by Jak Koke
Suddenly she remembered she was naked, and though she and Dougan had once been intimate, that was another lifetime ago. She smiled and backed into the room, but left the door open. "This had better be some crucial drek," she said, crawling back into bed to cover herself with a quilt.
Dougan stepped inside, a faint whine coming from the servos in his exoskeleton. He pulled the door shut behind him, plunging the room into sweet darkness again, though with light enough for her to see.
"Okay, Dougan, now that you’ve got me up, spill it. Or get out." She smiled and held the covers up. "Or get in if you want."
That brought a smirk to his face. He was obviously tempted. "I wish we had time for that," he said. "And maybe we will, after this is all over. But now . . ."
"Yes."
"I want to get La Muerte back together for a run."
Maria laughed. Deep and full, throwing her hair back. It was the funniest thing she’d heard all week.
"I’m serious," he said.
After a minute, she gained control of herself. "I can see that," she said. "Maybe that’s why it’s so funny."
"It’s important," he said. "And very lucrative."
Maria laid her head back against a soft pillow. "Go home," she said.
Dougan sat on the bed. "Maria, if we leave now, we can get Maurice and Bob Henry out before the El Infierno curfew."
"Dougan, you’re loco. El Infierno security won’t let them out. Nobody gets out of there anymore."
"I’ve already contacted them, and made plans to get them out."
Maria pushed up onto one elbow. He is insane. "Why should I help you? We’re both many years out of the shadows. The biz is different now. Lot’s of wetwork, no sense of honor. Besides, I have kids, and they’ll be home from school in a couple of hours. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I can’t just leave and go back into the gang jungle."
Dougan sat on the bed and looked at Maria. "Tashika knows about me, and knows we used to run together."
"He’s blackmailing you?"
"That would be the nice term for it, yes. He’s got data on our last run—the lost election job. Twelve years, and he still won’t let me forget it."
"Would you anyway?" Maria asked. Her brother, Jesse, had died in that run. Jesse with his dark, haunted eyes. His gaunt cheeks and whipcord physique, his bronze skin stretched tight over lean muscles.
She missed his reassuring presence, security and command emanating from him like heat from a kerosene burner. She dreamt of him often, during those days when sleep came slowly. And she could never get the events of his death out of her mind, despite years of trying.
Even now, she still saw that school building in Compton where they’d tried to hide from the Calfree forces—the state guard plus Lone Star special ops and corp mercenaries. Maria had crouched in the predawn stillness of the school’s library. Jesse, Dougan, Maurice, and Bob Henry sat next to the hulking shadows of their big bikes, silent and waiting. Leaning their backs against the bookshelves, holding their automatic weapons ready.
Combat mages sent fire elementals racing down the school’s corridors lined with old-style lockers. Heavy battery drones rolled on thick treads and blew holes in the walls with their cannons.
Maybe those forces didn’t know that orphans and homeless families lived in the school. Maybe they were unaware that gang wars had destroyed most of the houses and apartments in the neighborhood, that over four hundred people slept on the floor in the abandoned classrooms and the gymnasium. Maybe they were uninformed.
Or maybe they didn’t care.
Children went screaming out into the halls, running for their lives. Trying to find a safer place. Many people burned to death when the fire elementals engulfed their soft flesh, turning it to bubbling black gelatin. The smell of burning corpses filled the air with its thick stench.
That smell permeated Maria’s hair and her dark feathered suit, and it never came out. Later, she pulled all the hard-won feathers from her body suit and burned them. She cut her waist-length hair to the skull and threw it onto the fire.
Those people were innocent. The hardest lesson. Innocence is no protection. They had been killed because of her and Dougan. Because of Jesse, Maurice, and Bob Henry.
The Calfree forces fried the place to find them. Because they were La Muerte, a gang. And because they’d been smart and daring; they had branched out from gang-banging to shadowrunning. Shadowrunning was more to Maria’s liking; more subtle and technical. Purposeful. And it paid much, much better.
