by John Helfers
“Abiola means, ‘born in honor,’“ said the old man softly. “Maybe I wanted to see if that name suited you.”
Abiola turned that over in his mind for a minute. Then he said, “Who are you?”
“My name is Obi Akinlaja. I am a shaman, a master of Yoruba magic, of juju. I follow the old ways.”
He turned and pointed at the dark stillness that was Surulere. “That may be Africa’s future. Death. Evil. Darkness.” He shook his head. “But not if good men and women will stand against it. I am putting together a team to run the shadows. I can’t promise you it will be safe. But I can promise you it will be right.”
Abiola glanced at the two women and six children picking at the broken remnants of their lives. They were homeless and heartbroken and terrified. But they were also alive.
He had done that, him and this funny old man.
Abiola’s throat suddenly tightened with emotion. After plunging into despair and desperation he’d come out with a prize he’d never expected.
Hope.
He reached forward and enclosed the shaman’s tiny hand in his.
In Memory Of
By Bradley P. Beaulieu
Bradley P. Beaulieu is a SpecFic writer who figured he’d better get serious about writing before he found himself on the wrong side of a lifelong career in software. His story, “In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat,” was voted a Notable Story of 2006 by the Million Writers Award. Other stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Writers of the Future, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and several DAW anthologies. He lives in Racine, Wisconsin, with his wife, daughter, and two cats, where he enjoys cooking spicy dishes and hiding out on the weekends with his family. For more, please visit www.quillings.com.
I’d been in the noisy kafé with my handler for nearly an hour when a yellow alert flashed along the right side of my vision. A quick acknowledge of the alert produced an AR popup showing that someone in the kafé had been caught observing my conversation one too many times. I couldn’t see him, so I tapped into the camera feed from my Toy Poodle, Skittles, who was sitting in her carrying bag on the chair next to mine. The superimposed feed showed a tall, unassuming Aboriginal in a threadbare suit, sitting alone at a table near the corner. I rewound Skittles’ feed—the histogram geography of the business district and the curving grace of Sydney Harbour Bridge panning in time with the slow rotation of the kafé—and found that he’d come in nearly an hour ago, a few minutes after I’d arrived.
Despite the tetched-grandmother persona I wore for the benefit of Sydney’s sprawl, I was careful when it came to business, and took things like this seriously. My handler, a young elf with delusions of self-importance, caught my mood and stopped subvocalizing immediately. I tapped on the table three times in a place only he could see. Though our business wasn’t quite complete, he immediately nodded and stood, saying he’d see me next Thursday, which meant he’d contact me again in a few weeks.
As he left, I masked my discomfort by breathing in the scent of my steaming mug of kaf while studying a chiphead sitting at a nearby table. Then, using the Resonance that had been with me since the crash, I reached out and probed the walls around the Aboriginal’s PAN. My eyebrows rose, though I quickly brought my mug up to my lips and slurped to cover the mistake. His walls were good—not state-of-the-art, but close, and not at all what I expected from a guy who looked like he’d just dragged himself in from the outback. I might have been able to crack it, but as closely as he was watching me, as ready as seemed to be for such a thing, he would have sensed it.
Skittles captured his vitals using the instruments clustered in her skull, and I sent them to an identification service I paid more than just a little to use. It usually returned a positive match that was ninety-eight percent accurate within a second, but this time it took nearly five, and when it did return, it gave me something I’d never seen before: a non-match, which meant that the government and most, if not all, of the corps would have no idea who this guy was. It did, however, give probable indications that he hailed from the Northern Territory, perhaps the Tiwis—with some Western European ancestry thrown in for good measure.
I had two choices: call in the security firm I kept on retainer or invite this bloke over. Had he been a random gawker, I would have just ignored him and left, but it was clear he’d been hoping to find me here in this my favorite kafé, and I’d be damned if I’d give it up without a fight.
