She saw none.
Time to get some crappy workplace soykaf.
She led Rude to the lunchroom—she full well knew where it was, of course, even if the receptionist hadn’t directed her—and walked inside. It was empty. Rude filled up the doorway, letting her have the room all to herself for at least a few seconds.
She opened Emu’s case, took out the small crawler drones, and turned them on. They followed their programming and immediately scurried to dark corners of the cafeteria.
She checked their signals. Her programming had held—they looked like commlinks. Four commlinks, moving around the building like commlinks on the hips of office workers do.
They scurried off. Zipfile had volunteered to program them for the job they needed to do, and Emu had shot her a look somewhere between incredulity and murderous rage. So they were in her hands now.
Once the drones were moving, Rude cleared the doorway and sat down. There was not a troll-sized chair in the room, and his feelings about it were clear on his face. He put two chairs next to each other and perched on them. Awkwardly.
“One hundred minutes until my bathroom trip,” he said. “Got a deck of cards?”
“I’m so glad this is leisure time for you.” Emu was going to control the drones, but Zipfile sure as hell was going to watch them move. Four more plates added to her show.
They sat quietly for ten minutes. Then Frostburn sent a message that she had what she needed, and was ready to come in.
“All right, get up. Time to find a commlink. An Erika Elite, specifically. I caught a signal from what looks like one about two offices away.”
Rude stood and followed her out. Zipfile walked past the designated office. The name on it was Anita Ibarra.
They split up, Zipfile moving toward the office door, Rude moving to the end of the hallway. Zipfile knocked gently on the door frame, since the door was open.
“Hi, you’re Anita, right?”
The woman inside, who had dark hair tucked into a sensible bun, nodded.
“Hi, I’m Lesedi Kriege with Cartwright. I’m here early for a meeting with Suelyn Briggs, and my commlink and your public host simply are not getting along. Any chance you could help me see where I’m going wrong?”
Anita smiled and walked to the office doorway. “Share some AROs with me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
The nice thing about the first floor was that most of them reported to Suelyn Briggs. Which made them willing to help her, since it meant helping their boss.
Anita flipped through the AROs Zipfile shared. The public file transfer center was nowhere to be found—since Zipfile had gone to a decent amount of trouble to edit it out. That was another spinning plate.
“You’re right, it’s not there. That’s the darnedest thing!” Anita said. “The Matrix—who knows what it’ll spit out, right?”
Zipfile grinned in shared commiseration. “I swear it’s become sentient. And is a total ass.”
“Here, let me share my view, I can at least show you where it is.” Anita made a few gestures, and some AROs appeared to Zipfile, showing her what she had seen before she had deliberately screwed things up.
“Yep, that’s definitely different than what I’m seeing. You’ve got a square building with the columns, and an x-shaped building. Which one should I be looking for?”
Anita raised her arm to point to one of the hovering buildings. That was when Rude came crashing into the doorway.
Sweeping Zipfile out of the way, he knocked Anita to the ground. The troll stood over her menacingly for a second, then stepped back, suddenly looking confused.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“What the hell?” Anita said. “You—clumsy drekhead!”
“Max, you idiot.” Zipfile said at about the same time. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I…I thought I saw something,” he mumbled. “I thought she was making a move. A threat.”
“Let me help you up, Anita.” Extending a hand, Zipfile rolled her eyes as she pulled the corp exec to her feet. “I am so sorry about this. Our higher-ups just started sending bodyguards on some trips—” She glared at Rude, who managed to look suitably abashed. “—but I don’t think they screened them very carefully.”
Anita frowned as she dusted herself off. “I’d get rid of him if I were you. Fast. Before he gets arrested for assault.”
“I will take that under advisement,” Zipfile replied. “but more importantly, are you all right?”
Anita straightened her skirt and checked herself over one last time. “I’m okay, but…where’s my commlink?”
Zipfile looked over to where it lay in the hallway floor. “There. Is it okay?”
Anita gingerly picked it up, but the shattered glass and other parts falling off it made it clear that it was not, in fact, okay.
It helped that Rude, in his charge, had made certain to hit it with a small glass punch he had been holding.
“Oh no,” Zipfile said. “Oh no, I’m so sorry. That’s unacceptable. That’s—that looks like an Erika, right? An Elite? Hold on.” She made a show of typing things on her commlink. “Okay, I’m having a replacement couriered over, on us. We’ll have you back up and running before you know it. The messenger will be here soon.”
Anita still looked upset, but nodded.
“She’ll be one of our people—with Cartwright.” She smiled wanly. “If we know anything, it’s how to move things quickly.”
“Fine. I appreciate you taking care of this, but I really need to get back to work. Excuse me.” She walked away. Zipfile didn’t blame her for being angry. But once the rest of this morning’s events were done, Anita would likely have forgotten all about this commlink incident.
