Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  “You don’t like the way I’m running this?” Skater asked. Duran showed both palms empty. “Kid, you’re doing fine. I’m not asking this for me or anybody. I’m offering to come along as a freebie, take care of whatever personal biz is on your mind. All I’m saying is we got the time.”

  Skater looked into the ork’s dark eyes. He saw the honest intent there and it bothered him. Running alone, hanging alone, that was the way he’d tried to live his life for a long time now. But there was no way he could earn the nuyen he needed for Emma and him to survive on his own, and linking up with another shadowrun team where those boundaries existed again was kludge thinking. He didn’t like the idea of running up moral debts; nuyen was a hell of a lot easier to pay off, and a chummer knew when the bill came due.

  Still, offering Duran money for his time would be insulting. Skater knew that.

  “Know what it’s like to have something hanging over your head,” Duran commented.

  “Yeah,” Skater said. It was a big decision to involve Duran. One not easily made, and one that couldn’t be taken back. But he had to start working through the morass. His mind was his keenest weapon, what he had to offer the team. He didn’t need it spinning toward burn-out. Leaning forward, he tapped on the glass and gave the driver the new address. Then he told Duran about Deja’s calls and about the woman’s claims to be Larisa’s sister and her demands that he give up Emma.

  * * *

  Skater got out of the cab, resettling the Predator under his jacket till it felt comfortable. Tukwila was strictly low-class, where the down-and-out went to live and prey on each other. All the dosses appeared run-down, sagging little giants of plascrete block and ambitious mortar. Fly-by-night construction companies had poured, finished, and rented out the structures almost in the same week a few short months after the Night of Rage swept through Seattle in 2039. The alleys and narrow streets didn’t resemble paths anymore; they were scars ribbed by broken asphalt, urban hunting trails that knew no true relief from predators.

  Skater took the lead, Duran staying a half-step back to bring up the rear. The humidity drew out beads of sweat that made his clothes stick to his skin. He walked around potholes in the asphalt alleyways where a handful of children, human as well as meta, played with homemade boats flying paper sails in the pools of water that had collected.

  As Skater and Duran drew near, the children all became quiet and sidled up against the nearest building or fence. One of the boys even climbed up on top of a low retaining wall, eyes white and showing he was ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.

  “This is what Archangel was trying to get at when she was talking to you this morning,” Duran said in a low voice that didn’t carry. “Most people who have kids, they don’t prepare for it. They’re kind of thrown into it, learning as they go. She doesn’t want you to sell yourself short.”

  Skater didn’t make a reply, kept his attention focused on the movement around him. Some of the apartments possessed small balconies on the second and third floors that overlooked the alley. Most of them held piles of refuse, broken patio furniture, and plastifoam packing cases. A demented Santa Claus hung from one of them, a garrote knotted around his stretched neck, his round face and beard showing methodical cigarette burn patterns.

  “Maybe none of my biz,” Duran went on, “but I think she’s got a point. Look around you, kid, and smell the soykaf. How many of these kids do you really think stand a chance in this world? The boys will grow up to be local yabos, and gutterkin, probably get geeked in a bimble-brained turf war between thrillers. The girls will end up selling their hoops, hoping some fragging prince in shining armor will come take them away from all this. The parents living in here, slot, they’re all chem-guzzlers, chipheads, and street haunts who couldn’t make it in the straight world and were too afraid of the shadows, or too damn slow to make a go of it there.”

  “Doesn’t mean Emma won’t end up any of those ways herself,” Skater said bitterly.

  “Kid, you’re looking too far ahead.”

  Skater knew that was true. Before Emma, he hadn’t had to look much past the next handful of days.

  “You need to focus on right now,” Duran said. “Frag, you can always scope out the guessing game of what’s-gonna-go-wrong-next and bone your mind with more than you can handle. That’s fear talking inside you, not common sense.”

  “I know,” Skater said. Behind them, the children had already redescended to their play areas. “Emma needs a parent.”

  “You’re her parent.”

  Skater looked at the big ork. “She got fragged over in that department. She deserves something better, someone better.”

