Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 16
Halim turns away from her. He does not say anything, but it is clear that he does not see the mage’s departure as a tremendous loss.
Cayman, though, feels the deep stab of fear that comes from trying to face magic without magic of your own, and he is not about to let the only spell-slinger in the group just walk away.
“Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. You have a job to do. A commitment to fulfill. Sure, Mr. Johnson didn’t say we’d be delivering body parts, but he didn’t not say we’d be delivering body parts either. So he didn’t do anything to cancel our deal. You’ve got a job to do, and you don’t just walk away from a job.”
“And that’s the highest good you can think of?” Agbele Oku says. “That’s how you make your decisions? Your job?”
“The job,” Cayman says, “is the only thing that has consistently fed me. So yeah, it’s the highest good I know.”
“Then I will pity you, but I will not travel with you.” Again, she turns to walk away.
“All right, fine, let’s look at some other kind of good. Maybe, maybe this heart’s for someone who wants a transplant. I mean, they put a lot of care into keeping it cold and fresh, didn’t they? Maybe we’ve got a heart that’s about to save someone’s life.”
“You are an idiot,” Agbele Oku says. “No heart could be viable after this much time outside a body.”
“I thought you magic people were all about redrawing the lines of what’s possible,” Cayman drawls, and Agbele Oku frowns in a way that allows Cayman to chalk up a point for himself in his head.
“I do not believe we are on a mercy mission,” Agbele Oku says.
X-Prime jumps in. “Then that’s your choice. You can believe what you want to believe, but we’re saying if you want to believe we’re good guys, you can. There’s plenty of ways to do it. Like, maybe the heart and the scalp belonged to someone who really needed to have their heart and scalp taken away. Someone who’s been hurting women across the city. And we’re about to deliver proof that the bastard is dead.”
Again, Agbele Oku must pause. When she speaks again, it is with the extra vehemence of a wavering soul. “I do not believe that!”
“Fine. But it’s your choice not to believe. So don’t act like you have to leave the group. You just want to.”
And that is the button to push. X-Prime has not known Agbele Oku long, but he makes it a point to watch whoever he is with to see what they respond to and what they do not, because he knows that for a person that does what he does, that is the most valuable information in the world. Agbele Oku would leave a job for moral grounds, but she would not just quit. And he and Cayman have taken away her moral grounds.
She cannot just give in, though. Not after making her stand. So, there is more talking that must take place.
“You say this could be from someone bad. But we do not know who it is. Maybe we should,” she says.
“That would be good,” X-Prime says. “But we don’t have much to go on. You saw—we all saw—the scalp. Anyone recognize the person from that?” He pauses, there is only silence, then he talks again. “And while the heart’s got plenty of DNA, I don’t think anyone’s carrying a portable DNA lab. Are they?” Silence again. “All right. So for the time being, we’re a little stuck.”
“What’s in the third box?” Agbele Oku says.
Cayman saw where this line of questioning was going right from the start, he was waiting and ready, and a roar starts to emerge from his lungs, only to be stopped be an abrupt, palm-forward gesture from X-Prime. The fact that this gesture actually silences him surprises Cayman more than anyone.
“I don’t know,” X-Prime says. “But I can’t imagine there’s much point to keeping it closed. We already know what’s in two of them—why not open a third?” And Cayman has trouble disagreeing with that.
The third package is being held by Groovetooth, and the group moves toward her like her gravitational pull has suddenly increased a thousandfold. It is not accurate to say they are ready for anything to be in the box, but they are certainly prepared, based on the other boxes, to see just about any type of body part. They have all seen various body parts in all kinds of conditions in their time, so there is more curiosity than squeamishness as they lean forward.
Groovetooth does not feel comfortable in the spotlight, so through a quick and subtle gesture she manages to put the box in Agbele Oku’s hands, who shows little hesitation before opening it.
There is a brief puff of mist as the lid of the metal box is removed. The box is insulated, but not actively refrigerated like the container with the heart. The mist clears, and no one is surprised to see something the color of brown skin in the box. It resolves itself into a shape quickly, a rough oval with five tendrils. It is a hand.
There is a moment of relief that it isn’t something quite as visceral as the heart, and then a moment of collective guilt that they all felt relieved that they had just laid their eyes on a severed human hand.
X-Prime is the first to speak. “So,” he says in an inappropriately jovial tone, “anyone recognize this hand?”
Most of the others say “No,” except for Agbele Oku, who glares at him.
“Okay then,” X-Prime says. “The good news is we can ID this sucker. Even if the hand came from a different body than the other parts, we can learn something that we didn’t know before. Go get ‘em, Groovetooth.”
Groovetooth is quick enough to know what X-Prime wants her to do, and she has equipment with a sharp enough resolution to pull it off. She reaches out, she grabs the hand, she does not flinch—and there are a couple people watching who note the lack of a flinch—and she takes a nice detailed picture of one of the fingers. Then the software goes to work, flattening the image, finding the highlights, looking for what makes it special and unique, and then trundling off with the information to break into a large number of databases and see if a match for the print can be found.
