With a heavy thump, Rude landed on a long metal table. The last half hour or so was a blur, but he vaguely remembered somebody scooping him up out of the van and putting him in a beat-up old Docwagon rapid-response vehicle—a luxury he definitely couldn’t afford.
Everything was a haze; the venom tearing through him unabated and strengthened by the blood loss.
“I can start work on him,” one gruff voice said, “but this is a fraggin’ mess, Hez! You already owe us for that ghoul nest. This is already a blood—”
“Bloodbath,” Rude muttered, remembering why he was in this mess, “Renraku…”
“What’d you say?” another voice chimed in, “You know about that?”
“Serpent…Squad.”
“Go ahead and start stitching, Doc. Sounds like we’ve got a lot to talk about—if he lives.”
Take more’n this to kill me, Rude hoped inwardly as he lost consciousness.
Get down, Marcel! Incoming!
That same dream again. A firefight. Dead friends.
Man, Boston really is a shithole.
This wasn’t a dream, but it wasn’t a nightmare, either.
When did I ever work for a corp direct?
Whatever it was, they had a loyal soldier in Rude. In the dream he saw himself in a picture frame. His head was shaved, and he wore an earpiece like he has seen in CorpSec agents.
Time to kill some prisoners, I guess. Musta been framed or somethin’?
Rude looked down at the elf in his grip. The elf that, in the last few days, he had crushed, beaten, shot, and eviscerated in his mind a dozen times or more.
Time to die, Agent Garton…
That was a new voice. The guy from behind him. The guy with the hand cannon at his head.
Wait…not behind…
The voice warning him, high-pitched and feminine, wasn’t coming from a gunner.
It was in my earpiece!
This was it! Rude was on the edge on knowing what this was all about. He needed just a few more sentences; needed to hear it a little more…
“You still with us, Rude?” A deep, baritone boom in the ether of his mind.
That’s the wrong voice! No, wait!
“Dialed up to eight-forty. Clear!”
A blast of raw energy surged through Rude’s body. Lightning flooded his nerves, his wires, and bounced around inside his body like frag shrapnel in a bunker.
His eyes flew open, a field of static and reboot code flipping across his HUD, but he could see the ceiling. Surgical tools hung on dangling racks between yellowed fluorescent light bars, some of which shined with fresh blood. At the edge of his vision he could see the shape of a wide-shouldered ork shuffling about, the plastic visor-mask of an ops surgeon currently lifted in the “up” position. It was some kind of street clinic—a nasty, low tech one, too.
Frag! I’m gettin’ cyberjacked!
Rude had to move. He had to get out of there! He tried, but his body felt too heavy and numb. He lay there, trying to will everything into motion. All he could do was lie there and listen to the out-of-tune operatic music coming from somewhere nearby.
Then the ready lights to his arm blinked live in his feed, Just in time.
“It worked! Almost shorted out the genny, but—” The ork leaned over into Rude’s view, a pleasant smile on his leathery face—that was immediately pressed into a grimace as Rude’s cyberhand shot up and caught him by the chin. It was a familiar grip, even if last time it was the troll that was on top.
“None of that now,” a cool, calm voice purred into Rude’s ear at the same time the cold barrel of a pistol pressed up into his nostril, “Doc just saved your life. Don’t go making me waste all of his effort and expensive chems by making brain pudding, puddin’.”
“Heshz,” the ork slurred, “Heshz shent ush.” Rude relaxed his grip, and he laughed out his words again, a slight nervous tremble in his voice, “Hez sent us. I’m Doc—the guy who just patched you up. That BA chica who’s trying to pick your nose with a forty-four-caliber dep round? That’s Crow. The angelic tenor finishing his shower next door is Toro. Syd and Fritz are outside. We do a lot of work for the Underground.”
“Why can’t I move?”
“The big ones really are thick sometimes, aren’t they?” Crow holstered her pistol and hopped up onto the back of a chair, perching her elven litheness on it like a bird of prey. “Doc pumped you full of happy-sleep-o-meen or zonk-a-trol or something like that. Dug four damn bullets out of you, and filtered out all that nasty lizard spit. You’ll be fine.”
