Waypointing all the stops he’d have to transfer at to make the trip, the troll turned back to the door. Displayed above the access mechanism was his most treasured possession—and the only thing he could clearly remember from before waking up in Chicago—an old wooden sword wrapped in a black ribbon.
“Animam gladius,” Rude remembered out loud what the old, tattooed man said when he gave it to him, “Meus rudiarius.” Taking a deep breath, he took two steps toward the outside and then froze once more. His chin dropped to his chest heavily.
Well—his cyberarm shot out and plunged into the box to his right and popped back with a small, matte black spheroid in his fingers—just the Flash-pak wouldn’t hurt. With a happy whistle, Rude waved open the door and headed back outside into the unit walkway.
“Looks like somebody’s in for a rough night, eh?” Squid chuffed, the voice eerily coming from no specific direction and changing from speaker to speaker as he walked through the facility. “Go git ’em, lad.”
“Drek, man. I wish it was like that.” The exit gate pulled open to let him out, and Rude paused for a moment to address the disembodied old dwarf, “Ain’t gonna be much more than dryin’ paint.”
“Go ahead, ’runner,” Squid laughed himself into a lifetime smoker’s cough, “keep yer secrets.”
“Thanks, old man.”
Rude was used to getting drek looks on the streets of Seattle; most trolls were. It got better in Redmond and the Underground, but even in the gangland ghettos and industrial sprawls of Puyallup he seemed to bring out the worst in passersby. If they didn’t just avert their eyes completely or stay lost in the AR Matrix miasma, it was a flip of a coin whether the look in their face was going to be the pupil dilation of abject fear or the skin flush of a possible threat. It was a rare treat when he didn’t see someone’s pulse quicken or their muscles tense as they crossed paths on the sidewalk. That is, if they don’t just cross the street to avoid him altogether.
That’s what made Rude so hyper-aware of the people around him—when they didn’t fall into the common classifications his combat instincts put them into. Almost halfway to the subway station, there were two otherwise normal Seattleites that were raising his hackles pretty bad.
He knew what he had to do.
Rude slowed his stride by a quarter-step every ten paces; slow enough to be discreet, but an adjustment that would put him in striking range right at the open alley at the end of Meridian.
Five.
Rude’s AR overlay monitored the distance between he and the alley—ten meters. He and his followers—five meters. The distance between his hand and the hilt of his blade—ninety-eight centimeters.
Four.
Eight meters. Four meters. Eighty centimeters.
Three.
Five. Two-and-a-half. Sixty-three.
Two.
Three. One. Forty… careful now, don’t give it away…
“Alright ya’ll—” Rude suddenly took a sharp step backward between the two men, his strength and size plowing through them like an ax splitting a log. One hand already clasped tightly around the hilt of his sword and the other anxiously hovering over his sidearm, ready to draw. “Who’s payin’ ya to creep on me?”
“What the frag, man?!” Knocked aside by Rude’s maneuver, the man barely kept his footing. His eyes wide with shock behind green-tinted shades. Immediately throwing his hands up, he stammered, “H-hey hey now…”
“Damn it!” The other man, a shorter sod with a glossy, black plastic fade, didn’t fare as well—and was knocked completely off his feet. There was raw anger in his face; the kind of anger that the threat of great bodily harm doesn’t even dull. “Watch it, trog!”
“What the frag’d you say?” Rude was an incurable asshole with a kill count he literally couldn’t remember, but some things still caught him flat-footed—like fearless racism out of a worm like this.
“Hank!” The first man scolded the second. “You can’t say stuff like that!” He took a step backward, and shook his head at Rude in disbelief, “I’m so sorry, man. I ain’t like that. I don’t want no trouble.”
“He does,” Hank spat venom in his words at the towering troll, picking himself up off the ground. “They always do. But I’m not giving you anything. Not one nuyen!”
“Bless yer heart, ya stupid runt.” Rude’s laugh was terrifying. “Ya think I’m muggin’ ya’ll?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Ya’ll ain’t after me, are ya?” Rude folded his huge arms and took a step sideways, “Yer just fraggin’ idiots. Go on. Take off.”
They didn’t waste any time putting to heels and jogging away, the black-haired bigot sparing one hateful glance back at Rude before turning the corner. They were probably already calling the Knights about it and this whole block would be crawling in no time. Well, it was Puyallup…so, maybe not.
“Get a hold of yerself,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief and coming around to the present again. All too aware of the sixteen pairs of eyes—at least two sets augmented and possibly recording—watching him now, Rude ducked into the alley and thumbed his commlink to start searching for local reports. Keywords troll, assault, and dumbass-rookie-mistake.
Maybe the subway-to-monorail-to-subway route wasn’t going to be the best option today after all. He could call a Kombat Kab, which would have to be an XT model because…troll, but their rates were pretty ugly for a drive that far. Rude cycled through his commlink protocols and sent his current account totals to his HUD.
“Seventy-eight nuyen?” An alloy-knuckled punch of frustration buckled the steel of the dumpster with an echoing bong. “Are ya kiddin’ me?” The money from yesterday’s little jaunt hadn’t come over yet, which left him with very few legitimate options. Mass transit it is.
