Shadowrun 45 - Aftershock

by Jean Rabe, John Helfers (v1. 0) (epub)

  The use of their constituents to make quota was only one aspect of law enforcement that Simon wasn’t happy with. Still, I wouldn’t be anywhere else, he thought. Simon’s father, who hadn’t been able to pass the physical for Lone Star due to trauma he had suffered in the UCAS military during the Night of Rage, had instilled the need for order in his son at a very early age. “Society can never reach its potential until those who would transgress against others are brought to heel. ” It had been one of Thomas Chays’ favorite sayings, and he had clung to it until the day he died.

  Ah, what happens when the transgressors use the law as their shield? That had been the fundamental problem Simon had realized as he went through Lone Star’s cadet training, and witnessed the minor graft the cops were tempted with every day, which would eventually lead to bigger and bigger graft and offenses. At graduation, he had made a solemn vow to never become a cop on the take. To insure that, he had joined Internal Affairs as soon as possible, knowing that because he was policing other cops, he wouldn’t be as likely to fall from grace himself.

  Simon realized from the start that if word leaked o.ut about his real job at the precinct, the others would band against him, the so-called “Lone Star Shield” would go up and he’d never be able to work there effectively again. But he didn’t care; he was working for a higher purpose. He was there to try and insure that these officers, still servants of the public trust despite the private contract they had with the city, were not above the law. The police still need policing, and if not me, who?

  On that question, Simon’s thoughts turned to his partner. / know there are badder apples in the Third’s barrel, but for better or worse, Jhones is the one they wanted looked at first. Simon suspected that several of the officers were protecting a large fencing operation for a slice of the profit, but he hadn't been there long enough to get close to them. Jhones’ gambling problem had spiked on LS’s monitoring radar, which was why Simon had been paired with him. But Simon also knew there were other reasons. For all Jhones’ bluster, he’s an easy case. He actually believes that he's staying one step ahead of everyone else, poor guy. The brass is watching me on this one, to see how I do, and if I can be trusted to handle bigger jobs. And Simon had every intention of coming through.

  A stubby hand slammed down on his desk, jolting him from his reverie. “Ah, boychik, you look like drek warmed over. Didn’t you get any sleep yet?”

  Simon scratched his head as he realized the obvious truth. “Uh, no, I got caught up in that Plantech data, so I was going over what we had one last time, trying to see if anything was missed.”

  “I like that energy, it’s good, ’cause you’re gonna need it.” The dwarf pounded him on the shoulder. “Let’s go, I got a line on those runners that lifted the plants.”

  Simon frowned. “You do? From where?”

  Jhones tapped his temple. “My years of experience on the street, knowing just what rocks to look under, just what folks to ask the right questions—”

  “Okay, okay, omae, I believe you.” Simon cut the dwarf off before he could pontificate about his prowess any longer. “Lead the way, I’m all yours.”

  18

  4:43:16 p.m.

  Place is just as dumpy on the inside. Bet it was really something once, though.” Max stood in the living room, hands on her hips, shaking her head in dismay. “Shame that someone let a house like this fall apart. I had a house like this? It’d be in tip-top shape.”

  “Maybe you can buy it from the city. Bet it wouldn’t cost you more than a few thousand,” Sindje said as she scanned the corners of the room.

  The large living room had a raised ceiling with a ledge running around the walls just below it. A rusted, broken antique train hung half on, half off a track on the shelf. Miniature trees and faded, mildewed signs and railroad workers decorated the rest of the perimeter. Shreds of wallpaper clung below that in places, featuring washed out designs of old locomotives and whistle stops, giving the place a forlorn, haunted look. Remnants of charred furniture were piled in the center.

  Max sniffed the musty air, the filtration system she’d bought with her trachea replacement picking up traces of old sweat, rancid soyjerky and an assortment of other unpleasant things she elected not to take the time to identify. “Homeless have been squatting. Probably come in here at night and set a fire to keep warm. Been chilly.” Her face was a mask, showing no compassion or disdain for the unfortunate vagrants. She pointed to some discarded food wrappers. “Dumpster diving, most like. ’Spose the Johnson needed to meet with us before the sun went down and the bums crawled back inside.”