“Not if he keeps digging up garbage on that job with the Telestrian fakes, he won’t.” In clomped a massive wall of a minotaur. Toro’s deep chocolate flesh was a road map of dazzling white tribal tattoos and bioware scarring, all much too visible due to the comically small pink bath towel around his waist fighting against his every movement. He wrung water out of a clump of dreadlocks that sprouted from around his curved, silver-capped horns, and the occasional droplet fell from the brass loop piercing jammed through his nostrils.
“Let me help you up, tough guy.” Without so much as a strained sigh, Toro carefully pulled Rude up by his armpits and leaned him against the wall so he was sitting up and could look around. “You’ll be okay, cuz. Doc does real good work. Used to work on a ’wagon and everything.”
“Go get dressed,” Crow said, snickering. “Poor guy doesn’t want your moo meat draggin’ all over him while he’s on the mend.”
“You’re just jealous.” Toro laughed and gyrated at her suggestively, but then disappeared into the far room again.
“What…” Rude coughed, realizing suddenly that whatever the ork gave him must have been pretty strong, because even his tongue was numb, “did he mean by fakes? What does Telestrian have to do with Serpent Squad? Why’d they try to kill my, uhm, elf?”
“Why wouldn’t they? After the nasty mess they left when they butchered that Miller guy and all those Renraku wageslaves,” Doc shook his head, pouring a vial of neon green something on a delivery patch and turning it slowly in his fingers to evenly spread the fluid on the microscopic delivery fibers. “It was savage. Some of them weren’t even armed. Half of Serpent Squad, claiming to be Telestrian corporate, came in and did the gig. It was so dirty.” He flipped the patch down onto the troll’s thigh with a slap. “There. You should start to feel like yourself soon.”
“Woo.” He was right, Rude’s body came to life in a few seconds—but so did the pain from all the surgeries and chemical treatments over the last two days. He grit his teeth and exhaled slowly, trying to expel as much as he could before he passed out. “How do you know all this?”
“Well…” Doc smirked. “About that.”
“We found ’em,” Toro added, coming back into the room. At least now he was wearing pants and a tight vest made of interwoven shipping cord and carabiner clips. “Our team got hired to—”
“Whoa!” A skinny man with the world’s tallest flashing blue Mohawk burst into the room carrying two big sacks of greasy “burgers” from Chewy’s. “Can we trust this tall drink of chowder?”
“C’mon, Syd. He’s been through the drek.” A shorter blond guy with visible hardwires running up through his arms and an expensive-looking rigging node on his temple followed him in, half a dozen to-go cups balancing in a cardboard carrier. “Hez vouched for him, that’s good enough for me.”
“Hez owes us for another job, Fritz.” The scrawny one who must have been Syd plopped the bags of food on the countertop, far too close to a jar of unrecognizable organ parts drifting in oil. “I don’t trust ’im as far as I could throw ’im.”
“Not far, then, by the looks a’ya.” Rude chuckled, and everyone in the room—except Syd—joined in the laughter.
“As T was saying.” Doc rummaged in the greasy sack and pulled out an equally greasy sandwich. “We were on a job, taking out what we
were told was a new designer drug den that was cutting up the streets real bad. We didn’t do enough research—”
“That’s on me,” Syd admitted, shoving a handful of tofu fries into his noisily chewing mouth.
“We walked right into a setup,” Toro added.
“There was a whole room full of Renraku wage slaves getting cut to ribbons.” Crow continued the story between pulls of cola. “This team of Telestrian wet ops was in the middle of the hit when we rolled up.”
“We bounced a few shots back an’ forth.” The minotaur snorted. “But they bugged out as soon as we brought down one of ’em.”
“Lil’ dwarfy fella.” Syd whistled and traced his finger in the air, causing the white-feathered serpent to appear as a glowing image in the AR fields of the Matrix. “Fuckin’ Serpent Squad went an’ gone corporate.”
