“Well all right, all right, all right,” he drawled with his CAS twang, dazzling the little crowd of street muscle with a superstar smile, “Let’s get this hunt goin’, huh?”
Blue giggled like she was maybe a third her age, looked away and blushed almost indigo. Daisy also blushed, smiled, and forgot about her size and horns for a second. Hardpoint grinned clean through his shaggy beard. Caboose—swear to Jesus, Buddha, and Zeus—Caboose batted her eyelashes like a schoolgirl. Billy Bricks looked like he was about to ask for an autograph, and maybe that’s how the other ork had gotten him to come along for the day.
Me? I soaked up his details, like it or not, but realtime my eyes slid right past him. Climbing out the other side of his truck came what passed for my two best friends on this plane of existence. Skip and Trace. Finally. When I’d managed to get them on the phone, they were the only ones here I hadn’t had to beg, borrow, bribe, or cash in a favor from. They’d just come. They’d sold Chase on it themselves, dragged him here with the promise of the bounty and some dramatic action, and that’d been enough. Would’ve come even if he’d said no, I bet. Once they heard, once they understood, they’d just come. I felt like I had a shot, when I saw them.
I was glad to have ’em both, valuable additions to the team, not just friends. After burning out at U-Dub, Trace had hit the shadows, and was a good, reliable decker, for all her insistence that she wasn’t really a hacker. She wasn’t as sharp as FastJack or whoever-the-fuck, no, but she was good. Good enough she’d been at it, picking at the heart of the industry without ever really diving in all the way, for this long. That meant something.
Her girlfriend, I’ve mentioned, was Skip. Skip and I kind of grated on each other, almost as much as we both loved Trace. She had a history with elven men, I knew through the grapevine, and apparently one—some hombre named Angel—had given her some trigger issues with addiction to boot. I rubbed her the wrong way just by breathing, I think. We’d gotten better over the years, though, me an’ Skip. We respected each other, even if we still got on one another’s nerves.
Skip was a powerful orkish gal, like Caboose, but bigger. Toting more combat augs, more street cred, more attitude. Caboose could turn girly sometimes, could play nice, could be level-headed. Skip, though? If Skip knew how to smile—really smile, out of shared happiness with someone near her, not flashing her tusks in a dominance display—she kept it a secret between her and Trace. She had muscle implants and other curves augmented, but, like Trace, had never called herself a straight-up street samurai.
She was content to be a razorgirl, a Barrens-brat who stayed semi-legit, and the two of them were some of the most rock-solid bounty hunters in the Sprawl. They weren’t quite shadowrunners, but they were close enough for today’s work. Trace had her Ingram Smartgun, Skip’d brought along a pink-accented Ares Alpha, a recent upgrade. Those guns’d be handy down there.
Ariana was like a little sister to them, and knowing I needed some help to help her, here they were. Big shot bounty hunting trid-show contract or not, once I’d manned up enough to tell them what was going on, they’d shown up.
I did have some friends left in this world. All from the Barrens, or the orkish city underneath it. No one born and raised in uptown. No one from the Hermetic Order of the Auric Aurora, or who still worked for Lone Star, or the university. Even Martin de Vries had apologized his way out of it, telling me he preferred to work at night, so I didn’t have some big time world-famous vampire hunter, no. I had the half-and-halfs. The folks with—at best—one foot in the light, one in the shadows. I had the ones that fell through the city’s cracks. I had the ones that needed to get paid, or to get forgiven, or needed to get a chit called in.
But, hell. I had ’em.
“You all know the drill.” I drew my Colt, press-checked it to make sure I had a round in the chamber, then nodded at the tunnel entrance.
“Let’s get this over with.”
CHAPTER 39
The drones went in first. All three of Hardpoint’s, with their underslung assault rifles, and a pair of Chase’s, commanded by who-knows-who from who-knows-where, along for the ride and to set up good camera angles. After the drones came the gangers, mostly. Once a few Ancients took point, the denim-clad wannabes and second-rates had to follow suit. Their reps were on the line, and the cooler heads—older, one and all—were content to let the punks strut around up front.
