by John Helfers
>Get on the Matrix. Get us a rigger, right now. We need a drone here in ten minutes. Pay whatever you have to. But we need wheels.
>THAT SHORT WILL COST.
>Death costs more. Pay it.
>THE PLAN?
>Find a hide. Somewhere you can bear on the roof and the front of the building.
>I CAN’T LOOK TWO DIRECTIONS AT ONCE.
>Watch the front. You don’t need to watch the ork until I’ve got the girl.
>ROG.
Deke clicked the messager off and concentrated on the task at hand. The front of the Leaf clinic was brightly lit, just like most of the other ’corp clone businesses around here. Deke walked just beneath the sign and into the front door without hesitation.
A white-coated receptionist looked up when Deke entered. He was young, maybe twenty-four, a dwarf. He was sitting on a high stool, short arms manipulating an AR keyboard in front of him. Deke’s mesh registered a query from the dwarf but returned nothing, not even a carrier.
“May I help you?” the dwarf asked.
“I need a doctor,” Deke said.
“Your SIN?”
“It’s my hand,” Deke said, holding up his right arm.
“I understand, sir,” the dwarf said. The nameplate on his uniform read SANCHEZ. “But I need your SIN to begin processing your application.”
“It hurts,” Deke said. He stepped to the desk. A meter of countertop separated them, but Deke didn’t doubt there was at best an alarm button—at worst a gun—beneath the countertop. He poked his arm across the desk. The dwarf frowned.
“Sir, I’m afraid—” he gurgled the rest, as the monoblade in Deke’s hand penetrated his forehead.
“That’s better,” Deke said. >It’s on, he sent to Lincoln.
Alarms screamed to life around him. An armored door collapsed near-instantly across the entryway he’d just passed through, and doors snapped shut across the exposed corridors. Deke blinked his overlays up. His mesh came up and his AR went haywire with warnings.
“Bloody hell,” Deke murmured, and crouched in front of the dead dwarf’s desk.
“Sometimes they’re ready for you,” Deke’s father had once said. “Despite surprise, the buggers find out you’re coming or they’re ready to be surprised. Then all you can do is cause as much chaos as you can and hope you slip through amongst it.”
Deke shrugged out of the peacoat and flung it toward the door. He brought his subgun around and chambered a round. Then he reached into the baggy pockets on the thighs of his dungarees and pulled a small gray charge. He rolled around the corner of the desk, slapped the charge against the nearest blast door near where the latch would be on a normal door, and then smashed a flat metal plate overtop it. Then he rolled back around to duck and cover behind the desk.
He tripped a control in his mesh.
The explosion was a small one, but even small explosions are loud in small rooms. Deke’s ears—well, his real one, not his cyber—were ringing, but he staggered to his feet and smashed his shoulder against the door. The plate groaned and then snapped with a crack. Deke shoved his way through and led with the subgun.
Overlays washed across his vision as his mesh interrogated the arrows and dots and other RFID tags in the building. A sketchy map began to take shape in wireframe, but Deke ignored it for now. There were no doors off this corridor, so he had only one way to go. He went.
A man stumbled across the T of the corridor in front of him, moving right to left. It could have been an elf, or even an ork. It wasn’t a girl. Deke didn’t hesitate. He triggered a three-round-burst from his subgun, two of which removed the person’s head at the throat quite nicely. The third buried itself in the surprisingly sturdy door.
The reports of the gun were quite loud, loud enough to penetrate the ringing in Deke’s left ear. He reached behind him again and came back with a flash-bang, which he primed and rolled down the corridor. He came to a stop against the opposite wall of the T-junction. Deke crouched and opened his mouth. His overlays flickered to masking, and he closed his left eye. The explosion was even more devastating than the door charge had been.
>TWO DOWN IN FRONT. Lincoln was getting some work after all. >SWEEPERS.
