Find Your Own Truth

by Robert N. Charrette

  Monique shivered delicately. “Yet you stole the data. How did you do it?”

  Neko shrugged, dismissing the difficulty of his feat with deliberate casualness. “Cats are shadowy, silent creatures, unnoticed when they wish it so. I wished it so. Goroji-san will learn of his loss when his tame deckers begin tomorrow night’s work.”

  “Aren’t you afraid he will find out who stole from him? Goroji’s kobun are notorious for their brutality.” Chuckling, Neko put down his glass and traced the fine line of her chin. “However brutal they are, the soldiers of Goroji’s clan cannot hurt what they cannot find.”

  “You are marvelous.” She kissed his finger. “Are you sure they can’t trace you?”

  “Very.” Neko kissed her. His lips tingled, a sensation brought about by her lipstick, he realized, because it was strongest where the liquor had not washed away much of the ruby tint. He pulled away to stare into her eyes. She lowered her lids, a feigned shyness that hinted at the pleasure to come. He smiled. Biz before pleasure; it was time to end the pretense. “You may assure Cog that what I have is no isotope. He will not be burned by simple association, although some of the offering will have a half-life of usefulness.”

  “Cog? Who or what is Cog? What are you talking about?”

  Her eyes were wide and her tone a masterful blend of hurt and confusion. Her body language expressed innocence tinged with timidity and a hint of growing trepidation. He was impressed. The act would have been convincing. If he hadn’t known better.

  “Excellent performance.” He used his free hand to clap softly on the arm of the sofa. “But I do know that you belong to Cog. Do you think I would have spoken so freely if I hadn’t known you were screening for the fixer?”

  Her deception remained in play while those dark eyes evaluated him, measuring his conviction and weighing the cost of dropping her pretense. He let the seconds drag. Finally her eyes shifted focus, checking the room around them. Looking for the hidden ready lights of the even better-hidden trideo cameras. She needn’t have worried; he had already made sure the monitors were dysfunctional, though he saw no need to tell her that.

  “You are very astute for one so young." she said.

  He preened under the compliment. “A necessary attribute for anyone in the biz who wishes to get any older.”

  “Messing with the yakuza is not conducive to long life. Were Goroji a simple boss, dealing with your offering would be a delicate business, but as it is, the heat is higher than desirable. You were aware that Goroji fronts for Grandmother?”

  He hadn’t been. “Of course.”

  Her eyes gave away nothing, but the slight twitch of a cheek muscle hinted disbelief, or at least suspicion. He smiled, hoping to project the air of a confident and assured runner.

  “Cog would prefer that your next offering have nothing to do with Grandmother’s sources. She reacts violently when someone disturbs her network, and her wrath descends on those who bothered her and on anyone associated with those unfortunates. Should you continue to court such a fate, Cog wishes that you not involve him. He and Grandmother settled their feud long ago, and he has no desire to reopen that unpleasantness at this time.”

  “No one expects a fixer to show a warrior’s courage. This run was in direct response to the needs of a client for whom Cog serves as an intermediary. No stipulations or caveats were placed on me at the time of the request for information. Hence there should be no change in the payment. Fixers rely on their reputation with shadowrunners. Fair dealings are imperative.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Within reasonable margins of profit, of course." he added.

  “I’m sure a reasonable fee will be paid for the Contracted data.”

  “And for the bonus material.”

  “Commensurate with its value.”

  “And its temperature.”

  She smiled now. “We do have an understanding. The caution was meant for future dealings.”

  “If Cog fears connection with further enquiries, perhaps he would consent to bow out and let me deal directly with the client.”

  “Perhaps he will.”

  The possibility that the fixer might cut himself out of the deal made Neko realize just how dangerous Cog thought the situation. How could Grandmother be so territorial? It was bad business. There had to be something more to the data he was uncovering for the elven decker. Some secret connection perhaps? Understanding what was happening would make it easier for him to know the value of what he discovered. Knowing the value, he could cut himself a better deal. Coincidentally, he would also know just what kind of danger he was facing.

  He continued to dicker with Monique over the price for his recent acquisitions, but his mind was preoccupied with other matters. He began to wonder if Goroji’s search for Warlord Feng was just the yakuza boss grasping at power or something more sinister. Perhaps it was part of some great scheme of Grandmother’s. The Feng data was juxtaposed in Goroji’s files with material on enquiries into the matter of Renraku’s Special Directorate. An operator like Grandmother would likely have more than one angle on an operation. Goroji on the outside and Sato on the inside made for a well-orchestrated attack. Very understandable, considering the importance of the prize. Neko would be Surprised if Grandmother didn’t have other tools working on the target as well. An artificial intelligence would be a powerful research tool in the Matrix. If it was as good as his decker acquaintances claimed it could be, what computer secret would be safe, save one defended by a similar artificial intelligence? The worth to an information broker would be incalculable.

  If Grandmother had access to such a machine, she would know all.

