Born to run (s-4)

by Stephen Kenson

  "Then: you knew?" Kellan asked. "I mean, you knew Brickman worked for Knight Errant, and you didn't say anything to the rest of us?"

  "Of course I knew," Lothan said patiently, like he was explaining the blatantly obvious to a small child. "Only a fool doesn't check out a potential employer's credentials, just to be on the safe side, but the important thing is not to be seen prying into an employer's affairs. It's a matter of appearances. I didn't say anything because it didn't concern you."

  "Don't you think it's kind of strange-Brickman hiring us to steal from his own company?"

  "Not at all. It happens all the time. Midlevel employees become involved in corporate politics or power struggles within their own company, and some find it useful to go outside the corporate structure looking for a little help to move their own agendas forward. I've seen far stranger things in my time."

  "But I think Brickman is up to something-"

  "Of course he is," Lothan interrupted, his patience obviously wearing thin. "But Mr. Brickman's plans, whatever they may be, are of no concern to us. He hired us for a job, we did the job to his satisfaction, and he paid us the agreed-upon amount-with a nice little bonus, I may add. Now our business is concluded. Whatever Brickman's plans are, they're none of our concern. I suggest you invest whatever money you have left over, after a night of celebration in G-Dogg's company, in some new clothing and whatever other necessities you may need, and be here on time for your next lesson. Forget about Mr. Brickman."

  "But:"

  "Leave it be, Kellan!" the troll rumbled, drawing himself up to his full height to tower head and shoulders above Kellan. "Do I make myself clear?"

  "Yeah," she said flatly. "Like crystal."

  "Good. Now, if you'll excuse us:." Lothan stared pointedly at the door, and Kellan stuffed the dataBook back into her bag and left without another word, just a backward glance at Jackie and Lothan before she closed the door behind her.

  Fraggin' know-it-all! Kellan fumed as she stalked down the hall. I'll show him what he can do with his fraggin' advice. Everyone had told her that Lothan could be difficult, but she hadn't expected him to simply dismiss her. She knew the difference between professional discretion and a Mr. Johnson with something to hide, and Brickman was up to something. Lothan's refusal to even consider her point only reinforced her suspicions-and made her wonder about the magician's motivations, too.

  She headed out the door, choosing not to slam it, and down the street. She wanted to walk, needed to clear her head before she decided what she was going to do next.

  "Kellan, hang on a sec," a voice called from behind her. She turned to see Jackie Ozone coming down the street behind her. The decker now wore her jacket and had a stylish leather carrying case slung over her shoulder, which she steadied with one hand as she walked. Kellan stopped walking and waited for Jackie to catch up.

  "You okay?" she asked and Kellan nodded.

  "Yeah, fine."

  "Don't let Lothan get to you," Jackie told her. "I'm sure you've heard the same advice from everyone else who knows him even slightly. What they may not have said is that he actually means well. The fact that he bothers to hand out advice at all means he cares, even if he's annoying the drek out of you when he does it."

  "Yeah, something like that," Kellan replied with a snort.

  "He makes a good point," Jackie began, raising a hand to head off Kellan's retort, "but I think you do, too. In my opinion, sometimes Lothan carries the whole 'professional courtesy and discretion' thing a little too far, and doesn't ask enough questions. Me, I'm willing to question anything and everyone, and my gut tells me your questions deserve an answer. If Brickman has an agenda that could come back and bite us, or that might be worth something to us, then we should check it out, right?"

  Kellan smiled. "Exactly."

  "In fact," Jackie mused, a slow smile spreading across her face. "It would be wrong of us to not check it out."

  "Doing that is going to take a lot more Matrix muscle than I've got," Kellan said, lifting the bag containing her dataBook for emphasis.

  "Well, then, you're in luck," Jackie said, patting the side of her own bag. "Since I happen to know someone with just the right tools for the job. Let's just see what Mr. Brickman is hiding, shall we?"