“When they were comin’ after my guy,” Rude added, “they were all dolled up to be KE riot response, not Telestrian.”
“That’s so weird,” Syd mused.
“I know, right?” Fritz shook his head. “Why change gears between gigs unless they’ve been told to by an employer?”
“Nope. Not what I’m talkin’ about,” Syd swallowed the mass of half-chewed horribleness in his maw. “It’s weird that the Sony Emperor over there, the one in the pile of Rude’s gear, won’t shut up.”
“Syd!” half the room scolded him with well-practiced cadence. Syd shrugged in response and wandered off, muttering to himself about “the predilection of the governmental promises of the Man in the UCAS.”
“Frag—Zip’s prolly losin’ her mind, since my link’s still dark.” Rude swung his legs off the table and carefully put his weight on them. He started fishing through his things, strapping them on until he got to the small glowing screen of his Sony.
Nineteen messages. He stifled a smile before realizing that it actually could be important with all the crazy stuff going on. Something was really not right about all these things, and Rude wasn’t sure if he could actually trust the team standing around him just yet. “I’ll hit her back in a few.”
“You gonna be okay, cuz?” Toro spun a pair of billiard balls in his hand like meditation orbs.
“Yeah. Ya’ll were right. Doc does good work.” Rude knew he’d be hurting for a little while, mentally already asking Frostburn for some of her magical healing later on, “I’m glad Hez hired ya’ll to come get me outta that mess he sent me to.”
“Yeah, Hez ain’t payin’ for you. The Underground hasn’t even paid their debts from our last mission on their creds,” Crow steepled her fingers, putting her index tips onto her chin, “so all of this…it’s on you. Will that be stick or AR swipe?”
“Good luck with that.” Rude clicked his tongue cynically. “Until we get this whole Renraku-Telestrian thing squared away, I’m pretty much broke.” He was surrounded, and not going to be able to fight his way out of here. “So where does that leave us, then?”
“Oh,” Doc waggled a finger in the air, “with all that’s going down around you right now, we’re fine with doing this on the borrow. If whoever hired the Serpent Squad to get in our run is also mixing it up in your biz, I’m sure there’ll be the chance for your guys to pay us back soon enough.”
“Speakin’ of—” Rude held up his Emperor.“—I should prolly find out what’s happenin’. Zippy worries.” He looked down at the screen.
“I know the feeling.” Crow smiled.
“I’ll walk you out, Rude,” Doc said, swiping open the door.
“Nah.” He waved him off. “I can take it from here. Hit me up if ya’ll need. You need my inf—”
“Already got it!” Syd shouted from the other room. “Thanks! Drive safe! Don’t die!”
Rude steps out into the clinic’s parking lot, putting several paces between its door and the edge of the street before pulling up his Sony’s feed live on the Matrix again.
“Long story. Tell you later.” Rude glanced over his shoulder and saw Doc and Toro standing at the window, watching him.
“Frag,” Rude growled, “I’ve got stuff for ya’ll, too.”
“Zipfile?” Rude wrenched open the ignition panel of a beat-up old Nightmare—the only thing big enough to carry him within jogging distance that he knew how to hotwire, “can you scrub this bike’s sig for me? It’ll be faster than tryin’ to get a Kab to ya’ll.”
Back in the window of the clinic, Doc and Toro watched his patient steal one of their neighbors’ ride. The minotaur sighed, and Doc mimicked the sound. He folded his arms across his chest and slowly shook his head.
“What’s up?” Toro furrowed his brow.
“You think he knows?”
“About what? Why the inside of that lumpy skull of his is a scrambled memory omelet, or why a bunch of his older ’ware is experimental paramilitary stuff?”
“I bet he’d be interested to know all that, yeah, but not as much as the fact that those Telestrian hit-drones are following him,” Doc sucked air through his tusks.
“Oh…frag.”