On their last run, La Muerte had been hired to help get a team of cybersamurais and deckers into the California election computer base. The job was risky, but it paid well. How were they supposed to know that the insertion team was going to wipe the databanks clean, erasing the gubernatorial election results? It was an action that slotted off a whole drekking lot of powerful people. People who wanted anyone involved to pay.
Maria and the others were hunted for almost a week before they were cornered in the Compton school building. And by then a full-scale war on gangs had begun. State troops, Lone Star, and merc forces poured into the godforsaken streets of El Infierno, bombing, shooting, burning Maybe La Muerte’s involvement in the lost election was just the pretext the bigwigs in Sacramento needed for their dirty work.
Maria didn’t know, but in less than a week, the edict was proclaimed; all gangs were to be purged from Compton and Gardena. The jungle must be purified. The war was on.
What the frag did the suits know about the jungle anyhow? Nada. Zero. The big nothing.
The suits looked down from their towers and saw violence and strife, thought they could bring order to chaos. But what they didn’t know was that order was already there. Order of the baddest certainly, but order nonetheless.
El Infierno had its problems, perhaps more than most, but force was no way to solve them. Nuyen perhaps. Cred for jobs and schools. Self-confidence.
Hope.
Now, Maria felt tears resurface as she pulled her pillow close. She remembered how Jesse had sacrificed his life. As leader of the gang, and her older brother, he felt somehow responsible for them. So he did the fragging noble, heroic, macho thing. He rode his Honda Excaliber through the library’s double doors and across the asphalt basketball courts. He yelled and whooped, trying to draw attention.
Maria had cast an illusion on him, to make it appear that all of them were making a run for it. Jesse only made it thirty meters before the assault cannons and miniguns blew his body to shreds. But it was enough time for Maria and the others to escape into the night under the cloak of invisibility.
Jesse had saved them and the remaining families and orphans that night. And afterward, Maria and Dougan left the jungle, left shadowrunning. Maria had no other family really, except Theresa, her mentor, so she did a quick fade with Dougan. She’d never have survived without him. They bailed together, and had stayed together for a while before Dougan changed his face and got the gig with the Buzzsaws.
"How could Tashika know?" Maria asked.
Dougan shrugged. "He’s the one who helped me disappear," he said. "Got me the opening with the Buzzsaws, but I never told him anything about you or the others." He took a breath. "He shouldn’t know about the election run, but he does. He knows everything. Somehow he found out who we are. And if we don’t cooperate, he’ll reveal it. For Maurice and Bob Henry, that doesn’t mean much, but I’d be ruined if the fans and the public ever found out. And you . . . you have a family, a stake in this community. We could still be jailed."
Maria felt her shoulders sag under the weight of his statement. The daylight outside fogged her mind; Owl didn’t help her until the sun went down. "Talon," she called.
The ally appeared before her in the shape of a bird-man, taller than she was with large round eyes and feathered ears. "I’m leaving with Dougan," Maria said. "You will take care of the children."
"As you wish."
"Good." Maria looked at Dougan, who seemed suddenly tire
d. "Tell me about this plan of yours," she said. "We can go as soon as I dress."
Dougan talked about the run as she searched her closet for her old gear. He told her about Tashika’s request that he injure Tamara Ny, and his reluctant acceptance. Then how he had accidentally killed her. If she hadn’t moved her head at the last second . . .
In the back of the closet, Maria found her old nylon go-bag. And inside were her old skins and a gelpack armored vest to protect against the occasional bullet. She had attached new feathers to the suit, replacing those she’d burned twelve years ago, but she hadn’t actually worn it since. Maria had continued her magic over the years, but for herself only, and to stay close to Owl. Not for tricks and combat.
Dougan seemed very upset about Tamara Ny’s death. Now, Tashika was forcing him to get Muerte back together to tie up the loose ends. "After we get Maurice and Bob Henry, we’re to find a slag named Grids Desmond," Dougan said. "Plus some information he and Tamara Ny stole from Tashika."
Maria gathered her foci—a wide gold choker inlaid with orichalcum and studded with rubies and emeralds, and three silver rings that she wore on the last two fingers of her right hand. Then she opened her waist pouch to check her fetishes. There was a bag of down and four dried mice. Excellent.