  And what did she want to know? Why did Feng interest her? What connection did a Chinese neowarlord have with German terrorists, or to the breakup of the United States, or to Israeli commando strikes in Africa? And what did any of those things have to do with the financing of Ordo Naturum, the Humanis policlub offshoot, or with the financial holdings of Awakened beings? Neko didn’t know the answers, but he was suddenly sure that all the information was interlocked in a web of intrigue. His curiosity was aroused. Even if the answers meant nothing to him, he was sure they would be worth a lot of nuyen to someone. All he had to do was figure out who. And what the answers were, of course.

  * * *

  Seattle was worse than Portland. The boundary zones around the metroplex territory were not as developed as those around the city-state enclaves in Australia, but they bore the same hideous stamp of human architecture. The metroplex was crammed with smelly crowds of humans, dark breeds, and low-life elves. It was full of life, but only of a kind past the consideration of a rational being. The plex-dwellers were only vermin infesting a land nearly dead.

  Urdli wanted to go home. Australia was not what it should be, but even the wild mana and the chaos were preferable to the deadness of the metroplex and the stifling, oppressive gloom cast by the corporate skyscrapers. But he could not leave yet.

  His head hurt from the unaccustomed effort of maintaining the illusion that he was an ordinary inhabitant of this morass. He disliked the disguise but found it useful, possibly necessary. The first day had told him how unusual he appeared, when he had drawn unwanted attention from a group of hooded toughs shouting Humanis policlub slogans. They would not bother any other elves, blacks or otherwise, now. He supposed that he had incidentally fueled the Humanis hate, but he hoped he had fueled their fear as well. Fear was a useful tool for keeping animals in their places.

  Since he had taken to using the illusion spell, he had encountered no similar problems.

  For a week now he had been vainly seeking Samuel Verner, the one they called Twist. To make his inquiries less remarkable, Urdli had olfered incentives rather than taking the more direct approach of interrogation. The method had yielded results, but not satisfactory ones. There was no sign of the human shaman at his known haunts. Neither had Urdli learned the whereabouts of any of the human’s known associates, save former a
cquaintances such as Sally Tsung. The woman had spoken freely and disparagingly about her former lover, but claimed ignorance of his current whereabouts. Urdli might have probed her, but she was a mage of unknown ability, too great a risk.

  He wished Laverty had been more forthcoming about who he had observing Verner. Urdli wanted to contact that person, but had no way to do so. He had come to suspect that the decker operating under the name Dodger was Laverty’s observer, for Verner had regular contact with only two elves—-the decker and a woman named Hart. Hart was an unlikely candidate because she had worked for the Shidhe more than once in the past, and Urdli doubted that the professor had found a way to slip an agent past the Shidhe’s vigilance. Eliminating the woman as a possibility left Dodger the most likely candidate, but like all the shaman’s little ring of shadowrunners he had dropped out of sight.

  Awareness of time passing made Urdli uncomfortable and unhappy. Constructing a kulpunya was impractical here. His attempts to sense the guardian stone had been unsuccessful; either it was shielded or it had been removed from the metroplex. The latter possibility chilled him. If Verner was not in Seattle, Urdli had no idea where the human had run. The time for subtlety had passed, and the time for interrogation had come.

  17

  Hunting Howling Coyote was a fool’s quest that, since he was assisting in the quest, made Dodger a fool. If the Ghost Dancer Prophet was dead, Sam was throwing away his last slim hope of saving his sister. She would be lost to the wendigo nature before the Dog shaman would give up. If Howling Coyote was alive, Sam was unlikely to uncover Coleman’s hiding place in time. Even if by sheer chance he should somehow locate the runaway shaman, the chance of ultimate success remained slim. Despite Sam’s earnestness, he had little hope of persuading Howling Coyote to help. If Coleman could help. That possibility was just as unlikely.

  More foolishness. Just like Dodger’s run against the Ute Council government computer system. The pair of them were mad fools, tilting at windmills. Foolishness and obsession seemed the order of the day.

  As for Hart, Dodger had seen her reaction during his report of Noguchi’s last findings. Something in the Asian runner’s last data drop had touched on an obsession of her own. What it might be Dodger could only guess, for Hart wrapped her past actions and present motives in obsessive secrecy. She was so anxious to be elsewhere that she had agreed to let Sam leave for Denver by himself, an uncharacteristic response to the situation. If she had expected to thus gain freedom of action, she must have been disappointed when her own warnings about the dangers of decking into the Ute system backfired on her. Sam had pointed out that if, as she herself had suggested, they were to avoid their usual haunts and acquaintances, she was the only available person to sit guard on Dodger’s body as he decked. Her acquiescence might have fooled the love-besotted Sam, but Dodger had no trouble recognizing her restrained frustration.

  How could Sam trust her? She was even more secretive than Sally Tsung, and justifiably so, from the few hints of Hart’s former associations that Dodger had been able to dig up. He had not yet told Sam of those connections. If Sam thought Dodger was suspect for association with the professor, what would he think of Hart’s former friends? However Sam might feel about this side of Hart, he would almost certainly not take kindly to Dodger’s probing into her background.

