“Oh, yeah. That much is obvious,” Frostburn said. “Tell me, what was the next step in your plan when they caught you all alone out there?”
Emilia made a pfft sound and scowled. “Plans are overrated.”
“You don’t seem to know the first thing about plans!” Frostburn said.
“I know you think plans are downright plan-tastic, but look,” Emilia said, scowling, “I know what I’m doing. You need to be able to be spontaneous. Keep your enemy guessing. Do what they don’t expect.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You don’t know half of what I do out here, so stop pretending you know everything.”
Frostburn barked a laugh. “Listen to you.” Then a dawning realization crept into her thoughts. “Wait a minute. You really don’t know what I do every day, do you?” Gunfire erupted nearby, and bullet impacts pinged all around them.
“Frag it!” Frostburn and Emilia said in unison, and they ran.
“We gotta get out of here!” Emilia shouted.
“No drek!” Frostburn said. They ran, gasping, toward the back of the facility and the docks again, Frostburn leading the way. If they could just lose their tail long enough to get off the property, maybe they could get away. She considered the river, but did not want to contend with aquatic security, especially when swimming was not her strong suit. They’d have to hide somewhere, wait it out.
Before they reached the docks, Frostburn doubled back toward the heaps of shipping containers. “In here!” She motioned for Emilia to dive into one near the back and on the second row up. They helped each other crawl up and inside. With a quick glance behind them, Frostburn didn’t see anyone obvious right away, and pulled the door closed before crouching behind the heaps of tarps mounded near the back.
The only sound inside the container was Emilia’s and Frostburn’s breathing, which gradually slowed as they regained their breath. They both froze when the sound of the guards approaching reached their ears. Boots ran around on the pavement outside, and they could hear the sound of radio chatter, but couldn’t understand it. Frostburn could tell from the clarity of a voice when he called back to his team that he had just cleared the container underneath them.
A full minute after the guard sounds moved away, Frostburn said in a hiss of a whisper, “So what’s the big deal stealing my fraggin’ car after you got trashed? You’re lucky you didn’t crash it, because then I would have killed your drunk ass.”
“I don’t know if you noticed,” Emilia said condescendingly, “but I have the ability to cast magic!” She waggled her fingers in front of her. “Ever hear of a little spell called ‘Detox’?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, you’re one of those,” Frostburn said with a shake of her head.
“One of who?”
“One of those people who uses magic as a shortcut. Let me tell you, you can try to take shortcuts, but magic isn’t going to save you from wear and tear. You’ll succumb to it eventually.”
“Whatever.” Emilia shook her head. “Oh, and to answer your question from earlier, I don’t know what you do, but frankly, I can probably imagine.”
“You can, can you?”
Emilia snorted softly. “Yeah. Let me see, you sit on your ass all day, monitor screens, drink coffee... Let’s see... Oh yeah, eat all the doughnuts—”
“That’s cops,” Frostburn said flatly, but Emilia continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
“—And once in a great while, you get to play dress up! You and your little security team buddies suit up and go play shoot-’em-up! You shoot the drek out of some SINless losers... basically whoever your handlers tell you to shoot, you shoot them. Does that about cover it?”
Frostburn shook her head. “Actually, no. That doesn’t even cover the job I did when I was a corporate security mage. Not that I expect you to care, but I haven’t been employed by a corporation for a while now.”
“Sure,” Emilia said. “To be perfectly honest, you’re right: I don’t care. I know all I need to know.”
“Excuse me?” Frostburn said, a little more loudly than she’d meant to.
“There’s no excuse for you!” Emilia said. “It’s people you who’ve—” Emilia clawed at the air with both hands, trying to find the right words as the anger erupted out of her. “–Fuck up the world! And you’ve left it up to people like me to get drek done! We’re the ones who have to go out into the world, risk our lives every damned day, and fix the shit you and your types frag up!”
“And just who are ‘my types?’”
“Corpers? Sell-outs? ‘The Man,’” Emilia said.
