by Mel Odom
“More interesting,” Luppas grated, “and maybe they’ll get to live a little longer. But when we get to the end of it, they’ll be just as dead. They just don’t know it yet.”
14
Skater turned soybacon in the frying pan on the stove in the doss in Auburn they planned to use just as the cool-off after the run. According to the chron built into the stove, it was 08:48:10 a.m. Barely six hours had passed since the run on Shastakovich’s. On the other side of the dusty Venetian blinds covering the window, the sun was coming up and tinting the sky rose and lavender to the east.
“I’m done in there, Jack,” Cullen Trey said, coming into the small kitchen.
“What did you find?” Skater asked. He pulled the first of the bacon out with a pair of plas tongs and spread it across the waiting paper towels, then dumped in soysausage.
The combat mage leaned over Skater’s shoulder to observe the contents of the pan. “Spirits, you aren’t actually going to put that in your stomach, are you? Do you know how much cholesterol is in that?”
‘I’m more interested in what you found in that corpse.” Skater cracked open a dozen eggs in another frying pan, added a little soymilk, salt and pepper. He used a different spatula to stir them.
Trey opened the oven door and peered inside. “Ahh, wheat muffins.”
“And biscuits,” Skater said. After realizing the team was going to be grounded for longer than he’d planned, he’d made a lightning raid on a Stuffer Shack for food supplies. Hunger was one of the unpleasantries they didn’t need to deal with while trying to figure out the dead body and the Fuchi angle it brought along with it. Going out to a nuke-and-serve or McHugh’s as a group wasn’t doable. Neither was sending one person to pick up orders for all of them. Lone Star had snitches who worked the public places, especially eateries like a McHugh’s or a Bee Burger.
“Waste of water and flour,” Trey announced. “There were some watchers closing in on the body, but I dispersed them. Nothing else was there.”
“Did you find out who sent the watchers?”
“To do that, I’d have left a clear astral trail back to us. If it had been possible.”
“What about the slag’s personal effects?” Skater lifted the frying pan with scrambled eggs and scraped them into a paper-lined bowl. Then he cracked another dozen eggs and started the process over again. It still felt strange cooking for all of them. He’d always had a solitary life, and usually he preferred it that way. But this morning cooking was a blessing, giving him something to do with his hands while his mind raced.
“The ones we have,” Trey said, “are nothing. Charms, mostly, with only a hint of the Art clinging to them. May I help?”
“There’s a cantaloupe and a honeydew melon in the fridge,” Skater said. “You can cut them into chunks into a bowl, then put them back until we’re ready for them.”
Trey gave him a small salute, looked in vain for a sharp knife, then produced one with a flourish from somewhere inside his Kevlar-lined cape. He washed it under the tap, using the liquid soap Skater had purchased with the foodstuffs. Soap and babies, Skater had learned, went together like a yabo and a mean streak.
Skater finished pulling the soybacon out before briefly checking the soysausage links. They weren’t done yet, so he rolled them in the pan, getting all sides. With everything so close to being finished, he pulled a carton of processed hash browns out of the freezer unit and popped them into the nuker. By the time he was done, so were the soysausages.
“Got any soykaf?” Duran asked, walking into the room with an empty cup in his big scarred hand.
“Over there.” Skater pointed at the pot brewing next to the portable trid. He put the soysausage on another plate, then drained the frying pan and put it into the sink. “Find what you were looking for on Kylar Luppas?”
“Guy I know from the old days has a loose line on Luppas,” the ork said. “Before Luppas got the gig with Fuchi and Villiers, he used to hustle some action from my contact.”
“What kind of action?” Skater turned off the oven and removed the biscuits and muffins, placing them in a straw basket lined with paper towels.
Trey added two glasses of artificially flavored jellies, then a jar of peach preserves that had been incredibly expensive at a gourmet shop. “You’re a good man, Jack,” he said, beaming.
“Protecting high rollers who had plenty of cash and a proportionate amount of people who wanted to see them geeked,” Duran answered.