  Hart was not the only one restrained from what she wished to do. Of necessity, his own search for the lost Renraku artificial intelligence was sidelined. Dodger had vowed that he would prove his friendship to Sam despite the unfortunate English affair Compelled to pay that debt, he was forced to participate in this mad quest. Foolish as it was, Sam wanted the Matrix angle covered, and who could do it as well or as quickly as the Dodger? The elf’s own concerns would have to wait, but perhaps that was just as well. Since Noguchi’s first contact, his hope had swelled only slightly faster than his fear. He still didn’t understand the full ramifications of the AI and its attraction for him, but he felt its draw all the same.

  The AI belonged to the Matrix, and so did his attention. The middle of a run was no time to get distracted. The Ute Council Matrix segment was coded orange, and though not the highest security level, it held sufficient danger for the unwary traveler. Unwary was exactly what he had been. Already he had nearly blundered into several shades of black. He had barely skirted those threats, but if he were not more attentive, he wouldn’t have much longer to worry about anyone’s obsessions.

  The ebon boy with the cloak of glitter that was Dodger’s icon slipped away from the subprocessor serving Salt Lake’s government center personnel files. The hulking cubist bears prowling each of the data-lines leading into the stores made it patently clear that the Ute computer specialists had dealt with illegal entry through this route before. The visual design of the Intrusion Countermeasures might be more for the sake of intimidation than reflecting the true strength of the ice at those access points, but Dodger didn’t think now was the time to try it. The least threat involved in engaging one of the bears was the chance that the decker behind it would give notice of Dodger’s presence in the system. If an alert went out, the going would get considerably tougher. Sam’s schedule left no time for a siege, meaning that this run required total stealth until the goods were gotten, or else it was worthless.

  Somewhere in the Ute government files was information about Daniel Coleman, a Ute by tribal affiliation. Dodger had rifled the public database before starting, but that had, of course, yielded nothing really definite. The public record had been enough to send Sam to Denver, the nexus of so many of Howling Coyote’s activities, but it offered no clue to Coleman’s current whereabouts. To find the good stuff, Dodger needed to penetrate to the deep files where the Council’s leaders kept what they needed to run their little part of the world. If Howling Coyote was Still alive, his tribal elders were the most likely to know.

  A bit of lucky hacking uncovered a back door in a financial program—left, no doubt, by some embezzling decker. The lure of easy funds, to replace those he had been profligately spending on his own obsession, was great, but Dodger resolutely passed up the chance to transfer a few hundred thousand nuyen. Sam’s confidence was his goal. Were he to take the electronic cash, a routine balance-check could blow the whistle on him before he departed the regional communications grid. Though uncooperative on most matters, the UCAS government was more than happy to help foreign governments like the Ute Council track down computer criminals. Especially when the so-called criminals resided within UCAS boundaries, and that included Seattle. Perhaps some other time when he was more prepared for the operation; stealth and untraceability were too important right now.

  Stifling his avarice, the ebon boy tiptoed past locked vaults behind whose electronic doors he imagined lay bag after bag of freshly minted government notes, corporate scrip, and ICC transfer bonds. For him, this financial database had to be, not a bank vault full of plunder, but a doorway into other systems where the loot was less tangible. Near the end of the corridor, he located the door and slipped through. No bears rose to challenge him as he took a path toward the government center construct.

  Once inside, he saw that the Ute government was, at least in one respect, just like every other modern government. It was drowning in data. The points of light representing the datafiles made a hyperactive galaxy in the electron sky. In the glare, Dodger almost missed the sudden rush of a guardian program’s attack. Finely honed reflexes allowed him to engage a defensive program just in time. The ice, configured as a crystalline weasel as long as Dodger was tall, slid past him. Dodger engaged counterprogramming: a midnight hand emerged from beneath his cloak and pointed a slim silver automatic pistol at the electronic beast. The single bullet he fired struck the weasel as it twisted for another attack, turning it milky, frozen in mid-leap.

  The boy ran his hands over the immobile shape. Dodger studied the contours of the ice and adjusted his own masking programs with an eye toward sleazing past other guardians more easily. The tailoring w
as a temporary measure, the inspired improvisation of a consummate decker, and would not be of permanent advantage because it would work only for this run.

  He realized how well his camouflage was working when he got down to serious searching. Every time he initiated his browsing programs to look for key words to detect data on Howling Coyote, some kind of ice prowled by. Only his improved masking programs allowed him to continue his work unnoticed.

  The restless ice made it clear that he was probing a sensitive subject. Fearing that simply stripping the files out of the system or duplicating them would set off larger alarms, he decided to access a few where they stood. With his sensitized camouflage, he would be more likely to notice if his activity caused any reaction to his presence by the system or its owners.

  The first few files yielded nothing beyond historical data, but even so, he was forced to deal with another ice beast as he entered the sixth datastore. Three more stores later, another beast attacked, but he froze it as cleanly as he had the other. The file it guarded was more current than the others he had sampled but had no solid information less than fourteen years old. Most curious. If the past was so well guarded, what protections guarded present-day data? Heavy ice meant precious data, secrets. The biggest one that Dodger could think of was that Coleman still lived and was working for the Ute Council. Could Howling Coyote be engaged in secret magical research? Might this all be a prelude to a new campaign to rid the continent of non-Indians? The thought of another Great Ghost Dance chilled Dodger. Others besides Sam would want to know.