[Shadowrun 05] - Changeling

by Chris Kubasic - (ebook by Undead)

  Garner’s joy drained from his expression. “What?”

  “Did you not hear, or not understand?”

  “Mr. Itami?”

  “Do you accept?”

  Garner looked around, his eyes finally coming to rest on Peter. “I accept.”

  “Very good. Our business is finished. Billy will escort you out.”

  Garner stood, and Billy gestured to a door at the back of the club. Peter knew that everyone came in the front and went out the back.

  When the rear door had closed again, Mr. Itami spoke to Peter, though he did not look at him.

  “Well, what did you think, Profezzur?”

  “The guy didn’t seem to know what he was talking about, until you said you knew.”

  “Yes. And what did you think about being here?”

  “I like it here, Mr. Itami-sama.”

  Mr. Itami smiled. “No, I meant what did you think about being here at the meeting? This is the first time you have been present at such an interview.”

  “Yes. It was good.”

  “You will kill Katherine Amij.”

  Peter didn’t know what to say, so he went with the truth.

  “But, Itami-san, I cannot do that. She… is a civilian. She’s not part of our war.”

  A stillness flowed across the room as everyone seemed to freeze in place. A few seconds passed, and Peter thought that he might not leave the room alive.

  Billy was the most visibly disturbed. He held up his hand to Mr. Itami, silently asking for a minute to rectify the situation.

  He crossed over to Peter, put his hand on his arm and led him off to one side. Though still handsome, Billy had grown fuller and a bit weary-looking. It made Peter wonder suddenly what his father looked like now.

  “Listen, Profezzur,” Billy whispered. “This isn’t a joke, and it’s not an option. You’ve got to do this, or you’re going to get into trouble, and I’m going to get into trouble.”

  Peter glanced away. He hadn’t denied Billy anything for years. “I can’t do it.”

  Billy lifted his eyebrows, head cocked to one side, ass he stared at Peter. He was more than stunned. He was hurt. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. Maybe you don’t know what the word option means. No choice. Got it? When Mr. Itami asks someone to do something, it’s done.”

  “I didn’t hear the proof.”

  “What?”

  “The proof. That the woman helped the man break his contract.” Peter knew he was pushing the bounds of his fictional stupidity, but felt he had to stall.

  “That’s not your problem, Prof,” Billy said quietly. “But Garner is right. We checked Amij out. It’s all true. And just as important, we want her dead so we can put Garner in her place.” Billy clasped his hands together. “Listen, this is how it works. A man who doesn’t earn what he got, he doesn’t know what he’s worth. It’s like a gambler. He hits the jackpot, but he can’t take the money and use it intelligently. It was luck that got him the money in the first place. So he has to go back to the tables. He doesn’t trust himself, so he has to trust fate.

  “Mr. Itami is like the hand of fate coming in and making things happen for Garner. It’s great at first, but after the thrill is gone, Garner knows he didn’t earn his position, he didn’t make it happen for himself. Because he doesn’t trust himself, and he knows what fate did to his predecessor, he’s got no will of his own. He’s in the palm of Mr. Itami’s hand. That’s what we want at Cell Works. We want to control the place. And we will. We’ve already got people out looking for this Clarris. When we find him, we give him to Garner, who turns him in. Garner’s a hero. You kill Katherine Amij. That’s it. We win.”

  Peter hesitated.

  Billy saw it. “You’ll die.” The relaxed good nature flowed out of his face. “Do you understand, Peter? There will be nothing I can do to help you.”

  Peter thought of Jenkins, the guard at the O’Hare heist who had refused to lie. Peter decided that, unlike Jenkins, he’d try to manipulate fate more to his liking. “Yes, Billy,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  13

  Eddy drove Peter down to the Elevated, the massive gentrification project that had transformed the South-side into the new haven for businesses and the rich after the Loop had collapsed years earlier. The real estate developers had abandoned the Loop only weeks after the terrorist destruction of the IBM Tower, and ghouls from all over the city had rushed into the area, turning it into a haven for their kind. The national guard and several corporate security teams had made a total of three attempts to clear the area out. By the time the papers started calling these efforts “A Marshal Plan with a Morbid Twist,” everyone decided that the neighborhood was ruined. The developers turned their eyes toward the Southside and investors with land there became rich.