Frostburn snorted. “Honey, you are so confused—”
“Over here!” A voice shouted from outside the container.
Emilia and Frostburn both jumped, startled. Frostburn readied herself to counter spells. She reached for her Ceska, just in case.
Gloved hands began to pull open the doors. From behind her came a sizzling sound, an awful stench, and smoke began to fill the box. She glanced back, expecting to find a smoke grenade in their midst, but instead found Emilia, panting, with a smirk on her face and holding her hands up like a game show star demonstrating that the power of magic could do nearly anything, such as melt a hole clean through a metal wall. Which she had just done.
Frostburn stared at the hole, then at her cousin. “Nice,” she grudgingly admitted, and the two of them jumped out just as the guards were throwing open the doors from the other side.
The women jumped behind cover on either side of an open lane between the stacks of containers, barely dodging the bullets the guards slung in their direction.
Frostburn leaned out and popped off a burst toward the guards, who had jumped down and leaped behind cover of their own.
“How am I confused?” Emilia said.
“You really don’t know?” Frostburn said, then ducked as bullets popped over their heads.
“Enlighten me,” Emilia said.
Frostburn remained behind cover and pointed her gun over to blind-fire another burst at the enemy. To Emilia, she said, “I’ve been running the shadows for a while now. Got a team and everything.”
“Good for you. You’re still an asshole.”
“What’s your fraggin’ problem, anyway? I know you’re Awakened. I think that’s incredibly awesome, and I’m really sorry I wasn’t here to help you through it. But you have working hands, and you know my commcode. Or at least your mom does. You could have called me.”
“Why would I do that?” Emilia said, popped around cover, and launched an Acid Stream spell at the guards. She fell back as they fired bullets back at her. “Call the big, bad corporate mage who couldn’t get enough attention and money? I don’t want your help!”
“Can we just give the attitude a rest? I don’t need to be the bad guy,” Frostburn said, scowling at Emilia. She waited for the burst fire from the guards to subside, then shot back rounds of her own.
“No!” Emilia said with a hitch in her voice, “You don’t get to be the injured party here! You’re the one who left! You left me behind!”
Frostburn glanced over at her cousin, shocked, and saw light reflect off the tear tracks down her cheeks. Emilia scrubbed the tears off angrily and turned away.
“I―I didn’t mean to…” Frostburn said, and winced at the weakness of the reply. Bullets pinged off the walls of the shipping containers and whizzed overhead.
“Yeah,” Emilia said with a sneer. “Well, a lot of good that did me. Do you have any idea what it was like? My best friend took off and left me behind in Redmond because everyone was fawning all over her. Then you buy a house, and oh, isn’t she wonderful? But it’s in fragging Snohomish. Do you have any idea how awful it is there? What assholes those hick humans can be to people like us?” Emilia’s eyes flashed. “Then I Awakened? And I didn’t tell a soul! Because I’ll be damned if I’m going to become a sellout like you! I refuse!”
“I didn’t know,” Frostburn repeated helplessly. Emilia’s words cut her to the quick, and the
weight of responsibility for seemingly everything exhausted her: Emilia’s attitude, her acting out, everything. “I—” She stammered. “I didn’t know it was that bad out here, I just knew it was better than Redmond. I was just a kid!” She sighed, then frowned in confusion. “Wait a minute, what exactly were you doing here, anyway?”
“Running the shadows,” Emilia said, mockingly saying the words as though she were an old trid announcer. “At least, I thought we were,” She trailed off and a flush turned her cheeks pink. Her jaw worked as she ground her teeth together. “But I see the guy who pretended to be our fixer only had his eye on you. I’m sure you’re thrilled.”
“Oh for frag’s sake, knock it off! That asshole was out to kill me and my team! He targeted you as a way to lure me out, because he heard somewhere that I cared a whole lot about you, okay?” Frostburn was shouting now, but she didn’t care; the guards knew where they were, and her nerves were shot. “I’m not out for attention! I just want to keep people alive!” Her own voice hitched.