Billy Bricks had wanted to go then, too, but Caboose had held him back. Those two and Sledge, content to focus on ghouls for the moment instead of whatever betusked political squabble they were otherwise distracted by, were our second wave. Pinkerton was with them, and Granger and Castaigne, the Fast Response washouts who Lone Star’d screwed over almost as hard as me. They’d hold, that lot. Pink had bulked up his sturdy jacket with some old riot gear, and Billy Bricks had on what maybe looked like hockey pads. It beat nothing, and maybe even it’d beat a ghoul tooth or two.
Rook and Daisy were next, her maybe three times his mass, sharing notes. She was a troll, he was elven as all hell. She was a healer, he was a something else. The pair were still chatting spell formula and barrier theory all the way up until they ducked into the dark. Hell, maybe they’d hit it off. Maybe that’s where orks came from, what do I know?
Bushido Blitz and Chase, of all people, were shadowing the spellcasters. Chase was a glory hound, but smart enough to not want to take point. He’d hang back, be middle of the pack, and have plenty of space to twirl his guns and pose for the cameras. Blitz was worried about keeping Rook safe, but knew his katana wasn’t exactly an ideal choice for the day. He was good, and he was fast, but no one rushed in to go blade-to-fangs against ghouls. Blitz carried a slivergun for backup, and maybe it was that Ares Viper that had gotten Chase to chat him up as they headed in.
Blue and Sterling rounded out the pack, sticking close enough to the magicians, just like the magicians were going to be close enough to the main gunline. As far as I knew, they didn’t have anything in common but me. Neither one seemed bothered by it, though. They went over a few basic tactics, double-checked street names for the folks they were about to go into a fight alongside, high-fived when they realized they were both Savalette Guardian and HK 227 fans that carried compatible magazines. I guess they had professionalism in common, too, or at least the same love for price tags.
I was last in, and that hurt. Skip and Trace, the duo that had declared themselves my bodyguards, hung back with me. Skip had the layout of the place on her ’deck and was running on-site Matrix overwatch for the lot of us, handling a low-grade tacnet that coordinated everyone’s commlinks, headware or otherwise, to keep us in touch. Trace snuck Skip a kiss on the cheek before the two of them waded into the dark, I just caught it out of the corner of my eye. It was a nice profile shot, the two of them silhouetted against the still-early sun.
I prayed—just on the off chance anyone but that asshole Adversary might still listen to me—that those two, at least, God, Odin, St. George, the Virgin Mary, fucking someone, please, at least those two would make it back out. My plan had to work. There couldn’t be too many ghouls. I’ve got to be able to handle the bitch, Nimbus.
Don’t let my whole team die in the dark to these bastards, not a second time. At least those two gotta see the sun again, someone upstairs please listen.
I didn’t feel an answer. Instead, I just felt the hole where Ariana used to be. I ignored it.
Everyone had something that let ’em see in the dark. Everyone wore a light, at least a glow-stick or two. The Ancients had taken most of the spares, all in love with the things because they were green as all get-out, and probably let them see their own reflections better. So the whole lot of us, from our pointman-punks to Skip and Trace in the rear, glowed acid green as we entered the stink and the darkness of those half-abandoned sewer tunnels.
I’d shared spell formulas with Daisy and Rook, once they’d agreed to the job early the night before. I’d sweetened the pot with the detection sp
ell similar to what Ari’d been practicing the night she was taken from me. Spell formulas weren’t cheap, so they’d snatched it up. This one detected Krieger strain HMHVV. Ghouls, not vampires. They had the right mojo to spot the Infected. We had magical radar, basically, that’d hopefully keep us from getting caught with our pants down.
My headware told me exactly how long we were walking into deepening muck before the monsters came at us—six minutes, thirteen seconds, thanks for asking—but it felt like we were down there for hours, and had wandered miles underground.
It didn’t take long for the fight to start. This was a standard in-and-out for the ghouls, a favorite tunnel of theirs. We knew we were in a high traffic zone, knew they’d be on us eventually. Rook, Daisy, and I all had our eyes open, it hadn’t been a ward or anything that got us spotted.
