Choose Your Enemies Carefully

by Robert N. Charrette

  Laverty raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Estios did the reacting.

  "Saeder-Krupp! They’re Lofwyr’s puppets. If the beast is making moves in Seattle ..."

  Laverty’s voice was stiff as he clipped Estios into silence. "Mr. Estios, you are being most disruptive today. The dragon’s plans are not of importance in this matter. Simple stock ownership is insufficient evidence of the dragon’s involvement. Although ATT is owned by Saeder-Krupp, the corporation remains essentially independent, and I think it unlikely that Lofwyr even knows of this operation. Dodger, you did say that your Mr. Johnson was Glover?"

  "Andrew."

  Laverty nodded to himself. "Though I doubt your friend is enmeshed in some dragon’s schemes again. I think that he will have need of his budding magical talents."

  Dodger understood the implied question. He even had some idea of the offer that was being made. "He still won’t come to see you."

  "I understand. His rigorous logical training and scientific orientation made a very convincing argument that his mind would be oriented to the hermetic tradition. Your report of his vision of the Dog totem was most startling. I had not conceived of that possibility. It was a most embarrassing oversight. He probably holds me in little respect, since I misdiagnosed his calling."

  Ah, thought Dodger, if you only knew. " Tis not the reason. Despite surviving dragonfire, Sam barely believes in his magical powers. ’Tis unlikely that he would fault you for thinking him a mage when he himself will not accept that he has a shamanic calling. He clings desperately to his scientific view of the world."

  "Then he has abandoned investigations into his magic?"

  "Quite the contrary. He struggles to learn. It’s driving Lady Tsung crazy."

  Laverty actually looked surprised. "Ms. Tsung is attempting to teach him?"

  "Attempting is the right word. Were Sam not so stubborn, he’d see that he and Lady Tsung have incompatible magical orientations."

  "Given what you have said, his lack of vision now seems unsurprising. Try to bring him back."

  "He won’t come. He wants to find his sister first."

  "Such loyalty is admirable. And very valuable. But do what you can to bring him here."

  With that, Laverty turned and left the library. Estios and Chatterjee followed. Teresa remained standing at the door, making no move to leave. Estios aborted his own exit, and they exchanged a few words, speaking too softly for Dodger to hear. After a few moments, Estios straightened and threw a hostile look in Dodger’s direction. Dodger returned a smile, which only infuriated the elf even more. He said one last thing to Teresa before striding angrily through the doorway. Dodger was left alone in the room with Teresa. He waited and she made the first move, walking softly across the carpet to the desk where his cyberdeck lay. Dodger stood as she approached.

  She reached a hand past him and took the chip that the machine had extruded. She weighed it in her hand and said, "You seem very fond of this Samuel Verner."

  "I have told him that I will help him find his sister."

  "You’ve set yourself another task?"

  "A noble quest. We have learned that she was sent to Yomi Island. ’Tis a foul place where the Japanese send those unfortunate enough to be inflicted with metahuman genes. We would liberate her from such vile durance."

  "Once you would have gone charging in."

  "Yomi is not the sort of place where one could do that easily. There must be preparations. We will go when we are ready. First, we must gain information and credit because transportation, equipment, and muscle are not cheap. While we gather what we need, we hone our skills with shadowruns. Were Sam less fastidious about the runs, we would be further along." She made a tentative motion, almost reaching out to touch him. "You would have made a wonderful paladin."

  The old pain seared. Dodger turned his shoulder to her; he did not want her to see the emotions her words had wakened. "I am no paladin. I never will be. I refuse to be twisted to serve any person’s will."

  "Yet you serve this norm," she said softly.

  "I do not serve him. I help him." Dodger turned to look at her, but her face was shadowed under her hair. His hands hung uselessly at his side. "There is all the difference in the world between those two words."

  "You always did worry about words." Teresa toyed with the chip. She would not look him in the face. "Why are you helping him?"

  "We are friends."

  She tilted her head slightly. He could see her pensive expression now, achingly beautiful in its somber composure. Her serious mien shifted into a wistful smile. "We were friends once."

