Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  Yu had one more task to take care of tonight, and it wouldn’t get done here. He had to get out to Redmond, to the glamorous confines of the Novelty Hill Sleep & Eat. No Jitnee or cab would be willing to take him out there at this time of night, and Emu had expressed clear disdain for ferrying Yu around, especially after what had happened last time. So he was left to trudge back to the Americar she’d lifted for him.

  It seemed like she had access to an unending supply of these things. He had asked her about it once. She’d just shrugged and said, “It’s always easy to find things people need but don’t really like. Like tampons, or factory workers.”

  He had been unable to craft a reply to that.

  The current stolen Americar was two years old, silver-grey, and dented on the passenger side in multiple spots, indicating that the driver saw it as disposable transportation anyway. It would definitely be that—like the others, it would be trashed once the evening’s work was done. Right now, though, he had a date with the 520.

  Traffic was light out of Downtown and into Touristville. It was always a weird drive, as you essentially watched the trappings of civilization melt away outside your windshield. Gleaming skyrakers became luxury residences became plain apartments became ramshackle slums became decaying buildings became rubble. And he had to get through some of the rubble to get to his destination. He wasn’t just going to Redmond—he was going to East Redmond. The only good thing was that he wasn’t traversing the entire district the long way.

  The 520 became Novelty Hill Road, and the road became a collection of potholes loosely connected by asphalt. He had neither GridGuide nor a need for great speed, so he drove at an easy pace. He didn’t need the car to last long, but he also didn’t want to shatter his suspension before he was back at the safehouse,

  He chatted over his comm with Zipfile as he got closer, going with voice since he didn’t have to worry about being overheard.

  “I’m glad you’re still up.”

  “Of course I am. This is hacker primetime.”

  “Any messages from the contact?”

  “Not to me. He’s been chatting with a few friends, looking for any background on you.”

  “And finding?”

  “The truth, or at least the part we want him to know. Nothing you don’t want him to see.”

  “Is he bringing backup?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then why aren’t I?”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re not physically here.”

  “Well, sorry you’re feeling skittish. Wanna wake up Rude, see if he’s in a mood to join you?”

  Yu considered that for almost half a second. “Maybe not.”

  “Okay then. So what’s the easiest way to not get shot?”

  “Don’t give them a reason to shoot you.”

  “Right. Behave yourself.”

  And with that, the warehouse that held the Novelty Hill Sleep & Eat came into view.

  The Sixth World was built on a simple principle, namely: How little can we give people and still make them willing to pay for what they get? (With its corollary, how little can we pay people and still keep them willing to work?) The Novelty Hill Sleep & Eat was one of the clearest expressions of this principle. The name was a statement of purpose, since you could sleep there, and you could eat there, and not much else. The rooms were little more than a pod. The food was little more than soypaste (or, often, exactly soypaste). The Matrix in the area sucked. Recreation didn’t exist. Death awaited outside if you were foolish enough to make any conspicuous display of wealth.

  The good thing was, few people who saw you in the area thought you were up to anything big, because if you were up to something big, you wouldn’t be at Novelty Hill.

  The biggest trick was privacy. The “eat” part of Sleep & Eat happened in an entirely charm-free cafeteria, with bench seating for up to 150 weary souls. There were no backrooms, no private rooms. You could have a confidential discussion there, but you had to do it quietly, and it helped if you knew some of the slang Barrens rats liked to sling around. Or made up new slang, so you could keep things secret even from the rats.

  This meeting would be all business, since there was no reason to soak in the atmosphere. The only small talk would be there for reasons of keeping up appearances.

  Yu left his jacket in the car as he walked in. Once inside, he pushed the buttons to get a bowl of soy spiked with an Uncle Charleez’ Smoky Backwoods Maple flavor pack. The bowl was in his hands in seconds, the steam carrying the fine scent of a maple-wood campfire that also happened to be burning a handful of moldy dishrags.

  He saw his target quickly. It helped that there were only three other people in the cafeteria. One was an elf in fishnet stockings who gave him an inquiring look as he entered, another was a dwarf with a hunched back and a vacant stare, facing the wall and seeing nothing.

  The third person was a human, dressed simply in t-shirt and jeans. Spellcaster. That made Yu extra nervous about meeting him alone, because who knew how mages’ minds worked? Like Frostburn, who managed to be both a mother hen and an insane ball of destruction. Tough to pin people like that down. Anyway, he had to hope the references—including, eventually, the ork in the first bar of the night—would do their work.

  “Can I sit here?”

  The human shrugged and did not look up. “Sit where you want.”

  Yu sat down and heaved an exaggerated sigh. He grabbed his spork and began spooning up paste. The taste wasn’t any better than the smell.

  “Long day?” the human said.

  “Very long,” Yu said. “Felt like two days. Started at ten in the morning and didn’t let up.”

  “Ten’s not that early.”

  “Still long when you work until midnight.”

  “Yeah, but you gotta do it, right? Gotta bring in the nuyen.”

  “Barely any. Figure I should make a grand for what I did. I didn’t get anywhere near that.”

  “Maybe you need better skills.”