  13

  Kellan was surprised when Jackie made arrangements to check them into a coffin hotel on the outskirts of Bellevue. It was classier than the one Kellan stayed at. Not a haven for chipheads and other SINless, but the kind of place where cost-conscious business travelers caught a few hours of sleep between flights or after late nights at the office. When Kellan asked about it, Jackie explained that she hardly did any decking from home. With the existence of trace programs that could backtrack deckers' datatrails and locate them in the real world, Jackie preferred to not risk being caught at home.

  On the way to the hotel, Kellan filled Jackie in on her suspicions. She described Orion's apparently tense conversation with Brickman at the meet, including Orion's mention of weapons. The decker listened carefully to everything Kellan had to say, apparently reserving judgment on what any of it might mean.

  The clerk on duty at the coffin hotel did a double take at two young women renting a single unit. He leered, but didn't ask any questions as Jackie blithely slotted her credstick to pay for it, then took Kellan's hand to lead her to the elevator. Kellan could feel the back of her neck burning with an unaccustomed blush.

  "Cover," Jackie said once the elevator doors closed. "All that twinkie is going to remember is two slags who wanted a crash-space together. He won't be wondering about anything else."

  Sitting down on the foam padding inside the cubicle, Jackie unwound a collection of wires from a pocket of her carrying case.

  "This your first Matrix run?" she asked Kellan.

  "Well, in school:" Kellan began and Jackie shook her head.

  "Nope, not school, or playing virtua-games with friends or drek like that-for real."

  "Then, yeah, it is," Kellan replied reluctantly.

  "Ah, a Matrix virgin," Jackie said with a smile. "Well, then, you're in for a fun ride. Here."

  Jackie passed Kellan a collection of wires and leads connected to an elastic headband.

  "You know how to use an electrode net?" she asked, and Kellan nodded. She slipped the band onto her head, adjusting it so that the electrodes made contact with the skin of her forehead and temples. They would translate electronic impulses into neural information and relay them directly to her brain. The resolution was a lot lower than you got from the direct mind-machine interface of a datajack, but Kellan didn't have a jack, so the trode net would have to suffice.

  As Kellan settled the net in place, Jackie reached into her bag and removed a small, flat, rectangular object inside a burnished metal case. She set it reverently on the foam between them. Kellan let out a low whistle when she saw it.

  "Nice deck," she said, and Jackie beamed with pride.

  "Thanks," she replied.

  "What kind is it?" Kellan asked, looking on both sides for a logo or brand name on the sleek casing. Jackie laughed.

  "It's a custom build," she said. "Off-the-shelf is fine for newbies getting their start, but if you really want to run the Matrix, you need to know your deck inside and out. The best way to do that is build it yourself. This one has the casing of the old Cross Applied Technologies deck I started out with, but I've majorly upgraded most of the guts." She folded back the cyberdeck's protective case to reveal a sleek, flat alphanumeric keypad featuring a number of customized function keys. There was a slot along the side where a flatscreen rolled out, but Jackie didn't pull it out. The deck looked like a slim keyboard with slots for data chips and ports for plugging in peripherals, but no external display.

  Jackie opened a side panel of the deck and unreeled a thin fiber-optic cable with a standard jack terminator, which she slid into the chrome jack at her temple. It nestled there with a faint snick, lying almost flush against her head. The cable trailed down the side
of her face. Then she took the jack for Kellan's trode net and plugged it into a secondary port on the deck. She powered up the deck with a tap on the keypad. Kellan felt a faint tingle as the cyberdeck initialized and its simsense circuits established contact with her nervous system.

  "The hitcher rig," Jackie said, gesturing toward the trode net, "will feed you the same signal as me. It's filtered a bit, but you'll see, hear and feel everything I do in the Matrix. You won't have any control, though, that's all me. You okay with that?"

  Kellan nodded. "Good. We'll be able to talk through the interface, but no backseat driving, okay? I need to stay focused, so don't interrupt unless I talk to you first." Again, Kellan nodded in acknowledgment, feeling a knot of nervousness and excitement in her stomach..

  "All right, then," Jackie said. "What we know right now is that Brickman, our Mr. Johnson, works for Knight Errant and that he had some reason of his own for setting up our little run on Ares. He also has some kind of deal going with Orion and the Ancients, which may have gone sour, from what you told me about their conversation."

