Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small

by Russell Zimmerman

  DEDICATION

  I hope you dig it, Dad and Gramps.

  Thanks for introducing me

  to Marlowe, Spade, and Hammer.

  I miss you guys.

  Thanks, Russell

  CHAPTER 1

  It wasn’t raining, but that couldn’t last. For once I didn’t have my collar flipped up against the slush and cold water drizzling down my back, didn’t have my hat jammed tight on my head against a Pacific wind that carried shivers.

  It was a nice day. Nice days never last long in Puyallup, and the fair weather just made my mood even fouler; I had work to do, naturally. Lots of it. The shining sun didn’t help the street any; it was still empty. Folks were scared.

  The Better-Than-Life den, a tenement building taken over by dealers and burners, waited for me just down the street. BTL chips, intricate computer programs carrying fake memories and false experiences, tailor-written entertainment that overrode safety protocols, made for a bad hobby, but a good business. This particular chip-head hole, a place run by a two-bit razorguy who called himself Tinman on account of a chromed-up arm and leg, was a real dive. The place had been operating for about six weeks. Tinman had muscled out most of the decent folks in the building, taken sledgehammers to the walls and the citizens that stood in his way, and turned a handful of apartments into his own little wasteland. It was one part recording studio, a programming center for chip creation and reproduction, and one part safe place where his clients themselves, the burnouts who used these chips to escape reality and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, could squat and fry.

  Slotting BTL chips was dangerous work. I knew that better than most. A beetle-head had the rest of his brain turned off, just sat there, eyes wide shut, tasting fake food, feeling fake women, slinging fake spells, living a fake life. You lived a movie instead of watching it, and that just wasn’t safe—an addict soon left reality behind for the 24/7 fantasy. You couldn’t chip out just anywhere. Tinman was tough enough and scary enough that no one messed with his customers while they were sprawled out in his joint.

  Well, almost no one.

  An ork punk stood out front, all synth-leather and broad shoulders, no neck to speak of, and not much in his head but plugs and meanness. A shotgun was within arm’s reach, and Tinman made sure the whole neighborhood knew the double-barrel was packing explosive ammo; nothing in half-measures, no expense spared. The street muscle was big and dumb, even for an ork. A doorman’s number one job was always to look scarier than the door he stood next to.

  “Hoi, chummer,” I said around an unlit Target dangling at the edge of my mouth. “Got a light?”

  He didn’t reach into his coat to help a brother out, naturally. This wasn’t that kind of neighborhood, and he wasn’t that kind of guy. He did roll his eyes, though, and that was opening enough for me.

  My left fist came up fast, hit him just under his warty chin, then my right swung around in a big overhand that smashed square into a yellowed tusk. One wingtip flew up between his thighs to keep the pain coming and mess with his balance, and as I stepped back down I put all my weight and forward momentum into another big right and he dropped. Even an ork-thick skull didn’t help much against a decent punch and the added oomph of the densiplast plates sewn into the knuckles of my lucky gloves. That’s why they were lucky.

  I stooped to grab the old shotgun propped against the wall, and pointedly looked up, square at their small security camera, as I straightened.

  “Yo, Tinny.” I broke the shotgun open, made sure it was loaded, then snapped it shut with a flick of my wrist. “What did I tell you?”

  I knew that a few rooms away, Tinman and his chiphead buddies would be getting hollered at by their security man right now. I knew they’d start scrambling around, going for guns, shouting, cursing a lot. I knew they’d recognize me. I knew Tinman and his boys thought they were safe behind their door, that it would buy them time.

  I also knew they were rocking a Gatehouse Nine series security door, with an up-gunned Draco-Hoard maglock sporting a thumbprint scanner and RFID chip sensors. I knew they could buzz the door open from inside, or the ork doorman could open it, but only when the biomonitor—a solid model, not too shabby, even compared to my top of the line headware Corpsman—read steady vitals. I knew Tinman thought he’d been really smart when he installed it, invested heavily in it, told the whole neighborhood about it, showed it off to every chiphead junky screw-up that walked past it.