  “Tell me about it. You know who gets paid? Mages. Spellcasters. The ones who can shoot lightning and hit a commlink half a kilometer away or something.”

  “Yeah, it takes a good cast to do that. But it’s doable.”

  “They just need someone to tell them what to hit, right?”

  “If that someone knows what they’re doing.”

  Yu slurped the rest of his soy. “I tell you, spellcasters. They do it right, they got the world by the tail.”

  The man looked up with a frown and creased forehead. “It’s not always easy as all that, you know.”

  Yu stood and patted the man on the shoulder. “It’s all a step on the journey.”

  The man grunted.

  Yu walked away. Just like that, he had a spellcaster who would hit a commlink with a lightning bolt from half a kilometer away at 10 a.m. in two days. All Yu had to do was get him the location.

  Smooth and easy. All the pieces were in place. At least, all the ones he could put in place tonight.

  Time to report back. Then sleep.

  Back at the safehouse, Zipfile was still up, of course. Rude and Frostburn were sleeping. Emu was up, too, messing with a drone.

  She looked up as he came in. “Results?”

  “As good as can be expected. Zipfile had it down. The pieces are arranged like she thought.”

  To Emu’s right, Zipfile nodded in quiet pride.

  Yu settled into the vinyl easy chair that had become his preferred seat while here, even though it squeaked when he moved.

  “What worries me is we’re trying to read a lot of people to get this to work right. We read someone wrong, then we get unpredictability.” He paused. “I’d really like to be done with unpredictability.”

  Emu twisted the wrench she was holding, then dropped it to look at her handiwork. “In the wrong line of work then, ain’tcha? And aren’t a lot of these your reads? You doubting yourself?”

  Shift. Squeak. “…Maybe
.”

  She turned on the drone and watched it drift leisurely toward the ceiling while making remarkably little noise. “Don’t do that.”

  Sure, he thought. I made the reads. I know what we’re doing. This will work.

  Still, he didn’t drift off until the sun finally started rising.

  Frostburn

  By the time she’d run through all the messages that had accumulated overnight, Frostburn felt she was mostly up to date. The most important information she had was the timeline—one day and change. One more day, and they might all be able to go home.

  It’s not that she didn’t like being with the other members of the team, though stepping over Emu’s drone pieces every morning was something she could do without. It wasn’t just that some of those grease stains would never come out of the carpet. Living with the people you work with made life feel like work; every hour, every day. She missed her not-work life.

  But it was now barely more than a day. That, she could get through. Especially since there was plenty to do in that time.

  Emu was still up and tinkering, so Frostburn grabbed some ’kaf and sat on the couch reasonably close to the rigger’s impromptu workstation. She knew she was about to make Emu’s morning.

  “Let’s talk about cars.”

  The conversation with Emu was helpful, but also frustrating. It underlined the fact that there was a perfect mage for this job—and she wasn’t it. This job demanded subtlety, finesse, and sneakiness. Sure, Frostburn could be stealthy, but mainly for the purpose of sneaking up on people and throwing a fireball or ice spear in their face. The job she had in front of her was better suited to a conjurer, or a manipulator, or something. But she was the tool the team had, and she was what would have to work—blunt as she was.

  Zipfile made a persuasive argument why this wasn’t going to be in her department. “Yeah, I could make the car not work for a little. But most of the things I can do remotely can be fixed easily, unless I try to fry the whole circuitry. Which is hard, because most people don’t leave that on when they’re not driving, so my access is limited. And if I do it while he’s driving, it defeats the whole purpose of having the breakdown sneak up on him. Plus, do you know how many places my fingerprints are going to be when this is over? I have enough on my plate. You can do this. Figure it out.”

  So, with help from Emu, she figured it out. Maybe. Then Emu drove her and Zipfile to what was going to be the scene of the crime.

  Simon Dennis, the Mr. Johnson formerly known as Mr. Miller (Frostburn had learned long ago that working the shadows meant being comfortable with lots of names and shifting identities), had a nice home in a safe part of Renton. Just east of the 405 was a cluster of a few dozen houses spread around a perimeter road with another single road cutting through the middle of it. The trees surrounding the development were mostly natural, with a few artificial models for power generation or surveillance thrown in.

  “This is why I’m not gonna be helpful here,” Zipfile said, watching the trees. “The people living here have money, tech resources, and a mountain of paranoia. There’s a lot of corp facilities that’ll be less guarded than this mess, at least Matrix-wise. They won’t have Black IC—probably—because the corps can be touchy about letting that into the wild, but they’ll have enough alerts set to get both GOD and Knight Errant to the scene in short order. Which is bad for the low profile we want to keep.”

  “But I’m just going to coast?” Frostburn asked.

  “Do you know how paranoid someone has to be to keep a mage or spirit on retainer?” Emu asked.

  “Shadowrunners do it all the time.”

  “Exactly. But you know how neighborhoods like this treat spirits—they don’t trust ’em. Unauthorized summoning will get you cracked down on, hard. It’s way worse than unauthorized spellcasting, since from what I hear, most of the times they don’t know what people are casting anyway, so they don’t scrutinize auras too closely. But spirits of any kind just make ’em nervous. From what I hear, it’s best not to test ’em.”