The ghouls just…knew. Heard us. Smelled us. Felt a little grumble in their tummies like a bunch of steaks had walked in, I don’t know. But they were on us, and fast. We also knew, to our credit, and weren’t caught napping. Rook spoke up, beating Daisy to the punch, and their quick warning was all we got before the shooting started.
The drones opened up, Hardpoint sent the rest of us a quick text alarm and then things really picked up speed. My band of pointmen, whooping, war-painted, toting shotguns and machine pistols and more ammo than common sense, tripped all over each other to get to the front, firing as they went. The cops and shadowrunners in the second wave played it cooler, and Daisy just edged out Rook in putting up the first mana barrier spell.
It worked just like I’d explained topside. They were half-real mystical walls that stopped spells and living creatures, astral constructs, that sort of thing—and critters, like ghouls, that were half-astral and half-alive—but bullets and grenades flew through just fine. We stood and shot, they died trying to reach us.
Oh, the ghouls tore them down, make no mistake. They raked at those barriers with their claws, shoulder-bashed them, kicked them, ran headlong into them like animals until they broke or the ghostly walls did. Rook and Daisy stayed busy renewing the barriers, slowing the onslaught, buying all of us time—more time than we wanted to need—to line up our sights and, in picking good shots, to get a good look at the ghouls we were fighting. Some were naked except for the filth and long-dried blood, some were in rags, most were in clothes that wouldn’t be out of place anywhere topside in the Barrens.
Most were downright feral, but some were smart enough and metahuman enough to still be using guns. The firefight wasn’t as one-sided as we’d hoped; I saw Caboose tumble down with a slug in her shoulder, saw Bushido Blitz spin away from a grazing hit almost quick enough to dodge it, saw sparks fly as bullets bounced off Sledge’s chromed-up arms before the burly ork returned fire with a snarl. Daisy stopped her wall-flinging to pour new life into Pink after he went down to a burst of autofire from somewhere in the dark, then got back into the casting, her shamanic mask making her look shaggy and Bear-burly. It didn’t take long for the gunfight to turn into ’runners and gangers taking cover and returning fire, not just focusing on the claws and fangs of the ferals.
I saw it all, like always. My optical implant color filters followed my mood, and turned the whole thing into a sickly green mess, half-lit by the glowing chem-sticks we packed, half by the mad strobing of gunfire. My Avalon tagged the weapons, marked targets as dangerous or dead, blinked dutifully as friendlies changed from still-active blue on my heads-up display to fading blue-grays, swarmed by packs of blinking red hostiles.
I saw an Ancient get torn apart, limb-by-limb, during a mad surge between mana barriers. He was ripped apart by feral claws and opposable thumbs, taken to pieces in less time than it took him to fumble for an Uzi reload. I fired and fired, dumped a Colt magazine into the mass of lanky limbs and red teeth around him, just to make myself feel better. I saw Bushido Blitz swept right to left across my field of vision, a blur of steel and blood that held the line between wavering barrier spells, moving flicker-quick and leaving dismembered ferals in his wake. Pink cursed and dropped his pump-action into the muck to go for his trusty Predator one-handed, his left arm hanging useless by his side, leaning against Daisy while she casually held him up with one big arm. Rook stood, dark and proud with his spellcaster’s illusory mask deep in place, discarding his green-glowing chem-light to cloak himself in dark feathers and whispered promises, erecting wall after wall between himself and an ugly death. Chase stopped smirking and showing off, started picking his shots more slowly, more accurately, aiming to cripple and maim, to slow down the tide by taking out knees, to buy time for the gunmen around him. Every round he fired either took a ghoul right in the ugly face for a kill, or blew out a knee to keep the Infected away from his teammates. Trace’s blocky little submachinegun barked and chattered and ran hot just like everyone else’s, Skip’s bigger automatic roared and carved swathes out of the ghouls, circling like wolves. The two of them fought like they lived, side to side, doing their best work the closer they were to each other.
In the muzzle flashes and eerie green lights, I saw the skull-tattooed grin of Sammy Bones flash at me from the middle of the ghoul pack. Nimbus’ right hand ghoul, meat between his teeth, crest of implanted spikes and all. I wanted that bastard, but he wasn’t my job. Blue would get him, or Sterling, or Sledge. I had people for that. I had my own job to do.