  "There's the Street Deacon, too," Kellan said. At Jackie's quizzical look, she went on. "There was something about his expression when he saw Brick-man, like he knew him or something, and didn't like him. I got the feeling it was mutual, but it's harder to tell with Brickman."

  "Magical intuition?" Jackie asked with a raised eyebrow.

  She shrugged. "I don't know. Call it a hunch."

  "All right," the decker said. "So we've got Brickman, Orion and the Deacon, and something that might tie it all together. Sounds to me like Brickman is the center of all this, so we should check him out first. Since you already found something online, it's a good bet he's the most accessible, too. You ready to go?" Kellan nodded.

  "Okay, get as comfortable as you can. This could take a little while." Kellan settled back against the padding on her side of the coffin, while Jackie did the same on the opposite side, their legs stretched out in the middle and the cyberdeck resting in Jackie's lap. Then Jackie tapped a key on the cyberdeck and the world vanished in a wash of silvery static.

  Kellan fought down a surge of panic as she lost all sensation of her body for a moment. She was falling through an endless void of silent static. Then the chaos of static resolved itself into patterns and the world reformed around her in a different configuration.

  Kellan found herself standing on a vast, dark plain under a night-black sky. Hovering overhead were constellations of orbiting neon shapes: cubes, spheres, stars, pillars and entire buildings floating there. Stretching off in all directions were glowing traceries of lines, with pulses of energy running along them at regular intervals. The horizon was a vast cityscape glowing against the darkness. Some of the structures were familiar-Kellan saw the Space Needle and the Aztechnology Pyramid-while others were completely alien, even impossible in the geography and physics of the ordinary world. They were in the depths of the Seattle Matrix.

  "Still with me, Kellan?"

  She started at the sound of Jackie's voice, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

  "Yeah," she said, "yeah. Where are you?"

  "Right here," the decker said with a laugh, and Kellan looked down to see one of her own hands waving. Then she realized: it wasn't her hand, it was Jackie's hand, or rather, the hand of Jackie's Matrix persona. The software in the cyberdeck created the illusion of a virtual world. It translated the information from the Matrix into neural impulses, sending them into the user's brain. That included the appearance of a "physical" self. It was like Kellan and Jackie were inhabiting the same virtual body, except Jackie was in control. Kellan was just along for the ride.

  "Okay, hang on," Jackie said. She turned and stepped onto one of the glowing lines stretching toward the horizon.

  It was like being on a roller coaster. Kellan felt as if she'd left her stomach behind as she suddenly zoomed along a silvery tunnel. Hundreds of other packets and bits of data flew back and forth in either direction, like a kind of digital rush hour. She changed direction, zooming this way and then that way.

  Before Kellan even had a chance to get her bearings, it was over. The world snapped back into still focus and she stood out in front of a towering building. At least it looked like a building. The walls were of reddish stone, with inset windows of mirrored glass, tinted a coppery color.

  "Welcome to the Ares Macrotechnology Seattle host system," Jackie said, imitating the stereotypical nasal monotone of a tour guide. "Ahead you'll see what passes for security at a secondary Ares site like this one."

  Kellan could see the main doors of the building. Curled up on the wide stone landing in front of them was a massive black hound, as big as a troll. It had three heads, all lying on its folded paws, eyes closed. It was breathing slowly and deeply and appeared to be sleeping. Spiked iron collars around its necks were connected to a heavy chain bolted into the stone wall behind it.

  "Standard Ares Cerberus ice," Jackie said. "Not terribly imaginative, but then, what can you expect?"

  "Uh-huh," Kellan replied softly.

