Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  Frostburn swung and landed a punch on the spirit in astral space. The blow seemed to knock some of the spirit’s essence away, like a plume of cloud blown away by a strong breeze. The wolf pounced and leaped on top of Frostburn’s astral form. They fell together, grappling, each trying to gain an edge over the other. Frostburn pawed at the beast spirit’s muzzle, trying to get a hold, and the beast spirit snapped at her astral fingertips. Again, the beast tore into her arm as she blocked it from her face.

  With a surge of will, Frostburn shoved her arm into the wolf’s muzzle, wrapped her free arm around it, and lay atop the thing. It bucked and threw her off its back. Frostburn landed, rolled over, and cast a Mana Bolt at the spirit. Because the spell was wholly present on the astral plane, it made no disturbances in the physical plane. The Mana Bolt ripped through what little energy the beast spirit had left and tore the thing to shreds. The spirit dissipated to whatever plane from which it had originated, and Frostburn returned her attention to the physical with instant regret as the drain of the last spell washed over her

  She lay her back against the wall and let gravity draw her to the ground. A double-shot of spell drain and injuries caused her head to scream in pain, and weariness and nausea blotted out everything else for a few heartbeats while she tried to fill herself with clean, cool breaths.

  Spirits didn’t usually bother with the physical plane unless they had orders to do so. Where was its summoner? She put her face up to the window again, but could hear no voices. Warily approaching the still-open back door, she listened again but heard nothing. She snuck inside.

  She had barely taken two steps when a Stun Bolt hit her in the back, clobbering what was left of her will to the ground. With it, Frostburn fell, unconscious.

  When Frostburn came to, her wrists and ankles were bound with zip ties that dug into her skin. She was tied tightly around her middle, attached to a chair, and wore a blindfold and a gag. Panic welled up inside her, and she quashed it back down: if whoever did this had wanted to kill her, she probably never would have woken up. The fact that she had told her that her captor likely wanted something more from her, and that would give her a chance to come up with something. She was careful to avoid any movements or noises that might alert whomever had captured her.

  The odors of oil and gasoline told her she was probably still in the gas station. She could also hear very soft footfalls. A louder scrape of chair legs on cement startled and froze her in place.

  “I see you’ve rejoined the land of the living. How lovely for you.” She recognized the voice of the person who had been speaking earlier.

  The voice, cheerful and matter-of-fact, grew closer. “You can call me Sir. Well...” He chuckled. “You can’t call me anything at the moment, can you?” he said, and a gloved hand patted her face roughly where her gag dug into her cheek, “But you know what I mean.”

  “First, we’re going to have a conversation,” he said and moved away slightly. “You’re going to tell me everything you and your team know about a job you just pulled against Telestrian Industries. After that,” he said in a breezy, how-about-this-weather sort of way, “I’ll kill you. Loose ends sink ships, you know. Or something like that, anyway.”

  Frostburn remained very still. She couldn’t telegraph anything using her eyes or mouth, so it was best not to show him in her posture that she intended to fight back.

  “I have to say, this has really been fun,” he said in a conversational tone that suggested she hadn’t awakened his suspicions yet, though she wasn’t always the greatest judge of character. “Getting the chance to play fixer to a bundle of little baby runners. They’re so cute. And dedicated, my goodness. Did you know that it took only the tiniest push to work them up to practically foaming at the mouths to go right all of society’s wrongs? They’re simply full of the fires of injustice.” He chuckled and sighed. “So full of piss they are. So full, in fact, that I was able to get them out the door on a mission just as soon as I knew we had company.”