“If it comes down to it,” Skater asked, “how much trouble is Luppas going to be?”
“Working for Fuchi,” Duran said, “Luppas will be in the thick of it as long as they have an interest. They shut down the flow of nuyen, he’s gone. Work is never personal with him. Direct confrontation with him would be a last resort.”
“Finesse,” Skater said.
“Which, as it is,” Trey said, “happens to be your forte in the shadowrunning biz.”
Skater turned his attention back to the stove, feeling the weight of the run settling back onto his shoulders. He was the planner for the groups, the schemer who made the impossible at least worth taking the chance on. But he’d made mistakes in the past, little ones; until he’d hosed up and gotten Shiva geeked. Her face still haunted his dreams along with Larisa Hartsinger’s. Both of them had died in the ReGEN frag-up.
“I’m starved,” Archangel said, walking into the room, fresh from the shower. She ran her fingers through her hair, then took her time peering at everything that had been prepared.
“Your guy didn’t happen to mention in what capacity Luppas was working for Fuchi, did he?” Skater asked.
“General drift I got was that Luppas headed up some kind of specialty black bag squad for Villiers.”
“Worked himself right to the top, didn’t he?” Trey asked, smearing peach preserves on a muffin. “Shadowrunning on a corporate level. No real worries about Lone Star or Knight Errant, or any of the other government or federal blue crews. Not like us indi contractors? Some chummers have all the luck.”
“Yeah,” Duran said, “but you let an op go blooie in your face at corporate level, and you’re not talking about pulling a few years in some slammer where you’ve got to protect your hoop from some inconsiderate hosers in the showers. You frag up, they take you out if the corporate competition hasn’t.” Skater turned that over in his mind as he took up a piece of soybacon and pinched off bites. He chewed with patience, getting as much of the taste as he could. The flavor reminded him of the times when his grandfather had taken him camping on Council lands, when they’d caught rabbits and lizards and slow-roasted them over a spit so the juices didn’t all burn off.
“If he’s working a covert run for Fuchi,” Skater said, “the connection between Norris Caber and Fuchi might not exist. Caber could have been with any of the corporations.”
“Caber’s listed as a free-lance efficiency expert under the Coleman January name,” Archangel said. “According to it, he never worked for Fuchi.” She reached across the table and opened the blinds a little, allowing more natural light into the room.
“Any history to back the ID up?” Skater asked.
“Seven years of filed tax reports,” Archangel said. “But the trail disappears after that. Rented apartments, car payments, small purchases. It’s a decent enough cover. If someone didn’t know there had to be more, they’d probably have stopped their search way before I did.”
“This slag looks like he’s in his early thirties,” Skater said. “He should have had more history than that.”
“He doesn’t,” Archangel replied.
“Maybe he lives with his mother,” Wheeler said, walking into the kitchen and helping himself to the soykaf.
“Just a little joke, Wheeler?” Trey taunted.
The dwarf ignored the comment and took a tour of the breakfast laid out.
“Where’s Elvis?” Skater asked, knowing the troll should have smelled the food and heard the others talking.
“With Emma,” Archangel said.
“She woke up?” Skater asked. “I didn’t hear her.” Usually he was aware of every move she made when they were together in the small house he’d purchased for them on an island of Vancouver, British Colombia. The link had almost become psychic.
“She didn’t wake up,” Archangel said. “Elvis woke her up, saying he wanted to keep her from sleeping too much so she’d be ready to go back to sleep when you got a chance to crash. Personally, I think it’s because he can’t stand to see her sleeping when he’s around. He’d rather play with her.”
The troll had been one of the oldest in a family of several children. He’d played big brother and uncle to brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and dozens of kids who had just belonged to friends.
Skater walked to the door of the kitchen and stuck his head out long enough to call for the troll.
“Coming,” Elvis rumbled in his bass voice, “soon as I finish with this diaper.” A small cloud of white talcum powder poofed out from the side of the bed through the bedroom door.