  I knew Tinman was an idiot, though, who hadn’t worried about properly reinforcing the doorframe itself in this crumbling, half-dead, piece of crap apartment. I’d talked to those junkies, seen the door myself, done a little homework, and put the schematics and installation instructions into the supercomputer I kept hidden in my skull.

  I leaned into it as I wedged the shotgun’s muzzle snug against the door, opposite the fancy-pants maglock, right where my headware computer told me it was 285 millimeters away from the top of the door. I dipped my head and tugged the brim of my hat down low, then pulled the trigger and waited for the bits of hinge and doorframe to stop flying.

  “Knock, knock.” I rolled with the recoil, then took a knee before slamming the old Stoeger shotgun’s muzzle exactly 320 millimeters away from the bottom of the door. One hinge down, one to go.

  After the second shot, it just took a few kicks to send several thousand nuyen’s worth of security door and top-of-the-line electronics thumping to the ground. I dropped the shotgun, drew my Colt from its holster, and let the muzzle lead me in.

  One of Tinman’s muscleheads greeted me in the entrance hallway. His Ares Predator barked, and I took two to the chest—giving him a wolfish grin over the iron sights of my Model 2061—before I blasted him to the floor with a trio of shots.

  It wasn’t his fault, really. He’d lined up his shots better’n most, but how was he supposed to know what a cheater I was? My ally spirit, Ariana, floated just overhead, watching over me from the other side of reality. Bobbing and idling on the astral plane, she was tethered to me by a handful of protective spells, wards of armor and vitality, sustained enchantments that increased my strength and speed. She longed to join me, but I’d made her promise to stay put and help out from the other side. As magical friends go, she’s pretty great. I was making a statement here, settling the books with blood and bullets instead of magical flash; but that didn’t mean I wasn’t above using a little mojo to tip the balance of things in my favor.

  I put two more into the downed razorboy’s chest just for punctuation, adding to the noise, making sure everyone had been jerked out of their chip-ride by real life.

  “Hands up and move fast if you want to live, beetle-heads!” I hollered in my best Lone Star command voice. “I see a gun, I’m putting down the man holding it!”

  I let them flood past me, then, Colt at the ready but sliding the smartlink targeting pip over skinny form after skinny form, all of them in rags and cheap vending-machine clothes, most with the red eyes of deep-dream BTL junkies.

  I was glad for my usual cyberoptics’ color filters, making them all look just a step removed from real life, just a shade less close to me, greyscale images as they shambled by, sparing me the most specific details of their many ailments. Here and there they were polka-dotted with open sores, more than a few had cracked lips and bitten-ragged fingernails, raw infections around hastily-implanted chipjacks. My cyberoptics took it all in, my headware categorized it all, the Sideways gene-treatment that made me live my life in slow-motion ensured I noticed every little detail. Six, then eight, then a dozen, all dark-toothed and grimy, rail-thin from malnourishment, bundles of knees and elbows scrambling in fear, they pushed and jostled past m
e, scrambling over the corpse of Tinman’s bouncer. Even my headware couldn’t tell me who, but some enterprising soul in their mad rush had still had enough smarts to grab the man’s gun, another his belt, and someone darted away with his left boot.

  I figured the doorman out front would get a more thorough Puyallup rolling, if he hadn’t already.

  My Colt up and ready, I knifed around the corner and into the main hallway. It had been a long time since Fast Response Team training on room clearance, but the basics stuck with you, and it’s not like my life ever let me get real rusty at this sort of thing. My smartlink pip and iron sights led the way, rounding corners and sweeping into rooms.

  Sweeping the first room, I saw nothing but an assortment of filthy pillows and sweat-stained mattresses scattered on the floor, empty chip cases and broken glass bottles, protein bar wrappers, stains in the corners, something green-grey growing up the far wall. Rough edges scarred the room, where flimsy interior walls had once separated this into two apartments, and less-than-great care had been taken with the demolition and clean-up process. No one that used this place cared—about anything except slotting in. It was the playroom, where chipheads could squat and zone out for hours or days, so long as the nuyen kept coming. You could probably burn this place to the ground and it’d never smell clean.