Zipfile returned to the lunchroom and set about activating the new ’link Frostburn had just boosted. Frostburn arrived about ten minutes later, posing as Lisa the courier, and the receptionist sent her back to Anita’s office, and Zipfile made sure everything was working properly. Anita seemed content. And Frostburn was in the building.
Yu came a few minutes later. He had arranged an appointment for himself like he had for Zipfile, and his SIN held up.
They were all in.
They only met up at the lunchroom long enough to nod at each other. Emu’s drones had been busy in the meantime, connecting fuses and turning on detonators. The team followed their work as best they could, strolling around the floor and looking at the bottom of support columns as much as they could without looking stupid or obvious.
Then it was 9:30. Frostburn nodded to the others.
“See you later, Lisa,” Zipfile said, and passed her a commlink. One that, if it were hit with some outside electrical force, would set off everything. Frostburn took it and left.
“Positions,” Yu muttered. “Stay safe.”
They split up.
Zipfile walked to a west stairwell, Yu to one on the east. Rude went to the bathroom.
There were four bathrooms on the first floor. Zipfile watched a feed from Rude’s ’link as he went into every one, just long enough to drop something in the wastebaskets—though in two cases, he crumpled up some extra paper, filling the baskets more.
There was no wireless capacity on these devices. Just a timer, set so they all went off at the same time.
Four trash fires started in four separate bathrooms. The packages Rude dropped in had a little extra material to make sure they didn’t just burn out in seconds.
Fire alarms went off.
The building’s alarm system triggered sprinklers in the bathroom, but the sprinklers had been bent the night before. They didn’t spread the water right. The fires burned. People poked curious heads out of offices, and some of them saw smoke.
Voices grew louder. Some people ran to the bathrooms and saw smoke and flames. They immediately pulled manual alarms, even though alarms were already going off. This mainly served to make more noise.
Then the floor cap
tains kicked in. The loudspeakers came to life. Thank heavens for corporate training.
“AVR employees, please exit the building now. Please follow established emergency drill procedures. Exit the building now.”
Well-trained staff should be able to leave a building like this in less than five minutes. Ideally, the fire department would be here before then—if the alarm had contacted them. Zipfile didn’t want to break into the AVR host, but the underfunded Seattle Fire Department was another matter. The nearest station, a mere three kilometers away, currently had no idea that alarms were going off. And they had been disconnected from the emergency alert system, too. Help was on the way, but not from the closest possible place.
Zipfile had helpfully positioned herself near an exit, and she directed people out, making sure they didn’t stop to think if it was really a serious enough fire. She also scanned the crowd for the face of Simon Dennis.
She caught glimpses of Rude dashing through the hallways. Most people were out of the first floor, so Rude had pretty much a free run of the place. He found a few papers to add to one of the fires, then got ambitious with the legs of some chairs.
It was enough. It would burn as long as they needed it to.
It wasn’t Zipfile’s job to let him know. Not yet. She stepped out of stairwell to make sure he didn’t see her, just to be on the safe side. She still had a view of him as he stopped, looked around briefly before leaving, then exited the building.
He was out. Since he was on her side of the building, it was her job to follow him. She did, messaging Yu and Rude as she did so.
The traffic behind her seemed to be pretty light. Most of the building was out. For their sake, she hoped they all were out.
One minute.
Most of the workers were across the street. Zipfile went a little further away, just to be sure, but she couldn’t be too far from Dennis. She had a role to play. She edged near him. He exchanged a few words with other workers, but nothing sustained. He stared at the building, puzzled.
Forty-five seconds.
Maybe he was beginning to figure it out. Maybe something odd about the morning was tickling the back of his brain. He was looking around with increasing purpose, like he was seeking something specific. It was almost time to give him something to see.
Thirty seconds.
Zipfile had been using shadows and her shortness to keep out of sight. But now she stepped into the gray daylight, stood up straight, perching herself fully on top of her high heels. The street closest to her rose uphill, so she took a few steps back to gain elevation.
Fifteen seconds.
“Dennis,” she said. There was a lot of noise on the street, but she spoke it loud and clear.
He looked at her. He didn’t know, at first. But then she saw it register.
“You should get out of here,” she said.
Confusion on his face became a sneer. “What do you think—”
Somewhere, a half-kilometer away, a mage cast a lightning bolt at a commlink because he had been paid to do so. The commlink blew up, as commlinks struck by lightning tended to do. That set off another reaction.
There was a crack from the building, sharp and piercing. Then another, and another. They piled on each other, building a physical sense of concussion as they repeated, with a growing thud rumbling under the crack. The noises traveled around the building.
Then, for an agonizing moment, the building was still. Some dust drifted out broken first-floor windows. She thought they had failed, that they had not done enough—until the side of the building nearest her sagged. That sag roiled the edge of the building like a collapsing wave. The weakened first floor couldn’t hold, and it went down, and the lack of support pulled the other floors. They all started coming down, pancaking into each other as dust billowed and encompassed the lot. It built into a combined puff and pillar, and everyone knew that when it cleared, there would be no building left.
