Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  The whole time he was getting ready for this, Rude didn’t think he’d like it. It was too contained. Too small. Too quiet. He liked big, loud statements. Big, loud action. He was going to feel stifled. Boxed in.

  Then it started. And he loved it.

  It was high-wire tension. Focus in every movement. A sort of grace.

  Zipfile had gotten them a map of the key pillars of the building. In an ideal world, they’d drill holes in each pillar and insert the explosives with precision. But this was nothing close to ideal. The work would be done in bursts of about one hundred seconds, and they couldn’t come close to the noise that drilling through steel—and whatever was covering it—would make.

  They had to go clumsy, but they also couldn’t just be obvious, since leaving dynamite strapped to the outside of the columns would be noticed by even the dimmest office drones—and possibly even the watcher spirit. The cladding around the support columns had a gap of about four centimeters at the base. That, plus the SnatcherSnake toy robot arm they had picked up, would help them get the explosives in place.

  Each stick had a fuse that would be triggered by a detonator that had to be within five centimeters of the fuse. The signal wouldn’t travel farther than that. The detonators would be placed with the dynamite and then left off until, hopefully, it was too late.

  Yu had provided some tips on moving silently, but Rude surprised himself by not really needing them. When they snuck through a door closing behind a night janitor, he moved like silk feels. Or like water. He flowed through the door. Even though he was carrying about fifty kilos of gear (he’d damn well made Frostburn and Elfy-pants carry some of it, and while the ork held her own, who was gonna ask an elf to carry anything close to what a troll hauled?). He knew the joy he was having in movement meant something, probably something about his past, but he was too enthralled with it to think about it carefully.

  The janitor, deep in the thrall of whatever was pumping through his ear buds, didn’t even flinch as they slipped in.

  The timer had already started. Two minutes. First column. Pull out dynamite, spray adhesive, slip it under, adhere it. Keep fuse down. Check timer. Repeat if possible.

  They got three sticks on the column. Then moved. Forward, right, through a door, down stairs. Wait. Watch timer. Then back up. Frostburn first, looking on two levels, astral and physical, but not doing much else because she was keeping three people invisible.

  The watcher spirit wasn’t the only obstacle. Physical guards made occasional rounds and watched the hallways with cameras. The invisibility spell was there to hinder their efforts, but that didn’t mean they could make noise, or move things too much with their invisible hands.

  They kept moving, column to column. Pull out, spray, slip in, adhere. Check fuse. Check timer. Get out of sight. Over and over.

  Then Frostburn tripped.

  They were on their way up after getting out of the watcher’s way. The ork caught her toe on the top step, then stumbled forward.

  The floor was a metal sheet. It rang like a bell on early Sunday morning.

  All three of them said nothing. They didn’t stand still. They went down, as quickly as quiet steps could manage. Rude used the handrail to support his weight so his feet made only glancing contact with the surface of the stairs. The building was built to modern standards, so it had a reinforced handrail at troll height—Rude mentally added the architects of the place to the small list of corporate people he maybe didn’t entirely hate.

  It almost made him feel a touch bad about what he was doing to their work.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the door opened, smooth and silent. That was Yu, who clearly had some secret art to opening doors stealthily. Rude went through, not knowing where Frostburn was.

  Above, footsteps hit the landing they had just left. Two of them. Voices, too.

  “See anything?”

  “Scuff mark, maybe. But I sure heard something.”

  “Yeah. Camera mics picked the sound up, too.”

  “But they didn’t see anything?”

  “No.”

  Rude mentally patted Frostburn on the back. Keeping her focus while tripping was good work. Of course, he wouldn’t actually tell her that. He assumed she knew.

  “Watcher’s going up, so it will see anything above. Let’s check down.”

  They had to coordinate and move quickly, and they had to do it without commlinks. They had all their electronics off to avoid giving an observant spider anything to notice. They couldn’t signal to each other, because they couldn’t see each other. But they were ready for this.

  A sticky note appeared on a wall in front of Rude, out of nowhere. He moved to the left side of it. He might have heard Frostburn to his right. The note said: “R, 30m st, R dr, up, back.”

  He stared at it until it vanished again. Then he counted to three to give Frostburn time to move, and then turned right to follow the directions Rude had written.

  He went straight about thirty meters and saw a door opening to his right. Behind him, the two guards had entered the hallway and were looking around. The door swung into the stairwell—the guards might see it from their angle, they might not. Either way, no sense in waiting around. Frostburn should have already gone through, so Rude followed.

  He slipped up the stairs as the door closed silently behind him. Did Yu have to study lots of different door types to know how to move them quietly? Was it instinctual?

  Had Rude studied how to move quietly? Had someone taught him? Who? When? Why? No time for misty memories right now. Focus.

  Rude waited for the door at the top of the stairs to open, then slid through it. They returned to the column they had been working on, but they didn’t get back to work. They slunk into dark corners and waited, watched. When the timer told them the watcher was coming, they went back to where Frostburn had tripped in the first place. The guards had moved on.

