by Nyx Smith
Hallowed vessels conveying the essence of life.
Liron bends and pulls open the heavy latch crossing the trap door set into the concrete floor. Momentarily, the door rises, swinging back. One, then another, of his hunters climb through the squarish opening and straighten up, turning to face him. They are not particularly attractive, these sturdy ork women, with their brutish fangs and black leather clothing, but they are strong and enduring, and among the most conscientious of his minions.
Liron opens his cloak, and with a brief movement of his fingers reinforces the enchantment affecting both of them.
“Come, my dear.”
Erin comes forward, her smile almost girlish, coquettish. Liron envelops her with the enchantment of the cloak, an enchantment assuring privacy, and draws her mouth to his. The breath flows swift and lush from her lungs; he inhales deeply, eagerly. On the astral, she is a bright beacon of life gleaming against the dark. Her eyes burn with the light of souls uncounted. Now, the profusion of life energy she has assimilated flows to him. With it comes the essential force he requires to sustain himself, as well as the power to resist the leprosis, to hold any further deterioration in check.
As his reserve of energy swells, the whispers and rustlings from around the basement rise to a subtle crescendo. His failures sense the life he absorbs; they envy him his power. It is very sad. They are like Erin and Paige and the others, Changed, according to the principles of the great work of the Roggoth’shoth, only these early ones did not turn out so well. They are quite insane. Like the fiends of fabled Azzorloth, Bridge Between Worlds, so arcanely described by the ancient mage Penticlese in the Roggoth’shoth.
Erin sighs and sags. Liron releases her, then invites Paige forward, into his embrace. His power swells. His body tingles with pleasure. Once again, his hunters have saved him time, precious time, by bringing him life, thus allowing him to continue his great work, the search for a cure to the leprosis.
But now he must go to his wife, dear Victoria, to feed her, sustain her, as the hunters have sustained him. Tomorrow, when he returns to the office, he will attend to Ms. Amy Berman.
Dear child.
63
Ivar turns from the dark, crowded Bronx streets of Morrisania to a lime-green door covered with black and red graffiti. Beyond the door is a stairwell, a pretty dark one, too. It goes down about two levels. At the bottom is a small dark space, the bottom of the stairwell, and a pair of ugly black-leathered dwarfs with the Trollhammer insignia tattooed onto their faces.
“What you want, squat?” one asks.
Ivar replies, “A piece of your mother’s fat ass.”
The one who spoke now grins."You’ll have to get in line. Go on in, squat.”
So much for passwords. The only door leads to a circular stairway that circles down to the floor of a big room like a natural cavern, but decorated in penthouse style, or something like that. The walls are rough-hewn stone, except for the one covered by the three-meter-wide trideo screen. The carpet looks like velvet. Soft as a pillow. Built into the corner of the room is a circular table and a curving bench seat like a booth in a restaurant. Standing next to the booth is another Trollhammer slag. Now delivering a drink to the booth is some skinny Asian biff in a smoky black bodysuit and stilt-heeled shoes. At the rear of the booth sits a dwarf in a multichrome reflective suit and matching shades, white buzzcut hair, and a matching razorslash beard. His name is Flint. He sits there stroking a rockworm, which is like a snake, but with a mouth full of grinding teeth and horny plates, not to mention corrosive spit.
“Hoi, Conan,” Flint says."What’s tox, chummer?”
Ivar forces a smile, and says, “Heh.”
“We looking for some dosspay?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Flint taps a remote. A small panel in the tabletop opens. A slim cylinder rises. A panel in the cylinder opens and a datachip comes into view."You wanna cut some ice? Scan this.”
“What’s it pay?”
“It’s negotiable, omae.”
“Ain’t it always?”
“This especially. Pick up tonight, download tomorrow. Silicon swift. Right up your jack.”
“Sure, whatever.” Ivar takes the chip and slots it into the datascanner on his belt and jacks the scanner into his head. A virtual protocol scrolls past his eyes.
The job Flint’s offering looks pretty standard—deck into the Matrix, snatch some data, deep research—till Ivar catches some of the names involved. The first name is Phalen, the second is Hill. A few others look familiar too and all of a sudden he realizes he’s scanning a run proposal involving Hurley-Cooper folks, various slags from HC’s Metascience Group.