Part Four
Frostburn
CZ Wright
Spirits do not require eyes to see, but sometimes they work them into the form they assume when summoned to the material plane. This night, a spirit of beasts wearing bright, blue eyes spotted a metahuman creeping around where it did not belong. The metahuman was an ork, a woman, neither young nor old, who—the spirit tasted the unfamiliar emotion, trying to define it—felt disconcerted.
The spirit crept closer.
The ork crept up to a structure that was no more than a dark silhouette against the navy, starless sky. She pressed her hands against the smooth walls, and leaned her head closer to a half-broken window. The trespasser’s attention focused upon the spirit’s master. The spirit’s master would not be able to see her sneaking about, but the spirit could see her without difficulty.
Now was the time to act. Materializing directly behind the ork, the spirit let out a deep, guttural growl. The ork whirled to face the spirit, and although she tried to keep a stony expression on her face, the spirit sensed the fear she struggled to keep locked behind it. The spirit rejoiced at the impending battle as it leaped for her throat.
Traffic murmured around Frostburn as she merged onto the freeway. Technically, it wasn’t her doing the merging; it was just the car, piloted by a program and directed via GridGuide. Using GridGuide meant never having to check a map, which was a good thing, because Frostburn was intensely distracted.
“Record, love?” She had installed a voice mod into her commlink that gave it the voice of trid star Tommy Murphy. Normally, his gorgeous, deep brogue requesting that she unload all her thoughts and troubles soothed her, but today wasn’t a normal day.
“Record,” the ork agreed, and waited for the recording light to turn red. “Someone burned down our safehouse,” she said. The memory of earlier today―a tower of flames lighting the shocked faces of her crew―flooded into her brain. She cleared her throat and pushed away the worry and fear it ignited. “Luckily, no one was inside at the time, so no one got hurt. One of us got roughed up—” That was Yu, her team’s face and stealth specialist, but she didn’t like to use names on these recordings. “—but that was during the job he ran earlier, which turned out to be a setup. Then they hit our safe-house.” Frostburn trailed off and growled under her breath, thinking. “I don’t know what we were thinking, agreeing to him going in alone like that. Maybe we’re getting sloppy.”
Frostburn found herself chewing on her thum
bnail and stopped the tangled mess that was her thoughts before it could unravel any further down a dark, worrisome path. It always happened when she didn’t take proper care of herself, at least according to her records. She never seemed to notice while in the middle of it.
She stared at the lights of sunset reflecting off Lake Union as she and hundreds more crossed Ship Canal Bridge. Seattle rose like a wall: a silhouette of skyline to the west curved around the edges and reflected off the surface of the water, which was only visible for the height and relative empty space around the old bridge.
“Regardless,” she said, “We’re going to find out who’s got it out for us, and we’ve each got a job to do. But first, I need to make sure my family’s okay, and I’m happy the team was all right with my taking the time to check on them.” She could just call, sure, but she wouldn’t feel satisfied unless she’d taken a look around there, too. And since she didn’t know who had it out for them, she couldn’t know whether they’d trace her call home. “After that, I need to get some astral scouting done. That’s the plan, at least.”
She paused, unable or unsure of what to say more. “Stop recording,” she told Tommy Murphy.
A foul odor assailed her nose, and when she wrinkled it in disgust, her tusks brushed either side of her nose with the expression. The awful smell of industrial fire smoke came from—she sniffed to double-check—herself.
She pawed through a duffel bag she called her not-an-emergency-bugout-bag. She kept the emergency bugout bag stashed in the smuggling compartment she’d paid her brother Jules to install, making it much harder to find. Pulling a packet of shower wipes and a grey and faded University of Washington hooded sweatshirt from the duffel, she cleaned off the physical remains of the day and changed into clean clothes, heedless of onlookers, thanks to the one-way glass that had become the norm among auto manufacturers, because no one wants to become the target of a spell in your car during rush hour. Stuffing her smoky armored jacket back into the duffel, she zippered away the stench of smoke and sweat.
Shadowrun Page 19