There is a quiet moment while the team stands in a small circle, all of them staring at Groovetooth’s commlink as if it is about to do something. But no matter how good the agents are, databases take time to penetrate, and so there is nothing immediately forthcoming, and even if there was, it would only be visible to Groovetooth, so there is very little point to them standing around and staring.
“Let’s get moving,” Cayman says, and the team, all of them, move forward. For a few more moments, at least, they are still a team.
There is a high whine in the distance, and Cayman immediately tenses himself. He does not stop walking, but he wary, poised, ready for anything as the whine gets louder and closer and separates into two or three distinct whines. The sounds are coming from the south, and the fact that they have continued on for a good few moments is encouraging to Cayman, as he takes it to mean that there are few breaks ahead that will cause trouble. So they will make progress quickly, assuming the whines that are approaching are not going to cause them trouble.
The whines are fast, they come into view and they are black blurs, moving quickly, and Cayman sees the twitch from Halim that means that the samurai is considering a pre-emptive strike, but they are moving too fast for him to take them all out at once, and killing one of them would likely only serve to make the other ones mad. So he remains ready, but he does not yet draw a weapon.
Cayman can see now that there are three of them, hunched black figures over the silver and black blurs of bullet bikes, and they drive them with weaving, serpentine movements that are never straight lines. Some of the bikes have two people on them, and the people sitting in back are looking ahead carefully, watching for something, and Cayman firmly believes that when they see it, things will get significantly more complicated.
He does not want to wait for that to happen. He tosses the box with the heart in it to X-Prime so his hands can be free, and he pulls out a sword in his right hand and a gun in his left so he’ll be prepared for any circumstance.
But as soon as he made the toss, the people on the back of the bikes saw what they wanted. They swung their legs over the cycles and dropped to the ground, but they barely slowed. There are wheels on their feet, and they are shooting forward, moving their legs only to keep their balance, not to propel themselves. Cayman sees where they are headed, and he immediately understands his mistake.
“Throw it back!” Cayman yells.
“What?” X-Prime says.
“Throw it back!” he screams. And X-Prime hears. He was about to drop the box in a backpack, but he stops and prepares to toss it back to him.
But the people on skates, they are coming fast. Too fast. With his gun, Cayman fires, and he is pretty sure he hits his target, but nothing happens. The black clothing they are wearing is very possibly boiling them alive in the Lagos heat, but it is also keeping bullets from having much impact on their bodies. Cayman aims for the face, takes another shot, but it flies wide.
And X-Prime is listening. The one time he listens, the one time he does not decide to fight about what Cayman says, is the wrong time. The package is moving out of his hand, and to his credit he tried a high path, a lofting arc that might go over the heads of the approaching skaters, but these are people who can climb off a bullet bike and then skate at speeds that must be over fifty kilometers per hour, and jumping on skates is not going to be too difficult for them. And one of them jumps, and he has a wonderful angle, he flies in the air like the ground beneath his feet is elastic, his arms stretch, and the box lands gently in his hands.
He is close to Cayman, close enough for him to take a swing with his sword, and he does, a sweeping but quick swing, heading right for the skater’s belly, but the skater’s arm moves down and connects solidly with the sword, and the arm is armored and likely metal, so it does not take much if any damage, and the sword is bounced aside. The skater does not seem hurt, and most importantly he is not stopped, and the box is in his hand, and he is going away.
The only consolation is that he is taking the box in the direction it is supposed to go, toward Lagos Island.
Chapter Twenty-One
Three hours and fifteen minutes
before the bridge
Akuchi has always loved being a rigger, loved almost everything about the job, except for this one thing, and that is that when you are a rigger you are expected to give a ride to everyone. When you are part of a team and the other members need to go somewhere, they don’t even bother to stop and think about how they are going to get there. They just think, the rigger will take us! And that is that.
Having other people in a vehicle with you is annoying for any number of reasons, the primary one being they generally are telling you where it is you need to go, and more often than not it is a place you would not choose to go if you were on your own. Which you are not.
Another annoyance is that other people in the vehicle cannot help but react to the way Akuchi drives, and try as he might he cannot help but notice the way they are reacting. Usually this does not stop him, and he just drives as he pleases, but still he notices that people are nervous or even disapproving, and he does not like it. It prevents him from feeling the full immersion with his vehicle, the feeling of oneness that is the chief joy of his occupation.
All this is to say that when Akuchi dropped Cayman and X-Prime off in Ikeja, he felt a certain relief and freedom and pleasure that comes from doing his job the way he wanted. He could take any street he selected, come as close to pedestrians as he pleased, kiss any vehicle whose driving he did not like with a tap of his fender, and no one would say a word. At least, no one in his vehicle would say a word, and since that vehicle was at the moment his entire world, that was all that mattered.
He wished he could take his time, go to the destination of his choosing, but he had another passenger to pick up. Even in his brief freedom, he was constrained.
When this was all over, he resolved, he would go for a nice, long drive around the city. He would challenge any Yoruba he saw driving a vehicle, and he would beat their ass. Then he would ram them.