  Dodger swallowed hard. "I thought so."

  At last she met his gaze. Her eyes were pure emerald and as bottomless as he remembered. He had lost himself in those eyes long ago. He found himself ready to do so again.

  "But you left," she said.

  "I had to."

  "Have you come back?"

  "I’m not sure."

  "I see." She pocketed the chip and stepped around him. Pausing at the door, she said, "Come talk to me when you are sure."

  She was gone.

  The darkness and ancient books his only witnesses, he softly vowed, "I will."

  4

  Sam looked down at Sally Tsung. She was a beautiful woman. From her artfully tinted ash blonde hair streaming across the pillow, to her slim and shapely feet poking from beneath the rumpled blankets, she was the stuff of a lonely man’s dreams. Only she was no dream, and he hadn’t been lonely for months. He just didn’t understand what she saw in him.

  Sally was tall and trim, fleshed where a woman should be fleshed. But hard muscle underlay those shape defining curves. A Chinese dragon, vivid in its tattoo colors, slithered along her right arm. The beast’s bewhiskered chin rested on the back of her hand, whose slender fingers were half closed into a fist, almost hiding the missing last joint of her little finger. She had never told Sam how she had come to lose that joint. Despite what he knew had been an adventurous life, she carried no other scars. Her lack of scars she laughed off, attributing her smooth skin to the power of magical healing. Whenever Sam tried to ask about the finger, she found something more interesting to talk about. If he pressed her, she always had an appointment for which she was late. He had given up trying.

  The real issue wasn't the history of her finger. As free she was with her body, she had never let him touch her past. He hoped that in time she might open up and trust him, but as yet his hopes were unfulfilled. Sally Tsung remained mysterious.

  A cold nose pressed against his naked back told him that he was not the only one awake in the apartment. Rolling carefully to avoid disturbing Sally, Sam slid from the bed; its ancient springs squeaked only a mild protest. Inu lapped eagerly at his face, and Sam rumpled the dog’s fur in an equally happy greeting.

  Sam showered and dressed while Inu waited patiently by the door. Sam grabbed his fringed jacket on his way to the door. He really didn’t think he’d need its ballistic cloth lining for his run with Inu. Dark hadn’t fallen yet, so most of the predators were still abed. Still, the armor lining functioned as insulation, making the fringed synthleather the warmest coat he had.

  His runs with Inu gave him time to think. Or more precisely, time to worry. Tonight was supposed to be another magic lesson, and he wasn't looking forward to it. The lessons were not going well. No matter how patiently Sally explained the theory, Sam seemed incapable of grasping any but the simplest of spells. Even those only came after he’d had time to work out his own symbologies. The texts he’d gotten from Professor Laverty seemed only to confuse matters more. Sally insisted that he'd have more luck with ritual magics, but so far she had respected his refusal to even try them. Conjuring spirits seemed wrong, almost unholy.

  Why couldn’t it have been target practice night, even if that meant dealing with Ghost? With a magic lesson on the docket, facing Ghost’s coldness seemed preferable to Sally’s vituperous condemnations of his intelligence. Sam knew that intelligence ha
d little to do with getting a spell right. Even Ziggy, that street kid who dogged Sally’s steps, could get the spells going. He had an IQ several points below Inu's. Still, if it had been gun night, he was sure he would have preferred it to be magic night.

  His last several months among the shadowrunners had gone through more ups and downs than a Mitsubishi Flutterer skirting a storm front. Despite it all, he had found himself coming to like life in the shadows. It wasn't always pleasant and certainly lacked the everyday comforts of his former corporate life, but he felt he had been given a chance to make a difference. Here on the streets he wasn’t just a faceless minion among other faceless minions, plodding to the company’s tune. The street folk were individuals, some extravagantly so. Once they came to trust a person, which wasn’t quickly or easily, they were true friends. He found such company exhilarating. He was pleased that, under Sally and Dodger’s sponsorship, he had been accepted into their circle.