  So much of these movements had been worked out the day before. The system of communicating by sticky notes. How Rude, Yu, and Frostburn should position themselves relative to each other. They’d even gone up and down some stairs in Frostburn’s hotel with blindfolds on to get some practice in moving together without seeing each other. One or two passers-by had seen them practicing, but it was probably far from the weirdest thing they’d see that day, so they didn’t seem to care.

  Rude had grumbled a lot during the planning and practice, but that was mainly out of habit. He knew it would be valuable, and the last couple of minutes had made that clear.

  They went back to the work of preparing for the building’s destruction.

  Frostburn’s stumble must have been a sort of wake-up call, because the rest of the night went smoothly—if slowly, as the even distribution of 100 kilos of dynamite while avoiding a watcher spirit was time consuming. All told, it wasn’t terrible. When they were done, the early arrivers to the building were still a few hours off, and early morning traffic might allow them to get back to the safehouse and get a small amount of sleep. Frostburn made some halfhearted remarks about maybe she could just go back to her hotel, but Yu brushed her off, and Rude ignored the two of them. They’d done their part, he’d done his. The pieces were in place, the plans had been made.

  Tomorrow, it would all go off.

  That mean Rude might not sleep. The high-wire grace he’d felt while they made their way through AVR was leaving, but he could feel adrenaline building to replace it. There were moments in the next day he was looking forward to—really looking forward to—and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to chase the visions of them out of his head to allow sleep. Yeah, he was tired, but he knew how to push through that—adrenaline, determination, and street drugs were a powerful cocktail.

  So while Frostburn and Yu immediately disappeared to sleep when they hit the safehouse (having re-appeared, physically, back at the parking garage when they left), Rude sat down next to Zipfile, who of course was awake and working.

  “Ya know we been out riskin’ our hoo
ps while ya sit here playin’ in the Matrix, right?”

  Zipfile didn’t look at him. “I know.”

  “All the risk, right in our shoulders. While you sat here.”

  “Go tell Dieter there’s no risk on my end.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy. Who died doing what I’m doing.”

  “What happened, he choke on a Frito?”

  Zipfile finally looked up. “If you’re so bored, you could go find an alley cat to kick or something.”

  “But then I’d havta move.”

  “Lazy rudeness is the worst rudeness.”

  “’S all I got right now.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Rude disappointed himself by letting several minutes go by without another comment. But then he thought of one. “Ya know how much of this we’re not being paid to do?”

  “Some.” Her hands wiggled for a few moments on Matrix tasks Rude couldn’t see. “Consider it an investment in ourselves.”

  “Yeah. ’Cause we’re the only ones really investin’ in us.”

  “For now.”

  Something was tickling at his head. It had been different once. He thought it had. He had been sought out. A desired commodity. Then the big blur, the big grey in his head that separated then from now. And separated the people who wanted something from him from the person he was now.

  He couldn’t, though, remember what it was they wanted from him.

  That thought occupied him so much that he might have fallen asleep while wrestling with it.

  Zipfile

  Plate spinning and juggling are two different tasks, even though they’re sometimes used to describe the same things. Juggling is more controlled. It’s difficult, sure, but the art to it is that you control the velocity and trajectory of each item you throw. You just need deft hands. That’s easier said than done, but it’s all in your control. If you do it right, you can stand in one spot and let the items fall to you.

  Plate spinning is different. Yes, you touch each plate, but you have to go to them. They won’t come to you. And your movement adds more variables, like a tremor in the ground or the breeze of your passing. And you do not reach a point of equilibrium or calm, you just keep moving.

  The vast majority of times, Matrix runs were plate spinning, not juggling. This one was not just plate spinning, it was plate spinning in a crowd of people who actively wanted the dishes to break.

  Dieter had shown her of the challenge of making a frontal attack on any part of AVR’s Matrix. She wasn’t going to walk in there and just bend the system to her will. But she still had a big role to play.

  She’d like to just stay remote and keep all the plates spinning from some bunker, but the job would be tough enough without adding Matrix noise to the challenge. Plus, it gave her the chance to let Yu think his little speech earlier had worked.

  Around six in the morning, when the team was assembled and ready to go out and get the job done, Yu stood between them and the door.

  “We’ve been running in five different directions lately. We’ve helped each other, sure. But we’ve been scattered. There’s good reason for that, but now we’re together. We’re a team. We’re going to make a statement today.”

  “Yeah, RIP,” Rude said.

  Yu ignored that, of course. “We’re all in this together. Let’s give ’em hell.”

  “Wasn’t that from Chase: Errant Knight?” Emu said.

  “I thought it was from Blood Runners,” Zipfile said.

  “Maybe it was a compilation,” Frostburn said. “A greatest hits collection of sappy speeches.”

  Yu turned to let them all go out the door, looking a little disconsolate. Rude clapped him on the shoulder as he passed. “Lookit how ya brought everyone together to mock ya. Good job.”

  Then they went out.

  It took two vehicles. Yu drove Emu’s Bulldog step-van; Emu drove her GMC Commodore, freshly detailed and made to look like a Jitnee car, with both real-world and AR light-up logos. Zipfile rode in the Commodore, with everyone else in the Bulldog.