He had hit a populated section of the city, which meant the streets were crowded. He was planning on switching to his cycle shortly, and the crowds made him anxious for it. The cycle was a challenge in crowds, but it was also faster—he knew all sorts of maneuvers to get him past and through people. And there were plenty of them. With the heat and the discomfort and the unrest, no one was inside today. Everyone was out, but no one had anyplace to go, so they were standing and walking aimlessly, which made traffic slow for those who did not know what they were doing. For Akuchi, the people with their white-with-splashes-of-bright-red-and-yellow clothing were bright pylons, marking an obstacle course he felt more than saw. He navigated it quite successfully, with pivots and spins that cut through layers of loose dust to grab the hard road underneath. He avoided most of the pylons, he hit a few of them, but he didn’t think he inflicted any serious damage. He was not terribly worried about it, as there were a million risks that came with walking the streets of Lagos, and if people could not be bothered to pay enough attention to avoid them, that was not his affair.
But then he sensed something that was bad. Pylons without a path through them. People had lined up, maybe three or four deep, across the road, and there was no path through them. He saw them not long after he sensed them, and it was clear that this was no random pattern. They were standing there for a purpose.
Akuchi could run right through them, but some of them looked heavy and would do some damage to his car. Besides, glancing blows were one thing—cold-bloodedly driving the car directly into people was something else. Akuchi did not spend a lot of time worrying about things like ethics and absolutes, but he knew what it meant to be a monster, and to know that a monster was not something he wanted to be.
So he blared his horn, having little confidence it would work, and when it didn’t he did a trickish move where he skidded around and came to a stop right in front of the group and parallel to them. Then he blared his horn again.
That was when he heard the one thing he was not anxious to hear. His name.
“Akuchi,” someone in the group said. “We would have a word with you.”
Akuchi sighed. The silence in his car since he had dropped off the chatting oyibos had been a welcome relief, and now there were more people who wanted to talk. The world, he firmly believed, was dying from too much talking and not enough doing. But they had not yet annoyed him enough to make him run them over, so he slowly climbed out and got ready to listen until they were ready to let him go.
Once he was standing on the road, he leaned against the door in the time-honored way that people who are proud of their vehicles have been leaning against their doors since vehicles were invented.
“You are Akuchi,” a man in the middle of the group said. He wore the fila of a Yoruba Olorisha, which was not a good sign.
Akuchi nodded, but did not speak. The fewer words he said, the fewer overall words would be added to this conversation, and the sooner it would end.
“Eshu has led us to you. Eshu has revealed your path to us. Eshu serves us because we serve him. Glory to Eshu,” the Olorisha said, and the crowd around him echoed the last three words.
Akuchi made no movement or reply. The words were a show for the Yorubas around him, not for him.
“Akuchi,” the Olorisha said. “You have been warned.”
“Yes,” Akuchi said. He did not have the smallest idea to what the Olorisha was referring, but agreement seemed to be the best way to go at the moment.
“You have been warned many times,” the Olorisha said.
“Sure,” Akuchi said.
“You have been warned, and the consequences of ignoring the warning have been clearly explained to you.”
“Right,” Akuchi said.
“And yet you are going to meet the Igbo Halim. You are working with him against the Yoruba. You have ignored the warning.”
“I’m working with an Igbo,” Akuchi said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m doing anything against you people. I know all these tribal squabbles are important to you, but not every Igbo spends every waking moment plotting against the Yoruba. Sometimes they just do things for themselves.”
“This is not one of those times,” the Olorisha said.
“Really? Did Eshu tell you that? Because frankly, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”
The Olorisha’s mouth curled in a very unpleasant smile. “It would not be the first time that runners were the last to know their own business.”
“Touché.”
“And you are not a fool. You know something of what has been happening in the city. You know that the Igbo have attempted to gain control of oil fields and been stopped, and that they are now full of fake outrage at being denied what they feel they deserve. You know what is happening in the streets.”
“I’ve heard a few things. But I thought maybe everyone would just relax a little and not turn the whole thing into another foolish war.”
The Olorisha’s eyes narrowed. “Avenging honor is never foolish.”
“Seeing as how honor ain’t worth a thing, yeah, fighting over it usually is pretty stupid. But that’s not the point. The little oil field spat went the way it went, but it’s all over. I don’t know what the Igbo are planning to do to strike back at you, or what you’re doing to strike back at them, and I don’t care. I’m doing a job, not fighting a war.”
“Ignorance will not save you. This job you are doing is part of the war, and you are on the wrong side of it.”
“Fine. Look, I’ll stipulate that I was warned and that I was told the consequences for ignoring the warning. In fact, I remember the warning quite well, and it included promises of death in any one of a number of horrible ways, but what it didn’t promise was that I would have to endure a conversation before I was killed.”
“Justice demands that the condemned understand the reasons for his punishment. If you believe the demands of justice have now been met, then I am satisfied as well.”
The Olorisha turned to his people and prepared to give some sort of an order. Akuchi moved, hoping he could be inside his vehicle before any guns fired, and hoping all the Yorubas had were weak weapons that wouldn’t penetrate the vehicle’s exterior.