Bullets zinged through the air, seemingly to punctuate her point, and she whipped around the corner and emptied the rest of her magazine. She fell back under cover, chest heaving, and reloaded.
The guards, for their part, responded in kind. They fired dozens of shots, and through the din, Frostburn distinctly heard someone shout an order to move in.
“New plan: we gotta get out of here—Go! Jump the wall, get to the car!” Frostburn shouted at Emilia, as she laid down the best representation of suppressive fire she could muster.
“Plans are overrated, I’m telling you,” Emilia said, but obeyed her cousin’s order and bolted for the wall. Once Emilia was out of the line of fire, Frostburn launched a Mass Confusion spell in the direction of the guards and ran after Emilia, heedless to whether the spell worked on any of them or not.
As Frostburn rounded the corner and dashed for the wall, Emilia pulled herself over the top and disappeared on the other side of the wall. Frostburn tried to follow suit, but over twenty-four hours’ worth of stress, drain, and fatigue made her muscles only shake as she tried to leap up and catch the top of the wall. Her fingernails scraped stone, and she dropped back onto her feet on the Ingersoll side of the wall.
She heard the footfalls of the guards before they rounded the corner and she bolted. There were only two of them, she saw, and they lifted their guns toward her. Frostburn ran. Her lungs burned and her legs felt like she’d worn iron boots all day. She dodged for the cover of the corner of the building and popped off another burst in their direction before running further. She holstered her pistol and dug in her pockets as she ran, and found one of the stim patches she’d packed.
No time like the present, she told herself. If she dropped from the crash of this thing in the half-hour or so the drug was effective, it was game over for her anyway. Maybe her brother, sometimes professional contact, and fellow ne’er-do-well-type Jules would get the news to her team.
She slapped the patch on her upper arm and gasped as the shiver of stimulant drugs hit her bloodstream instantaneously and flooded through her system.
With the hiss of rejuvenation, she bared her teeth. She was done with this drek. She stopped, rounded on her pursuers, and summoned a spirit of fire, then summoned a spirit of water, and then called forth her spirit of kin, which still owed her a service after finding Emilia. Go big or go home, she thought, managing to avoid the majority of the drain from each of the three summonings. She sicced them all on the guards.
Poof, poof, poof. Each in turn, the three spirits materialized into the physical plane. The spirit of fire took on the appearance of a humanoid shape made of orange flames. The spirit of kin was still the old-timey farmer, and the spirit of water took on the shape of a massive fish made entirely of water. The three soared forward just as the guards rounded the corner. Frostburn watched, amused in a wicked way, as the guards’ eyes widened in shock. One brought a rifle up and started firing. The other turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Frostburn sidled away and cast a Levitate spell on herself. She grunted as a dose of drain washed through her and she cursed her luck, because she’d taken care to cast the spell at the minimum power necessary to get her butt off the ground. She was almost, but not quite as bad off as before the stim patch, but she was still up, and the Levitate spell was just strong enough to hoist her up and over the wall.
Boots on the Seattle side of the ground, Frostburn sprinted to her car. Just because she escaped their property didn’t mean they’d call off pursuit, and she had a car full of baby runners—she made a mental note to try to avoid calling them that to their faces—that she had to get back home in one piece.
Frostburn reached the street and stopped dead in her tracks.
The elf appeared decidedly less well-dressed than he did the last time Frostburn had seen him. His suit bore scorch marks, his face bore bruises, and a swath of singe cut through his short, neat hair along the side of his head. He stood just next to Frostburn’s car. His boot was on the small of Emilia’s back, and his pistol was aimed at the back of her head.
“Don’t try anything. Drop your weapon on the ground. I will kill her,” he said with a sneer. Whatever cheerful talkativeness had ensnared him earlier seemed to have bled away.
“Okay, you got a deal.” Frostburn slowly removed her pistol from its holster and held it loosely out in front of her. “The deal is, I disarm myself. You let her go.” She locked eyes with the elf as she took a half-step forward, crouched ever so slowly to the ground, and set her pistol down gently. Frostburn backed away a step and rose to her full height again, her hands held out before her where he could see them.
