Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 3
He was moving quickly, sweat was running down his forehead, but he felt as if his heart rate had slowed. His breathing was even.
Movement was rapid and fluid. Forward left, swoop down, lunge, cut, step ahead, skitter right, flow back. Never slow down, never give them a clean look. He did not look at any of their faces, he could not describe any of their faces if asked, but he knew their fighting styles. Two of them are down, three are left, and they are a brawler, a dodger, and a counter-puncher. As he moved, as he whirled, Halim could see how they would work together, and knew he would not let that happen. He had identified their styles, but they did not yet know what his was, or indeed what he was.
They moved, cautiously, staying together, waving a board with nails through it, a chain, and an iron bar. Halim had a gun. He could shoot them and be done. But Halim had never been one to prematurely end a fight.
He moved the sword from hand to hand, spinning it, and it was all rather unnecessary but quite pretty. His sandaled feet brushed across the street like dust in the wind, stepping light, keeping his assailants from landing blows, from knowing what he would do next. He enjoyed watching them feint, he enjoyed watching them lunge, and he played with them like they were yo-yos, moving them toward him, then pushing them away. Then he tired of the game, and his sword blade moved with purpose, and blood made the dust even redder. Halim felt the impact of each blow in his arms, the slowing when the blade hit flesh, the complete stop when he dug into bone, the rough, rumbling pull when he brought his hands toward his stomach and removed the blade from a victim.
There was still more red, red filled his vision, he stepped through red and into red and made more red with every move. Every motion he made flowed into another motion, every move gave power and speed to the next one, like a creek flowing into a stream flowing into a river. Then there was the moment, the single moment everything had been building toward, when it was silent around him, no noise, no scraping of feet or panting of breath, and everything was still. He did not have to move anymore. Every muscle in his body was awake and loose and poised, his brain was alive and sharp, and he was standing tall above the five forms lying on the ground near him. He breathed the moment in deep, his tusks brushed his upper lip, then he exhaled, then it was gone.
The noise of the city around him returned, flooding into his ears. People were shying away from him, especially from the dead people at his feet, but at the moment no one was doing anything about it. No one was calling the authorities about the situation because, as far as they were concerned, Halim was the authority, the only one that mattered.
He could see everything again, the buildings, the people, and the blue of the sky peeking through the red dust in the air. He cleaned and sheathed his sword. It was over. This moment was gone. He moved forward so that he might find the next one.
Chapter Four
The moment Halim had with the Razor Cutlasses, that was not a moment. That was a gunfight, and it is not the same. He had not even had to move that much during the course of that fight. He just dropped to the ground and fired. It had no poetry to it; it was just a simple transaction in which living people were traded for dead ones. He will have to wait a bit more for his next moment, but he would be happy to know that it is not far off. But he did not know, and I am powerless to go back and inform him.
At the ferry, the six runners are, of course, the first people on the raft, and after that there is a pause, as few people are anxious to be the first going onto the raft with them. They look at each other and shuffle, hoping that as they lean toward the ferry that will make another one take a full step, and then they will know it is okay to board, and they will move on. And it happens—one steps forward and many others come in a surge, a push so rapid that the raft heaves under their feet. The surviving Black Roger collects the toll from all passengers, then mans his position by the cable. Cayman is at the same position on the other end of the raft and he starts pulling and the raft moves across the water. The people on the raft, they are very still and quiet. They wait to get to the other side, then they hurry hurry off.
Now comes one of the great secrets of the Third Mainland Bridge. Back in the old time, when the bridge was mostly for cars, you only got on or off at the ends. So a place like this, one of the isolated pieces of the bridge that has collapsed sections on either end, you would expect to be less crowded than the ends. Because people here just passing through, abi? No new traffic?
But this is the Third Mainland Bridge of today, not of some other day. There are jutting peninsulas of land that let you walk to it, and boats that let you row to it. And why would people come to it? Because there are pirates, and the pirates have money, and there are flat surfaces away from much of the dirt and chaos of the city itself. Parts of the bridge, they have become their own villages, with merchant booths and shanties and even huts. They are built poorly, held together with wattle or with gravity and a fond wish, but they are there, plywood boards leaning against each other or corrugated metal sheets forming huts that hold incredible heat, and all other manner of improvised, poorly made structures.
And so the walking has become more difficult. The pathway is narrower, the people are more numerous, and they are not still. They are running and biking back and forth, they are haggling and trading, they are fighting and occasionally dying, because there is money coming in here from either end, there are pirates collecting tolls at each gap in the bridge, and where there is money, there are people who want it.
Cayman tries to push his group to the same pace they had made on the north end of the bridge, but it is impossible, so he must go slower. He can see the skyline of Lagos Island ahead of him, maybe eight kilometers away, not so very far, really, but at the same time impossibly distant. He is angry that it is so far away, and his anger is going to be taken out on someone.
Halim is nearby.
“That wasn’t our fight,” Cayman says.