That left nine, one of which was the bunny’s little girl. Deke ground his teeth and moved toward the junction. Sweepers from around back of the building—sweepers being those blokes who’d try to come around the building and get behind him—in less than thirty seconds meant a disgustingly high state of readiness. Either these Leafs were real pros, or they were real nervous having the bunny’s daughter getting her organs removed in their building.
Either option would get Deke killed.
Two more forms loomed out of the darkness ahead as he went left at the T. He brought the subgun up and fired twice, six rounds. Three to each form. Both of them collapsed as Deke darted forward behind his bullets. They were women, in hospital greens. Harmless.
Still dead.
“There’s two kinds of people in the world, lad,” his first sergeant in the SAS had told him once. “The kind that matter and the kind that don’t.” Deke had frowned then, and the sergeant had clapped him on the arm. “On an op, there’s those you’re there for and those you aren’t, and those you aren’t are disposable. They get in your way, you move them. You don’t leave problems behind you.”
Deke stepped past them. He didn’t look down twice.
Seven.
>THE ORK IS DOING SOMETHING.
Deke swore and shouldered a door open. An empty breakroom, full of spilled coffee and dots screaming fire warnings. Deke swung around.
A flicker of light made him jerk back, but not far enough. Something tugged at the subgun for an instant, right before the front half of the barrel dropped off. Another flicker of light, and Deke looked away from the end of his gun lying on the floor and down the hallway. A man in heavy gloves twirled a length of line. Monofilament. As sharp as the blade in Deke’s fist.
“Runners,” the man spat.
“Corps,” Deke spat back.
“You’re not getting out of here,” the sec man said.
“Darn,” Deke said. He dropped the remains of his submachine gun and held his hands out toward the man. The sec guard snarled and swung his line. Deke, his overlays ready, tagged the line in flight and stuck his right hand out, fist clenched. The line jerked in the air and went taut, the end wrapped around the edge of the monoblade protruding from Deke’s fist.
“Nice trick,” the sec guard said. “Not nice enough.” He jerked.
There was another tug as the monofilament sawed through the blade and swung free. The man spun, unbalanced, gathering the line back to himself. It took the low-mass line barely a second to writhe back under his control.
Just in time for the bullet from Deke’s pistol—the one he’d drawn with his left hand even as his right registered the tug of the monofilament cutting—took him in the shoulder and spun him around.
Deke switched the gun to his right hand, advanced two steps, and put four more rounds into the downed sec man. The fourth round entered the man’s head through his right temple. It didn’t—that Deke could see—come out.
“Works,” Deke said. Six.
>DON’T GET COCKY.
Deke’s cyberear picked up the footstep even as he chuckled at Lincoln’s comment. He spun around, gun ready, but not fast enough. Bullets crackled down the hallway as the man—the elf, Deke saw—held down the trigger on the submachine gun he held. The first round crashed against the right side of Deke’s chest, but it bounced off his dermal plates and ricocheted away. The others—twenty-eight or so, his mesh told him—flew on steadily higher trajectories as the recoil raised the barrel.
Pain flared through Deke’s chest at the impact. The armor was subdermal, after all… he had a right-big gouge through the flesh and muscle of his chest. He let himself fall to the corridor floor but kept a tight grip on the pistol in his right hand.
“Did I get him?” the elf asked.
“No,” Deke snarled. He fired.
Five.
Deke gathered himself and stood. His chest burned, but he didn’t have any trouble breathing. He replaced the magazine in his pistol and moved down the hallway in the direction the man with the submachine gun had come from. A large pair of double-doors were at the end of the hall. Deke bulled through them in a rush.
The room was brightly-lit from a bank of lights on the ceiling. The light was harsh, actinic. Four men stood around a table, trays and instruments all around them. A small form was on the table, covered in green surgical blankets. There was blood on the blankets.
“Get out of here!” one of the men said. “You’re not sterile!”
Deke swallowed. There was a lot of blood on the blankets. More on the aprons of the men, and on the tools scattered on trays around them.
“Did you hear me?”
Deke shot him.