Dennis paled. His brow creased, his body tensed, and he looked ready to attack. But he looked over his shoulder, then looked ahead. Then he ran.
“You be safe,” Zipfile called after him. “You find somewhere safe to go.”
She felt pretty confident that wherever Dennis wanted to go, he wouldn’t want to walk far.
Luckily, a ride would be ready for him.
Emu
Simon Dennis needed to get away from where he was. The entire building where he worked—that he had been in charge of—had just collapsed in a heap. He might be curious about what was going on, except he had seen someone he very much had a problem with right by the building. And she had delivered something that sounded like a threat. He would want to get away, but there was one small problem—he’d left his car at home, thanks to a drained battery. So what now?
He needed a ride. That would be fine. Rides were everywhere. He just needed to signal a Jitnee. Someone would take him out of—hey, wasn’t that his Jitnee rider from this morning? Great. She definitely could get him somewhere else.
That was the situation they’d set up this morning. Zipfile had found out that when Dennis used a ride share, he used Jitnee, and then she made sure that his next request would be routed to Emu. After dropping Zipfile off in the morning, Emu sped away from the AVR building to Dennis’s house so that when the call came, she could be there in minutes. And she was.
Dennis had not met Emu in person, but he knew what she looked like. That meant a disguise had been needed. Nothing fancy. Her hair was pulled back, and some nanopaste and makeup made her face rounder and her cheeks bigger. The fact that she was dressed in a normal, boring blouse-and-pants combo didn’t help—the floral pattern of the blouse was so non-rigger that she had to actively fight nausea when she put it on.
It was far from the only distasteful part of this ride, because she not only had to earn a five-star rating—she had to be liked. The very worst, most humiliating part of this job was the time she had spent reading articles on likability. She had some notion that that wasn’t something you should have to learn, but she also had a notion that without help, she wasn’t going to make the connection she needed to make.
Fortunately, she wasn’t trying to sleep with Dennis or anything, so there were some lengths she would not have to go to. But she also wasn’t going to get by just turning in pleasant music and shutting up.
In the end, it was both simple and incredibly difficult. The simple part was that all she had to do was ask him about himself and keep the conversation on topics he clearly wanted to talk about. He was a sport shooter, and could have spent the entire ride talking about it. He nearly did. The tough part was she couldn’t just turn around and scream, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up!” at him, even though she really, really wanted to about a half-dozen times. As a plus, she learned about three different shooting ranges she didn’t know about (and probably couldn’t afford), as well as something called the Shooting Stance Controversy of 2079 that, if she heard any more about it, might just force her to steer her car right into a building.
It seemed like it worked. He made a point of showing her that he was giving her a five-star review when he left, and he gave her a warm smile.
When he got in her car that afternoon, trap shooting was far from his mind.
“Drek. Drek drek drek drek drek drek!”
“You okay, mate?”
“No! I’m not okay! Drek! I should stay. People will be looking for me. Police. Police will be coming. Do I need to talk to them? What do I tell them?”
“Tell ’em the truth, mate. You tell them it was shadowrunners.”
He started to respond. “But if I tell them that, I’ll have to tell them—” Then he started to understand.
Emu helped h
im out by peeling the nanopaste off her face, then turning around and smiling at him the next time the car stopped. By the expression on his face, he’d already guessed.
“You’re—you’re psychotic,” he said.
“Naw. If that were true, you and all your employees would be lying under a heap of rubble. Do you know how much trouble we went through to keep you all alive?” She shook her head. “Work of art, really. What we did here.”
There was rapid movement in the back seat, then a sharp snap, a cry of pain, and a thud. She glanced at the rear view to see Dennis clutching his right hand in pain.
“You leave that gun where it fell,” Emu said. “Understand where you are now. You’re in a rigger’s car. Worse than being in a spider’s web. You don’t want to try anything that makes my machines angry.”
“What do you want from me?”
Emu pointed to the Jitnee logo glowing in her car. “I want to take you where you’re going and get a five-star review! The same thing every hardworking person of the world wants.”
“You want money? Is that it?”
“Why do you think we’re doing this? You keep your money to yourself. We got paid for this. No worries.”
He leaned forward, coming close to getting himself another shock from one of her hidden devices. “Are you going to kill me? Is that what this is?”
“We could have killed you last night, at your house. I could have killed you when I picked you up this morning. We could have left you in the building when we blew it up. I could have killed you when I picked you up again. You should be happy. We clearly want you alive.”
“Then what the hell do you want from me?”
“I already told you, mate. Your building was hit by shadowrunners. That’s what you’re going to tell anyone who asks. The investigators will be able to find out some information about them, but here’s a big clue—the detonation was set off by a lightning bolt hitting a commlink. Some astral investigators should look at that, fast. It will be good for them to know that.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s mostly it. There’s just one more thing: You should remember the list of times I gave you when we could have killed you.”
Shadowrun Page 35