“You said that already,” Halim replies.
“I know. But I’m not sure it sunk in yet. I didn’t think I needed to tell you that there’s some fights we don’t need to get into, but I guess I do.”
“It got us through faster. We would have had to wait for the fight to play itself out, and then for the Cutlasses to figure out what they were doing with the boat. I didn’t want to wait.”
“Yeah, yeah, but it was just…it’s…”
“Do you still need me for the remainder of this conversation, or could you just yell to yourself?”
Cayman gives him a glare that he knows will have no effect, and then mumbles to himself for a time as they walk on through the thickening crowd.
The most noticeable thing in a random setting is something that is not random. Cayman has been traveling this way and that to push his way through a particularly crowded section of the bridge village, and he is tall enough to notice that he keeps seeing the same head-tops ahead of him, bobbing when he bobs, weaving when he weaves, and coming closer and closer. It is possibly a coincidence, but very probably not.
“Now this one,” Cayman says, “this one is our fight.”
Cayman turns to look down at Groovetooth. He raises an eyebrow, but she only shrugs back. There are a few PANs here and there, but no grid. No access to the larger Matrix. No AR overlay. The bridge is bustling, but to her it is eerily empty. I can tell you that she has not been at all comfortable since they set foot on the bridge, and she has nothing useful to tell Cayman about what may be happening.
Cayman looks forward again. He does not even bother asking Agbele Oku if she is going to help, because he has already learned that Agbele Oku only helps when and if she cares to. He believes that she will intervene when necessary to save the lives of anyone in the group—at least, he sincerely hopes that is the case.
Guns are of limited use in such close quarters, unless you are eager for the type of accidental shootings that tend to make fights bigger, bloodier, and more noticeable than they need to be. It is so crowded on the bridge that long blades like Halim’s sword will also not be very useful, for there will not be enough room to swing it without hitting either a building, which could collapse it, or an innocent person, which would make the fight overly complicated. And so Cayman opts for a dagger, and Halim flexes his forearm so a blade snaps out of it and locks into place.
Cayman keeps his dagger low, thinking that perhaps the people coming toward him will be willing to talk before any combat ensues, but he is honest enough with himself to admit this will probably not happen.
Then there is enough space and the crowd parts, and Cayman can see more than the tops of the heads of the people coming toward him. They are two humans, a dwarf, and an ork, and there is enough ink in the tattoos on their bodies for me to write out this entire story in longhand. The ork has a brand on his cheeks, the letters “A” and “E,” but the rest of his skin is so scarred and uneven that the brand gets lost in the landscape of his face.
They move with the grim determination of people who have done this kind of job before, and know how to accomplish it even if they do not enjoy it. Perhaps they would spread out as they approached the runners if they could, but there is not enough space, so they move ahead in a tight square. They, too, have weapons out, and Cayman looks at them and sees he is in for a good, old-fashioned knife fight.
Cayman believes you cannot overestimate the importance of landing the first blow in a knife fight. He firmly believes that the first person to bleed in such a fight almost always loses.
So when the four come forward with their weapons ready, Cayman advances quickly and aims a blow at the heart of the target closest to him, one of the humans of the group. The target is ready for this, of course, and moves quickly to block the blow, but the direction of the blow has already changed. Cayman has anticipated, is pulling his arm back and away, slashing across the target, and the blade drags across the man’s arm, cutting through skin and into muscle and tendon.
To his credit, the attacker doesn’t drop his weapon, a metal rod with an unfortunately jagged end. But he hesitates, and that means Cayman can control the fight.
If he wanted, Cayman could play with the target like he was a marionette, pushing here, pulling there, and watching the man react to every move he made. But there was no reason to mess around.
And so Cayman proceeded with various stabs and slices that I do not have the heart to describe in detail, because there is something about knives that puts a cold knot in my stomach. Please be assured, though, that Cayman does some things that are very bad to his target, things that involve hard slashes and multiple kinds of bodily fluids and grunts of surprise and pain, while next to him Halim is doing things that are worse. And the whole time Cayman is waiting for one of the other members of the group to move on him, because this is not a trideo where the combatants attack one by one, politely waiting their turn instead of ganging up on the hero. So he expects to be hit from another direction at any moment, and it is because of this awareness that he sees the ork moving around him and heading toward the people in back of him. Heading toward X-Prime.
Cayman runs. That boy, that X-Prime, Cayman thinks, cannot defend himself against a fly, let alone a charging ork. And the boy (who is actually more than thirty years old, but will forever be a boy in Cayman’s eyes) seems to know it too, as there is panic in his eyes. Both of his arms are wrapped around a package, the package they had retrieved just over an hour ago in an extremely annoying fashion, he is clutching it to his chest and leaning backward. Like a stupid boy, a boy who does not know how important it is to keep his balance. He will have few options against the ork now, he will be pushed around and pummeled at will unless Cayman helps, and the ork knows it, he is closing fast, Cayman can hear a guttural growl in the ork’s throat, his blade is ready to slash X-Prime as soon as he is in range, and he is quite unprepared when abruptly one of X-Prime’s arms unfolds, and there is a holdout pistol in his hand and he fires it at the ork’s head.