  My gene-tweaked neuroproteins and Transys headware supercomputer desperately sought patterns in the chaos, counted every piece of detritus in the place, tried to feed me clues about behavioral patterns based on forensic evidence, but eventually gave up. There wasn’t a pattern to be found there. There was no logic to it. The rooms where chipheads killed themselves didn’t have to make sense. My gut already knew that, it just took my head a while to agree.

  My cyberaudio suite picked up the sound of a hammer being cocked as I turned to step back into the hall, and Ari’s mojo and my Sideways helped me lurch backwards as a pistol round slapped into the doorframe where my head had been. There were limits to Ari’s magical protection. I had a tac-vest on under my Kevlar-laced long coat, which had helped with the shot to the chest, but nothing but her mojo was protecting my face. A head shot would’ve done a number on me.

  I emptied the rest of my magazine out into the hallway, in the general direction of the shooter, but it was enough to my ear upgrades to tell me more of a story. As I grabbed a fresh mag from my belt and slapped it home, one guy grunted, the other cursed. I had good ears. I made out scuffs of shoes on the floor, separate footfalls as someone ground loose plaster into the floorboards, the rustle of cheap synthleather against an interior wall, the just-audible whine of a cheap external smartlink’s battery pack. Sounded like two guys.

  “Listen boys, this is between me an’ your boss. No one else has to die here. Now drop those pop guns and lay down, or I’m gonna lay you down.”

  I didn’t expect them to surrender, don’t get me wrong. Anyone working as this sort of low-rent muscle was bottom of the barrel, even where Puyallup was concerned. I knew Tinman’s guys, and I knew what caliber of punk he kept on the payroll. I knew what they did. They were the used-ups and the burn-outs, the guys running secondhand implants a generation or two behind, the guys who’d do anything to anyone for a job and a taste of making folks afraid, the sort of skull-fried thugs who took their payment in goods instead of nuyen. Tinman didn’t hire ’em ’cause they were the introspective sort, given to pondering philosophical questions of life and death, the morality of their place of employment, or the odds of getting out of the business in one piece. No, he hired them ’cause they worked cheap.

  The streams of profanity and bravado they sent down the hallway did what I needed, though; confirmed numbers and location. Say what you want about Lone Star—hell, I’ll cuss ’em out right with you—but before they let me go, they gave me some pretty handy headware.

  I came around the corner while they were still cussing at me and shouting threats. I watched the ammo marker on my smartlink display dip as I poured round after round into, or rather through, the wall one of them was using for cover. Plaster flew, then blood, then I heard him tumble to the ground. A split-second later, so did my second empty magazine. As I pulled a fresh one off my belt, a round whizzed past my head so close it sounded like a clap in my ear.

  The thug crowed insults at my family in a gutter-lingo bastard child of Spanish and Japanese—my vocabulary of curses and profanities was terribly global—and fired at me again, his troll-sized Ruger wheelgun looking absurdly oversized; partially because he was just a human struggling to hold it in two hands, partially because every gun looks a bit bigger when you’re staring down the barrel. He fired again, but the recoil from the first shot still had him unsteady and aiming high.

  My slide slammed forward, mental commands chambered a fresh round, and I lined up the targeting reticule while he staggered and tried to line up his stupid-big Ruger again. My shot smacked into his forehead and left a mess on the wall behind him as he dropped to the stained carpet.

  I angled my Colt as I rounded the corner, shifting the plane of the sights and smartlink, leaning around with my smartgun’s muzzle leading the way. I snapped off a quick shot as one more of Tinman’s boys lunged back into a side room halfway down the hallway, reticule hovering over a jacket so ugly even my color filters didn’t fully spare me, and was rewarded by a groan of pain. I ducked back around the corner as his gun-arm stuck out into the hallway and a long burst of autofire rang out.

  He laid on his trigger, and I waited it out. Plaster and paint flew as his blocky little submachinegun chattered, and I stayed out of sight while my headware and Sideways-infused compulsion counted the rounds. Thirty-two. Even Tinman’s second-rate muscle weren’t stupid enough to spray and pray with their only ammo, so as soon as I heard his empty magazine hit the floor, I made a big show of waving my arm around the corner like I was about to come out—sure enough, I snatched it back just in time, and he leaned on the trigger again.