  He continued talking as he approached and moved around to behind her right shoulder. “You showed up earlier than I’d expected, I’ll admit. I had a terrific plan all laid out, too. You would come looking for young Emilia—or so my research said—and poof, here we’d be: me with you under my boot, and you all alone. But you came early. I had to get them to work so quickly that I might have forgotten to tell them some important information.” His tone lightened with amusement. “The corporate stooge they’re off to egg may have gotten an anonymous death threat within the past, oh, six hours or so? And so the stooge’s guards will certainly be on their toes. Hell, they’ll probably shoot anything that moves. Ah well, that’s what you get for trying to change the world. And what budding revolutionary wouldn’t love to become a martyr for their cause? Down with the Industrialized Food Chain!” he shouted. “Or was it a more general ‘down with industry?’ I can’t keep these pet causes straight.” He sighed. “No matter. Let’s begin.”

  A cold band of metal lay across her cheek where he’d patted her earlier. The gag around her mouth tightened for a moment and she heard a soft tearing sound. The fabric loosened and fell into her lap. The metal blade moved smoothly along her skin to rest on the side of her neck, where he pressed in. She noted he seemed careful not to touch her.

  “Now,” he said, “start talking about your job.” His tone of voice turned into one of mock-intrigue. “Tell me everything.”

  Frostburn worked her mouth carefully, grateful to get the function of her mouth back to her, though mindful of the blade on her throat. She was never a good talker, even at the best of times, but she started in, talking empty information while her brain sorted for a good plan.

  “Well, I wasn’t there for the job itself, so I don’t know much about it―”

  The blade pressed into her neck, and she grunted in pain. Warmth seeped down her neck. “Don’t tell me what you don’t know,” He said quietly into her ear. “Tell me what you do know. Things will go much easier on you that way.”

  “Okay, okay.” Frostburn swallowed. “We got approached by a guy who wanted us to hit a warehouse,” she said haltingly, acting as though she were flustered and scared. Trying to take her time. The guy seemed to buy it. At least, he hadn’t called her on it yet.

  Her brain stumbled over the fatigue and the worry and the pain, sifting through coherent thoughts and blind, lizard-brain reactions to formulate a plan, all while trying to speak in complete, understandable, not entirely true sentences. She made up facts off the top of her head, mostly pulling from vague memories of the last action trid she watched. Careful to insert plausible details in among the bullshit.

  A plan began to coalesce in her mind, and Frostburn knew she had just the one chance to try to get it to work. He had neglected to lash her legs to the chair, though her ankles were tied together, and she knew from the direction of his voice and the blade that he was behind her right shoulder. In mid-sentence, Frostburn pretended to be caught by a fit of coughing. Her captor, who was apparently eager to hear all she had to say, lessened the pressure on her neck ever so slightly. At the easing of the pressure, Frostburn shoved her boots hard into the floor and threw herself backward and to her left.

  He squawked in surprise and managed to dodge out of the way of her fall.

  When Frostburn hit the floor, she pulled up her feet and kicked out, viciously, with all of her strength. He snarled and cursed in a lilting language she didn’t understand as she thought she heard him land in a heap.

  She shot a silent order to her spirit of air to free her from her restraints. She could hear the man hacking and coughing and his boots scraping the cement floor as he scrambled to get back on his feet.

  The air spirit assented silently. Frostburn heard a rush of wind as the spirit materialized at her side and removed her blindfold. She locked eyes with her captor—a young, well-suited elf—as the spirit pushed electricity through the plastic around her wrists. Frostburn yelped as the jolt burned her skin. The spirit za
pped the plastic around her ankles, and she got to her feet, and kicked the chair away.

  The elf glowered at her from the other side of the room while he summoned a spirit of his own. A humanoid shape comprised of fire materialized beside him.

  “You’ve only bought yourself a few seconds, my dear,” the elf said. “You and I both know you’re barely on your feet. Tell me what you know, and I won’t even cut you. I promise!”

  The air spirit dove for the elf, expanding as though inhaling a massive breath. It spread out and tried to engulf the elf within its form, but the fire spirit counterattacked, breaking up the attempt.

  Frostburn dashed out the open door at the back of the station. The sky had lightened considerably since she first arrived: the rosy hues on the horizon had paled and almost disappeared in the lightness of daytime.