  “Slot! Listen to you, kid.” Duran slapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to sting and grab Skater’s attention. “Fragging quitterspeak is what that is. It surprised me that Archangel didn’t grab your ears this morning and pull them down to your ankles. For a guy as smart as you, you can sure pull a set of blinders on.”

  “I can see my weak areas,” Skater said.

  “Frag, everybody has ’em. The joker you should look out for most in this world, he’s the one don’t know he’s got weak areas. You play to your strengths, kid, you always have. That hose-up a few months back, look at the way you managed a save out of that. I don’t think many could have. You took on a Tir Taimgire corp, the yakuza, and Conrad McKenzie’s mafia bunch. You even went up against the dragon Lofwyr himself. I know the idea of taking care of Emma can’t be any scarier than that.”

  “I didn’t save Larisa.”

  Duran dropped a heavy hand on Skater’s shoulder. “You couldn’t, kid. That’s something you’re going to have to acknowledge or it’s gonna eat you alive.”

  Skater paused a moment before speaking. The subject matter was already taboo. “I ever tell you about my mom?”

  “No.”

  Feeling the squalor of Tukwila all around him, it suddenly brought back the emotions as well as the memories of those times. Taking a deep breath, Skater plunged ahead. “She was bom to Daniel Ghost-Step and Imala Loves-Walking-In-Sunlight. She was the baby, bom after four previous children, and christened Kolenya Dances-in-Flowers. She ran away from the Council Lands at seventeen and moved to Seattle.”

  “Drawn by the lights of the big city,” Duran commented. Skater shrugged. “I never asked what brought her here, she never said. After she was here for a time, she got pregnant. Story goes that she was hanging with a shadowrunner, maybe even more than one. At the time she’d set herself up as a fixer, working low-end profit and safe black market goods, barely surviving. When she got close to the birthing time, she went home. Nowhere else to go, I suppose.”

  “And maybe she figured you had no place in the sprawl.”

  “Maybe.” Voice thick and surprised because of it, Skater made himself go on. “After she had me, she stayed around for a few months. My grandfather told me she even tried to make a go of motherhood, said he could tell there was a lot of love there.”

  “But in the end, she buzzed turbo.”

  “Before I was six months old.” Skater took the corner at the next alley and spotted Kalika Chilson’s doss only a little further on. “I was raised by my grandfather. My grandmother, my uncles and aunts and cousins, none of them wanted anything to do with me.”

  “Tainted blood.”

  “Something like that. Daniel Ghost-Step was a leader among the Salish. Nothing big, but tribespeople mentioned his name with respect. Having me there changed a lot of that for him. They stopped somewhere short of ostracizing him. Even his other kids.”

  “Man must have loved you.”

  “In his way, as much as he was able,” Skater said. “I think he did. But I keep wondering if it wasn’t more out of his idea of duty than any real feelings for me.”

  “Look at what the man did, omae,” Duran said. “Not what a crazy, mixed-up kid was feeling.”

  “Most days I do,” Skater said. “But having Emma’s made me look at those times with a harder
eye. Sometimes I don’t like what I see.”

  “Part of the biz when you start going internal, kid. It’s what gives you the strength that you have, and it’s what points out your weak spots for you to pick at. That’s also your greatest gift when it comes to running the shadows: you’re able to look at more perspectives than most people.”

  “I was fifteen when my grandfather died,” Skater said. “Left me at loose ends. Nobody in the tribe was particularly ready for me to break bread at their tables. Late one night, I packed up the few things I cared about and made the trek into Seattle. Took me a few weeks to find my mom. She was living as a fixer, and not too happy to see me when I came strolling through the door of her doss.”

  “Back with your dad?”

  Skater shook his head. “Never knew who he was.”

  “Ever try to find out?”

  “I never cared. Not really. Every now and then I’d get a twinge of curiosity, but no way to really follow up on what had gone down all that time ago.”

  “And now?”

  “Mostly I don’t think about it.”

  Duran nodded, and let the matter go.