Moments after I sent him a polite request to join me, he picked himself up, wove through the crowd, and sat across from me. His skin was the color of moist earth, and his hair was wild, going in all directions. His clothes—twenty years behind the times—smacked of someone consciously trying to look like a dreg, but strangely enough his smile, pleasant but knowing, made it seem like he knew I would see through it, and that he didn’t care if I did.
No, it wasn’t that he didn’t care. He had wanted me to understand that not all was as it seemed. He would have been disappointed if I hadn’t noticed. And that was when I realized then that this was a much more dangerous situation than I’d given it credit for.
He had an open channel into his PAN for subvocal communication, so I patched in.
Have a name? I asked while a waitress with glowing red piercings sprinkled all over her face poured me a refill.
Macquarie will do. You’re Mav?
I nodded, smiling politely at the name he’d given—Macquarie was the most common alias for Aussie clients who wished to remain nameless, the equivalent of Mr. Johnson in the UCAS. What can I do for you, Mr. Macquarie?
He sat forward in his chair, looking at Skittles with a pleasant smile on his face. Before I could stop him, he had reached out to scratch Skittles’ ear through the holes in her carrier. Skittles bared her teeth and snapped, and Macquarie snatched his hand back, frowning and shaking his finger. He pulled a napkin from the table’s dispenser and used it to staunch the wound.
She doesn’t like strangers much, I said.
He glanced at Skittles, frowning at the red blotch on the otherwise white napkin. I have it on good authority you’re the one I need to talk to.
Whose authority?
He leaned back into his black plasteen chair, gripping his finger, silent.
I can find out, I said.
Perhaps, but by then our dealings will be done.
What makes you think they’re not done already?
He paused, glancing at the crowd over my shoulder. All I need is a simple data drop.
Not my cup of kaf...
I pay well.
Money I’ve got. Not strictly true, but it wasn’t something he needed to know.
Then perhaps the target will interest you.
I waited—my expression appropriately blank—as dozens of nearby conversations washed over us.
Cylestra, he finally said.
And why would Cylestra interest me?
Cylestra has the largest database of Tamanous agents south of the equator.
I prided myself on maintaining my composure, especially during negotiations, but I found my eyes thinning at what he was suggesting. And I saw within his eyes a look of hunger. He knew he had my interest. Clearly he also knew that my second husband had been taken by a Tamanous ghoul nearly thirty years ago. Liam had gone to Adelaide for a sales conference. He hadn’t shown up on the second day. The search for him began in earnest on the fourth, and on the fifth they’d found him floating in the Myponga Reservoir south of Adelaide, missing one lung, both kidneys, and his liver. He’d had a bad heart or they might have taken that, too. I’d married twice since then—divorces, both of them—but Liam’s death still haunted me.
I realized my jaw was clenched so tight my molars ached. That Macquarie knew this about me was disturbing. Combine that with the fact that he had the capacity to obtain an encrypted tunnel into one of the better guarded biotech corps made the situation frightening, and I’d always told myself that if my alarms were going off, they were going off for a r
eason, and I’d better listen.
Skittles had started barking—she’d always been a good pooch that way. I shushed her and said, “That’s all right, girl. We were just leaving.” Without another word, I broke my connection with Macquarie, picked up Skittles’ carrier, and left the kafé, taking the transparent pedestrian tube that curved down and around the building toward street level.
Shortly after we joined the flow of busy morning traffic, Skittles resumed her barking, and I saw in my AR overlay that she thought the situation dangerous enough that she had activated the tranq gun hidden inside her throat. I brought up Skittles’ video feed and found Macquarie forcing his way through the crowd toward us. I sent a command to Skittles that forced her to calm down—dealing with the fallout of a tranq was sometimes more trouble than it was worth—but I did prime a signal to SkySec that if not defeated within one minute would result in a security team being dispatched.
Macquarie ran in front of me and blocked my path.
