre fashions and glow-in-the-dark tribal body paint—drooped into these chairs, loose-boned, eyes staring, lost in the world of the Matrix.

  That was how I'd be meeting my contact—in the Matrix. The Binary was a place for icon-to-icon meetings, not face to face.

  I looked around for a free cyberdeck. I needed one with an electrode net interface, since my regenerative powers didn't allow me to have a datajack. The only deck available was built into a telecom set whose monitor screen was set to a news channel. I slotted my credstick into the box at the side of the telecom. The tridcast disappeared from the monitor, and was replaced by the face of a metallic-skinned android— a digital rendition of the program that served as the Binary's bartender. It asked if I wanted a drink in a voice that sounded like it was being reverbed through a tin can.

  "Sure," I said. "Why not?"

  The Binary makes money not only by charging for Matrix access, but also by selling "smart drinks"— herbal concoctions that supposedly boost the brain's processing power. Normally I wouldn't touch the stuff—on the two other occasions that I've been to the Binary, I came strictly for the Matrix access. But it had been a hot walk over to the bar and I was thirsty. I stabbed the icon under a greenish-looking cocktail glass with the name Neural Nectar. Then I was prompted to select a size: single or nought.

  "Which one's smaller?" I asked.

  Tinny laughter echoed from the monitor, as if my question was the dumbest thing the bartending program had heard in weeks.

  "Never mind," I growled. I touched my finger to the "single" icon.

  Within a minute, the drink was at my table: a soupy green liquid in a frosted shot glass. It smelled like grass and algae, and had a bitter aftertaste. And it had the punch of a half-dozen cups of coffee. Within a few seconds of downing the drink, it felt as if the tufts of hair on the tips of my ears were vibrating.

  I set the empty glass down and fitted the trode net over my head. I waited the minute and thirty-eight seconds it took for the clock to hit precisely 21:00 hours—nine p.m. in the real world—then entered one of the private chat rooms that were the Binary's stepping-stone to the Matrix. I didn't need to bother actually surfing the Matrix; I knew my contact would find me.

  My body tensed and I involuntarily bared my teeth as I found myself in the chat room I liked the least: the Roller Coaster. Logically, I knew I wasn't really moving, but my stomach lurched and my pulse sped up as the virtual roller coaster I was riding plunged down an impossibly steep track into what appeared to be a bottomless pit, then rocketed through a series of turns, corkscrews, and hills, turning the landscape around me into a blur. Everything seemed real, from the rumble and squeal of the metal wheels on the track to the smell of cotton candy that filled the air. The worst part was, you couldn't close your eyes. The sensations were being fed directly into the brain, via the electrode net that was snugged over my temples.

  Finally, with one heart-freezing jolt, the roller coaster left the tracks altogether and sailed into a star-speckled black void. That was when my contact appeared in the seat beside me.

  His Matrix persona was an ink-black skeleton wearing a loose black suit and a tall top hat. The skeleton's eyeballs were yellow and bloodshot, and a noose made from frayed white rope hung around his neck like a tie. He blended with the backdrop of the chat room, a shadow against the darkened sky.

  "Good to see you again, Romulus," he said in a voice like velvet dust.

  "Good to see you, too. How's Chester doing?"

  "Just fine." He turned and grinned at me, baring teeth as shiny and black as piano keys. "Thanks to you."

  My contact went by the name of Dark Father— when he was in the Matrix. In the real world he was a wealthy Toronto businessman and philanthropist, a prominent campaigner for metahuman rights in the UCAS. He'd come to Halifax in person a few months ago, searching for his estranged son. Lone Star hadn't made any headway in tracking the boy down—the fact that Dark Father's son was a ghoul hadn't exactly motivated them—and I'd been assigned to the case. I'd found the son—Chester—in record time, despite the fact that the piece of clothing from which I'd sampled the boy's scent hadn't been worn by him in years.

  Sometimes you just get lucky—and wind up with one of the world's hottest deckers owing you one, as a result. I'd figured that if anyone could track down the data on spike babies, it was Dark Father. And I was right.

  "What did you find?" I asked. "What's a 'spike baby'?"

  Dark Father answered my question with one of his own: "Are you familiar with the theory that there are cycles of magic?"

  "Sure," I said. "But just what I've seen on the tabloid trid shows—about how the level of magic in the world rises and falls over the millennia, and that the peak that resulted in the Awakening of 2011 was just one of a series of high points. And something about the last time magic reached threshold levels was maybe 5000 B.C., with a seven-thousand-year trough when magic didn't work."

  "They're talking about the ambient mana count," Dark Father said. "But some people think there may have been highly localized mana spikes during those trough years. Not necessarily high enough to allow for spellcasting—although some of our 'legends' seem to indicate that magically active individuals may have been able to cast spells, in certain specific locations. But certainly high enough for the genes linked to the elven metatype to express themselves."

  "So you're saying elves were being born before the Awakening?" I asked. It made me wonder i
f there had been shifters in earlier centuries, as well—if the legends of werewolves might be true. "What about other metatypes? And paras?"

  "It's possible some paranimals might have been born in the areas where mana spikes occurred," Dark Father said. "But my sources say elves would have been the only metatype that appeared pre-Awakening. Remember that when the Awakening started producing 'unexplained genetic expression,' elves were the first metatype to appear."

  "And dwarfs," I prompted.

  "Yes, although I haven't heard anything to suggest that there were dwarven 'spike babies.' And the magic certainly wasn't high enough for other metatypes to appear. Even after the Awakening, the mana level was still rising. It took another ten years before 'goblinization' began—before orks and trolls began to appear."

  "And ghouls?" I asked. "Were they after that?"

  "Ghouls aren't a metatype," he corrected me. "We're a result of a virus: the Krieger strain of the HMHW virus, to be specific."

  He sighed. "Maybe if we'd also had a genetic reason for our appearance, rather than being linked with a disease, people might have treated us like people, instead of like monsters ..."

  He stared off into the star-filled sky for a moment, a pained expression on his skeletal face. I could feel for him. Dark Father was a ghoul—one who could pass for human, just as I could pass. But ghouls were even more reviled than shifters were. Shifters ate raw meat, but at least we didn't feed on our own. Ghouls were cannibals, and ate the flesh of the dead.

  "So how come only some of us are born metas and paras?" I asked. "Why are there still humans?"

  Dark Father turned his yellowed eyes back to meet my own. "It's in the DNA," he said. "And it's recessive. Just as some people are redheads or are left-handed, only some are metas—those that have the DNA coding for it. There is a magically triggered 'loci' on one of their chromosomes that doesn't express until the mana level has reached a certain threshold. When the level of magic does become high enough, these genes activate and begin producing enzymes that cause specific changes in the body. Two human parents living in a high-mana area suddenly produce a child with pointed ears and strangely colored eyes and hair: an elf. Or two wolves produce a cub capable of shifting into human form.