  Skater felt silently thankful, surprised at how hard it was to talk about those things and wishing he could find a way to stop. “I lived with my mom almost three years. We never got close. She always had biz to do, and didn’t want to be looking over her shoulder to see where I was while she did it. So I was left alone a lot. But that was okay, because I liked being by myself.”

  “That’s when you started in the shadows,” Duran guessed. Skater nodded. “Mainly boosting. Then I used my mom’s connections to pass off the goods and get whatever nuyen I could. One day I came home, found a group of Dissemblers in the doss. They’d already geeked my mother. Later I found out it was over money. She’d shorted them on a credstick.” He left out the part about how he’d rescued Kestrel, maintaining some of the distance between then and now. “I tracked down the gangers responsible over the next year. It didn’t happen easy. I learned how to geek someone quick, in the heat of the dust-up, and I learned how to geek someone cold, once I knew it had to be done.”

  “That’s a drekking learning curve from helL,” Duran said. “It didn’t all go my way,” Skater admitted. “That’s how I picked up most of the cyberware I’ve got.” He touched the side of his head. “Like this eye. I didn’t have it installed by choice. I’ve got too much of my grandfather’s ways in me for that.”

  “Sure,” Duran said softly, “but what’s all that got to do with Emma?”

  Skater felt that answer was obvious. “I don’t know anything about being a parent, Quint. I’m not even sure if I know how to—to care about someone else.”

  “You’re this confused and it’s bothering you this much,” the ork said, “I’d say you should have a clue by now.”

  Skater shook his head. “What I feel shouldn’t matter in this equation. What counts is what’s best for Emma.”

  “Take a look around, omae,” the ork said in a low voice. “You see anybody else waiting to take that weight off your shoulders?”

  “I’m not ready to be a parent,” Skater said.

  “No one is. Not even when they know it’s coming.” Duran tapped Skater’s chest with a forefinger, and Skater felt the taps thump hollowly inside his body. “You go with what you feel in here, chummer. And that’s chip-truth.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Skater shook his head as he aimed himself at the stairs leading up to Kalika Chilson’s doss. “The one true thing I know is that I don’t like the idea of being away from her, maybe never seeing her again. That hurts.”

  “Something you should file away and keep in your brainbox to remember,” Duran said. “Larisa had time to ask other people to take care of your daughter. She could have closed you out of the loop entirely. She didn’t, kid. She chose you to take care of Emma.”

  True enough, Skater supposed. But he remembered the mess his ex-lover had gotten herself into there at the end. Just maybe, leaving Emma with him was a sheer act of desperation.

  He brushed away the thought as he put his hand on the stair banister and started up the stairs. Kalika Chilson lived in 305. Before he reached the door, he heard shouting coming from inside. A man’s angry voice shrilled invective.

  Skater rapped his knuckles against the scarred plastiwood surface, his other hand slipping beneath his jacket to free the Predator. The doorbell hung in pieces against the frame.

  The screaming man inside the room quieted.

  A moment later, the door opened, the chain securing it to the door frame visible in the gap. Kalika Chilson, blood running down the corner of her mouth, peered out at Skater with one rheumy eye.

  23

  “Get back here, you thieving slitch!” the man’s voice grunted. A big hand seized Kalika Chilson by her gray hair and yanked her back. The door slammed a moment later.

  Adrenaline instantly yanking him into overdrive, knowing his thoughts were razor-edged and running in a thousand directions, Skater took a step back and drove his foot into the door beside the locking mechanism.

  Plasteel shrieked as the door shuddered, then gave way entirely.

  Skater wrapped both hands around the Predator and stepped into the room. Fear surged within him. The situation was definitely out of the safety zone. Anyone in the neighborhood could trip a PANICBUTTON in the next breath, bringing the Star down on them in force. Blue crews didn’t hit the low-income squats with any conception of tact. The safest course of action for Skater and Duran was to leave immediately.

  The desire was there, but Skater found himself unable to act on it. Whatever else Kalika Chilson was, she had been Larisa Hartsinger’s mother. And she was Emma’s grandmother. He’d never thought of her that way before.

