Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  “Nothing,” Zipfile told him.

  “Maybe take a break,” the elf said. “You’ve had a day.”

  Zipfile looked down at the deck in her lap. Melanie’s chip was inserted. She was using the power of her cyberdeck to try and force her way through the chip’s encryption. It was running fine without her. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I’m actually right a lot,” Yu said.

  Zip patted his hand. “Of course you are.”

  “Seriously, Z,” Yu said, after a moment. “You okay?”

  “I thought I was going to die,” Zipfile whispered. She set her deck aside and rubbed her hands together. Her palms felt dry and wet at the same time. She’d showered, and washed her hands a dozen times since they got back, but she still felt the tacky sensation of Melanie’s blood on her skin.

  “That never feels good,” Yu agreed. He sat down next to her, dapper as always. He leaned in and bumped her shoulder. “But you’re still here. Bad guys aren’t.”

  “Thanks to Rude.”

  “Thanks to you, too,” Yu said.

  “It was more Melanie than me.” When she closed her eyes, she saw the black suppressor swinging toward her. She saw Melanie shooting her gun. She heard the tick of the barrel hitting the helmet, then the blam blam blam of the shots. She felt the weight of the dead shooter.

  She shivered.

  “It’s going to be a hard couple nights,” Yu said. Zip looked at him but he was looking at the floor. “If you’re lucky, only a couple of nights.” He glanced at her and forced a grin. “If it helps, you did the right thing.”

  Zip closed her eyes and focused on her breathing for a long moment. When she opened them, she told herself it was time to be someone else for a while.

  “What’d you guys find out?” she asked.

  “Well, Frostburn says there’s probably not too much magic at AVR,” Yu said, grinning.

  “Probably,” Zipfile deadpanned.

  “Right,” Yu replied. “Not too much.”

  Zipfile chuckled. “Mages. Always deal in absolutes.”

  “Every time,” Yu said. “Rude got a line on the explosives before he ran off to meet you. Emu’s out picking them up right now, but Rude’s contacts aren’t the most stable, so Frostburn went with her.”

  Zip snorted. “And you? Anything from the triads?”

  “You were right. I’ve reached my limit for a while.” There was a catch in his voice.

  “Everything okay?”

  “It will be,” he said, and left it there. Then he slapped his knees and stood up, turning to look back down at her. “I’ll let you get back to it,” he said. “I asked Myth, when I was asking her about Rude’s friend, to see if she could get us a better plan set for AVR. If we’re supposed to do the snatch on the schematics before we blow the place up, we’ll need better maps.”

  Zip frowned. “I should be doing that.” That sort of work was literally her job on the team.

  Yu grinned. “Maybe you’ll get there before Myth’s people,” he told her. “I told her I put fifty on you beating her hackers.”

  “You son of a slitch,” Zipfile said. She felt herself smile in spite of everything else. Yu knew her well, knew a job and a bit of competition would get her going again. “Get out of here.”

  Yu raised his hands and backed to the door, then closed it behind him.

  Zip looked at her clean palms, rubbed them together, then ignored the phantom tackiness and jacked into the Matrix.

  Back in her own private host, Zip stood again in front of her murderboard and thought. The system automatically added in the new data and updated itself. Melanie’s picture was now covered with a big red X. Simon Dennis still glared at her.

  And way off to the side, in the unknown box, was Wuxing’s corporate logo.

  Behind her, an old-style coffee percolator sat on the counter, burbling away. This was how her host represented the cyberdeck chewing its way through the encryption on Melanie’s drive. It would burble until the coffee was ready; until she could read the chip’s data.

  Until then…there was the question of AVR.

  She called up the map she’d captured during the Dieter raid. She didn’t think too hard about where it had come from. Instead, she worked for a short time annotating what she knew about it. Several areas were clearly marked.

  What wasn’t marked was structural plans. They’d need those to know where to place Rude’s explosives. You couldn’t just put a stick of dynamite against a wall and hope the whole building came down.

  And before that, they needed to hit the central memory.

  Black spiders flashed in her memory.

  There were two ways they could approach that. The first was for Zipfile to hack in during the run and download the data. She didn’t like that idea; she’d seen firsthand the level of black IC running in AVR, and there was always the omnipresent threat of a Renraku demiGOD being just around the corner. She’d take the risk if she had to, but…the other way was to just have someone go inside and grab it.

  And since they had to go inside anyway…

  But to do that, she had to be able to tell them where to go.

  Which meant a run or a hack.

  She didn’t have time for that.

  Which meant spending some nuyen. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  she commed, from inside the Matrix.

 

  she sent.

 

 

 

  That dealt with, Zipfile went back to her murderboard. She’d chased down Melanie testing the assumption that Renraku owned Rip Current Sea Lanes, the company that had hired them to infiltrate Telestrian. What she’d gotten from Melanie so far didn’t help or hurt that theory, but the basis of evidence was on Renraku.