It starts him thinking, just a bit feverishly. Pixelated squat! Amy Berman must’ve set this up! She didn’t want to risk him blowing his parole, so she passed the job through some shadowlink to a handy fixer, our slag Flint. That means Ivar’s guess was right: the problem’s serious! Ole HC is in trouble somehow. Maybe because of the effing auditors. Maybe not. Who knows? What matters is that Berman needs help, HC’s in trouble, and Ivar’s the slag for the job.
He jacks out."Time to talk nuyen.”
Flint grins."Six fine.”
“Double it.”
Seven’s as high as it goes.”
“You mean eight.”
“Give the halfer a cigar.”
The Asian biff sashays over and hands Ivar a big fat smogger. Ivar accepts it just to be polite.
“Delivery in twenty-four hours.”
“Sometime tomorrow.”
Flint grins."No liner.”
“Heh.”
It’s a quick walk back to the street. Ivar catches the subway and rides the thundering tram back to the Pelham Bay Projects. The lift shoots him upstairs. In his apartment, Novangeline’s sitting on the black neovuelite sofa, watching him as he comes through the door.
“How come you’re so late?” she asks.
“Got a little work, that’s all.”
“What work? For that Ms. Berman?”
“Nah, it’s got nothing to do with her.”
“Then what’s it got to do with?”
“Heh. Making a little extra money.”
“In the Matrix?”
“Do I look like a BTL trader?”
That was supposed to be kind of a joke, but it doesn’t go over. It flops. Novangeline gets to her feet, meets him beside his SoloFendi recliner and leans right into his face."Ivar, you’re on parole! You can’t run the Matrix. They’ll put you back in prison!”
“Have to catch me first.”
“Ivar!” And suddenly Novangeline’s eyes are spilling over with tears."What—what are you doing this for? Are you glitched?”
Ivar hesitates, then blurts, “You want a kid, don’t you?” Stupid. Shouldn’t have said that. Suddenly, Novangeline’s face is all twisted up and she’s sobbing."That’s not... you can’t ...”
“Go take a nap or something.”
Hey, he’s reformed, all right? He wouldn’t be taking cred for a Matrix run if it wasn’t important, and this is a special case. They need the money! Novangeline’s got this problem getting foggled. She needs some kinda nova gene therapy. Not covered by the health plan. Eight fine’ll cover it nice.
That HC and Berman’re involved is an added incentive. In a manner of speaking.
Ten minutes later, he’s sizzling with electrolytes and blasting down the datalines in the gleaming rainbow cockpit of his virtual Boeing-Federated Death Eagle 2, the Iron Dog. He flicks on the afterburners and slams like rocket-assisted lightning out across the glaring starlit night of the LTG. Heh. As usual, quite a rush.
To start with, this slag named Hill. Where did he get all this money he’s got cozied up in the UCAS Bank? Ivar steps through a portal into a blazing red node and comes face-to-face with the massively muscled icon of a Fuchi Centurion combat utility. That’s chill, though, because Ivar tosses his flaming yellow barbarian hair and engages a special sleaze of a
utility.
Two thousand iconic salarymen all wearing UCAS Bank ident codes come slamming into the node. The Centurion combat utility backs to the nearest wall and freezes. Gleep! Overload.
Ivar slips on by.
Somewhere back along the datalines, his stubby fingers are rapping touch-sensitive keys with silicon speed, but he’s got no time for that now.
In another nanosecond or so, he’s into the bank’s datastore archives. He initializes his scanner: Kamik the Mystic. A hacked-up version of some Hacker House scanner prog that needed some custom upgrading. A burning chrome-spangled window opens. Kamik rises like a puff of smoke out of his multicolored bottle, extends a jeweled hand into the swirling streams of passing hexadecimal code, and removes a burning pink envelope winking with the logo: And The Answer Is.... I
“Newark Interbank Credit Corp,” Kamik says.
“Where did Hill’s nuyen come from?” Ivar intones, because it’s traditional.