Taking it slow and additionally careful, it took Rude almost an hour to reach the subway station. He was sure to use blind walkways, covered passes, clouds from broken steam vents, and one sewer junction supposedly “closed for safety reasons.” Nothing had rolled in on the feed about him this entire time, but he still wanted to be careful. Zipfile asked this to stay as anonymous and down low as possible, and Yu would surely have his ear to the pavement, too. Shadowrunners are the perfect mix of skill and paranoia, and Yu wore his like a badge of honor sometimes.
Subway stations and the trains heading in and out were a great way to travel incognito, even if they weren’t the cleanest, safest, or most timely method. In greater Seattle, two-thirds of the subway trains had been vandalized, damaged, and muddied up in the Matrix enough that surveillance is limited to “eyes only” most of the time. Quite a few were actually run by the Ork Underground these days, and Rude had spent enough time on them to generally recognize the Or’zet graffiti on the doors to know the best ones to use when you’re a troll on the lam.
It took him all of nine minutes to know he needed to be on the Green Line.
Two hours on the Green, a quick hop on the monorail to cross Downtown, then dealing with all the stops on the Violet to get to the Waterfront.
This ain’t worth a damn coat and some goofy software, Rude sucked through his lustful grin loudly as the subway car doors hissed shut, but SINnamon is.
“Ugh.” A troll’s sense of smell wasn’t as refined as some of the other metahumans out there, but it was heightened enough for Rude. Stepping up those last few stairs into the evening air, he forgot what a displeasure it was; a foul combination of salty sea, urban pollution, homeless dinge, and that weird ozone smell that only seemed to blow in from the south sometimes.
He fished around his pockets for a slightly crumpled pack of cigarillos, plucking the last one out and tucking it into his lips. He wouldn’t be able to keep it lit for the actual stakeout—Yu would see the cherry from a block away—but if he dragged deep enough off it until he got close, it would keep the Sound’s stink out of his nostrils.
The directions to the Rip Current storage warehouse were pretty straightforward, and Rude wasn’t even goi
ng directly there anyway. It would be a short trip to the building across the way, and the best vantage point to get a good look at the site.
“What’s the rush?” Rude checked the timestamp and raised an eyebrow, “It’s like seven blocks.”
“Alright, eight. Whatever. Wait just one fraggin’ minute, how do you—”
“Emu and Yu rode into West Seattle together,” her voice interjected, briefly switching away from text in order to interrupt the troll’s impending line of questioning. “But Emu’s nowhere nearby, and Yu’s headed in alone.”
“Ooh.” Rude gestured with fake shock despite no one else in the conversation being able to see. “That’s terrifyin’. Three blocks and a half-klick walk all alone on dainty elfy toes?”
“Alright, Zip. If it’ll make ya feel better.” Rude began to pick up the pace, “but while ya’ll are chit chattin’ about her choice of parkin’ spots, figure out what happened to our shares of the Telestrian gig. I’ve smelled enough subway train vomit and ork piss today, and I need cab fare.”
“Don’t mention it,” he growled into the comm, “I mean it.”
Putting more pavement between his strides, Rude began making short work of those eight blocks. Unlike the streets of Puyallup in the middle of the day, West Seattle was far more sparsely populated in the evening—especially this close to the waterfront. Sure there were scores of homeless and wage slave laborers, but seeing a troll taking two-meter paces down a dark street wouldn’t leave quite as lasting mark as one might think. If they even unplugged from their BTL feed or put down the chem-burner long enough to even notice him at all, that is.
It was odd. Rude didn’t really care about anyone, not especially, but he had come to at least respect the roles Frostburn, Zip, and the others filled for him. They scratched an itch that he couldn’t quite understand. Yes, even Elfy-Pants. Knowing they needed him somehow invigorated him on a core level; like a hero complex he didn’t actually know he had. Running toward this secret stakeout of his foolish teammate’s wasn’t how Rude expected to be spending his evening, and should have pissed him off hours ago.
Yet, it didn’t.
Quite the opposite, in fact. He found his running gait opening up even further, each step a leap longer than a Tír-born elf was tall. The reinforced soles of his combat boots clomped on the concrete, and the tattered tails of his coat trailed behind him like the cape of the world’s dirtiest superhero. Rude would never say it out loud, or even admit it to himself, but he liked being a part of the team. There was so much that he couldn’t remember from before Chicago that he didn’t spare much thought to some of those hardwired feelings that occasionally popped up—but he always knew they were there.
Like that moment. Running full tilt like a two-and-a-half-meter tall lion bounding across the Serengeti, he could feel a memory scratching at the inside of his skull. His cybereyes outlined parked cars and urban debris as obstacles seconds before he would zigzag around or vault over them, but Rude’s mind’s eye wanted to see them as something else—riot barriers? It was a real mess in his head, like a knotted-up ball of wires, both figuratively and literally. It was always worse when he slept, especially when it was without proper pharmaceutical aids.
