Shadowrun: Crimson

by Kevin R. Czarnecki

  The fifty meters before the wall had been cleared to create a perimeter. Bullet craters pockmarked the few ruins left, testament to bug spirits staging an attack, or any number of predators, man or monster, wanting to hunt fresh meat on the other side.

  We were huddled against a small bit of standing wall right before the barren space. Putting them in the middle of it would be fine. They could send someone over to pick them up. But there would be no running it from here.

  I shifted my eyes into the astral, scanning for the presence of a mage on the wall. If there was anywhere an LS mage or shaman would be on duty, it’d be here, on the border of a territory of supernatural chaos. My real worry was that one of them would present a threat to our decoy…

  Whispering her true name made Menerytheria materialize before me, smiling serenely, though I could tell she was excited to be helping out. She knelt with us, elbows on her knees, looking like an excited kid.

  “You rang?”

  I looked up at one of the two watch towers, pointing past it. “I need you to fly up past that nest, draw as much attention as you can. Lots of flash and swirl. Let them know you’re there. But the moment you sense a real threat, get out of there, okay?”

  She giggled with anticipation, her eyes lingering in gratitude for my concern over her well-being. Were kind masters so rare that I was such a catch? I signaled the ghouls to remove the sacks over the officers. Didn’t need the wall guards to think they were bombs or something.

  I nodded, and she sped off, trailing water droplets that hovered in midair for an instant before hitting the ground. I rose as the floodlights turned to track her, running with the three ghouls behind me. The officers were moaning and wriggling, but couldn’t put up much of a fight. The time crawled and the meters seemed to pass slowly. No drawing on my vampiric abilities for this: this was pure adrenaline. It would only take one of those heavy machine guns raining hot lead death on us to kill us all, regeneration or not.

  The already broken ground was littered with shards of glass and bits of noisy debris, making a stealth approach impossible. Whoever was in charge of this garrison, they were clever.

  Fortunately, we were all wearing combat boots.

  I stopped halfway to the wall, pulled off my tattered long coat, and laid it on the ground. The ghouls piled the officers there. My eyes darted to the spotlights as heavy-caliber fire chopped into the sky. Menerytheria was a small storm of distraction, leaving wet trails behind her as she danced through the sky, uncaring whether the harmless bullets passed through or sprayed around her. She still made a show of it, dancing about and occasionally clutching her chest as though mortally wounded, falling, then spinning back up to soar around again. I could hear the frustrated, confused cursing of the security gunners between their HMG bursts.

  The tiniest twinge of intuition told me to dodge right while the ghouls ran straight back. It turned out to be correct, as a spotlight landed squarely on me. Throwing up a hand to block my face from any cameras, I ran faster. Gunfire peppered down around me, licking at my heels and throwing up bits of glass. I pushed myself, blitzing forward until I felt a round pierce my ankle. The sickening snap and burning feeling stunned me, I heard Memerytheria scream as I fell face first onto the filthy ground.

  Not anticipating me going down, the spotlight passed me in a flash. In the instant of darkness, I pushed myself…well, sideways I guess you could say. I melted into an amorphous cloud, simple mist given will. Colors diluted and vision distorted as though I was staring through a dense fog, sound muffled as though I was wearing earplugs. As my unattuned clothes fell to the ground, I stretched myself in ways my physical form could never accommodate, spreading myself thinly over the ground, to present as little profile as possible.

  Slowly, inching my way away from the light I felt on my ethereal form, I floated to an outcropping of wall. Pressing my misty self against it, I materialized, hands and cheek flat against the bricks. Pulling back, I knelt, letting my ankle regenerate as I whispered her name again and shivered with my nakedness.

  A ringing of pixie-like laughter let me know I’d been heard, and she spun off into the ruins, drawing the bullets and lights away. I waited for a while, listening to the post-skirmish chaos of the watch posts.