At his left, a burning pink window opens. A fat Irishman chuckles. The window vanishes. Thank you, Hacker House.
Ivar blasts through the regional telecommunications grid and goes streaming down into the Newark LTG, straight into the Vaux Hall Pirate Net. The node flashes around him. He’s back in his barbarian persona, standing atop the quarterdeck of a Man-O-War flying the Jolly Roger high overhead and pitching and rolling through a smoke-shrouded sea. Iconic cannons roar. A shimmering silver Captain Blood goes swinging down from the yardarms to lead a party of iconic pirates boarding a nearby ship. Ivar turns to the slag at the wheel, the one with the knife clenched between his iconic teeth, and says, “I need to sleaze the Newark Interbank Credit Corp.”
“ARRR, me hearty!” quirks the glaring green parrot on the slag’s shoulder."You’d be needing a code-red masking utility straight from Davy Jones’ locker!”
Ivar flexes his massive barbarian biceps, and nods.
A nano or two later, he’s into the Newark bank’s archives and Kamik draws a burning pink envelope from the streams of hexidecimals. And The Answer Is.... ! “First Corporate Trust of New York.”
“Where did the money come from,” Ivar intones, it’s traditional, “that went into Hill’s UCAS account?”
“Hurley-Cooper Corporation Materials and Supplies account.”
“What specific account did the money come out of?”
The fat Irishman chuckles.
Heh.
So this slag named Hill got his three million nuyen, indirectly, from Hurley-Cooper bank accounts. Ivar wonders if that means anything. Who in hell is Hill anyway? Some lab-coat, maybe.
He blasts back across the datalines.
A dozen more names to go.
64
The room is very much like the chamber where Striper is confined: dull gray walls, no windows. Furnishings are limited to a trio of cots, a table with chairs, and a large trideo-equipped telecom on a cart. The lone door is open, providing a view of the prep room and the door to the lab control room, as well as the door to Striper’s room.
Whistle lies supine on her cot, drawing pictures in the air with her fingers. Shaver readies her weapons. O’Keefe keeps a wary eye on Shaver. Her experience with Striper and the trolls left her bruised, how badly is hard to discern, but O’Keefe suspects that the worst of the bruises show only very discreetly. She spends every spare moment working on her weapons. She mutters in her sleep. O’Keefe has little doubt that Striper figures prominently in Shaver’s dreams.
Sitting at the table, O’Keefe looks back to the telecom. Modern Merc fades from the screen, replaced by a view of a troop of six-wheeled armored scout vehicles rolling through the hilly country of southeast Turkey, raising dust along some unimproved dirt road. The man standing before the road, looking right out of the screen, in urban gray camo no less, is Duke Baader, formerly a ranking commander with Germany’s MET 2000 mercenary corp. This is the man who derailed the Russian offensive on Fortress Berlin back in 2032, and who later orchestrated the lightning assault on Castle Sofia. Now he hosts trideo shows for the Arms and Armor Network. O’Keefe resists a sigh.
Time marches on and good men spiral downward, enticed by luxury, till they become parodies of themselves.
O’Keefe would rather take a bullet to the brain.
A metallic rattling arises. Germaine Olsson comes in from the prep room, pushing a commissary wagon. Whistle hops up to survey the food. Shaver glares, then returns to cleaning her Ingram 20t SMG. Olsson parks the wagon, then steps nearer O’Keefe, and says, “Dr. Hill feels we’ve got things under control, so if you’ll just stay till the next procedure is finished we’ll consider the contract complete.”
O’Keefe hesitates, then nods. It won’t be his funeral. ‘That will be fine.”
“How should I contact you when the doctors have another contract?”
“You can use the same means as before.”
“Oh, okay. Just checking.”
O’Keefe smiles. Olsson turns and walks out. O’Keefe returns his attention to the telecom screen and ponders.
He’ll be glad to be done with this contract. It’s troubled him since the beginning. The doctors’ interest in Weres seemed logical enough, but the insistence that he snatch a beast as powerful as a Weretiger had seemed unwise. All Weres change shape. They all have certain Awakened abilities, such as the ability to regenerate lost limbs, to heal injuries with remarkable speed. They are not, however, equally dangerous. Why pick one of the most menacing varieties?