  If for no other reason than Telestrian had hired them to get revenge on Renraku. Why would a hungry corp like Telestrian take the chance of pissing off Renraku if they weren’t sure who hit them? Telestrian had a hundred deckers like Zipfile, she knew. They had the code Yu had put in their own servers. They could read it just as fast as she had, and they likely had all the other snippets that fed whatever the hell had happened when Yu had been inside.

  So they should know.

  Zipfile frowned.

  Something felt off. But she couldn’t put her finger on it. Her eyes shifted to the Wuxing logo. What was their involvement? Why kill Melanie? Had it just been coincidence that they had struck while Rude and Zipfile were there, or had their visit been the trigger?

  Zipfile sat down—a chair appeared from her host—and cupped her chin. The collar of her Han-style jacket tickled her chin, but she ignored that. It always happened.

  Fact: Simon Dennis had appeared to run Rip Current Sea Lanes. Now he was a Renraku executive. Or at least a subsidiary executive.

  Fact: Melanie had been his assistant. She had the SIN and commlink that had purchased the chip Yu had carried into Telestrian. She had been assassinated by runners likely hired by Wuxing.

  Zip frowned. Runners were freelancers. Even if Wuxing hired Saroyan often, she probably freelanced. They all did. So maybe it wasn’t Wuxing that had hit the elf.

  Fact: Telestrian Industries believed that Renraku employed Dennis. They believed Renraku needed retribution.

  Zip closed her eyes and jacked out.

  It was all too much, and she was missing something.

  Zipfile had just put the teabag in her mug when her AR pinged her. She called the alert up. It showed a coffee pot shooting steam. Her deck was done with Melanie’s data. She took her tea to the couch and jacked in. A new frame hung on her murderboard, flashing. She toggled the data open and began to read.

  A minute later she flashed the whole group.

 

  She jacked out.

  By the tim
e Rude appeared, yawning, everyone else was present, and Zipfile’s tea had steeped. Emu and Frostburn were on the couch. Yu perched on the arm next to Emu, arms folded. He hadn’t said anything about the AVR map, so he must not have heard back from Juggler yet. Rude looked around the room, shrugged, and sat down against the wall. His horns scratched parallel lines in the drywall when he put his head back.

  “I’ve got him,” she told the group.

  “Got who?” Frostburn asked.

  “Simon Dennis.”

  “Got him where,” Emu asked with a grin. “Like, locked in your room?”

  “I’ve got his address,” she said. “I’ve got his GridGuide routes to and from AVR. I’ve got his office number.” For proof, she put up an AR holo, and pulsed an office in the executive offices at the assembly plant.

  “Where’d you get this?” Yu asked.

  “Melanie’s chip.”

  Rude snorted. “That elf bit? She had all this?”

  Zipfile nodded. “She didn’t trust her boss. And she wasn’t what she seemed.”

  “What’s that mean?” Frostburn asked.

  “She was setting up to blackmail him,” Zip said. “She wanted to be a runner.”

  Rude burst out laughing. “You’re joking.”

  “She wanted to be a face, I think. She had gathered all this data on Dennis and hidden it on this chip. A couple of the notes are addressed to “Lou,” but I don’t know who that is.”

  “A partner?” Yu put in.

  Zipfile shrugged. “It could be. Or it could be a boss, or a cutout, or her imaginary friend. I don’t know.” She spread her hands. “The important thing is, we can grab Dennis if we want. Anytime.” She switched the AR display to a map, where a gold icon pulsed. “There he is.”

  Yu stood up. “You got his SIN. His real one.”

  “The one he’s using right now, at least.”

  The whole group stared at the map for a quiet moment. Zipfile knew what they were feeling. She felt the same thing. A sense of satisfaction. They had what they needed, almost.

  They could do this.

  “What else is on there?” Emu asked.

  “I’m still going through it,” Zip admitted. “There’s a lot.”

  “Don’t matter,” Rude put in. “Let’s just go grab the scummer.”

  “Maybe,” Yu said.

  “Whaddaya mean, maybe?” Rude asked. He pointed a gnarly finger at the map. “He’s right there!”

  “He’s only half the job,” Yu said, “and not the half that pays.”

  Zipfile drifted into the only empty chair. “The building. The factory.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get the map?”

  “It’s coming,” Yu said, not looking at her. “Myth said Juggler has a line on it. He’s getting me a price.”

  “This job is really starting to cost,” Frostburn muttered.

  Zipfile looked at her, surprised. “They went after your family,” she said. “You want out?” Someone went after her brother, that someone was dead. Zip didn’t care if it cost her a few bucks or the freaking moon.

  Dead.

  Frostburn glared at her. “Not even a little. But cash is cash.”

  “I can cover it,” Yu said diffidently. “And we need it.”

  “Okay,” Emu said. “We have Dennis. We know the building. We’re about to have a map. We have some explosives.” She looked around the room. “So what’s next?”

  Zipfile cleared her throat when no one else spoke.

  “Let’s figure out how we do this,” she told the others.