The others yelped and backed away from the table. There were no other exits from the room except the large doors Deke had come through. He brandished the pistol and the men whimpered and backed against the wall. Sheep. Deke stepped closer to the table and jerked the surgical blankets back.
She was perhaps nine years old, and pale. Or, even healthy she’d have been pale. She was certainly pale now. Her body was lined with incisions and stitches. It looked as though they’d already had their harvest, but they’d taken the time to close her up. Deke looked around. “Where are they?”
“They?”
“Her bits,” he said. “The bits you lot took out.”
“In the tank, of course,” one of the men said, pointing. There was a small stasis unit near the wall, glowing with a full charge. “We had to protect them.”
Deke looked down. He blinked, hard. Several times. He heard his father’s voice in his head.
“Don’t let them fool you, lad,” he’d said, one of the last times Deke had seen him. “They’ll tell you about rights and liberties and what’s right. They’ll sell you a whole load of bullshit, if you let them. But it’s real simple.” He’d taken a swig of his pint and looked Deke straight in the eye. “The world doesn’t care. Nature, she don’t care about your rights. A tornado doesn’t care about your right to life. Viruses don’t care. A wolf, he don’t care about your right to protection. He’s gonna eat you, ‘cause he’s hungry and you’re soft. Don’t be soft, lad. Be the wolf.”
Deke looked at the little girl. Her hand was bandaged. He reached down and pulled the bandage back. Her pinky finger was missing, as was half of her ring finger. Deke frowned. “You’re going to sell her fingers?”
“No,” one of the docs said. “That was by instruction.”
“Instruction?”
“Mr. Johnson. He told us to take off her fingers.” The doc glanced at the others, but they weren’t talking. “Said it’d send the message he wanted.”
Deke blinked again. He holstered his pistol and gathered the small child up. Several tubes pulled free of her arms. Machines started beeping, and his mesh picked up a persistent warning about moving patients. He cradled the girl to his chest. As if she were his own.
“What are you going to do now?” the doc asked.
“Wait.”
“Wait? For what?” Deke said nothing. The doc frowned. “What are you wai—“ he collapsed. A wave of dizziness passed through Deke, and the yak princess whimpered. The doctors collapsed. There was a crash from outside in the corridor. Deke set the girl back down and stared at her. The ork—Deke looked up but saw nothing through the skylight.
>HE’S COMING IN.
Deke inhaled. The world doesn’t care. He opened the stasis tank and looked inside. Everything was sealed and tagged. He searched for a moment before he found the items he was looking for. They were quite small, and the miniature field generator barely held them, but they fit into the now-empty pocket at the small of his back. Deke closed the tank and turned around, facing the door. He drew the pistol.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I got the little girl back. He squeezed the grip of the pistol and looked around. The doctors were unconscious, not dead. He saw one’s chest rise and fall. His finger twitched on the trigger guard.
The ork walked through the double doors and stopped. He looked around, taking in the dead doctor and the others lying unconscious on the floor. He looked at Deke, who nodded at him, then at the little girl.
“Chikusho,” he whispered. Then he turned his gaze on the doctors. “Eta!” he spat.
“You have docs that can put her back together?” Deke asked.
>WHEELS ON THE WAY.
“We have doctors,” the yak said. His tattoos were still glowing, and even Deke, who was about as magical as the mud on his boots, could feel the energy crackling in the room. The dead doctor’s body burst into flames.
“So we’re done?”
“She has been disfigured.”
“You have docs. You can fix her,” Deke said.
“Not that,” the yak said. “Look at her hand.”
“It’s only a couple of fingers. You can get her cybers, or bud them.”
“It is yubitsume.”
“Yubi-what?”
“Yubitsume. It is a yakuza thing.”
Deke loaded a message to Lincoln. “But we got her back. We’re done.”
“Her father will not be pleased.”
“That he’s getting his daughter back?”
“That she is missing her fingers. That she has been dishonored, and through her, the entire kai has been dishonored. I have been dishonored.” The ork stepped closer, leaned down. “Why would they do such a thing?”