  “Makes me feel fortunate for what I have.” Khase looked to his sister, who wriggled her nose as she made a concerted effort not to touch anything. Debts and all, he mouthed. She glanced around, and he knew she was weighing whether sustaining a levitation spell would be worth keeping her feet out of the mess on the floor.

  “Yo, Mr. Johnson!” Max cocked her head, waiting for an answer. “He told us to find him upstairs.” She tromped through a doorway and entered what used to be a dining room. There were more bits of railroad memorabilia there, namely smashed china plates and cups, the fragments of which showed old-time engines circling the rims. The dining room table had been hacked up and used in another bonfire. “Surprised this whole place isn’t ashes, what with the lire bugs everywhere.”

  Stairs rose off the dining room, thick with shadows because the side windows had been boarded up. Through a listing archway was the remains of the kitchen, the appliances long gone, and remnants of chairs, pots and smashed canisters scattered and broken on the tile floor. There was more of the railroad wallpaper, it faring slightly better than what clung to the living room.

  “Mr. Johnson, we’re—”

  Sindje put a hand on the ork’s shoulder. “Real itchy about this place, Max. Let me take a better look around lirst, ’kay? Then when I’m satisfied, we’ll all go upstairs. Something just isn’t sitting right. But at least I don’t sense any spirits here.”

  “No boogga-booggas peeking at us?” The ork put on an impatient look and tapped her foot. But she didn't make a move for the stairs, just watched them, her eyes picking through the dark with her thermographic vision and seeing spiderwebs artfully hanging from the railing dotted with the husks of long-dead insects.

  “No boogga-booggas. Max. Still. . . . Keep me up, Khase. 1 am not sitting on this floor.”

  Khase thrust the philodendron at Hood. “Tad, if you please.”

  Then Sindje was softly humming, inharmonious, but so muted it wasn’t jarring. She became an elf-shaped piece of fog again, glancing in the kitchen, flitting down the hall and peering in bedrooms, where it was very obvious vagrants were staying. Then she floated up the stairs, marveling for just an instant at the banister, carved to look like a railroad track. Maybe because it was so intricate and made of a beautiful dark wood that the bums had left it alone—their small measure of respect for the crumbling house. Or maybe they simply hadn’t yet run out of other things to burn. She sadly suspected the latter.

  The stairs turned at a landing, then angled up to a short hallway cut by four doors. All of them were closed.

  Odd that the Johnson wouldn’t have met us downstairs, she thought. Odd that since he decided to handle the trade upstairs, he also didn’t leave the door open so he could see them coming. The Johnson had no magic, she would have sensed this at the first meeting, and so he couldn’t watch them with a spell.

  Odd indeed. Sindje tried scratching her arm, only to remember she was still astral. Duh. The itching had now settled in the back of her mind, sending prickles of unease through her.

  She ghosted through the first door to find an empty room thick with dust. The second showed the same. The third had been a nursery with an attached bathroom, with pink ducks painted on the wall and a bassinet and crib burned for another campfire. The last room contained a man—face down on the floor in a still-spreading, red-black pool of blood. Not the Johnson; in fact, sh
e’d never seen this man before.

  Recent. Very recent, all wet and shiny. Maybe the vagrants did it. Maybe not.

  She knew the body was warm, though she couldn’t touch it. She stared, though she told herself not to. The man’s brown hair was mussed, the ends of it touching the blood and drawing some of it up like an antique quill pen might. His fingers were curled, one hand in the pool, the other clutching at a tattered throw rug, likely a reaction to the pain he’d felt in the last seconds of his life. His face probably evidenced the hurt and shock, but she wasn’t going to float down into the floor to confirm it.

  Sindje wasn’t panicked, and she wasn’t surprised to find a corpse. As she’d already suspected, something was terribly wrong in the house. Too, she’d had a niggling feeling ever since they had left Hood’s condo that the entire run was botched. Hood would want to know about the dead man, and naturally who killed him and why. But Sindje wasn’t going to waste precious time looking for any more clues to make the troll happy. She'd not spotted bullet holes or burns on her quick look-see. If she was in her physical body, she’d have searched the man for a credstick or two, wanting something out of this soured milk run. But she wasn’t going back to get her physical body . . . not to come up here.