  Outside the windows of the Westwind Peter saw the towering monorail tracks that looped around and through the Elevated in a clover pattern. The pylons that held up the tracks, the tracks themselves, and the monorail Skytrack trains all glittered with silver lights that spoke of enchantment and wealth. The lights could be seen from kilometers away—a distant carnival that most inhabitants of Chicago could glimpse but not enter.

  Peter looked at the imposing homes along the snow-covered streets. His father probably had a house around here somewhere. Or used to. He’d jumped contract. In 2052 that was close to a capital crime. Perhaps he was hidden away in some underground base.

  The homes lining the streets were elegant multi-story buildings with large, heat-inefficient windows that let their owners look out onto grass lawns. Peter would probably have lived with his father in such a house if he hadn’t become a troll. Golden rectangles of light spilled out the windows into the night, illuminating white snow and plastic, pure human Jesuses in plastic-molded crèches.

  “Sure sure sure sure is nice around here.”

  “Yeah.”

  They pulled up to the address Billy had given Peter. “Come on, let’s get going. I want to get inside before she gets home.”

  They parked the Westwind as far as possible from the golden glow of the powerful lamps that bathed the street in lights, hustled out of the car, and up to the back door of the house. Eddy pulled out a security kit and used the skills he’d picked up over the years to open the door in mere minutes. Good, but not as good as some of the young gutterpunks Billy could hire off the street. Expecting praise, Eddy turned to look up at Peter, a huge grin on his twitching face. “Good work,” Peter said. “You’re still the best. Now get down the street, out of sight, and wait for me there.”

  Eddy ran off, muttering under his breath, “Right right right.”

  Peter watched his friend go, for a moment startled by the paradox of their relative competences. Eddy, a pure human, wired to be more than human, slowly falling apart over time. He, a troll, less than human in so many eyes, on the verge of a tremendous scientific breakthrough.

  He stepped into the doorway and found himself in the kitchen of the house. Dim white-blue light-strips created pools of illumination and pockets of darkness. Peter saw quickly that everything had its place—a knife rack of finished wood held a dozen blades so shiny he wondered if they’d ever been used, plastic flowers (they gave off no heat) rested in a well-polished vase, The color scheme looked black to Peter’s thermographic eyes, but he guessed it was, in fact, blue—the chairs, the tiles on the floor, the paper on the wall, all designed to complement one another. In its own way the room seemed as barren as the bare white apartment Peter lived in.

  He left the kitchen and entered a central hall by the front door. One doorway led to me dining room, which also had a door directly to the kitchen, and another led to an office. Wide stairs ascended to the second floor. Everything from the wooden chairs in the dining room to the chandelier in the hall gave Peter a hollow feeling; none of the furnishing radiated a sense of invitation. They were merely carved wood and elaborate shards of glass, and no more.

  He noticed the walls of the hall had glass panes b
uilt into them, set about a meter and a half off the floor. He stepped up to one and spotted a small switch underneath the pane. When he flicked it, a light came on behind the glass, revealing a miniature room within a box-like shelf set into the wall. He leaned down, fascinated.

  Behind the glass was a miniature of an old-fashioned drawing room. There was a fireplace with a mantel over it, wooden chairs with tiny patterns sewn into small cushions, fingernail-size paintings on the walls, small statues and busts resting on top of tiny pillars, and little framed mirrors. A jade Buddha sat on the mantelpiece. The detail delighted him.

  Peter leaned in closer, looking for miniature people. He thought perhaps he’d find the figure of a woman reading a book on one of the chairs or a man standing by a false, curtain window. With so much fine detail put into making the room he thought mere should also be people there.

