Shadowrun: Fire & Frost

by Kai O'Connal

  Elijah’s report came last. “There are four people I can detect inside. From what I’m seeing, they’re Kobold’s people. I’m confident that we can at least trust them not to turn on us while we’re in there.”

  There were a few brief nods, then the team went inside.

  The saw a guard immediately in the short hall on the other side of the door, a grunt who wore a mirrored visor, even though he was indoors. He didn’t acknowledge them, but he didn’t stop them, so they walked by.

  They went through another set of doors into a vast room that was two stories high and about a hundred meters long on all sides. The floor was concrete that had been swept clean of any traces of what had been stored here, and light poured in through ceiling skylights. There was a stack of crates in one corner, and it was difficult to get a good look at them because they exerted a powerful compulsion telling any passers-by to look away. Elijah assensed them enough to see the aura of the spell sitting on top of the crates, and once he saw that aura he left the stack alone. He couldn’t exactly say that it was part of the magician’s creed to respect one another’s spells and leave them alone when possible, but he thought that’s the way things should work, so he often behaved as if such a creed did, in fact, exist.

  He looked at Kyrie and Pineapple. “Did either of you note the skylights?”

  “Couldn’t see ’em from the ground, could we?” Pineapple said. “But we know they’re there now, so we’ll keep an eye on ’em.”

  In the middle of the room was a small structure that looked like a concrete bunker with a window. The group walked to it. Kyrie and Pineapple peeled off to take up positions on either side of the building, and the others walked inside.

  There was a table, some metal folding chairs, and dust bunnies in the corners. It was homely and bare bones, but it was also, for Elijah’s purposes, perfect. It was isolated, it was securable, and there were no distractions. He could get to work, so he did.

  Elijah had talked to plenty of people in his career that envied the globetrotting exploration part of his job, but said the research would drive them crazy. He couldn’t understand that at all. Research was where he made his livelihood into an art, where he took an object that was just sitting there, was just being a thing, and made it something alive, something worth having. Something that others would covet and, not at all incidentally, pay lots of money to get.

  Research, when he did it, was not just a matter of looking facts up in an encyclopedia. It was digging through the secrets buried in manuscripts written by madmen, pulling a hint here and a clue there into something that resembled a fact, it was staring at an aura and analyzing it down to the minutest flickers of color around the edges, it was listening to the whispers of spirits in his ear as they returned from some errand or another. It was all of these at once, and most of all, it was the moments when it all came together, and a spirit’s words echoed the fact he had just discovered, and the item’s aura put a small twist on that information. Those moments when Elijah, standing alone with his object, had learned some truth, or created that truth out of whole cloth, a truth that maybe a handful of people living knew, or maybe no one knew it, maybe Elijah was resurrecting a truth that had once been known, but now was forgotten, and he was alone with himself, his object, and that wonderful, fledgling truth.

  In actual fact, he was not alone, as the others were nearby, but their physical presence didn’t matter. He didn’t notice them. They could have indulged in an orgy so grandiose as to put a Roman emperor to shame while he was working, and he would not have noticed. And would not have cared.

  When it was over (for the moment, at least—the work of discovery was endless, and never really over), he sat back with an exhausted smile on his face. Leung sat near him, gesturing silently at AR windows only he could see, probably hacking into any devices he could get a signal from. An unfiltered cigarette in his mouth had burned down so far it looked like his lips were in danger of catching fire. Cao was stretched across two chairs, pretending to be asleep. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was even, but one look at her aura told him that she was mentally quite awake. He wasn’t sure if the act was intended to make the other members of the team leave her alone, or if she genuinely was trying to force herself to sleep.

  He didn’t see Kyrie or Pineapple around; he figured they were still outside keeping watch. They would likely want to hear what he had to say. He only had to poke his head out of the door and give a quick wave, and they were in. Cao sat up as soon as the big troll tromped by her, and soon all five runners were seated around the table, expectant and ready to listen.

  Elijah launched into his findings.

  “It’s a map.”

  Pineapple slapped the table and made his eyes bug out. “Holy shit! Get the hell out of here! What a discovery!”

  Elijah ignored him. “It’s trying to be something called the Piri Reis Map, but it’s not. It’s not magic enough, and it’s not complete enough. But it still has some pretty good enchanting in it. It’s like someone wanted to make a copy of the map to take around with them without putting the original at risk.”

  Kyrie sighed. “Okay, I know this is the kind of question I should never ask you, but it seems important. So: what’s the Piri Reis Map?”

  “Good question!” Elijah’s eyes lit up in a way that drew the interest of the others—except Kyrie. She recognized the light in his eyes, and she knew it was trouble.

  “Piri Reis lived in Gallipoli in the sixteenth century. He was a sailor, and a good one—moved his way right up in the Turkish navy. Like most sailors back then, he had a particular obsession for maps, for charting places the Europeans had only just found out about. There were a lot of maps flying around back them, and most of them showed only part of the world—a coastline here, part of a continent there—and they were, on the whole, wildly inaccurate.