  One of the biggest downs was the estrangement of Ghost Who Walks Inside. The big Indian had seemed pleased to see Sam leave the corporate world. He had even been eager to help Sam redress the wrongs caused by Haesslich’s plot, Sam felt good about that; he was impressed by the Indian’s quiet strength and focus of purpose. But then something had happened to change Ghost’s attitude toward Sam. Since the night they had settled with Haesslich, Ghost had refused to take part in any runs with Sam. Ghost still helped train Sam in the ways of the shadows, but he held aloof, appearing for the lessons and vanishing when the instruction was over. Sally shrugged and Dodger told him it would pass, but no one else would talk to him about it.

  Inu finished his business and they headed back to Sam’s squat. Turning for home set him to thinking about Sally again. Their relationship seemed increasingly fragile. One might almost say it was deteriorating on every front, except perhaps in bed. There the passion seemed as strong as ever. From her first invitation, he had fallen quickly for her. But now, months later, he realized that he really didn’t know her at all well.

  When she wasn’t with him, he had no idea where she went. She admitted having her own place but had refused to take him there, saying that it wasn’t his kind of place. He had never tried to follow her; that would have been a betrayal of trust. But he had wondered a lot about where she went.

  No one could spend as much time together as they had and not get to know something about the other person. Between the shadowruns, the training, and their time in the sack, he had come to know something about her personality. He wasn’t very sure he liked what he had learned. As far as he could tell, money was her principal motivation. She was mercenary almost beyond ethics; her principles were for sale to the highest bidder. All she knew of honor was what affected her reputation. Loyalty she understood; at least, within the bounds of a run where reliance on the team was, by necessity, absolute. But she only gave that kind of loyalty when she was sure that it had already been given to her. If she had the slightest doubt, she would arrange failsafes, backups to ensure that no one betrayed her. At least she hadn’t shown such suspicion toward him. She didn’t seem to understand that a shadow team had to be a family. In fact, she didn't seem to understand family at all. Of all her sins, he couldn’t forgive the way she always tried to talk him into forgetting about his sister. Even for her, he would not forget Janice.

  Inu won the race up the stairs as usual, but Sam was not winded as he would have been last summer. His time in the shadows had toughened him, honing away the fat and softness of his corporate life. He opened the door to the apartment, allowing Inu to scamper in through his legs, and found that Inu’s excited yapping had done its work. Sally was awake.

  "Get enough exercise?" she asked slyly as she tossed back the covers.

  He smiled, knowing what kind of exercise she had in mind. "I thought we were supposed to have a lesson this evening."

  "Too much work makes Sam too dull." She stretched, testing his resolve. Seeing that he withstood the temptation, she shrugged and pulled on her shorts. "I thought we’d try a conjuring tonight."

  Sam frowned. "Why? You know I don’t want to do that kind of stuff."

  "Every magician needs to know how," Sally said, lacing the strings on her halter. "If you don’t know the basics of conjuring, you can’t banish an enemy’s sending. That’s too useful a skill."

  "Banishing is sort of like an exorcism, isn’t it?"

  "Give the boy a gold star. Yeah, it’s like that but it doesn’t have any of the religious nonsense attached." Knowing it was a sore point, Sam said, "Religion is not nonsense."

  "Don’t start with me." Sally’s eyes flashed with adamant heat, then softened. "Anyway, what I wanted to do tonight was to get you an ally spirit."

  Sam knew what she meant; he’d done some reading. Perversely, he played dumb. "You mean like a familiar."

  "Another star."

  "You don’t have one," he pointed out. He was surprised by the petulant tone in his voice. From the look on her face, Sally noted it too.

  "I’m not hung up on learning magic, either. An ally may be what you need to break this block you’ve got."

  She was not going to give up. Well, neither was he. "I won’t deal with the devil."

  "Idiot! There aren’t any devils but the ones running the megacorps. Spirits may quibble and bargain, but they’re not demons. They’re just energy forms cast into a particular construct by the intelligence whose energy forces them to coalesce. They don’t have any connections with fallen angels or cosmic malignancies or anything like that. All that drek is stories made up by pasty-faced old men to scare impressionable kids into following orders that are too stupid to defend logically. I thought you had a better mind than that."