  Peeking around the corner, I saw the three officers were now lit by one of the spotlights. Reinforced doors hissed open, and six more Stars ran out in covering formations, just like in the trids. Two more followed with med kits, making sure they were real officers before they were picked up and led back through the wall. The spotlights formed a perimeter around them until they made it back inside, leaving me in the darkness.

  I took advantage of it and gingerly walked off into the night, content with my good deed.

  I opted to take the scenic route, feeling pretty invincible and willing to tangle with a bug if it felt the need to fight. It was a little surreal, strolling naked through the blasted ruins of the city I grew up in only seventy-five years ago.

  Seventy five years…has it really been that long?

  I didn’t like thinking about my age; it brought up too many uncomfortable things. My family was long dead, whether by age or VITAS, with only a few of their descendants scattered about the UCAS. There was Gizelle, of course, but my close associations ended there. A few other distant relatives had proven to be a depressing discovery, few who cared to associate with the pale, long-lost uncle with a questionable career. But I missed my immediate family dearly.

  More directly, I missed the trappings of my old life. I missed eating, socially and privately. I missed the feeling of comfortable, natural sunlight on my skin. I even missed the pain of a wound that took a week to heal. I couldn’t go out drinking with my chummers, or sunbathe, or ever get cyberware. If there was ever a way to have kids, someday, they’d almost certainly be infected with HMHVV, whether they wanted it or not. And could I find someone to love who would understand my condition without being some kind of wacko? So much of the world was closed off to me. It just didn’t seem fair.

  And then there was what the virus demanded of me, in return…

  I pushed those thoughts aside altogether, my face scrunching up with physical revulsion. I started running, making for the warren, hoping the painful sawing of chill wind in my lungs would distract me.

  Chapter 6

  Truthsayer

  The hissed, hushed whispers of discontented ghouls filled the silence for the next few days. Words like “traitor,” “soft,” and “weak” were bandied about in the long debates over Needles’ release of what some considered good food, others guilty criminals.

  For my part, I knew he’d done the right thing. He’d built good PR, and maybe swayed some minds. In the long run, that could save lives on both sides. But his eloquence had been wasted on some of the more feral members of the pack, and it was becoming more and more apparent that there would soon be a reckoning.

  In particular, the widowed ghoul Barnes was one of the more outspoken of Needles’ detractors. He was an interesting case. A well-bred and educated doctor before his infection, the transformation (from a late night bite at the ER, I was told) had left him still sentient, but possessed of a feral edge. He was one of the warren’s “cooks,” or people with enough knowledge of anatomy and familiarity with surgery to get the most out of a kill, wasting nothing usable. His wife, one of the younger born ghouls of the pack, had died during the Lone Star assault, and he’d been helpless to save her, trapped around a nearby corner by two other ghouls holding him back.

  His persuasiveness wasn’t just born of his well-spoken manner, but the fact that he was able to channel that with his feral senses to appeal to the less-cognizant ghouls. He went into vengeful detail about how he would have sliced them up while they still lived, and served their tender flesh to every ghoul in the pack. He spoke of how every member would have had a share, and some began to compare that to Needles’ methods of leadership. Needles favored a few ghouls, like Pretty and Slim, with more toys and attention.
I knew he did that to keep them operational in their respective roles in the warren, but some could not, or would not, see that. Barnes was, perhaps, one of them.

  The tension became the two sides became palpable. Divisions between loyalists to Needles and Barnes’s supporters were a physical thing, as ghouls split into little cliques in the hallways, casting suspicious glances at one another. I could usually tell who was who, since it was well known I was one of Needles’ friends. His supporters looked at me with something like awe, while Barnes’s ghouls growled or hissed quietly.

  One day, as I sat down across from Slim in his gadget room, I could already tell the politics of the warren were taking their toll. His eyes flitted nervously from commlink to busted component, occasionally darting up to look at the Maria Mercurial poster. I waited patiently until he was ready to talk. Then again, if he got too distracted, he might forget I was there altogether.