I nearly let Skittles shoot him. But there was something in his eyes, a desperation that hadn’t been there before. His heart rate was up; so was his breathing. He was pinging my subvocal channel over and over, pleading for a new tunnel.
He was truly worried. It had been a bluff inside, an act, something to get him in with someone bigger than he was used to dealing with.
I should have kept walking—I should have—but in the end I was curious about him, about his story. What had driven him into the sprawl to find me? What wrongs did he hope to right? And who stood to get hurt once the scales had been balanced?
Why Cylestra? I asked after reopening the channel.
He shook his head. I’m not paying you for that.
You’re not paying me anything, as I recall.
The database means nothing, then?
I bit back my reply. You could get anyone to use an open tunnel. Why me?
There can be no traces of the drop. I can’t leave this to an amateur.
Since the moment I’d heard the word Tamanous in the kafé, my mind had been feeding me memories of Liam I’d long since thought forgotten—the brain had a funny way of squirreling those things away and bringing them back when they were the most unwelcome. In my thirst for revenge, I’d contacted over a dozen shadowrunners, paying them what little I made to search for his killers. They’d found nothing. All of it had been wasted money. Then came the crash of ’64 and along with it my newfound gifts as a technomancer. What I had viewed as a blessing quickly became a curse as I failed to master even the simplest of techniques to manipulate the Resonance I could feel all around me, every minute of every day. It seemed like the harder I tried and the more I focused upon my goal, the further away it became. After several frustrating years, the anger became too much to bear, and I gave it all up.
In the months that followed, without even trying, my abilities began to soar. I’d taken it as a sign that searching for Liam’s killers was, in the grand scheme of things, fruitless. Strange that now, when I thought I’d finally managed to leave all of it behind, an opportunity to exact some revenge was presenting itself. Karma at work, I told myself.
A troll shouldered his way through the tunnel, nudging both me and Macquarie aside. Skittles barked at his retreating form.
Will you do it? he asked.
Give me the key and the package.
The tunnel’s good for another three days, he said while transferring the data through a secure socket.
Come to the kafé in two days, and I’ll let you know how it went.
He nodded, a curious look on his face, and then he turned and walked away, moving through the crowd as if he’d been living in the sprawl all his life.
Before I lost sight of him, I tagged him and sent a request to SkySec, who in addition to straightforward security dabbled in surveillance—they leased time from the city’s traffic cameras for just this purpose. With any luck, I’d know where Macquarie was holing up by the end of the day.
• • •
I returned home and released Skittles from her carrier. She circled around the room several times before jumping up to the beaten brown chair she’d long ago claimed as her own. She barked several times—no doubt still excited from all the goings on—before finally settling into the familiar curves of her hopelessly matted pillow.
No sooner had I sat down on a recliner and ordered the windows to shutter themselves than I received a message from SkySec: they’d lost Macquarie. I sent back a request to provide details—I needed to know how he could do such a thing—but my hopes were small that a useful answer would ever be returned. The pretty penny I paid every month was worth it, but SkySec was not known for value added service.
After swiveling the chair away from the windows, I reclined and gave my aching knees a rest. It was time to find out what I could about this deal.
I was curious about the Trojan, but given how Macquarie had lost SkySec, the possibility of finding out more about him was simply too tempting, so I decided to have a little look-see before getting down to business. I knew a probable place of origin, and I knew he had a beef with Cylestra, so that’s where I began.
It was at times like this, when I was physically tired but mentally curious, that the Resonance called to me most strongly. Sometime I found myself having to fight the urge, but now, luckily, I could simply let it take me. And it did. The reality around me shifted, and though there was a brief moment of reorientation, it quickly felt like I belonged there, perhaps more so than the physical world. There, I was part of the world, and it was a part of me. I was not bound by the frailty of my form, nor the aches and pains that had collected like driftwood along the shore. Here, I was free to go where I would, unfettered.