“Because they were paid to. Just like me.”
“Like you?”
Deke gestured. “Wake that one up. He told me. His Johnson had him take her fingers off. I don’t know what mess a couple bloody fingers makes, but those were his instructions.”
The ork stared. He walked around the table and nudged the unconscious doc with his foot. The man moaned, and shifted a bit, but did not wake up. The ork grunted, kicked the others. They all had the same reaction.
“No one can know of this,” the ork murmured.
Deke swallowed. >Get to the wheels.
>MORE YAKS. COMING UP BEHIND ME. GOOD GUYS, I THINK.
The ork swung around. “Lincoln is moving. Where is he going?”
>Ping me every two seconds. Let me know you’re still there. Watch the new guys. Deke shrugged. “Maybe he saw something.” He took a step toward the door. A light flashed on his AR, every two seconds. Deke clenched his jaw.
The ork inhaled deeply. The tattoos on his face and arms flared brightly, and the ork shuddered with exertion. “I have friends outside now,” he said.
The light stopped flashing on Deke’s AR.
The ork’s eyes opened, turned toward Deke.
Deke shot him, two rounds, in the stomach. The ork cried out and collapsed, arms wrapped around himself.
“Dragon’s piss!” Deke swore. He moved quickly around the small table, where the ork had fallen. Using the toe of his boot, he rolled the ork over. As soon as the yak was on his back, Deke planted a knee in the center of his chest and leaned down. The pistol, traces of smoke and cordite still wafting from the barrel, notched itself between the ork’s eyes.
“Is Lincoln still alive?” Deke demanded.
“Yes,” the ork said.
“Transfer the money.”
“I cannot,” the ork said. He groaned in pain, and then opened his eyes and stared at Deke. “It requires me to commune, and I cannot while in this much pain.”
“Then do it tomorrow.”
“Why should I, when you have betrayed me?”
Deke laughed. “Tell your bunny that he owes me what was promised. Whether he wants his little princess back or not, he’ll want the secret kept. I’ll keep his secret. Lincoln and I, we’re getting off this rock. But I’m taking some insurance.”
“We will hunt you dow—”
Deke reached b
ehind his back and pulled the stasis pack out. He brandished it in front of the ork’s face. “I have these.” The ork’s eyes widened. A finger and a half lay nestled in the sterile package. “You come after me, these come out.”
The ork grunted in pain as Deke shifted his weight and stood. “I don’t care what you all do around here. I’m getting out.” He slipped the fingers back into their pouch above his belt. “But I want to be left alone.” He aimed the pistol. “Do we have a deal?”
The ork stared at him, then yelped as Deke pushed down with his foot before nodding at the runner. “We do.”
Deke smiled. “Then so long, lad,” he said. “And remember. They world may not care, but you do. And I’ve got these bloody fingers.” He smiled, a full, toothy smile, and spun and slid out the doors with nary a whisper of noise. The yaks outside are on the wrong side of the building.
And was gone.
Better Than
By Jean Rabe
Jean Rabe is a long-time Shadowrun player who favors trolls that use bows and arrows. She is the co-author of Aftershock, a Shadowrun novel she happily penned with this anthology’s editor. In addition, she has written two dozen novels and more than four dozen short stories. In her spare time … such that it is … she plays a variety of games, tugs on old socks with her dogs, and tries unsuccessfully to put a dent in her growing stack of to-be-read books.
Moses loved the night. Not because he could see better in it—which he could due to various enhancements in his cybereyes—but because that was when the snakes crawled out onto the sidewalks.
Moses loved to watch the snakes.
Pink, grass-green, blue, day-glo yellow, purple, they slithered into the low spots still filled with rainwater from the late afternoon deluge. They shimmied into splotches of beer and butted up against pretzel pieces puked from the drunkards tossed out of bars along Western Avenue. They slipped into puddles of piss provided by Seattle’s vagrants.
Reflections from the neon signs was all they were, so his chummer Taddeus had said.