  “They also weren’t consistent. When they were wrong, it wasn’t like they were all wrong in the same ways. They differed greatly, and there were many long arguments about which maps were worthwhile and which were not. But Reis had that certain arrogance that comes from spending many years watching people skitter to obey when you give voice to whatever idle idea pops into your head. He thought he could resolve all the controversies, and he could do it without having to engage in tedious debate. He would make a map, a world map, and it would be right, because he would make it be right. Some of it would be based on his own travels, but not most of it—he simply hadn’t traveled and mapped enough. So he’d take sources—the best sources, as he judged them—and he’d pull info from them to make his map.

  “It took some time, but he did it. By 1515, he had a map. And most of the people who took a look at it figured either he was a genius or insane.”

  “Why?” Cao said.

  “Because he’d gone beyond anything most of them had seen. While most of Europe was still adjusting to the islands Columbus had discovered, which they figured were not that far from India, Reis went beyond those and showed a whole new continent, a vast coastline stretching nearly the length of the globe. The age of exploration was just revving up, but there, before DeSoto, before Pizarro, Piri Reis had just plopped the American coastline down on his map.

  “But he did more than that. He also dropped a continent down on the bottom of the map, a continent covering the South Pole. And he did it three centuries before Antarctica was officially discovered.”

  Pineapple sighed. “That’s great for people like you. Can you give me a reason why people like me should care?”

  “Yes,” Elijah said. “Ice.”

  “Now you’re just being enigmatic on purpose.”

  “No. Look at this. This down here. That’s the Antarctic coastline.”

  “Neat.”

  Elijah shook his head. “No, you’re not seeing it. That’s the coastline.”

  Nothing about Pineapple’s expression—or the expression of anyone else in the group—indicated dawning comprehension.

  “That coastlin
e is land. Land. Not ice.”

  It was starting to register. Kyrie was leaning farther forward, staring more intently at the map.

  “When this map was made, Antarctica was buried in ice, just like it is now. Just as it had been for thousands of years. There was no way Reis could have known the shape of the coastline, even if he somehow knew about Antarctica. And they had no science, no technology that would have let them look under the ice. So how did they map it?”

  “There’s some math he could have used,” Leung said.

  “No, there wasn’t. There wouldn’t be for a few centuries.”

  Without thinking about it, Elijah had started bouncing his leg. Sometimes the bounce was so high that he hit the underside of the table in front of him. He didn’t care, and neither did anyone else around him.

  “Where did Reis say he was getting his info from?”

  “Older maps, was all he said. Including, maybe, some maps that had been in the Library of Alexandria before it burned. But if he’s right, if he’s telling the truth, then these older maps were made by people who not only knew that the world was round, but who also somehow knew how big the globe was. Almost exactly.”

  Leung shrugged. “Fine. Maybe that makes for fun mental puzzle, but I’m not seeing—”

  “The map shows a bit more than the coastline in places,” Elijah interrupted. “Look here. That’s a mountain range.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Now look closer. At the edge of the range. This mountain at the edge of them all. Look at it carefully.”

  Kyrie saw it first. “That’s not a mountain.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “The sides are vertical and it’s got a flat top. It’s too regular.” Kyrie looked up. “It’s man-made.”

  “Right. I’d say it’s some kind of tower.”

  Now he had their attention. “A tower?” Cao said. “On Antarctica?”

  “Right there. And look where it is. Not all that far from the southern tip of South America, is it?”

  Kyrie stepped back. “Oh no. No no no.”

  Elijah quickly waved his hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not saying we should go there. But we should at least put two and two together. We have a map showing something impossible on the world’s southern continent, and we have a group of people who had been in possession of the map heading far south.”

  “This isn’t so much about the map, then,” Kyrie said. “It’s about what’s down there.”

  “That would be my guess. And here’s my next guess. We recovered this well over halfway between home to Antarctica. Once we report in, Mr. Johnson is going to see if we have any interest in extending our trip.”

  “Aw, hell, no,” Pineapple said. “I packed for Amazonia. I brought a thong, not no damn parka.”

  Elijah spoke quickly so he would not have time to draw a mental image of the troll in a thong. “All I’m saying is that there is a good chance we’ll be asked to go farther, so it would be a good idea to know what we think about that before they ask.”

  “You don’t know they’ll ask,” Kyrie said. “You didn’t know about the tower being there until just now, so maybe they don’t know about it either. They may just want us to bring it to them, so we will, then they’ll need time to look at it, and by the time they do we can be so far away that it wouldn’t make sense to call on us.”

  “So, you don’t want to go?”

  “I don’t have any great desire to go to the coldest place on Earth, no.”

  Elijah tilted his head. He hadn’t ever known Kyrie to be scared off by the cold—or by anything else. “I could keep us pretty warm.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  “And that doesn’t change your mind?”

  “We don’t have any offer. Just your guess. So there’s really nothing for me to change my mind about.”

  “Kyrie’s right,” Leung said. “We have no offer, and we might not get one. Who says Mr. Johnson really cares about the tower?”

  “Why else would they want the map?”