  But no miniature people were present. Not even a dog on the rug. Despite the fact that the tiny room called out for life, it was empty. The lack of human figures disappointed him. And yet, he realized, if little people were in the rooms, they wouldn’t work. The room was perfect because of its stillness, a frozen moment, a tableau that could be real because all the objects portrayed would be still. People, thought Peter, are not still, and someone in the room would draw focus away from the detail of the rest, would break the illusion.

  He switched off the light and examined two other glass panes, turning on their lights one after another. One shelf contained a miniature cathedral, another an old English kitchen. Their stillness and precision calmed him, drew him in as if they were enchanted items—the lotuses from the Odyssey. Then he remembered the task at hand and clicked off the lights. He stepped up to the front door and looked through the window. Nothing. He checked his watch. She wouldn’t be back for at least twenty or thirty minutes, if Billy’s information was accurate.

  He decided to wait for her in the office. He’d learned the best way to keep wetwork quiet was to pick a spot and sit in it. Meet a target by the door, he bolts back outside. Come up on him after he closes the door behind him, and it’s too much like an assault. His instincts kick in, he puts up a struggle.

  But let him find you sitting calmly in one of his chairs, like an unannounced guest… Well, that changes things. He’s thrown off guard. Should he be polite? Should he scream for help? Should he run away? Unsure what to do, he surrenders control of the situation, waits for the killer to explain. It made it all so much easier.

  Peter entered the office and turned on a small desk lamp. A Fuchi Nova computer sat on the desk, and several shelves of chip cases and antique books lined the walls. The books were histories of Europe. The chips were recent economic theory tracts, shareholder reports for Cell Works, and other business matters. The word that came to Peter was “functional.”

  He stepped over to a closet and opened the door.

  The mess within startled him. Compared to the order of the rest of the house, the scattered boxes and holo cards caught him off guard. It was like an ancient, secret tomb ransacked by robbers. His curiosity was piqued. He knelt down and found a holo display unit. He took it, along with a stack of holo cards, and carried them to a couch set opposite the desk. He sat down and slipped a card marked 7/18/30 into the unit.

  The holo-image of a little girl with bright red hair sitting behind a computer terminal floated before his face. Kathryn Amij, he guessed, for Billy had described her as a redhead. She-was about seven or eight years old. She smiled into the camera—a beautiful smile. Her fingers rested on the keys, but because she looked into the camera, she was obviously playing at typing.

  He slid the card out and put in one from 2035. Kathryn on a horse leaping over a fence—proud, face set, in control. She wasn’t the cute girl of five years earlier, but a girl on the verge of turning into a very attractive adolescent.

  Then he found a card from 2039 and put it in. The change in her appearance startled him. Now fifteen, she was very thin, almost gaunt. The scene showed her at a birthday celebration with other teenage girls. A white-frosted cake sat in the center of the table. The other girls smiled into the camera, some with cake in their mouths. Kathryn looked toward the camera, her expression listless. Peter looked closer and saw that her cake had been mashed up, but looked as though none had been eaten.

  He found a card from the following year. Still very thin, she stood on the deck of a boat with a man and woman, also with red hair, probably her parents. She showed a smile now, but her look was more surprised than happy. At the edge of the holo Peter saw a woman seated on the bow of the boat, looking down into the water. Something about her reminded Peter of Thomas.

  He felt as if he were watching a story unfold before him in holos, and was curious to find out what would happen next. He seemed to have stumbled onto a kind of arc in Kathryn Amij’s life. The next card he slipped in was from ’41. A nearly supernatural image appeared: Kathryn in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers. She smiled for the camera, almost as winningly as when she’d been a little girl. In fact, she seemed genuinely happy. But her face was a death mask, a skeleton frame with skin stretched taut over the bone. The holo transfixed him. He stared into her eyes, wondering what illness had made her waste away.

  He would never know, for he heard the sound of a car pulling up, then a mechanical garage door opening. He fumbled with the holo unit, surprised and embarrassed. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, he didn’t want her to find him prying into the holos. He gathered up the cards and the display unit, rushed over to the closet, and dumped everything back into the secret mess.