A holdout pistol is usually not enough to stop a charging ork, particularly the little lemon-squeezer design X-Prime is holding, but it is enough to startle him. The ork’s growl becomes a roar, his head leans back, and Cayman gets a clear view of the flechette sticking out of it, but the ork is still moving forward, and now he very much wants to rip X-Prime into many small pieces.
X-Prime, though, did not just sit there and wait after he fired his gun. He was already moving when the round fired, sliding to his left, and the ork had to adjust, turning and moving and waiting to slash into the short, annoying man, but the delay and the move to his right have cost the ork, because Cayman is there now and his knife, which was already red, is prepared to do more work. Cayman slashes up and pulls his arm to him, cutting the ork under his arm. It’s a hard cut to make, there is armor and tough ork skin to get through, but Cayman is slashing hard, and he found a way through the defenses. The cut is not deep, but it assuredly hurts.
The ork howls, starts to turn, but then there is a second flechette sticking out of his eye now, and that will have an impact. Ruining a creature’s eye, Cayman knows, is not always fatal, but it is most certainly always critically demoralizing. People do not just jump up to fight more when their eye has been ruined.
The ork goes down. Cayman sees that X-Prime is now standing with exemplary balance and poise, and for perhaps the hundredth time he wonders how long it would be before he stopped underestimating this boy that he had been forced to mold into a runner a number of years back.
He shakes his head and starts to speak but the ork takes the opportunity to remind him that two flechettes are not normally enough to finish an ork. He is on the ground and his right foot flies up, an awkward but swift kick aimed at X-Prime’s gut. X-Prime is balanced, but he is not ready for the speed of the blow, while he moves back the foot catches his arms and the ork’s toes hit the box he was carrying and send it flying.
Now, it may be that you have not fought in a crowded place very often, so it is my duty to inform you that shooting a bullet horizontally into a crowd presents problems, while firing a bullet downward is a simpler, less perilous affair. Cayman has his handgun out, a weapon with much more punch than X-Prime’s little holdout, and he fires it so that the bullet makes a path into the concrete of the bridge by way of the ork’s skull.
X-Prime is already retrieving the package that had been kicked out of his hands. It had hit the ground near Cayman and broken open, and X-Prime is furtively stuffing the contents back inside and closing the box. He is fast and smooth, but Cayman gets, for the first time, a look at what it is that they are carrying. The first thing he sees is the hair, black and wiry and curled, and then he sees the odd, leathery fabric that is holding the hair, and when X-Prime scoops up the object he sees the brown and crimson underside of it with all its ragged edges, and then he recognizes it for what it is.
They had been tasked with carrying three packages to Lagos Island, and Cayman now knows that one of those packages held, until very recently, a human scalp.
Chapter Five
Four hours before the bridge
Everyone knows that a professional runner only knows what they are supposed to know and then does not worry about other things. When you are at an oasis, you do not concern yourself with how much desert is around you, and when you are in the desert you do not waste time thinking about oases. You worry about what you have to do, and that is all.
But a runner may be good and professional, but a runner is still a metahuman, and a metahuman is generally curious, which must be the way, or all our collective species would not have survived as long as they have.
We should take a moment and look into the minds of Cayman and X-Prime when the box opened, and what we will see is something we will not understand until we first look at them when they found the package, four hours before X-Prime dropped the package on the bridge.
They were in a dumpster. Or, to speak correctly, they were next to a dumpster, having a discussion about going in it.
“Get the hell in the dumpster,” Cayman said.
X-Prime looked at the dumpster, which once was white, but now was mottled with many colors, most of which were unspeakable. “Mmmm, no.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“I’ll just look in it and see if I see a package.” X-Prime stood on his toes and scanned the inside of the dumpster. “Nope, don’t see anything that looks like a package.”
“Who says it would be on the top?”
“Who says it wouldn’t? Why would someone bury it in the dumpster?”
“Maybe they didn’t bury it,” Cayman countered. “Maybe it’s just been there a while and now it’s covered.”
“You know what they’re paying us for this job, and you think that whatever it is we’re picking up, the thing that is worth so much to them, might have been left sitting in a dumpster for a few days?”
Cayman looked around. Other than flies, X-Prime was the only form of life he saw. There were empty tan buildings, most with at least one portion of collapsed roof, and there were empty lots filled with the type of rubble that is left once the scroungers of the sprawl have given everything careful repeated goings-over. “I think it might be kind of safe here if they did. Anyway, the point is we’re supposed to be good at what we do, and being good means being thorough, and you weren’t thorough when you looked in the thing just then. So get in there.”
X-Prime did not say anything for a time. He opened his eyes a little wider, which made him look even younger and more innocent than was his custom. He remained silent.