  So where was the Johnson? He’d called Max. But he didn’t call from this house, as he led them to believe. A shiver raced down her insubstantial spine.

  Time to leave this rat hole.

  First a look out a window, though, that wasn’t boarded over. It was at the back of the house, facing the suffering lawn, stripes of weeds and the grocer’s parking lot. She floated above the dead man and let her face pass through the filthy bulletproof glass, wincing as she did so. Sindje spied the large gray van that had bothered her earlier. Two men, no . . . three, were getting out. All of them were in black pants and shirts, stocking masks on their faces. One had a long ponytail sticking out below the mask, and he carried an Uzi IV machine gun. The others had short-barreled assault rifles slung over their shoulders, and all of them had Ares Viper sliverguns holstered on their belts.

  Gonna rob the grocers? No. Too much firepower for a register takedown.

  They looked to the back of the house, the one with the ponytail pointed her way and said something. Then they started jogging toward the decrepit mansion.

  Frag! Major setup!

  Her ghostly image flowed back under the door and across the hall floor, running fast down the stairs like rushing water and pouring into her body, which Khase was holding up.

  “Out of here now!” Then she was pushing away from her brother and heading into the living room, nimbly stepping around the furniture campfire and heading toward the front door. “It’s a trap! There’s a dead guy upstairs. And there’s a team coming in the back to send us to the hereafter!”

  In a heartbeat she threw the door open and stood in the frame.

  “Ah, frag! More coming in the front, too! We’re cut off.”

  19

  4:43:01 p.m.

  The Nightsky slipped through the streets of Ballard like a gray wraith, the blocky Typhoons following on its flanks. Inside, Roland watched beads of sweat form on Hiyakawa’s forehead as he concentrated on the spell he was maintaining.

  After they had left the troll politician fuming in his plush apartment, Roland had requested that the shaman summon another city spirit and request that it search the area to find the pollen trail and lead them to its source. Hiyakawa had also wanted to keep an eye on the spirit as it looked. As he was doing so, the sec chiefs commlink hummed, indicating an incoming call.

  “This is Roland, go.”

  “Chief, get ready to be happy. ” Morgan’s jolly voice said in his mind. “Tell him, Trevor.”

  “Hey boss, while I was in that apartment building’s sec system, I ‘borrowed’ the last twenty-four hours of camera footage on the garage door, and this is what I found. ”

  A window opened and showed three still shots from a security camera. The first was a familiar, battered Ares Roadmaster entering the underground garage. The second showed the same Ares, now being towed by a heavy-duty GMC 4201 that had been converted into a wrecker. The last shot was of a clean and shiny Ford-Canada Bison RV, complete with license plate. The time stamp in the bottom right hand corner showed that the two vehicles had come and gone about twelve hours apart.

  “Now, these are the only two vans or RVs that have entered or left the premises in the past twelve hours. I’ll bet my next paycheck that our runners—and the cargo—are on that Bison. ”

  “Trevor, if you’re right, you’re getting Morgan’s job.” Roland had cut his connection over his lieutenant’s squawk of outrage and nodded to the shaman. “I’ve got something better than the pollen for your spirit to track.” He linked into the flatscreen monitor in the backseat of the limo and showed the Bison. “Have it look for this vehicle, as fast as it can, starting with the downtown area first.”

  That had turned out to be very fast indeed. The spirit had easily outpaced the Nightsky, disappearing into the urban sprawl in a twinkling. Hiyakawa had suggested cruising Highway 5, which bisected Seattle proper from the University to downtown, figuring the runners wouldn’t want to set the deal up too close to where their safe house had been. Meanwhile, the shaman would maintain a view one hundred meters above them, so that he could see the spirit as soon as it came back.