I bent myself to my task, sifting through tera after tera of news releases, images, blogs, vlogs, memory uploads. I took each of them and played them against the others, building the pieces of the puzzle first and then, one-by-one, piecing them together until the picture began to form.
Finally, twelve hours after entering, I found it.
Eight years ago, an Aboriginal girl named Sindala Hendesa had, with the consent of her parents, joined a drug trial to restore her failing kidneys. It was a process that was advertised as costing half as much as growing a new one, and since it was a final-phase trial, it was subsidized and would cost them even less. Cylestra was administering the program through a loosely veiled partnership with the Northern Territory government.
Bathurst, and especially Sindala’s village, was not wealthy. The doctors were subpar, as was the nearest hospital, which was where Sindala would have been taken had the Cylestra medical team not offered their services, so it was natural that Sindala’s parents would jump at any small increase in their daughter’s chances. The treatments continued for several months, and Sindala showed signs of improvement.
But then there was a reversal. Sindala’s organs—not just her kidneys—began growing at an alarming rate. By the time they decided to drop her from the program, her lungs had enlarged by thirty percent; her heart was twice as large as it should have been, and her kidneys had tripled in size. Within another few months, many of the subjects began experiencing similar issues, forcing Cylestra to abandon the trial altogether. Shortly after, Cylestra simply picked up and left, sidestepping the repeated requests for follow-up visits.
Sindala’s father, of course, was my Mr. Macquarie—real name, Koorong Hendesa—and her mother was Allora. As Sindala’s health deteriorated, Koorong and Allora fought in the courts for Cylestra to pay for new organs. Their lawyer, one of the few that would agree to take on a small-stakes claim against a Double-A corp, tried to argue that the side effects were much more damaging than had been accounted for in the initial discussions with the Hendesas. The judge, in the end, ruled for the plaintiffs, but it was a sham—the Hendesas were awarded the exact sum of money they had paid to Cylestra, an amount that would fail to even dent the mounting bills and future treatments that Sindala would need.
After the trial,
with Koorong and Allora’s savings drained, the village chipped in, but they could afford little more than an ancient dialysis machine.
Sindala died two months later.
An alarm from the lobby of my apartment complex broke my train of thought. I tapped into the intercam and found Koorong speaking feverishly into it.
“Please, Mav, let me in, we need to talk.” He pressed on the button for my apartment feverishly. “Mav—”
“I don’t appreciate clients following me home, Koorong.”
He paused at the use of his real name. “Can I come up?”
I let him in, and a minute later he had reached my apartment on the 132nd floor. He gave Skittles a look of consternation that I couldn’t quite interpret. Perhaps the bite earlier...
“We have to leave,” he said, “Now.”
Skittles measured an extremely high heartbeat from him, and I could tell just from the sound of his breathing that he was anxious.
“What’s happened?”
He glanced back at the door, then Skittles, and finally back to me. “I’ll explain it all later. But please—”
His eyes widened as he looked over my chair to the windows beyond. Shadows were playing among the shutters—something large obstructing the sunlight. The entire apartment was soundproofed, but there was the telltale whine of jets could be heard.
I triggered the windows to drop their shields. The kevmesh armor shot downward from its recessed compartment above the windows, fast, but not fast enough.
Guns opened fire, stitching bullets across the apartment. The windows shattered, spraying glass over the confined space. The whine of the jet engines became suddenly and overwhelmingly loud. Bullets stitched a trail across the wall, in a heartbeat eating up the distance from the yellow acacia in the corner to Skittles’ chair.
I had already begun rolling to the floor, but before I could even touch the carpet I felt something burn along my upper thigh and then my backside. Then something hotter than I had ever felt in my life bored deep into my lower torso. As the shields finally slammed into place, I looked down to find blood welling from a hole in my gut, not the bright red one saw against their skin after a small cut, but blood of the dark and deep and deadly variety. I knew just from looking at it that I would soon slip into shock, but that knowledge seemed to slow time down, seemed to sharpen my senses, not deaden them.