Billy Bricks falling beneath a pack of ghouls—three, four, more?—was the last thing I saw before I turned my back on all of them and ran down my assigned side tunnel. They had enough guns there, and better ones than me. They had enough spellcasters there, each one easily twice my power. They had cooler heads than mine there, Skip coordinating over the tacnet, Trace firing just the right bullet at just the right time, again and again. I had somewhere else to be, I had to trust my team. They’d gotten me to the cross-section of tunnels I’d needed to reach in this Infected warren, and they were going to hold that intersection behind me. I had to go after their boss alone, or Adversary’d probably never let me live it down. I cast Reynolds’ vampire detection spell, got a hit, and let the detection mojo pull me like a diving rod.
I kept my Colt up as I ran, leading with it around each corner, and let the gunfire recede behind me. I was close. Nimbus was close. I could feel her in my bones, a little itch at the old scar on my neck.
It wasn’t the heads-up display that told me I was in her private chamber, it wasn’t the map we’d worked so hard on, the projections we’d overlaid onto it. It was the way the door slid shut behind me and a fog—that damned impossible vampire fog, them turning to fucking mist—swirled around me. I’d been there before. I’d almost been right here before. It was my nightmares coming to life, but me with a worse gun, with weaker armor, with less power, without Ariana. It was my lowest point, but worse, happening all over again.
And I think Nimbus could taste that.
She coalesced in front of me, and I tried my luck with a double tap. My aim was dead on, but she didn’t care; the rounds tore ragged bloody holes in her chalk-white flesh, and she laughed around the blood that sprayed up.
“Oh, you,” she said, like I was a kid that had teasingly pulled a pigtail. She lurched at me, impossibly quick, and shoulder-checked me to one side. Then she vanished as I spun and scanned the shadows for her. I knew she was healing. Every second I wasn’t hitting her, she was healing.
“Boys and their toys.” She laughed at me and my gun from somewhere off to the side, but even as I turned to line up the sights she was gone. She was so fast. Faster than I remembered, or maybe I was just slower.
“Your gun won’t work, silly. You tried that before, don’t you remember?”
She punched me, or shoved me, or just tapped me on the chest, and suddenly I was flying backwards, smacking into a concrete wall with the expected result. My wind left me, but I sucked it back as I clambered to my feet, Colt up in my right hand.
Nimbus came at me again, a blur of alabaster skin, slash-cut multi-colored hair, and breath like rotten
meat. I had the satisfaction of putting another pair of slugs into her torso before a backhand knocked my Colt away and damn near broke my wrist.
She stopped to pose and hiss, baring her fangs like an animal instead of pressing the attack. I punched her in the face, my best big right haymaker. The densi-plast knuckles of my glove added weight and striking surface, and she looked surprised. She’d gotten by on fury and fear for too long, she probably hadn’t had anyone just sock her in her stupid face.
Nimbus blinked at me, and I brought up the tire-thumper. A sawed-off bat, old enough to be made of real wood, Louisville Slugger etched on the side.
She blinked, snarled, bared her fangs and tried to scare me off.
“Go fuck yourself.” I gave her a solid overhand bash that sent blood spraying. I turned the recovery into a proper two-handed grip, wound up, and as I brought it around it took out one of her front fangs.
Good.
She hit me for real, then, and I think I blacked out for a second after I slammed into the wall that time. Maybe I should’ve brought a helmet. I tried to keep a grip on the bat, but it was tough, my body wasn’t responding quite right, my Corpsman was trying to tell me exactly what was wrong, but I didn’t have a chance to read it.
She lunged across the room to hook her claws into the front of my tac-vest and effortlessly lifted me, shook me, slammed me against the wall. The blood was still slick on her chin, the wound was still ugly and raw, her snarling face was lopsided and off-center missing one fang. She looked pretty stupid, but she looked pretty mad, too.
Mass didn’t matter, she had her stolen-life-force strength turned way up. When she smacked me against the wall for the eighth or tenth time, when the sawed-off little bat clattered to the ground from the shaking, when she was pretty sure she had me well in hand, she turned on the crazy.
Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small Page 22