  Finally he focused on me, the smiles in his cybereyes not so smiling today. I tried a weak grin. “You feeling okay, chummer?”

  He nodded, his lips pouting and his hands gripping the arms of his chair over and over. All of this must have been hitting him pretty hard.

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  He shook his head, eyes gazing at nothing, his thoughts elsewhere.

  “You hungry? We brought in some more termite yesterday, I could grab you a slice—”

  “Nah, nah, I ain’t hungry. I don’t usually eat that much.”

  “Don’t like the taste?”

  “Oh, I never taste what it really tastes like.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I slot a cannibal chip. I picked it up a while back, a reality filter for vampire wannabes and sickos, makes everything you eat taste like blood and stuff. Actually pretty close to the real thing, and far better than the bugs really taste. It’s pretty wiz for my purposes.”

  “Huh… Yeah, I guess it would be. They can make all those soy paste meals taste like filet mignon for the wage slaves, so why not a little something for us, right?”

  He nodded, still distracted.

  “So… who am I meeting next?”

  He halfheartedly held out the ’trode net for me, and loaded up the file. The clean, white room manifested before me, and I noticed this one did not have all the charts and calculations. He was really distracted, then.

  A dwarf in a human-sized trench coat, the excess pooling around him like robes, worn cargo pants, and mesh tank top appeared before me. No beard, going bald on top but the rest of his black hair was long enough to be tied back. His swarthy skin and aquiline features suggested his ancestors hailed from India. Funny, but I’d never met a dwarf from there before.

  “This is Halian Focht.”

  A short list of data appeared before him as his profile began to rotate. I made out a pair of datajacks on his temple, and a few other bits of chrome on his skin. He didn’t look like a samurai, but I had been fooled before. My money said he was a hacker. Given the aged-looking datajacks, I was willing to bet he’d been doing it since they were first given that title.

  “Do we know what he does?”

  “He doesn’t have a SIN, if that’s what you mean. No, he operates in the black. I did a little checking in the Shadownets and it sounds like he’s an info broker. I don’t know if that means he’s a hacker on his own, or just knows lots of people, and passes on what he knows for a price.”

  “What’s our pitch to him?”

  “You mean why should he care about us? We get all kinds of weird tidbits about Lone Star when we steal or salvage their gear, plus we could pass on things from other contacts we’re making. And there’s always the chance we’ll need some info at some point.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. When and where?”

  “Tomorrow, just after sunset. Seattle’s Choice Coffee Shop in the NeoNET Zone of the Naperbrook subsprawl.”

  Pretty didn’t guide me this time; in fact, I hadn’t seen much of her lately. When I’d asked Slim, he said she was busy meeting with Edgar about fencing some loot. So I donned my nice shirt with my torn jeans and boots, and cleaned the synth-leather jacket so that it looked worn, but not destroyed. I figured fostering the “I could afford better clothes, but I’m such a rebel” look would match his own, and from what I’d heard, it was all the rage for the rich bratpacks that populated the squeaky-clean corporate subsprawls.

  A trip down the sewers and ducts and a quick shower later, and I was on my way to the coffee shop. The neighborhood was much improved. I remembered the old days, before I was turned, when it had straddled the line between dangerous gang territory and popular hipster hangout. Since Chicago’s population had surged outward with time and the Breakout, it had become a much nicer area, with higher security and well-dressed young students-cum-socialites.

  It’s my opinion that neighborhoods go through a growth cycle. At some point or another, a place becomes trendy, slowly driving out the riff-raff as expensive shops and high rent bring better security. It stays that way for a little while, as only people “in the know” live there, until good press gets everyone who wants to be cool to take up residence. Soon it’s packed with too many people, standard shops move in, and it’s no longer trendy. It becomes a boring little neighborhood where people sleep, but don’t spend any of their free time.