  They didn’t go into the subdivision itself, as both Emu and Zipfile assured her that they would be tracked as soon as they did so. But a drive around revealed a rather plain five-story hotel just west of the development. Zipfile made a quick render of the building and its environs and found that the top floor would be slightly too low to get a view over the trees—but the roof would be just right,

  “This will work great,” Frostburn said. “I’ll get a room, set up shop here.”

  “Do you want company?”

  Frostburn bit her tongue to keep herself from saying, “No, that’s okay” too quickly. In the end, backup was more important than solitude. Solitude would come soon enough. “Yeah, having someone here would be good. And we should be coordinating anyway. Do you have a SIN we could use here?”

  Zipfile rolled her eyes. “I could check in here with a drawing I made of my kitty in grade R.”

  There were about 200,000 hotel rooms in Seattle. A lot of them were Downtown, and were nicer than this, and tens of thousands were sleeping tubes, or something close to it. But about twenty thousand were like this—same full-size bed, same chipboard desk, same pay-for-play trid player. Twenty thousand identical rooms.

  Frostburn couldn’t decide whether that made her feel comfortably anonymous or entirely like a nonentity, a person to be overlooked and disregarded.

  But like solitude, existential questions could wait a day or two.

  When she did this for real, she’d need to be up on the roof herself, but for planning purposes, a drone was sufficient. Emu wasn’t there anymore, but she’d left a crawler behind, and even entrusted Zipfile to run it herself. The dwarf took to it like a kid with a new remote-controlled car on Christmas.

  “Forward…backward! Forward…backward! Now side to side!”

  Frostburn glanced at the ARO Zipfile shared with her showing what the drone was seeing. It was moving in accordance with Zipfile’s description. She returned to the car schematics Emu had referred her to.

  “You better hope no one’s paying attention to the roof.”

  “Oh, someone is. The two other kids who have drones up here are watching it all.” She paused. “I think we’re gonna race.”

  “I know tomorrow seems like it’s a long way away, but maybe we should focus?”

  After a single race around the roof—which she won handily, thanks in part to a cornering algorithm she whipped up on the fly—Zipfile set the drone to work.

  The fates were smiling on this job enough that Frostburn was beginning to get suspicious. Sooner or later, she was going to have to pay for it. She just hoped fate could wait.

  The garage of Dennis’s house was where her focus would be, and it was perfect. The yard had a colorful array of bushes and native flowers—Zipfile’s drone caught a glimpse of the gardening drone wandering through the branches and leaves—which partially obscured the front of the house. The driveway was broad and bright, leading up to a white garage door. She had a clear shot. She could even see the release for the opening mechanism inside a window above the door.

  It was too perfect.

  Even the car schematics she was looking up were making sense—the parts she had to target were things she already knew.

  Zipfile kept the drone moving and taking pictures so Frostburn would have a virtual model of what they were seeing. Content that the dwarf knew what she was doing, Frostburn turned back to her AROs. She closed the car schematics and instead focused on the spell formula she had picked up—thanks for a referral from Emilia, of all things.

  Food would come in ninety minutes. The sun would set in three hours. She’d probably wait three or four hours after that. Then, there would be no more sitting around.

  At one o’clock in the morning, Simon Dennis was safe at home—in bed, judging by how the lights in his house had gone off a few hours ago. Zipfile was in the hotel room, hacking a Jitnee driver’s profile while pacing the drone across the roof to keep an eye on thing
s around Frostburn.

  Frostburn, of course, was on the roof.

  She wished she had been able to levitate herself from the floor of the room right out the window, but she had trouble steering through the angles when airborne. Instead, she had to step out the window and give herself a jolt as she fell and then caught herself. And then slowly drift upward.

  They had put themselves on the top floor, so there was no other window to worry about passing. It was a short trip until her feet were on something solid. She scurried backward reflexively, moving away from the edge. Behind her, cars passed every few moments on the 405. None gave any indication of seeing her, primarily because she’d made herself invisible before stepping out of the window. This wasn’t amateur hour.

  Before she did anything, she scanned the area for auras—mages, spirits, anything that might throw a challenge her way. A few houses in the subdivision had mana barriers around them—good for them, Frostburn thought. Good to see people actually paying attention to the world. But it was even better to see that Dennis’s home was not one of these. And none of the magical auras she saw looked like an entity—nothing that would see her or interfere with her. At 1 a.m. in this part of Renton, all the good mages were home in bed.

  From the rooftop to the garage was about 120 meters. She had to make three shots from her perch. All of them would be hard.

  Actually, the first shot itself wouldn’t be difficult—seeing it would. The lights in the house were out. There were no lights in the garage. The only nearby lights were street lights, and their glare off the garage windows only made the task harder.

  Frostburn messaged Zipfile.

  The drone’s camera zoomed in, and the earlier images they had taken during the day came in handy. They could match up the daytime images with the nighttime ones to see which line or which shadow she was seeing was the item she wanted.