  She'd heard of ice, decker slang for IC or Intrusion Countermeasures. Ice programs protected Matrix hosts from unauthorized intrusion, safeguarding the valuable data and systems within those hosts. Deckers specialized in finding various ways past ice to access that same data. The most sensitive data was protected by sophisticated ice. Most ice programs simply knocked a decker offline or denied her access to the host system, but Kellan knew there were ice programs that could trace a decker's location in the physical world, sending the information to the authorities or corporate security. Ice programs could damage a decker's cyberdeck, corrupting software or even frying the hardware. Then there was the legendary black ice, which could drive an intruder insane, or even kill a decker, inducing seizures or sending a lethal charge of electricity directly into the decker's brain. Kellan suddenly wished she'd asked Jackie how much protection the trode net afforded her.

  "You don't have to whisper," the decker said in her mind. "It's not like anyone else can hear us."

  "Oh, okay," Kellan said, somewhat sheepishly, in her normal tone of voice.

  "Now; let's take care of Fido here." The slim, silvery-white hand of Jackie's persona reached out and plucked a large soup bone from the air with a flourish, like a magician producing a bouquet of flowers. She ran her other hand along its length and suddenly the bone split and there were three of them, held fanned between her hands.

  "The triple-redundancy of the Cerberus ice is what makes it such a fraggin' pain," Jackie said. "But once you know about that, it's pretty easy to handle." She took a few steps closer to the sleeping hound and the middle head opened one eye to look at her. It snorted and all six eyes opened, its three heads rising up to look directly at her.

  Jackie tossed the bones at the hound. They flipped end over end through the air, and the Cerberus neatly caught one in each of its mouths.

  "There you go, boy," she said. The Cerberus immediately began gnawing on the virtual bones, hunkering down on the landing, its heads lowered. Kellan heard the sound of the dog's teeth grinding against the bones and shuddered a bit, but Jackie seemed pleased.

  "That'll keep him busy for a while," she said, and then calmly slipped past the guardian hound.

  "What did you do?"

  "Modified a loop program that has it distracted," Jackie said. "I just had to make sure to take the redundancy of the ice into account. Now it'll be busy gnawing on that program for a while before it realizes there's nothing really there. I thought the bone was a nice touch, don't you?"

  At the door of the building Jackie produced a key from somewhere in the folds of the flowing white dress her persona wore. She fit it into the lock and turned it to the right, and the door opened, allowing them to enter.

  Inside the door was a foyer done in reddish marble and bronze, with a maze of corridors leading off from it in all directions. Jackie seemed to know where she was going, gliding along the corridors until they reached a certain
doorway. The key granted them admittance once more, this time into a room filled with floating silvery spheres, row upon row of them. There were easily hundreds, if not thousands, arranged in perfect order.

  "Personnel files," Jackie said, sliding along the rows. "Let's see what they have about our Mr. Brickman. Ah! Here he is." She stopped at one sphere and pressed her hand against it. Her hand sank into the surface of the sphere with a ripple like quicksilver.

  Suddenly images unfolded before Kellan's eyes, displays with words and pictures scrolling down them. Jackie seemed to scan quickly through descriptions of Brickman's education and work background, skipping over pages of history to more recent entries in the file.

  "Promotion to junior director of external resources and relations," she read out loud.

  "Which means?" Kellan asked.

  "It means that our Mr. Brickman is a professional Mr. Johnson. He handles shadow ops for Knight Errant, and he's up-and-coming, too, from the look of it. So it's not unusual for him to be hiring shadowrunners. He's not just a corporate suit playing a little game on the side. He works with runners a lot. Of course, that doesn't mean he isn't playing a little something on the side, but it makes it harder to tell.

  "It might also be how the Street Deacon knows him," Jackie continued. She gestured and the file collapsed back into a sphere. With a wave of her hand, she brushed the sphere into the open mouth of a bag she held in her other hand.

  "We'll just download this for future reference," she said to Kellan. The gesture told the host system to transfer the data to her cyberdeck's memory.

  "Now what?" Kellan asked. "That didn't tell us much."

  "I didn't think it would, but it's good to check out the basics. Targets rarely leave the good stuff just lying around where it's easy to find, but that first level of information is sometimes more revealing than it's intended to be. Most of the time, though, it's like diving for sunken treasure: it's a big ocean, so it helps if you know where to start looking, and you've got to watch out for sharks."