Rude didn’t respond. He hated conversational hashtags, and really wanted to grind some ear-numbing profanity into Zipfile’s comms, but he was moving along too fast to grab or talk to his Sony. The idea that she knew exactly where he and Yu were—probably by the ping of their various gears’ AR signatures—was a little troubling. Yeah, Zipfile was their team’s go to Matrix expert, and the best ass to have in the C&C hot seat when on a mission, but real time tracking on a little personal side job like this? That kind of “Big Sister” shit made him nervous. What else was she watching and keeping tabs on? What else has she seen? He couldn’t exactly turn off the networking to most of his internals; he’d be a one-armed, blind sloth with a heart arrhythmia! We might need ta talk about some privacy settings, he thought as his waypointing suite signaled his arrival, but that’ll have ta wait.
The “West Campus Rip Current Shipping Lanes Office and Alpha Supply Depot,” a mouthful of self-aggrandizing corporate label if there ever was one, was two stories shorter than the Argyle Fields Park-n-Go. This meant that Rude couldn’t see Yu’s meeting site from where he was currently standing, but it also meant that anyone over there couldn’t see him, either.
Higher, he looked up the side of the parking garage, Up there.
The pedestrian entrance was on the side facing Rip Current. Rude wasn’t about to stroll around to where everyone could see him in order to get inside, but he was not equipped for scaling a five-story building, either. For security reasons, there were no access openings aside from the main entrance on the first floor, but the second floor windows were probably big enough for him to squeeze into if he could reach them.
A single sweep of the immediate area gave Rude a few different ideas. Because the refuse drum looked too flimsy and the lid was missing from the recyclables dumpster, that left the burned out hardtop a little too far away to be an easy step. He backed up a few paces, judged his distance, and sucked in a deep breath.
Surging forward, he leaped onto the hood of the old car and pushed off with every ounce of strength in his legs—which is to say a lot. Over three hundred kilos of troll flesh, cyberware, and equipment launched up into the air toward the building.
“Oh—” Rude arced through the distance with the right amount of force and speed, but geometry was not his strong suit. The angle was off, and he was headed for a face full of siding. “—frag.”
Fortunately, trolls have long arms, and this troll also had a military-grade prosthetic fist. The shining metal fingers of Rude’s left hand slammed against plastic-coated concrete, biting like five mountain climbing pitons into the wall. Metal-capped boots scraped and scrambled against the wall beneath him and his right arm stretched up to grab the window ledge. “Fragfragfragfrag.” It wasn’t a pretty landing, and he was glad no one could see it, but it worked.
Straining his muscles, Rude lifted himself into the window ledge, smashed the double-thick panes with a trio of quick head butts, and rolled inside. Glass fragments clinked and tinkled onto the pavement as he stood up to take in his surroundings. There weren’t too many cars logged in their spots on this floor, which likely meant there were even fewer on the levels above. All of the apparent security cams in the main parking rows that Rude could see were shattered or spray painted over, but the lift between levels was sure to be fully gridded out. Stairs it is.
The rooftop access door wasn’t even locked. It looked like it might have had a deadbolt at one time or another, but that had been wrenched out of its frame at some point. The door basically was being held shut by the seal around its own weight, and didn’t look like the kind that would latch behind him when it closed or anything. There was a chunk of broken cinderblock sitting right next to it on the outside though.
Prolly to keep it from blowin’ closed when it comes in hard off the Sound. Rude sat the manmade stone t
rapezoid in the obvious path and started to let the door swing shut—but caught it with his ankle at the last moment. Don’t get sloppy. Yer better than that, he chastised himself as he slowly let the door close to 90% with a barely audible klok.
The rooftop parking sleeves were reserved only for utility employees, garage staff, and special permits, explaining why there were only four vehicles scattered around up here; two security sedans, an Ingersoll delivery truck, and an enormous Monohan charger-construction Roadmaster taking up two rows of spaces on its own. There were scattered illumination pylons around, and a few climate control nodes, but it was otherwise pretty wide open.
Surrounding the roof, for safety reasons, was a meter-tall border wall topped with ten centimeters of anti-gull wire mesh. It would be great cover for a normal sized person skulking around the roof, but Rude had to crouch-walk like some kind of beast to take advantage. It was uncomfortable, undignified, and smeared the hem of his coat with road oil, but there was no way anyone in Rip Current could see him.
He awkwardly scuttled up to the edge, being sure to keep the wall between him and the street and the parked vehicles to block out the blind angles in case someone came up the stairs. A quick tug on his pistol to break the magnetic seal and he lifted his Predator carefully over the lip of the wall so the barrel could “see” toward the building beyond. The fibrous pad in his palm made the connection to the pistol’s integral SmartGun link and Rude synced his eyes into full view so he could see what was going on, making his gun into a “bullet’s eye periscope” so he could keep his horny head down.
The streetscape filled his eyes. It was a green grid of topographic lines and data signatures, outlines of objects and highlighted potential threats, and a few flashing silhouettes of targeting solutions. A few neutral non-classified guards patrolling near the main gate, a pair of blue-level armed drones whirred around the window line of the smaller building, but nothing highlighted with “imminent danger red.”
Shadowrun Page 15