  Leung smiled, then spit off the final remnants of his cigarette, which disintegrated into ash in mid-air. “You think it’s a treasure map, so they must be seeking the treasure.”

  “That seems like the logical thing to do.”

  “The hell it does. Did your research tell you what this little piece of paper is worth?”

  Elijah opened his mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again. “That wasn’t ... That wasn’t what I was looking for. That information. I suppose, if I had to make an estimate, based on what I have seen ... It would be in the six figures, at least.”

  “There you go,” Leung continued. “Let’s make a deal here. You could take what’s in the briefcase, which is right in front of you and worth hundreds of thousands of nuyen, or you could take what’s behind door number one. Behind door number one could, maybe, be something more valuable than what you have. But it could also be something that kills you. Or it could be nothing. Oh, and to get it you have to travel through the most vicious wasteland on the planet, with the possible exception of some toxic spirit hangouts. So—who wants what’s behind door number one?”

  Elijah immediately raised his hand. No one else did. He looked carefully at each of them, but their extremities refused to budge.

  “That’s the way it is, omae. You may think that they will obviously want to go to the tower, but what we see is that not everyone thinks like you. You think the map leads to treasure, but the map could be the treasure. At least, treasure enough. No more hunting needed.”

  Pineapple had been blankly staring at nothing for most of the meeting, but now his eyes finally focused and looked at Leung. “If it’s worth that much, why are we just handing it over?”

  “Because we’re being paid well to do just that!” Elijah snapped.

  Leung’s reply came in a milder tone. “Because people that have the resources to send us nation-hopping after a precious map are also people who have the resources to ensure they are not fucked with. And if we steal the map, they’ll put out words that will make it very difficult to fence.”

  That seemed to satisfy Pineapple, and his eyes once again lost focus. Everyone else seemed pretty satisfied with where the conversation had rested. Everyone but Elijah.

  “But let’s say they ask us. To go to Antarctica. Would you all be willing?”

  “I’m guessing that the fact that you won’t let this go means you are,” Leung said.

  “Of course I am! Are any of you looking at this? Are you seeing what it is? It’s a tower! On Antarctica! It may not be there any more, or it may be entirely buried under ice, but if it’s there—if even a trace of it is there—it’s something, it’s the kind of thing you never see in your life. I’d call it a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but most people, billions of them, go their whole lives without seeing anything like this!”

  Leung looked at Kyrie. “He wasn’t anywhere near this animated back when people were shooting at us.”

  She shrugged. “We all have our triggers.”

  “That’s true,” the hacker replied. “I have my own. Want to know what one of them is? When someone wants to drop me into some frozen hell just to satisfy their own little exploration fetish.”

  There was a pause, interrupted when Cao grinned. “So that’s you angry, huh?”

  Leung’s expression didn’t change. “I’ve never felt it was necessary to be dramatic in order to be passionate.”

  Those few moments of conversation gave Elijah time to collect himself. When he spoke, his voice was level. “If I go to Antarctica—if we’re asked to go—no one would be forced to come along. You should only go if you think there’s something in the trip for you. I’m telling you what I see in it for me. If we get the offer, you can make up your own minds.”

  “Thanks,” Leung said, his inflection making it impossible to read if he was being sarcastic or not.

  Elijah looked down at the map and regretted ever having looked up from it. He thought about making
up some reason to look at it further, to pull out some nuance he may have missed, but he didn’t. There likely wasn’t much more to find right now, and even if there was, his heart was no longer in it. He started packing up the map, though he did it slowly, knowing this might be the last time he saw it. It would stay secure, rolled up in a tube and surrounded by as drab a mana barrier as Elijah could construct, until it was handed off—there was no way he would risk broadcasting that beautiful, unusual, attention-grabbing aura to anyone who might be looking.

  He looked up briefly and saw that everyone was impatiently waiting for him to finish. Or maybe they were just waiting, and the impatient part was his imagination. Whatever the case, he finished quickly so they could leave their warehouse bunker.

  It would have been nice to relax for a night, to celebrate their accomplishments in one of Metropôle’s nicer hotels, but nothing draws attention more than a runner on a bender. Most runners are smart enough to confine their celebrations to times when they are not carrying incredibly valuable objects.

  Metropôle offered a seemingly infinite supply of flophouses, so Elijah took the group to a different one than the rat trap they’d been staying in while waiting for the Kobold gambit to play out, springing for one that charged a little extra. This particular flophouse was run by an eternally tanned old woman who had developed her small portion of magic talent enough that she could keep the place clear of bugs. The interesting thing was, she had no idea she had any magical ability at all. She just hated bugs and had made it her life’s mission to eradicate them from her house, and her small grain of magic ability had attuned itself to this aspect of her, so that wherever she went she radiated an aura of loathing for insects that sent them instinctually scurrying away. There were more expensive places than this flophouse that were not bug-free; had the woman been aware of what she was doing and how she was doing it, she likely would have tripled her rates. But her sun-addled memory kept her from grasping the true success of her anti-bug campaign, so her rates remained low, and she stayed in a state of perpetual surprise at the steady traffic coming to her door.