"Are we to kill this person?" she asked, slipping into her vest and skins. Everything still fit even after two kids and twelve years. Amazing. "I won’t do wetwork anymore."
"Uh no, I don’t think we’ll have to."
"Tashika doesn’t care?"
"I guess not," Dougan said. "He just wants the data." Maria snorted. "Good."
"But if we did have to kill the slag," Dougan said, "it would just be part of the biz. No big deal."
She gave him a hard look as she finished dressing. "Shut up," she said. "Just shut the frag up, and let’s go get the others."
ACT TWO
-
HIS LIFE AFTER DEATH
20
It was late afternoon by the time the skycab helicopter dropped Jonathon off at his estate just outside of Montecito. He stood at the edge of the helipad and waved at Synthia, who smiled back through the glass of the skycab’s window. His hair flattened in the wind from the Hughes Airstar as it powered up. Jonathon ducked instinctively as he stepped further back to let the ’copter lift into the air.
The Airstar crested the top of the big oaks of his grounds and angled south, out over the water and toward LA, taking Synthia back to the heart of the sprawl. Jonathon took a moment in the aftermath of the helicopter’s hurricane simply to stand with his eyes closed. He breathed deeply and felt the heat of the sun against his face.
Calm after the storm.
And then, into the calm, under the gentle breeze, came the low hiss. Ever-present. Tamara was still there in his head, and he found himself getting used to the constant frayed edge to his nerves.
He opened his eyes and walked slowly up the brick path to his house. He’d endeavored to recreate his childhood home when he’d purchased the ten-acre plot of land in the hills above Montecito. It covered most of a small, grassy hillside, shaded by old oaks planted eighty or ninety years before. He preferred oaks to the ever-popular palms that grew ubiquitously in Southern Calfree.
The house, which had been finished only a few months ago, was much larger than his childhood home in Redding, but the look was the same. Two-story, wooden farmhouse-style structure with wrap-around porches on both stories, painted white. But the architect had convinced him that such a meager house would devalue the property, and Jonathon knew how much nuyen he’d paid for the land.
Too fragging much.
He took one last glance out across the water in the distance, wondering if he could see Synthia’s chopper. He loved her; that much he knew. She was warm and intelligent, fascinating and unlike anyone he had ever known. She wanted to be with him just to be with him. No ulterior motive. No agenda.
Oh, she had her secrets, her own life at UCLA, teaching young wannabee mages. But he liked that. He enjoyed discovering things about her that he never expected. He didn’t know her inside and out. Unlike Tamara . . .
Now that Synthia was gone, Jonathon would contact Grids and learn why Tamara had been killed. He’d been waiting, impatiently, for this moment ever since he’d played the message from Grids.
The recording had been short and concise. "Jonathon, you’re the only one who can help me. I’ve got to know what’s happened to Tam. On the trid they’re saying she’s dead." The video was blanked and Grids’ voice wavered as though he were agitated. Rushed.
"If that’s true, I know why," he said. "Call this LTG. But use a public telecom or a secure line. Leave a message for Tamara’s real mother. That’s how I’ll know it’s you. Not Anna, but the other. You know who. Then give a meeting place and time. Make it a public place with a lot of people. Come secretly. Come alone."
Then Grids had disconnected.
Venny was asleep in the guest room, exhausted after keeping watch all last night while being besieged by reporters and lawyers and fans. PR work was never Venny’s biz, Jonathon thought. But since he’s asleep . . .
Jonathon moved through the massive kitchen, tiled with large white and black squares. He passed by the broad, hardwood staircase in the main entryway and into the garage.
Four vehicles awaited their turn to roll at high speed over the twisting, turning mountain roads along the coast and through the forested terrain east of Santa Barbara. There was a vintage 1988 Jaguar XJ12 with retrofitted cybernetic interface. Pristine condition. And next to it, a Mitsubishi Nightsky rested like a gentle giant.