Emilia’s voice regained some of its customary strength, though it was muffled. “Don’t you talk about me like I’m not here!”
The elf shook his head, holding Frostburn’s stare like a viper and completely ignoring Emilia. “I don’t think so. We can deal right here and now, with my little bargaining chip.”
“No way. This is between us, and you and I can deal like adults. You only involved her to lure me out here, but we don’t have to do things this way.”
The elf scoffed. “I shouldn’t have even bothered—they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
“Frag you!” Emilia shouted and a Power Ball exploded around her with a crack like thunder.
Frostburn fell backward as the air around Emilia and the elf seemed to break apart, the seams crackling like lightning scorching the atmosphere. The elf convulsed like he was suffering a seizure and dropped his pistol. Blood bubbled from his nose. Emilia was barely visible within the center of the maelstrom of spell-effect that raged around her. And just as abruptly as it had appeared, the spell ended.
The elf ran wobbily around to the other side of the car, using it as cover. Frostburn took cover behind a tree. Emilia rolled across the ground in front of the car and sat on the ground.
“You all right?” Frostburn called from her cover.
Emilia grunted something in the affirmative.
A snarl came from the direction of the elf, and he popped up just enough to launch a Lightning Bolt at Frostburn. Frostburn ducked behind the tree just in time, and the spell cracked through the air and hit the trunk, leaving a jagged scorch mark and sending bits of bark flying in every direction.
Frostburn darted around cover and tried to assess the situation. Her car was maybe ten to twelve meters away. She couldn’t see details inside, but she could see vague silhouettes that told her that Emilia’s friends had listened to her and were inside. She hoped that none of them tried to play hero. She did not need them trying to interfere. It would just get them killed.
Emilia sat on the ground on Frostburn’s side, her back up against the rear passenger door, and, Frostburn just noticed, her Ceska Black Scorpion in her hands. She got on her knees, then popped up, and fired a wild burst in the direction of the elf.
“Stop that!” Frostburn shouted. “You’ll hit the others!”
The elf ducked, then rose, his own pistol in his hand, and fired back at Emilia. “Yes, Emilia, stop shooting!” he said. “You wouldn’t want to hurt your friends.”
“Come on, drekface!” Frostburn said. “Who uses kids as meat shields, anyway? Grow up, get away from there, and fight like a professional!”
The elf laughed. “I don’t think that would be in my best interest,” he said, and squeezed off a three-round burst at Frostburn. Bullets chewed up more of the tree.
“I’ll bet HTR is on its way by now,” the elf said. “Or Knight Errant. Or both! I don’t really care who kills you. Just so long as someone gets the job done.”
Emilia crawled on her hands and knees around the back end of the car. Frostburn noticed her and suppressed the urge to tell her to stop, to knock it off, that she was going to get herself killed, to just— What? To get away? This was her fight, too.
Frostburn instead started talking some more, with a few bursts over the hood for emphasis, in an attempt to distract the elf from whatever Emilia was planning. “You really screwed up, didn’t you? Look at us: all three of us trying to get big-time work done all by ourselves. Except now I have help, and you still don’t have anyone to back you up. You know, of course, that any high threat response teams showing up here won’t show you any leniency. You’re just as culpable as us. You ready to die at the hands of farm guards?”
She couldn’t make out just what Emilia was doing: she stopped crawling and sat on her butt at the back end of the car. Another burst of gunfire from the elf made Frostburn pop her head back behind her tree and fully distracted her from wondering about Emilia.
“The day is still young,” the elf said. “Perhaps I jumped the gun, but that’s only because I was excited to get the job done. I would get all I needed out of you, and then kill you. Then, I’d collect my paycheck. Or maybe I could go help off the rest of your team. Either way, I’m satisfied. And through it all, I probably would have kept the respect of my team of baby runners. I probably could have kept using them to do jobs for me. It’s a shame, really. This could have been so much less messy.”
Shadowrun Page 24