Worse, in first discussing the contract, Olsson had insisted on a particular individual, rumored in certain quarters to be just such an Awakened beast, and, worse yet, a known assassin. O’Keefe would not have thought that someone like Olsson, or the doctors she represented, or any corporate for that matter, would have had occasion to hear a name like “Striper,” much less have some concept of to whom the name referred.
O’Keefe supposes that one of the doctors must have some special interest in Striper. Likely, it’s something personal.
What other explanation could there be?
65
The voice from the ceiling drones on endlessly about pain and killing and death, about the son killed in an alley in Philadelphia, and the millions of things all this is supposed to mean.
“I’ve lain awake in bed till dawn imagining what I’d do if you were ever caught,” the voice says."Thinking things I’d never tell anybody, they’re so horrible. That’s how I got around to wondering what would be the worst? the worst that could happen to you? You’re an animal. You act like one. Being caged, that’d be bad. Real bad. Being used for research, now that’d be worse. Being caged and used for research. Like the animal you are. Now that’d be even worse than seeing you killed.
“I never thought you’d have a kid, too. I got lucky with that. I want you to think about it. What’s going to happen to your kid. What would you do to get it back? What if you could never get it back? What’s happening to it right now, and you can’t do a thing about it.”
Tikki lies beside the panel concealing the only door into the room, her flank pressed to the wall. Her hours confined in this room have taught her the futility of wasting energy on anger. But when the door opens again, she’ll be ready. If she can just stay awake.
She’s thought a great deal about her cub and decided it’s probably already dead. The idea disturbs her, but it’s not real. It won’t be real until she can see it for herself, till she can smell it, rub her nose in it. If she ever gets out of this room, she’ll exact a ruthless vengeance for that death. Lately, though, she’s begun wondering if she’ll ever get out of this room. She’s also done some wondering about other things. One thought keeps returning.
The voice from the ceiling said, “You took everything from me that meant anything.”
That’s incredible. What is it supposed to mean? That some two-leg actually cares about its offspring? That by killing some ork in a Philadelphia alley Tikki took everything of value from some two-leg’s life? Tikki finds that hard to
believe, harder still to comprehend. She’s known two-leg females who left their cubs in garbage compactors rather than bother feeding them. She’s seen human sibs fight each other to the death, the victor walk away laughing. Two-legs are the great betrayers. They care about nothing but their own survival.
“You took everything from me that meant anything.”
Money, power, sexual gratification—that’s what the metahuman realm revolves around. The idea that some ork could be damaged by the loss of a cub is obviously just stupid.
She remembers one of her earliest experiences with two-legs. Humans came up the Nun Kiang River from Tsitsihar and killed her sire. Why did they do this? Her mother explained that humans kill for the same reasons that all animals kill—to eat, to dominate, to survive. Killing is part of the way of things, but two-legs make it personal. Sometimes they kill for the fun of it, which is like saying for no reason at all.
Her mother explained that by the end of the twentieth century the semi-sentient creatures that are their ancestors were hunted to the brink of extinction. If not for the Awakening and the rise of ones like her and her mother—ones who could really think, who could elude the two-leg hunters, even destroy them—there would be no tigers, no Weretigers. No Tikki. Their kind would be gone. Dead. Eliminated.
That scared Tikki and filled her with anger. It made a lasting impression. It convinced her that two-legs should be seen as prey. Rival predators. As enemies to her and her kind. As just waiting for the chance to kill her. That’s probably why she’s never had any problem with killing them.
Ruthless murderers. Every one of them.
Now she wonders if that’s right.
If an ork could be hurt by the loss of its son, like she was hurt by the death of her sire ... Like she’s been missing her cub ...
It seems almost impossible.
66
The clock on the wall shows just past eight a.m. as Amy strides into her outer office, and she immediately realizes she’s just in time to get into a situation. A black-suited man wearing KFK ID is growling something about not having all day. Amy’s personal aide Laurena is looking back and forth across her desk, brushing at her eyes first with one hand, then the other, then leaning forward, both hands abruptly covering her face.