  A man in his late forties stood behind Kalika Chilson, one big hand still knotted in her hair while the other held a small hide-out pistol screwed under her jawline. Madness twinkled in the solid purple cybereyes set close together in a face that looked sculpted from a plascrete pyramid. The shaven skull, overlapped by scarred chrome that still had a few shiny spots, came to a narrow wedge of bone and metal over the wide shelf of jaw.

  Kalika Chilson clapped both hands to the fist in her hair, making plaintive whines. Short, thin, and frail, with her face all pinched in from age and chronic abuse of alcohol or drugs or something just as debilitating, she looked like a child’s stuffed monkey with its head ripped open, the stuffing material forming the gray nest of springy hair that exploded from her scalp. She wore only a faded blue tee shirt that hung almost low enough to cover her bikini-cut pale green panties and didn’t conceal the fact that she wore no bra over her sagging breasts.

  Tripping his boosted reflexes, Skater squeezed the Predator’s trigger. The bullet sped true, gouging deeply into the man’s shoulder. Pain and the impact made the man drop his weapon without firing it while the Chilson screamed.

  She ducked her head and kicked back at her captor. Strands of gray hair remained in his fist as she fell to the floor. He screamed as the pain took him.

  Skater reached down and caught the woman by the arm, propelling her back toward Duran. The ork caught her easily and kept her moving till she was out of the line of fire, tucked away behind his armored body.

  The purple cybereyes flickered for a moment, then the grimace of pain washed from the man’s face. “Think you’re a mean little slotter, don’t you?” he said. “Gonna teach you a thing or two about trying to drek over ol' Karg.” A set of matte-black Wiremasters hand razors popped from the fingertips of both hands, extending almost eight centimeters past the flesh.

  A cold chill buzzed through Skater but only touched him fleetingly as the adrenaline laced his system after the boosted reflexes came on-line. He slid the Predator into shoulder leather. Maybe most of the squat dwellers hadn’t heard the sound of the shot, and maybe most of them would prove willing to let the first one go. But if a barrage went off, the call to the Star would go through without a doubt. He took a step
forward, watching the eerie surface of the pupil-less purple cybereyes, getting close enough to see himself reflected in them.

  “Lemme put a pill between his lookers and we’re down to null sweat in a heartbeat,” Duran said.

  “No,” Skater replied. “We do this quiet.”

  Karg barked laughter and started circling warily. “You must have a trog-sized death wish, browncone. Slot, you’re looking at death on the move.”

  Judging from the way Karg moved, Skater recognized immediately that the man knew his way around a dustup. Skater took a step forward, like he was closing to do battle with his hands.

  Instantly Karg reached out to slice and dice.

  Skater wasn’t there when Karg made his move, though. Ducking under the hand razors, Skater bent and twisted at the waist, driving home a stamp-kick that caught the man in the crotch.

  A high-pitched yelp of pain echoed off the walls. Karg staggered and looked dazed.

  Never letting up, Skater dropped his hands to the floor to support himself, then launched a kick at Karg’s immense jaw. The man’s teeth clicked together. White splinters spilled across his pale blue lips a moment before crimson threads wove across the puckered flesh and dripped to his chin.

  Skater flipped backward, easily avoiding the fistful of razors that swiped at him. He landed on his feet and took a step forward. He feinted a forward snap-kick, holding it back just long enough for Karg to react and raise both hands, in his defense. Spinning, Skater brought his foot around in a long, vicious side-kick.

  The impact of the kick knocked Karg backward over a sagging couch. An overflowing rose-colored plastiglass ashtray filled with nicostick butts upended like tombstones fell off the arm of the couch to the floor with a dull thud. A pix frame holding a cheap reproduction holo of a mother hellhound and her pups in a torch-lit cave splintered. The plastifoam backing shredded and dropped the holo in pieces.

  “Not bad, kid,” Duran growled as he surveyed the unconscious Karg. “Woulda still been safer to put a bullet into this joker’s brain pan if you ask me. You’re out on the street some night, this slag notices you, maybe you don’t get the chance to defend yourself and you get geeked.”