by John Helfers
Mute glanced around the room, and her nose wrinkled. “Just visiting, fortunately. I need some information.”
“Blow me.”
She brought her hand out from behind a cushion and pointed a slivergun at his chest. “Would you care to rephrase that?”
Kaminksy closed his eyes. “I don’t know anything.”
“George White, also known as Picket. Murdered in his shop, Western War Surplus, on Monday night.”
“You don’t think I had anything to do with that, do you? I hardly knew the guy!”
“How did you know him? Through the Moon Traps?”
The survivalist hesitated, then nodded. “He came along to meetings sometimes. He sold us stuff cheap, that’s all.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Survival gear. MREs, camo, weapons, stuff for our shelters …”
“Did he have a shelter of his own?”
“Apart from his shop? I don’t think so.”
“Did he know about anyone else’s?”
Kaminsky bit his lip. “You think we published a guidebook or something? He might have known about a few, though we were only supposed to know the exact locations of three, in case one of us was captured and talked.”
Mute managed not to smile. “What about Lucas Fletcher?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells,” said Kaminsky, uneasily.
“Think. He’s a Navy Seal, if that helps.” She reached into her pocket and drew out a photographic print of Fletcher pre-surgery, which she threw like a shuriken. Kaminsky ducked, then cautiously bent down to pick it up.
“Nope,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “But we weren’t the only ones who did business with Picket. He had friends in the military, too—that’s how he got a lot of his stuff.”
“Would they have known he was in the club?”
“Dunno. Maybe. Why?”
“Knight Errant thinks he killed Picket. He may have taken some stuff from the shop—ammo, weapons, survival gear—but they don’t know how much. Did Picket have anything of value there?”
“Doubt it. Anything he could sell, he did, soon as he could find a buyer.”
“Would he have sold a list of names and addresses? Fallout shelters, places to hide?”
“He might have,” Kaminsky admitted. “He liked money. But I dunno.”
“Think,” said Mute, firmly, looking at him along the gunsight. “You’re a survivalist, aren’t you? Think of this as improving your chances of survival.”
• • •
Magnusson spent the evening at home, nuking himself a meal, and reading academic journals while listening to Beethoven symphonies and stroking his pet cat (not a familiar, despite rumors to the contrary). He slept badly, dreaming of surgery that turned into autopsies, and arrived at university barely in time for his first class, resorting to a makeover spell instead of a shave and eye-drops. Fortunately, he had enough seniority at the university to be able to avoid teaching on Friday afternoons, when all but the most obsessive students were thinking of better things they could be doing.
Friday night was no more restful than the night before, and on Saturday, he went to the gym for a workout, a sauna and a swim, something he hadn’t done since his brief spurt of anxiety at turning fifty, a year before. He even looked in his sock drawer to make sure the Roomsweeper 8-Ball had given him ten years before was still there, then removed the gel rounds and dry-fired the gun a few times to be sure his fingers remembered how.
When a tearful Kenda called him on Sunday afternoon to say that the body of a male elf had washed up on a beach on Shaw Island and that Paul’s parents were flying out there to make a positive identification, he listened carefully, then phoned Marcus Shawn.
• • •
“How did you know he’d been murdered?” asked Shawn as he sat down in Magnusson’s office. “The body had been in the water nearly three days; after the fish and the birds finished with it, we’re lucky there was enough of the head left that we could ID him with dental records. If the dart hadn’t stuck in his spine, we might not have found any proof he was killed.”
“I didn’t know,” said Magnusson. “I just … it was somewhere between a hunch and paranoia. I didn’t even know him all that well; he was in one of my classes as an undergraduate, but I hardly saw him after that. But his partner—research partner and girlfriend—is one of the faculty’s research assistants. Best student I’ve had since you dropped out.”
“I didn’t ‘drop out’,” said Shawn, slightly nettled. “I just didn’t want to be an ivory tower academic. When I’m your age, maybe I’ll feel different, but someone has to do field work!”
“I know,” the professor replied. “I’m sorry … you were saying something about a dart?”
“A flechette. It took us a while to identify it: it’s from an M24A3.”
Magnusson looked politely blank.
“It’s a special carbine designed for underwater use. Takes caseless ammo. The Navy uses them, but not many of them make it to the street.”
The professor’s face turned pale as he thought. “The Navy … do they know about this?”
“I haven’t told them,” said Shawn. “I don’t know about the coroner. There are NCIS agents in town, investigating the George White case, but they’re not telling us anything, so she probably won’t have mentioned it. Why?”
“White sold military weapons, didn’t he?”
“Yes. You think there’s a connection between them?”
“I don’t know,” said Magnusson. That was strictly true, but he had a sinking feeling that the man who’d killed White had also murdered Santos… and that if he’d agreed to help 8-ball and Mute, Santos might still be alive.