  The elf was right. Even now, she was barely upright after the barrage of drain and spell damage nearly put her on her ass, and the drain from summoning that latest spirit felt an awful lot like shoving a knife through her third eye. She ducked behind an old, electric-blue Nissan Jackrabbit that looked like it had been driven into every light pole in Seattle. Distant sizzling and whooshing came from the interior of the station as the two spirits battled one another. The elf would be out here and on her in a second. She had to get away.

  With every instinct in her screaming to just run, don’t fight, she summoned a third spirit—the last one she could keep under her control—and nearly fell over from the effort. Her eyes watered from the pain in her head as a column of white and blue fire materialized next to her.

  She peered over the roof of the car and spotted the elf, who had indeed followed her out. He was hunkered behind a junked Toyota Gopher a row over and peered back at her. Like two opposing kickers in a sports match, Frostburn and the elf eyeballed one another and readied their attacks. Frostburn stood and let loose a Flame Strike down on her opponent, suppressing a gasp from the effort. But the elf was ready for the spell and dissipated the magical energies before they could do him any damage with nearly effortless counterspelling.

  “Attack!” She ordered her own fire spirit into action, and it closed in on the elf. With his spirit of fire busy with her air spirit, she took a chance and sprinted for her car.

  A whoomf from behind her was her only warning, but she knew that sound and threw herself to the ground. A ball of flame flew over her—right where she’d been standing a moment ago. The heat seared her back, eliciting a cry of pain and an acrid stench from the scorched synthetic fibers of her sweatshirt. She scrambled back up to her feet and continued sprinting. The row of bedraggled trees at the back of the lot took the brunt of the spell. Leaves sizzled and smoldered as the fire burned off the morning dew.

  Frostburn slapped her palm on her car door. The biometric reader recognized her print and unlocked the door. She leaped inside, hearing the sound of small arms fire battering the lightly-armored back of her car as she sped away.

  Frostburn reached out to her spirit of kin as she drove. The spirit assured her it was near Emilia, and offered directions to reach their location. Frostburn navigated the district and tried to follow the spirit’s instructions, an enormously difficult task given that spirits don’t consider streets and city layouts when guiding their summoners around. So, while the spirit would indicate that way, Frostburn had to deal with city blocks, traffic lights, and one-way streets.

  She’d done her best to keep an eye out for anyone trying to follow her. She kept an eye out in astral space, looked behind her in physical space, and saw no one matching her route. So she was in the clear for now, but would have company soon enough.

  The destination the kin spirit directed her to was the Ingersoll Aquaculture. Perched on the south bank of the Snohomish River, the facility was one of many owned by food giants Ingersoll and Berkeley. Eat anything produced in 2080? Chances were extremely good that whatever you ate was made from one of their products. The facility wasn’t a very large one, but like every other piece of corporate property, Ingersoll and Berkeley was a subsidiary of Universal Omnitech, which meant that Knight Errant didn’t even go in there. If you stood within the corporate limits, you played by the corporation’s rules—rules that generally permitted them to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. And considering the elf had said he’d called in an anonymous death threat, “shoot first” was certain to be the course of action security would take.

  A stone wall encircled the perimeter, with a sign that read “Ingersoll Aquaculture” in enormous green letters standing upon it. Greenery of many types, none of which Frostburn could name, grew along the front and the top of the wall, lending the place a refined appearance.

  Dawn sunlight glinted off the one-way glass covering the four-story building at the center of the property. It wouldn’t be long before the morning rush of employees began streaming inside. Of course the place would be filled with guards, as any self-respecting corporate facility should be. Honestly, a part of Frostburn―the part that bought and consumed groceries from the greater Seattle area―kind of hoped the place had decent security, if only for the sake of public health.