  Roland had set it up, informing the Typhoon drivers of the plan, and they had settled in for the most nerve-wracking twenty minutes of their lives. As the Nightsky slipped in and out of the late afternoon traffic, he tried not to think about the precious time slipping away. But the readout in the corner of his vision wouldn’t let him. Nineteen hours and six minutes left until his corp and his world crumbled underneath his feet. That is not going to happen on my watch, not without one fraggin’ huge fight.

  To distract himself, he had run the Bison’s license plate through the DMV database, but come up with nothing. The RV was registered to the company that also owned the Alki apartment building, which had all the earmarks of a shell corp. Roland didn’t have the time, skill or inclination to poke deeper, but he had sent a note to Trevor to dig around and see what he could find.

  As he had finished the message, Roland’s commlink rang with a different chime, and he smiled as he realized who was on the other end. He turned to Lilith, who was watching the shaman work with the intensity of a BTL addict, and touched her on the sleeve. “I’ve got a call I have to take. Let me know if he comes up with anything, all right?” She had nodded and returned to her study of the mage while Roland slid over to the other side of the limousine and established his connection. “Hello dear ... where am I? Well, you’re probably not going to believe this, but I’m sitting in the company limousine on Highway Five. What did I do to deserve this? I’ll tell you later tonight over dinner. Yes, I should be home, assuming all goes well this afternoon. Yes, I’m still pursuing that business I mentioned before. No, no, of course it’s nothing dangerous”—he stole a glance out the back window at the twin Typhoons trundling along in the Nightsky’s wake—“You know I’m always careful. Oh, you have been thinking about our vacation . . . good, keep your list handy, and we’ll narrow down where we’ll be going when I get home. I’m looking forward to a peaceful night in, too. Thanks, sweetheart. I love you, too. See you soon. Good-bye.” Roland disconned just as Hiyakawa came out of his spell-induced trance. “The spirit is returning.” As he spoke, the translucent head of the watcher spirit popped through the window, searching for Hiyakawa.

  “Found it, found it, found it, yes I have, yes I have.” Its voice was high and squeaky and childlike.

  The shaman bowed to the small figure. “If you would be so kind as to take us there.”

  “Follow, follow, follow me.” The spirit flew ahead of the Nightsky, and Roland lowered the barrier between the front and back compartments. “Morgan, follow Hiyakawa-san’s directions to the letter.”

  Minutes later, their small convoy pulled onto the
Ballard street, and Morgan pointed ahead of them. “Got a Bison parked on the street near that old house there. License is a match. No one outside, and thermal registers that there’s no one in the vehicle.”

  “Try scanning the house, but keep it on quiet,” Roland ordered while opening a channel to the squads in the Typhoons. “Gentlemen, we have our suspects’ vehicle in sight. On my command, and only my command, execute Drill Echo Three. Try to take the suspects alive, but use deadly force if necessary, copy.”

  Each squad leader confirmed the orders. Roland turned back to Morgan. “What you got?”

  “Walls are run down enough that I get a read on four in the house—a troll, an ork and two humans or elves. I think this is our crew.”

  “All right, get ready. We cut off the Bison, disperse in standard flanking formation; One right, Two middle. Three left, and take them as they’re coming out. Morgan, when we hit the street, your only job is to tag that Bison with a homing beacon, then regroup with me.” Roland picked up his helmet and grabbed his HK, hauling back the cocking lever to make sure a round was seated in the chamber. “Once again, Lilith, Hiyakawa-san, I cannot ask you to accompany us on this mission.”

  “In for a pound, in for a ton,” Lilith said.

  Hiyakawa nodded. “I believe you had mentioned that at least one of them is a mage. If so, my services will probably still be needed.”

  “Thank you both. I would suggest that you stay close to the limo, just in case things get hairy.” Roland opened his channels again. “Squad One, Squad Two, Squad Three, Drill Echo Three, execute!”

  With a throaty roar the Typhoons accelerated down the street, screeching to a halt as they boxed the Bison in between them. Morgan brought the Nightsky up, everyone in the limousine watching as the Plantech security forces spilled from the side doors of the RVs and spread out across the lawn, subguns at the ready.

  “Here we go.” Roland popped the door and paused at the opening. “Please keep your heads down and stay close to me. Let’s move!”