  My Transys Avalon and TacWhisper, headware computer and cyberears, worked their magic again. As soon as thirty-two distinct firing sounds were registered, I went around the corner again, this time catching him in the middle of fumbling for his next magazine. My reticule danced square in his center-of-mass as I advanced down the hallway. I slid my point of aim higher, past the faintly glowing plaid pattern of the world’s ugliest armored jacket, and right at the bridge of his nose, I squeezed the trigger just so.

  I didn’t get a satisfying bang and the buck of recoil. My smartlink pip dissolved in a burst of static, I got four different pop-up displays warning me about malfunctions, and my magazine fell right out of the bottom of my Colt.

  Well, crap.

  A mental command shoved the warning messages out of my field of vision even as my audio suite picked up a giggle from the side room Ugly Jacket had been ducking into.

  It only took us an eyeblink, both standing there with empty guns. I could’ve tugged the knife from my pocket and tried my luck. I could’ve gone for my wand and seen what combat mojo I could whip up, keeping my distance and using old instincts and the flickers of power I still clung to. I could’ve reached to the offside of my belt for my last reload, betting I’d be quicker than Ugly Jacket. Instead, I just rushed him while he fumbled at the pocket of his ridiculously baggy cargo shorts, trying to free another magazine.

  Empty or not, a gun’s still a weapon, or at least a tool. The Colt Model 2061, the commemorative 150th anniversary edition of that seminal semi-automatic handgun, is a well-crafted machine of violence. My particular model, an academy graduation gift from my father, is gun-blued and traditional, even for 1911 clones, with tasteful—and real—rosewood grips, simple ergonomics, an unobtrusive internal smartlink, and a traditionalist’s wary view of modern lightweight polymers. In other words, even unloaded, the thing’s a handy 1.12 kilograms of metal and wood, and not something any rational human being wants to get cracked in the face with.

  My shoulder slammed into Ugly Jacket’s ugly jacket, and both of us hit th
e ground, him with his neck wedged against the doorframe and my weight blasting the air from his lungs. A single, long cyberspur burst from the back of his left hand—he had a second port, but must’ve sold off that other blade—and swiped wildly at me.

  I reared back as he slashed, then grabbed him by the forearm. Leaning forward, I pinned his blade-hand against his side and, holding him beneath me, lifted my blocky pistol and smashed him in the head with it. Then again. And again. And again. It only took those few swings, gun butt sharp and hard against human flesh and bone, before he stopped struggling.

  Snarling, I lurched to my feet and saw a pair of scuffed combat boots poking out amid a tangle of wires and cables beneath a workbench. Three strides carried me across the room, and thanks to Ari’s loaned mojo, one good kick sent the bench and the punk beneath it flying. My optics snapped a quick look while he was in midair, and for an instant the light flashed against a glossy touchscreen tablet strapped to his wrist. His fingertips danced over it even as he half-slumped against a wall, and I knew what had happened to my smartlink.

  Moving smoothly and calmly, I reached for my last magazine and fed it into the empty well of my Colt. A thumb-swipe against the slide release snapped it forward, chambering a fresh round. I lifted it, fingers certain and grip comfortable, and lined up my front and rear sights, smartlink targeting pip nowhere to be seen. He typed faster, licking cracked lips.

  “I turned off my wireless after you tried that the first time.” I didn’t quite smile as I said it.

  He stopped tapping at the softly glowing screen of his cyberdeck, and raised a hand to block the sight of me, like not seeing it coming meant it wasn’t. The Colt bucked in my hand, and his arm fell. The Sprawl had one less hacker in it.

  I looked around, and immediately regretted it. My lawman’s gut didn’t obsess over details needlessly, but implants did; I didn’t have time to play Count The Cord in a room like this. I was in their workshop, where the chips were burnt and mass-produced. The workbench I’d splintered against the wall was covered in now-broken electronics, tangled masses of wires—most of them patched and re-patched time and again, even now a few sparking—leading from device to device, banks of processors, chip burners, replicators, and simrig terminals. This was where the memories and experiences were synthesized and programmed, which meant…