  She stashed her car on a corner up the street from the plant, . It wasn’t illegal to park outside the place, even right next door, but she preferred to keep it as out of sight as she could—no sense in having her vehicle appear on a sec drone’s camera.

  Her head hurt terribly. Now that she had her car back, she had access to her supplies. She popped a pain pill and considered applying a stim patch―the only way short of a nap to rejuvenate herself―except if she couldn’t finish her job within the half to full hour the drug remained active, it would wear off and she’d probably crash hard. She couldn’t afford that. Nevertheless, she pocketed a few, just in case. She also grabbed the Ceska Black Scorpion machine pistol she kept hidden in the car for True Emergencies. And finally, she shoved herself and her bulky sweatshirt into the smelly armored jacket she’d removed on her way home. It might stink, but smelling bad beat getting dead any day of the week.

  More properly equipped, she considered her options. The spirit said Emilia was inside this facility somewhere. From what the elf had said, there was a group of them here, waiting to egg some suit. She only knew Emilia, not the others, and she honestly didn’t know what to expect from any of them. She was going in blind. Hell, maybe the elf was lying, and he hadn’t sent them here at all. Maybe this was just one more convoluted way to try to get her killed. She’d take a look around, avoid trouble, and come out for backup if necessary. With luck, it wouldn’t be necessary, but she crossed herself for good measure. She would have tried to call Emilia again, but the elf must have taken her commlink. It made her extremely grateful she kept her notes generic.

  The telepathic connection between spirits and their summoners made it possible to know whether a spirit had been dissipated or whether it remained available on the physical plane. The spirit of kin was still around, but the spirits of air and fire had been sent back to their home planes. The air spirit had “popped” during the first few minutes of her drive; the fire spirit soon thereafter. That meant she had the freedom to summon up to two more spirits. A good thing to know, just in case. Of course, it also meant that the elf and his spirit had won the battle back at the gas station.

  Frostburn closed her car up and walked deeper into the block, away from the road. She backed up against the side wall of the property where she was hidden by the masses of greenery and the shadows produced by the morning light. There, she cast an Improved Invisibility spell on herself. A wave of nausea passed through from her stomach, up her core, and into her head. Sometimes magic was like that, though. Some days you could cast spells all day, it seemed, with little to no trouble. Other days―particularly, she had noticed over years of experience, on those days she succumbed to worry or fatigue―even a simple spell could knock you down for the count. Considering the stressors in my life at this very moment, she thought wryly, she could understand taking some drain.
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  Her physical form vanished from view. She could still be heard―or smelled, she supposed, and briefly wondered whether the smelly armor jacket was such a good idea―but she’d just have to be careful. She tied off the threads of magic to sustain the invisibility and then cast Levitate on herself. The drain on her system after the second spell could have been harder to resist alongside having to sustain the first spell, but she managed without a twinge of nausea.

  Enveloped in invisibility and with the ability to fly, more or less, she lifted herself into the air in order to better survey the grounds of the aquaculture. At first, she lifted herself only so far as to see over the wall. There, she waited and watched astral space, looking for magical security. If anyone would be able to easily notice her, it was magical security. That invisibility spell made her invisible in physical space, but the spells lit her up like a spotlight in astral space. Once satisfied she could move around without attracting attention, she rose further into the air and floated within the bounds of the property. She perched, but did not relax, over the roof.

  Ingersoll Aquaculture was predominantly focused on the growing and farming operations on the river. A large grid of pens and their accompanying harvesting drone tracks covered the shoreline. The surface of several of the pens glinted and bubbled with jumping fish. Outside the perimeter of the grid, a line of buoys marked the boundaries of the operation, and Frostburn figured the corp probably had some other painful goodies waiting for anyone trying to gain entrance from that side. She’d heard rumors of modified guards (either with ’ware or genetic modifications) who spent their entire shifts underwater. Though she wasn’t sure they were that intense for guarding something like this place, she certainly didn’t want to test that theory, either.