For a moment, the new guilt that Skater wasn’t used to assailed him, rending at him with the sharp talons of a firebird. Grudgingly, he pushed it away, blaming the fresh round of fears on Deja and her demands.
The truth, however, remained that he was raising his daughter around the dangers of his own life as a shadowrunner. Elvis, no matter how he was with her, had killed people with his bare hands and cybernetic augmentations.
All of them had killed. The thought lay in his stomach like the greasy remains of undercooked krill-filler.
The telecom in his pocket buzzed for attention. When he punched up the connection, it was Deja’s harsh voice in his ear. “I found you, Skater, just like I told you I would. Don’t you dare cut me off without listening to what I have to say!”
15
“Talk,” Skater said. He walked as far away from the kitchen and the back bedroom of the doss as he could, wanting the space from the rest of the team. Deja was his problem, and he’d find a way clear of it.
“You got my messages, Jack?” the woman taunted. “Yeah.” Skater gazed through the mini-blinds set horizontally across the window overlooking the Boeing manufacturing plants to the east along Auburn Enumclaw Road and SE 408th Street. The factories ran three shifts a day, churning out aviation parts and supplies, filling the air with gray-black drek that was a visible announcement of someone in the mayor’s environmental protection offices taking graft.
There’d been three messages from the woman in the last ten days. The first came a few days before Dunkelzahn was assassinated in Washington. A second had come the day after the assassination. And the third had come only yesterday, the thirteenth of August. Skater had never talked to her, only listened to the messages. He’d tried to trace her number and location through the telecom, but hadn’t been successful.
“If you got my messages, Jack,” the woman said, “then you already know what I want.”
Skater felt his stomach turning over. He widened the gap in the mini-blinds with his fingers a few centimeters more, trying to find something to focus on that would allow him to remain calm and collected. The early morning traffic taking all the tool pushers to the various factories was in full swing, and the streets filled like rivers of shaped steel and ceramic on the verge of overflowing their banks.
“You want to know where I got this telecom number, Jack? A friend of yours with loose lips.”
Skater knew that wasn’t true. The people in this doss were the only people he trusted with it; except for Kestrel, who was his oldest chummer. The telecom number the woman had reached was an old one by his standards. Almost seven months had gone by since he’d set it up for a piece of biz that had fizzled out.
The number was routed through two piggy-backed exchanges that officially didn’t exist. One of the exchanges was in the downtown office of a semi-retired mage who specialized in healing spells. The other exchange was through a troll pizza stuffer who ran a sports book on the side where an extra telecom link wouldn’t be noticed. Once every eight hours, Skater had a program that beeped all the drop numbers he had and dumped the messages into a blackboard system that held them for another eight hours before pushing them on to an apartment in Tacoma that he’d rented under an alias through a guy he’d paid but had never met. After the key had been exchanged through another drop, Skater had Kestrel set up the system. The street fixer was one of the best in the biz.
Elvis came out of the back bedroom holding Emma over his head and sticking his tongue out at her. Trapped as the troll’s tongue was between his tusks, Slater didn’t think most people would have seen the humor in the expression.
Emma, however, cooed in appreciation and dribbled milky baby spit. Augmented as his street samurai reflexes were, Elvis managed to hold her in one massive hand while he gently caught the spit on her I Love Trolls bib and patted her lips before it hit him in the face. She was dressed in a frilly tourmaline jumper with white booties that Archangel had purchased for her. Emma’s elven ears came to delicate points, her fine dark hair parting on either side of them.
“What do you want?” Skater asked the woman called Deja. “Exactly what I’ve been saying all along: I want Emma.”
“What for?” he asked.
“I get to know Emma is going to have an okay life. That’s more than Larisa got. You killed my sister.”