  When all was as he had found it—the door closed, the desk lamp off—he sat down again on the couch, pulled out his gun, and placed it on his lap.

  He heard a door open somewhere in the house. No voices. She was alone.

  A few moments later the lights in the front hall went on. He glanced at the computer on the desk. She would probably come in here to check her mail.

  She pushed the door open, turned on the light, saw Peter, and froze in mid-step. Her mouth opened a bit, as if to speak, but no sound emerged. She put her hand on the door handle for support.

  She was gorgeous. Whatever happened in her teens had been taken care of. She wasn’t the industrial standard of beauty that Billy liked to drape over his arm, but something else…. Her red hair grew down almost to the small of her back, and she kept it tied in a thick pony tail. She was tall—as tall and strong as a beauty queen from Texas. Solid.

  She wore a green jacket and a skirt that came down below her knees. The flesh of her calves…

  Photons bounce of her body, pass into my aqueous humors, through my pupils and lenses, careen into my retinas, which turn the image into neural impulses, which then slide down the optic nerve into my brain, which, almost magically, turn the original photons into lust.

  Amazing. Peter thought he’d killed passion in his flesh years ago.

  He also noticed, out of habit, that she didn’t seem to be armed.

  “Hello…” she said uncomfortably. “Can I help you?”

  “Miss Amij,” he said, smiling, trying to put her at ease. “Would you sit down please? I must speak with you.”

  “What is this about?”

  Peter uncrossed his legs and revealed the gun. “Please. It will be easier if you sit.”

  She drew in a sharp breath, then placed her hand on her stomach. “Oh.”

  “Please.”

  She moved to the chair by the desk. Watching her move only made the intoxication of Peter’s lust increase. He needed to focus. “Miss Amij, I was sent here to kill you.” His jaw tightened. Not the best opening.

  “Yes?” Her face was a mask that revealed nothing, but he saw something flicker in her eyes. He knew her mind was whirring, making plans, looking for angles. He liked her.

  “There was a man who worked for you…. a Dr. Clarris.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh. As in surprise.”

  He smiled. “Dr. C
larris was extracted from Cell Works a few weeks ago, by mercenaries working for an unknown employer.”

  “Yes,” she said, and cocked her head expectantly to one side. She placed her hand on her stomach again.

  “Your security forces are at a loss to explain how it happened, and believe that the mercs must have received information to help them, information that Clarris would not have had access to.”

  “Yes.”

  “They are, of course, doing what they can to find Dr. Clarris. It is still not known if he was kidnapped from Cell Works, or if he wanted to break his contract with your company.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you helped him?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter was surprised. No denial. She gave him nothing he could use to twist around her later. “Why?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Since I’m here to kill you, would you mind sharing them with me?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter drew in a breath. “You have betrayed your own corporation, a company founded by your grandfather. My employer, a man with a great deal of stock in Cell Works, has very traditional, and Eastern, values. Such behavior rubs him the wrong way. And, if I’m not mistaken, if you die, a man named Garner has a very good chance of becoming Cell Works’ CEO…”

  That caught her off guard. “Garner.” She looked away, disoriented, and then her eyes opened and she nodded once, as if the final piece of a mental puzzle had just slid into place. “Garner,” she said again, but this time with a firmer voice.

  “Yes. Garner. My employer is helping him find Clarris, to bring him back to Cell Works as a trophy. And since my employer is helping Garner get your job, my employer would, in effect, be the boss of Cell Works’ boss.”

  Kathryn stared down at the ground and gripped the side of her chair with her right hand. He saw that things were finally moving too fast for her to keep up. “Who are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Peter said, getting to his feet. “Now, since you’ve let all my statements slide by without protest, I’m going to assume all are correct. And I’ll level with you. I want to find Clarris myself. For my own reasons. Miss Amij, I will help you escape if you will tell me where he is.”