  Zipfile had already set up everything she’d have to monitor. That list was:

  Maintain the hack making Emu’s car an authorized Jitnee;

  Make sure no one’s fake SIN was blown;

  Monitor what was happening at AVR without doing anything that might make their ID grumpy;

  Ensure every dynamite detonator came online and stayed there;

  Ensure the blocks she had put on nearby emergency services were intact;

  Maintain the master detonator; and of course

  Make sure the approximately two billion cameras in the area saw what they were supposed to see and didn’t see what they shouldn’t see.

  All the plates needed to stay up—right up until the big boom, when she’d happily let a few of them drop.

  This meant she wasn’t great conversation on the drive. She was going to have to do this on the move when they got there, so she spent the drive training her brain how to see all these things at once, making part of the background noise of her thought process. Lungs breathed, heart beat, and brain watched the Matrix.

  Traffic had picked up beyond middle-of-the-night level, but it had not yet reached why-aren’t-we-moving-what-is-wrong-with-everyone level. It was one of those Seattle mornings where the sun didn’t so much as rise as make the cloud cover incrementally lighter shades of grey. Rain spat intermittently as if the clouds, like much of the population of the sprawl, were just really having trouble getting going this morning.

  The Commodore stopped before Zipfile knew they were getting close. They were further away from the building than the Bulldog, since Emu would need to be able to drive up when the time came. They were in a Soybucks parking lot. Zipfile would be here long enough to grab a soykaf, then she’d be off to fill the anticipated ride request from Simon Dennis, who was about to find out his car battery was entirely drained.

  Emu reached into the back, grabbed a case, and handed them to Zipfile. “You got four in there. I assume you know how to activate them?”

  “Are you asking if I know how to turn on a drone? Really?”

  “Okay, fine. Take them. Go.”

  Zipfile turned and looked at the passenger-side door and stared.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  The dwarf glanced back over her shoulder. “I’m not a rigger, so I’m just not sure how to open one of your fancy car doors!”

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  Zipfile grinned and opened the door, getting a shove on her shoulder from Emu to help her get out. She turned and looked back at the rigger before walking away. One advantage of being a dwarf is you didn’t have to bend awkwardly to talk to someone inside a car.

  “Do it right,” she said. “Make him see you.”

  Emu nodded, and Zipfile headed off to AVR.

  Zipfile wore a white blazer over blue-and-black vertically striped pants. Frostburn had a white tank top over a short plaid skirt and long black leather boots, giving her a kind of business punk vibe that worked with her hair. Yu was Yu, his dark suit and skinny red tie making him look like someone who could walk into any office in the world.

  Rude—well, Rude looked like hired muscle. Zipfile didn’t think he could look like anything else. Black trench coat, jeans, white t-shirt. Basic and simple. And they wouldn’t be the first business people traveling with muscle, so he’d be fine.

  Of course, they weren’t supposed to be together, so Rude was assigned to someone—specifically, to Zipfile. She hoped it would be a blessing, not an obstacle.

  Two blocks away, they stopped. Zipfile reviewed the status of the fake SINs, and Yu reviewed who should go in when and what they should do when they got there.

  Then Zipfile and Rude walked away, since they were going in first. It was underway.

  She wanted to have a kind of laid-back stride, but that wouldn’t be possible if she was going to keep pace with Rude, so she went with business brisk instead. Rude, of course, got to walk as
lazily as he pleased without fear of falling behind.

  It was just before eight. Worker drones were all over, flooding into ’kaf shops and offices. Wireless devices weren’t really a problem now, since there would be so many that a security spider wouldn’t be alerted by seeing one. They’d only look for something threatening, so one of Zipfile’s jobs was to keep that from happening.

  The most immediate concern was looking like she fit in inside an office building without actually doing anything.

  They approached reception for the day’s first test.

  A female elf—corporations of a certain size seemed to have a bottomless supply of attractive elves to stock their front desks—smiled at her as she approached. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, thanks! I’m Lesedi Kriege, I have a ten o’clock with Suelyn Briggs.” She smiled as the receptionist started to speak. “I know, I know, I’m early. Very early. Traffic delays never hit when you expect, right? But it’s spitting rain out there, and all the ’kaf spots are crowded, and wandering around the city isn’t going to work in these heels. I won’t bother Ms. Briggs early, but if there’s a water cooler near any sort of horizontal surface, I’ll plant myself there and won’t even be noticeable.”

  The receptionist nodded, partially because Zipfile’s fake SIN had been cleared, and because the appointment (phoned in by Yu yesterday) had been verified. “Of course, Ms. Kriege. There’s a lunchroom through those doors, down the hall, and on the right. No one will be eating yet, so you can be there and barely be noticed!”

  “Perfect! Thank you. I’ll make sure my associate—” she jerked her head backward, “—doesn’t break anything.”

  Rude, whose SIN had also cleared, squinted menacingly at the receptionist as he passed. Zipfile wasn’t sure if he was playing a role or just acting on his mood.

  They were in. She watched the ARO with information on the SINs carefully, looking for signs of any alerts, any double checking, any alarm.