The accusation hit Skater like a physical blow. Larisa Hartsinger had been Emma’s mother and Skater’s lover. Throughout the time of their relationship, Larisa had never mentioned a sister named Deja. She hadn’t mentioned any of her other family either, and Skater hadn’t asked. At the end, after Larisa had been killed during the ReGEN run a few months ago, she’d kept Emma’s birth a secret as well.
“Emma doesn’t need to be with you, Jack,” Deja stated. “You’re dangerous. You’re only going to get her hurt.” Feeling the conversation on the verge of circling, Skater punched off the telecom, then immediately coded in a block on calls through the number Deja had accessed.
He punched in another code and was tracked onto a recording without an identifying announcement. “Jack,” he said simply. Kestrel would know his voice. When he heard the beep, he started talking. “I’ve got some software problems I need you to handle for me. Nothing heavy and nothing’s flaming. I’ll give you a call back at ten in the a.m.” He punched off and pocketed the telecom.
He felt the pressure coming in from the run and his personal life. Either would have been hard enough. Together, at the moment, he could think of no certain way out. His team was at risk, and so was his hold on his daughter. Divided allegiances more than divided a man’s strength and sense of purpose by half. If he gave up on either one of them, though, he didn’t think what was left of him would be worth having.
16
Skater returned to the kitchen. Despite the problems he faced, he felt better for getting some food and a bit of rest. It was hard to believe that only five hours had passed since they’d come off the streets. The others kept their conversation animated, like none of them were curious about what was going on. Cullen Trey had them involved in one of the wiz stories he often liked to tell. They were usually events that had actually happened to him, but tweaked a little for maximum dramatic payoff.
Emma pumped her hands out from her position curled inside Elvis’s big forearm, reaching for the pacifier the troll teased her with by holding it in his mouth. She reached it and twisted her fingers around it. Elvis opened his mouth and let her take it. She laughed at him, then poked the pacifier into her mouth.
No one asked what was on Skater’s mind. The adrenaline pounded inside him, nearly as bad as it had been when he and Wheeler had gone running across the Mariah Building’s rooftop with Luppas’s black ops group in tow.
Quint Duran regarded Skater with a black gaze. There were no questions in the ork’s eyes, but Skater felt like he was being measured. The feeling was almost enough to make him angry at Duran.
&nb
sp; Then Skater did get angry—at himself. Because the ork had every right to know how Skater was handling himself and what kind of weight was being pulled along into the run.
“Look,” Wheeler said, pointing to the trid. “We made the news flash for this hour.”
Skater took a biscuit from those left and smeared it with grape synthjelly while watching the vid loop play on the trid.
“No one knows what the thrillers behind the raid were after,” Trey quoted after the snoop had closed his beat.
“As if there’s not a history of thrillers boosting the place for cadavers to ransom,” Elvis said. “That’s why the fragging security was so tight.”
“What’s more interesting,” Skater pointed out, “is the fact that there was no mention of a missing body.”
“Fuchi covered it up,” Duran stated.
“Maybe,” Skater said. “Until we scan the true situation, we’ll stay low profile.”
“What do we do about the Johnson?” Duran got up long enough to refill his cup with soykaf. “The guy’s going to be waiting on us.”
“We make contact and negotiate the rendezvous spot,” Skater said.
“What about the corpse?”
The body was in one of the other bedrooms in the doss. Wheeler had gotten a used inflatable synthrubber raft from a military surplus store that catered to an all-night, no-questions-asked trade. The raft had been big enough to outfit one man, maybe two for a time in a pinch, and had come with a rain-proof tarp that snapped down tight enough to keep the inside dry. After the body had been stored inside and wrapped in plas storage wrap, they’d dumped in sacks of ice to preserve it as best as they could.
“It stays here. We’re not going to risk losing it.” Skater shifted his attention to Archangel. “You said you needed gear to trace out all the cyberware Norris is outfitted with.”
Archangel nodded. “A Yamatetsu Cyberware Subsystem Diagnostics Interface. I can get one. I just need it moved.” Wheeler nodded. “Okay. Elvis, you up for an early morning drive?”