But neither the Jag nor the limo was appropriate for his errand this afternoon. He needed something subtle. Something that might blend into the flow of traffic—his new Eurocar Westwind 2000-turbo. Hah, he thought, as discreet as an ork at a Humanis rally. The Westwind was uncommonly flashy for most occasions, but it would still be less noticeable than either of the other two.
The fourth vehicle was a motorbike—a custom, built-for-the-road Harley Scorpion. Not appropriate for a trip into the city. Jonathon walked over to the sleek Westwind and punched the combination into the door lock. With a muffled click the lock released and the door swung upward. Have to hurry while Venny’s sleeping. The bodyguard would never allow a solo jaunt into the sprawl. Especially now.
Jonathon checked the storage compartment to make sure his drones were fully charged and loaded. The remote birds rested neatly in position. One was a Cyberspace Designs Stealth Sniper, gleaming on its spring-loaded launch rod like a cat-sized beetle. Equipped with a rudimentary sensor package and a sniper rifle. The other was an AeroDesign Condor, inflatable, solar-powered, and excellent for longterm recon and info-gathering. He hoped he wouldn’t need them, but since he had the toys, he might as well play.
Nestled neatly next to the drones was his box of emergency rations, hi-carb energy bars and a case of chocolate protein shakes. Gotta keep the beast at bay. He pulled a can from the case, peeled away the top and drank half of it before closing the trunk. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat, wincing against the stiffness in his knee and the pangs in his chest.
The car’s internal trid unit linked with the surveillance cameras to show a couple of trid reporter vans waiting outside the front gate. Luckily the underground rear entrance was still secret enough to elude unwanted scrutiny. Jonathon fired up the Westwind and made his way out through the short tunnel.
The unmarked private road joined the main road three kilometers from his front gate, and the cameras showed no traffic. Within minutes he was down the road and out onto the CalTrans expressway, bound for the LA sprawl. Jonathon drove manually for a while, losing himself in the physical mechanics of it. He hadn’t jacked into a machine since attacking Dougan, and he didn’t particularly want to any time soon.
He tried to give himself to the road, the muted growl of the pavement under the wheels—nearly in harmony with the hiss of his head. The stretching flickers of the dashed white l
ines disappearing into the distance, forever over the curving horizon.
He stopped at a rest area to place the call. Stepping up to a telecom that smelled of urine and vomit. He activated the telecom, voice only, and punched in the LTG number Grids had given him.
No message. No beep. Just the faint whine of empty memory.
"This message is for Jennifer Sanborne," Jonathon said, using the codename Grids had asked for.
When Jonathon and Tamara were in prison, after the Multnomah Falls accident, Tamara had hired the services of a genealogist to track down her real mother. Evidently, the gypsies had found her as a baby, abandoned on Freeway 10 in Pueblo territory. Anna had adopted her and raised her, but Tamara had always longed to know her real mother.
The genealogist took some DNA from Tamara and scanned the databanks for a SINner with a close match. Jennifer Sanborne was one of the closest, and since she lived in Phoenix, smack in the Pueblo lands, Tamara was convinced the woman had to be her real mother. But Tamara had never confronted Jennifer Sanborne to learn if she’d abandoned her six-month-old daughter on a freeway in the desert. She’d been too afraid of finding out this wasn’t her mother after all.
Then Tamara would have no real mother.
Very few people knew about Jennifer Sanborne. Grids had been smart to pick that name. "Jennifer," Jonathon said, "meet me at Venice Beach. The Dockweiler Gardens." Jonathon focused on his retinal clock, which showed 02:48:21 pm. "At five o’clock," he said, then disconnected.
He quickly climbed back into the car and accelerated out onto the freeway.
About an hour later, Jonathon parked the Westwind 2000-turbo in a Mafia-controlled gravel lot between Grandma’s Pharmacy and Survival and a giant, hotdogshaped food shack called The Big Weenie. Venny had tried to get him on the car’s telecom more than once, but Jonathon wanted to be on his own for this one. Venny’s presence might make Grids bolt, and Jonathon needed to find out what he knew about Tamara’s death.