  "You’re entitled to your opinion," Sam said huffily. He knew that most of what was said about spirits being demons was garbage—he wasn’t a total idiot. "This dealing with spirits just doesn’t seem right. Even you say that they talk. That implies sentience, but whether they are free intelligences or not, talking to spirits is just too crazy for me. I had enough of that in those nightmares last summer when I talked to the dog spirit. I haven’t had one of those episodes in months, and I don’t want to do anything to start them again. I’m just getting back on track. I’ve put all the troubles that followed Hanae’s death into the past where they belong. I don’t want to wake that kind of craziness again."

  Sally shook her head, her expression hardening into contempt. "You’ll never learn with that kind of attitude."

  "I’ll survive," Sam said defensively. "I’ve done all right so far."

  "Babe, you’re in the woods. You’re alive ’cause I keep you alive."

  Sally might believe it, but Sam knew better. He had learned his lessons. "You weren’t there last night."

  "And you nearly got smoked."

  "We did fine."

  She gave him a look that left no doubt that she didn’t agree, but she didn’t say anything. Her stony silence indicated that she had taken the subject as far as she thought necessary. Sam didn’t want to take it any further, either. They would be snapping at each other again soon enough.

  "Are we going to do some exercises?"

  "What for? You wouldn’t learn anything. You’re too pig-headed." Sally gestured, casting an illusion spell, and Sam knew that to a viewer he would appear to be literally pig-headed. It was juvenile of her to resort to such a poor joke.

  "I haven’t given up trying to learn," he said. "Have you given up teaching?"

  She snorted. "You don’t pay me enough for this lost cause."

  Wondering how serious she was being, he said, "I didn’t realize I was supposed to be paying you." Scowling, she breathed a long sigh. She shook out her hair and turned to stare through the grimy window. Her voice was distant. "Drekhead. You want to learn something tonight, you do it on your own."

  Conversation ended; sentence pronounced. There would be no point in trying to change her mind. Sam found that he didn’t mind. He almost felt relief. As much as he knew he needed
to learn, their sessions had become increasingly difficult. Another teacher might be better. Professor Laverty had offered; so had the dragon Lofwyr. The dragon’s offer had surely been false, since his agent had betrayed Sam and the runners instead of helping. And Laverty surely had his own reasons. Sam was sure he did not want to get involved with some as high up in the Tir Tairngire power structure as Laverty appeared to be. Sally had seemed the only mage he could trust, and now he was having his doubts about her. He would have to sort the mess out soon. He’d need whatever magical ability he could muster to go after Janice.

  He watched Sally pretend interest in the outside world. She was flighty in her anger sometimes. Maybe she would relent.

  "Just as well that we’re not going to practice. I’ve got a meet with Mr. Johnson tonight. I’d like you to run backup."

  "Got better things to do than baby-sit," she said without looking around.

  Sighing, Sam let the insult slide. It was just her heat. He hoped that she would feel differently later. "All right. I’ll catch you later."

  "Later," she replied almost inaudibly.

  He left her sitting in the apartment. As he walked down the stairs, Inu skipped at his side. Sam wondered if Sally would be there when he got back.

  5

  As Sam approached the corner of South Main Street and Fourth Avenue South, the dark bulk of the Renraku arcology loomed ever larger before him. The megastructure towered above its neighboring buildings, blocking most of the sunset’s red tones. Already lights were sparkling on the east face. Low down on the north face, the glare and blare of the club quarter was awakening. Less than a year ago, the arcology had been his home—and his prison.

  He turned right on Fourth. He was less than two blocks from Club Penumbra, but the walk seemed lengthy. The first time Sally had taken him here, he had almost run away when he had realized how near to the arcology the club was. It had only been a month after the firefight on Pad 23, that regrettable battle which Renraku security forces believed that he started. He hadn’t really been there, but a deception on the part of Lofwyr’s agent had made it appear that he had led the attacking raiders. Sam had been afraid of ’Raku retaliation. The thought of walking exposed anywhere near the megastructure had frightened him. But he had learned that he was just a face in the crowd; no more remarkable than anyone else to the guards on the west face of the arcology.