  From the look of things, this was a prime example. There were still a few trendy types, but it was clearly winding its way back into safe normalcy, with happy family businesses popping up to supply the average people filtering in. The sheer mundane nature of the setting, in addition to the safe feeling from the Lone Star beat cops, made this an ideal place for a meet. After all, who expects the shadows in calm, well-lit, upper-middle-class neighborhoods on a Monday night?

  The coffee shop was a cliché, still clinging to the classic look of modern, sleek counters and decorations. Catering to a higher-income clientele, the place offered both soykaf and real coffee, ground right there in the store, filling the space with one of the most coveted aromas in the world. At least I could still appreciate the smell, even if I couldn’t have a cup. Again, I marveled at how little some things had changed during my decade-long sleep in the river.

  Halian stood out only slightly at his table, tuned into his commlink with a discreet datajack cable. He wasn’t so rebelliously dressed, in a sweater and slacks. His age, as well as his slim build for a dwarf, reminded me of a harmless little college professor. It was a far cry from the street threads depicted in his picture.

  I ordered a cup of cheap soykaf from the counter, and checked the room out while waiting for it. A few folks were enjoying their pre-bed caffeine infusion, but no one seemed out of the ordinary…until my eyes fell on a human, perhaps barely in his twenties, reading a hardcopy newsprint and casting suspicious glances over the top from time to time. He was angled perfectly to keep an eye on the door and Halian, and his scans always roamed over the other customers. He didn’t have the shy or hungry look most young students have when cruising for a date or drugs, so I presumed he was Halian’s backup. His gaze fell on me and lingered for an instant. I smiled back, and the paper shot up, his face buried in its sheaves.

  I paid cash and coin for my kaf, despite the strange looks the barista gave me, and strode over to Halian’s table. His eyes flitted up to me as I stood looking at him, clearing from whatever the commlink was feeding him. I smiled.

  “Halian Focht?”

  He was suspicious, but hid it well, giving me a discreet once-over before meeting my gaze again. His voice was soft, tinged with a faint Delhi dialect. “Do I know you?”

  “I have a few questions I want to ask you.”

  “Are you one of my students?”

  I somehow liked that he was, in fact, a teacher. This wasn’t a coded phrase, and as I looked maybe 20, I could easily be mistaken for a college student.

  “I’m just a seeker of truth. Information is power, as they say.”

  He smiled faintly, and gestured for me to sit. I did. He tapped
a switch on his commlink, and suddenly my own AR started crackling. I shut my commlink down. Nicely done, jamming without making too much noise.

  “I take it you are Mr…?”

  “Crimson, sir, my name is Crimson.”

  “Good. I was starting to think you weren’t going to show up.”

  “I’m sorry I was late, but my commute takes some rather unorthodox routes.”

  “No doubt. So, you contacted me on the Matrix?”

  “No, sir, that was an associate of mine. I’m here on his behalf.”

  “And what have you brought for me?”

  I assumed he meant information for sale. I figured as a businessman he might appreciate a mercenary approach. “That depends on how much you have to offer for it.”

  His face showed confusion for a moment before hardening. “Mr. Crimson, perhaps you do not understand what it is we are trying to accomplish here. The truth is not something that is the exclusive privilege of the elite and wealthy. Everyone, from UCAS citizens to the SINless to the rest of the people across the globe, has a right to the undistorted truth.”

  “About…?”

  “Everything!” There was a manic light in his eyes. Nothing to scare me, but far more fascinating, genuine passion. It was a rare thing, in this or any age. I knew he was being honest. I could smell it on him, see it shining clearly in his aura. I also could see that this was a man who, though clever, was not prone to guile. Finding the concept refreshing, I decided to go with it.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Focht, I think I’ve misunderstood what you are about. I was given to believe you were an info broker. Was I mistaken in my assessment?”

  Halian leaned back, considering me. I stayed steady. He had something to hide, that was for certain, but there was also something about it that denied malicious intent. No, this was a man with a cause, if I read him right. A man with a crusade who might be hunted down and stopped if he wasn’t careful. And now he was wondering if I was a man who could be trusted with his secret.