  Part Six

  Retribution

  Jason M. Hardy

  The Job

  Yu

  The elf at the bar was drinking gin and ignoring a half-dozen unfriendly glares. He stood instead of sat, his back to the bartender, looking out at the sparse clientele with a neutral expression. He considered his tan jacket, black pants, brown shirt combo to be business casual, but in this setting it might as well have been a tux. The lighting was dim, the tables splintered, and the cleanliness of the glasses was questionable.

  Finally, an ork in one of the darkest corners spoke. “You’re not wanted here.”

  Yu smiled. “I get that a lot.”

  The ork rose to his feet. His stance was unsteady. The table in front of him ground on the concrete floor as it edged forward. “We know who you are. Your people killed Saroyan.”

  Yu shook his head ruefully. “No. The target did that. Not us.”

  “Your people were there.”

  “And unaware of the hit. It caught them off guard.” He sipped his gin. “The target, though, was prepared.”

  The ork shoved the table out of his way. “You think Saroyan was unprepared? Bad at her job?”

  “To be completely honest, I don’t know enough about her to form any opinion.”

  The ork weaved closer. His jeans were ripped, and his Concrete Dreams t-shirt was frayed. The cloud of alcohol around him could have overwhelmed a barghest.

  Yu, though, was built of sterner stuff. He refused to wilt.

  The ork jabbed a thick finger at him. “We’re mourning here, drekhead, and you’re playing like Mr. Smooth, Mr. Ice, or whatever. Get out.”

  Yu stood up straight and wiped any trace of irony of his face. “Look, I know how this is. I’m one of you. We’re all out here together. We’ve all lost people.” He leaned forward, barely. “And we know what we need to do after we lose them.”

  “I don’t need you telling me how to do anything,” the ork growled. But he didn’t push Yu away, and he didn’t take a swing.

  “I’m not going to tell you how to do anything. I’m just going to help you do what you want to do.”

  Later that night, Yu was in another bar. Fortunately, he trusted the kitchen in this one more, because he couldn’t keep drinking on an empty stomach. The surfaces were light speckled stone, the accents were warm wood. This time he had a table, and he perched on a high stool nibbling pieces of a veggie platter. Didn’t make the fingers messy, didn’t have lettuce that could get stuck in the teeth, didn’t weigh him down with carbs. The stool was the biggest challenge—looking dignified without slouching over on one of those things was difficult.

  Then his target returned from the bathroom. He smiled as the human woman walked by and tilted his glass toward her, and she smiled back. They’d exchanged a few light pleasantries and shared a laugh. The harder part was coming up.

  Zipfile messaged.

  he sent back.

  The next move was easy. She was between him and the bar. He could plausibly walk by while getting another drink. So after waiting for a few minutes, that’s what he did. He planned the interaction carefully. If he was too playful, he’d seem flirty, and that was the wrong tone. So he focused where he needed the talk to go.

  “Remind me how many drinks before negotiation powers slip? Is it ten?”

  “Sounds like you’re trying to negotiate with yourself,” the woman said. “And failing. You may have already hit your limit.”

  “Then I might as well keep drinking, if it’s already a lost cause!”

  She smiled, and he continued on his way.

  Zipfile reached out to him as he ordered his drink.

 

 

  Yu was honestly not sure how to take that. So he just plunged ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

&n
bsp; He enjoyed a sip of his next gin at the bar, letting it swirl around his mouth, soak into his tongue. He wasn’t sure if he liked the taste or just found it reassuring, but then he wasn’t sure if there was a difference between the two.

  Then he heard the plane. The roar grew, and he started walking. It was loud as he passed the woman, so he had to raise his voice. “11:40 to L.A.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.” He tilted his head. “Sounds like it’s carrying…commlinks. Lots of commlinks. And some Snohomish Farms cheese. Probably cheddar. No wait—Gouda.”

  “You have an amazing ear for shipping,” the woman said.

  “It’s my life’s work.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He stopped in his tracks and pointed at her. “You’re in it, too. I heard it in your voice. You are a fellow laborer in the field of moving drek around the world.”

  She raised her hands. “You got me. Wuxing.”

  “Maersk.” He pointed to a chair. “May I sit?”

  She swept her right hand to indicate acceptance. He sat.

  “So!” he said.

  “So,” she responded.

  He leaned forward. “I’d introduce myself, but I don’t have to. You know my name. You knew I was Maersk before I walked over here.”

  This was the moment where he either pulled it off or blew it. She stared at him levelly, the nearly straight line of her brown eyebrows not betraying anything about her thoughts. He didn’t know which way this was going to go until she spoke.

  “And you probably knew I was Wuxing when you walked into the bar.”

  “Isn’t it a shame that two people can’t just meet randomly in this world any more?”

  “This is the world we have.”

  “Yep. Where people are commodities.” He grinned—rakishly, he hoped. “So. Want to exploit each other?”

  The conversation took a while—it was past 1 a.m. when he left the bar. Downtown still showed sparks of life here and there—the office buildings were empty, mostly, but people walked in and out of the restaurants and bars attached to hotels, and Jitnees prowled, waiting for anyone looking for a ride. Occasionally someone yelled something into the streets, the actual words lost in echoes off the steel, glass, and concrete all around.