“It’s not much of a lead, anyway,” Shawn replied, “Even if it is the same killer, there are hundreds of islands in that archipelago large enough for him to hide on, if he hasn’t moved on, and most of them are Salish-Sidhe territory, out of our jurisdiction. Getting permission for a search would take days, maybe weeks, and it might just be a red herring.” He looked at his former teacher’s gloomy expression, then at his wristwatch. He knew that Magnusson had learned more magic on the streets than in the university, and rightly suspected that he’d run the shadows in his younger days. Unlike many in Lone Star, Shawn had nothing against shadowrunners per se, except when they created extra work for him (usually in the form of crime scenes, and corpses needing to be autopsied). “I’m due in court at eleven,” he said, “have to testify in another case which might take all day. I can put this on the backburner until tomorrow, and call NCIS then, suggest that they search those islands that they can without causing an international incident. Let me know if you find anything or if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“I will,” Magnusson promised, then walked Shawn to the exit. On his way back to the office, he stopped at the alchemy lab storeroom and picked out a collection of talismans and elemental binding foci.
• • •
Zurich leaned over the gunwale of the Nightrunner and vomited. Mute, at the helm, glanced back over her shoulder and said, “I thought you were used to boats!”
“Boats, yes,” said the dwarf. “Seas, no. I learned to sail on Lake Geneva.”
“Oh.” Mute turned to Magnusson. “You okay?”
The magician nodded. Now that the peaks of the San Juan Islands were in sight, he was busily conjuring watcher spirits and sending them to search the archipelago. The first, he directed towards the hide on Battleship Island, where Paul Santos had camped. If Fletcher had found it, he might well be taking advantage of its rather primitive comforts; if not, then much of Santos’s equipment might still be there, including his cameras and computers. Magnusson dispatched another four watchers to the larger uninhabited islands in the archipelago, but without much hope: even at high tide, there were more than a hundred islands and another few hundred rocks large enough to make good hiding places, and the heavily forested areas provided good cover for astral vision as well as the no
rmal spectrum and infra-red, especially for a heavily-cybered man trained in evasion.
Mute powered down the multi-fuel engine and started up the quieter electric motor, slowing the boat down to little more than walking speed as they sailed into Haro Strait. Zurich stopped retching long enough to toss a microskimmer drone off the boat, while 8-ball stared at the 3D map on his commlink screen. “Orcas Island… Skull Island… Deadman Island… Cemetery Island… Victim Island… Massacre Bay… Smallpox Bay… Deadman Bay… Suicide Cliff… another Skull Island… hell, who had the naming rights to this place? Edgar Allan Poe?”
“Do we know where Santos was killed?” asked Mute.
“I’ve run a simulation of the tides,” said Zurich. “He must have been either killed or dumped in the water for the current to have carried him where it did, but without an exact time of death, all I have is probabilities. Sorry.”
“Battleship Island’s over there,” said Magnusson, pointing at a tall pine that resembled a mast. “Could his body have come from near there?”
“From the north side … it’s possible. More likely it was further east, in deeper water.”
Mute nodded, and headed northeast to circle the island. Magnusson’s watcher spirits returned, but none had anything to report. Gloomily, the magician asked Mute to stop the boat close to shore so that he could astrally project into the camouflaged hide and search it, and then the forest, more thoroughly: watchers, he knew, wouldn’t recognize a clue unless they were given a detailed description beforehand, and he didn’t want to send the water elemental he’d bound to his service on a job he could do at least as well himself. He sat down in the seat next to Mute’s, adjusted his floatation vest and fastened his seatbelt; then, his consciousness flew towards the island, leaving his physical body behind.
Zurich looked at his commlink at the datafeed from his microskimmer. “Anyone else get the feeling we’re looking for a needle in a couple of hundred haystacks? What if he’s not even here any—” He stumbled as a wave hit the boat. “—ulp—‘scuse me—” He leaned over the gunwale and opened his mouth to throw up, then yelled in pain and staggered backwards. 8-Ball stared at him, and saw the finned tail of a flechette protruding from his cheek, which was bleeding profusely.
“Shit!” he yelled, as Zurich keeled over. “The bastard must—”
Mute turned around, and kicked her boosted reflexes into high gear so that the world seemed to slow down as if its batteries were running low.
“—beee riii—g”
She flung off her vest and hastily grabbed her spear gun.“—tuuunnndddrrruuusss—”
—and dived into the sea, activating the oxygenating spell tattooed on her body in the same instant as Thresher’s heatseeker rocket hit the Nightrunner’s engine and the explosion blew the stern of the boat to splinters.
• • •
Magnusson looked around the hide—an artfully camouflaged tent roughly the size of a small van, with the cameras and other gear leaving just enough floor space for a troll-sized inflated mattress and sleeping bag. It didn’t quite have the aura of a happy home, but there was no astral residue from violence or death inside the shelter, suggesting that Thresher probably had never found the place and that Santos had left it voluntarily…and probably not very long before his murder, if Magnusson was any judge. The scientific equipment still had the psychic patina of something often used with great care as well as eagerness, and even a certain degree of love. As he left the shelter, trying to follow the faint astral impressions of Santos’s footprints, the professor found himself regretting that he hadn’t known the parazoologist better.
He was halfway to the shore when the shock hit his astral body, sending it reeling in pain.
• • •
Mute drew her smartlinked Fukubi with her right hand, and scanned the area for a heat trace from Thresher’s weapons. She spotted the contrail from the rocket before she saw the well-disguised shape of her human target; Thresher had dropped the launcher tube and swum away from it, then unslung his M24A3 and fired.
A needle-sharp flechette tore through Mute’s lightly armored bodysuit and into the flesh of her right shoulder. The rangefinder in her cybereyes told her that the SEAL was nearly fifty metres away, much too far for either of her weapons to be of much use; she returned fire with the Fukubi anyway, in the hope of spoiling his aim, but none of the shots came within a metre of hitting him, and they had lost most of their force before they even came close.
Thresher grinned as Mute swam towards him as fast as she could, weaving through the water like a dolphin and being careful to present the smallest possible target and squeezing off single shots in the hope of distracting him. She knew the carbine’s mag held thirty shots, but she could only hope that he didn’t have enough ammunition left that he could waste it. If she could just get close enough to fire the speargun …
• • •
8-Ball sprayed a bandage onto Zurich’s face, sealing the puncture made by the flechette and stopping the blood loss, then hooked the medkit up to his friend’s biomonitor before dragging him over to where Magnusson’s meatbody was floating. His inflated vest kept him the right way up, but he’d had to ditch his backpack, gunbelt and most of his weapons to keep his face above water. It hadn’t been an easy choice.
Unlike Zurich, the magician had been sitting far enough from the explosion that he didn’t seem to have been badly wounded—the back of his seat had absorbed most of the fragments, and 8-ball had cut him free of the wreck before it sank. Magnusson was still staring sightlessly at the dark clouds above him when the rain began to fall onto his face and Zurich’s, and onto 8-Ball’s hairless scalp. The dwarf checked the pulse in his throat yet again, unsure whether there was anything else he could do to help any of them, and sighed with relief when the magician suddenly turned to face him. “What happened?” asked Magnusson.
“He shot Zurich, then blew up the boat,” said the dwarf.
“Mute?”
“Went after him. Took the power head and your talisman.”
Magnusson nodded. “Can you make it back to shore? We’re sitting ducks here.”
“I’ll try. You?”
“I’ll see if Mute needs help.” He cast an Oxygenate spell on himself, commanded his bound elemental to sustain it, and slipped out of his lined coat and flotation vest and into the depths.
The magician’s astral vision allowed him to see underwater more clearly than even the best cybereyes, though the sea was teeming with life that shone in the astral like fireflies. Thresher, by contrast, was little more than a shadow, so heavily cybered and modified that he barely had a recognizable aura; only the murderous intent he radiated made it clear that he was actually alive. Magnusson cast a stunball spell at him; Thresher, his adrenaline pump having already kicked in, remained utterly unfazed. His next shot hit Mute below the collarbone, but she continued to press on, watching the rangefinder reading superimposed on the crosshairs on her retinal display as she closed the distance between herself and her target. Thirty-eight metres … thirty-seven … thirty-six …
Magnusson cast a levitation spell on Thresher’s carbine, trying to wrest it from his grasp. The SEAL managed to retain his hold on the weapon, but the magician did succeed in deflecting the gun upwards so that the next burst missed Mute, and in distracting him while she swam near enough to fire the speargun. Thresher looked towards her an instant too late to dodge the dart, and it slammed into his chest hard enough to detonate the power head. Flechettes ripped into his armored wetsuit and toughened orthoskin at point-blank range, missing his heart but tearing a hole in his left lung.
Thresher released his grip on the rifle and clapped a hand over the bubbling wound, trying to hold it shut. As Mute neared, he drew his underwater pistol and fired the last three rounds, hitting her twice. Then he drew his fighting knife while he waited for her to come within melee range—but instead of returning fire, Mute drifted down towards the sea floor. Thresher watched her until he was convinced she wa
sn’t merely feigning unconsciousness, then activated the jets in his leg and shot up towards Magnusson, spearing him in the stomach.
• • •
8-Ball sighed with relief as his flailing feet finally touched wet sand. The inexpert swimmer staggered the last few meters before dropping Zurich on the shore of Battleship Island, then collapsed beside him, staring up at the sky and gasping for breath. A few seconds later, he sat up, checked the medkit screen to see whether there was anything more he could do for Zurich while they waited for DocWagon, then patted himself down in the hope of finding some weapons he hadn’t discarded. It didn’t take long to discover that all he had was his neck knife and a signal flare. He would have sworn long and loudly, but he didn’t have the energy to spare.
• • •
The force of the collision lifted both Magnusson and Thresher partly out of the water, and when the SEAL cut the power to his jets, both of their heads remained above the surface. They stared at each other, almost nose to nose, for a few seconds, before Thresher removed the knife and began to laugh. “You should’ve stayed home. You’re way out of your depth—but me, I’m in my element.”
“Maybe,” Magnusson gasped weakly, “but you’re in my elemental.”
“Wha—” Thresher drew back his knife for a killing blow, and the water spirit engulfed and bound him, lifting him and spinning him around in a towering vortex far above the magician. Magnusson watched the SEAL struggle for a moment, and realized that he couldn’t drown and was protected against cold and possibly even against the great crushing pressure that the powerful elemental could generate. He thought quickly, then ordered the spirit to hurl him towards the island.
