Shadowrun, page 36
“What the frag, Ed? I wasn’t even at the forum yesterday. I asked Lightstep to send me the brief.”
Ed’s eyebrows furrowed, and he smiled a tight smile. “Okay then. Tell the computer guy that wasn’t you.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“’Ey! Can I get you all’s attention over here, or are we being too much of a burden on your highness’s time and energy?” Lightstep’s shout dripped with annoyance.
Lotus jumped to her feet and spread her arms wide. “Will everyone stop fraggin’ treating me like I’ve just kicked all your puppies? I didn’t say those things last night, I wasn’t even there!”
Ed and Lightstep shared a long look, then they both met Lotus’s eyes.
“I wouldn’t say that kind of stuff. I hoped you would have known me better than that.” She tried to meet Ed’s eyes, but he looked away. “Come on…at least entertain the possibility I’m telling the truth?”
“All right, fine. Hand it over.”
Lotus set her commlink on the table and slid it toward Ed.
“It was terrible!” Lotus sobbed into his chest. “You wouldn’t believe what happened! ... I just don’t understand!”
“Oh my: ‘terrible.’ I hope for all the world for enlightenment to bestow itself upon us both. Tell me what happened.”
Lotus told him about her meeting with the team, including Ed’s and Lightstep’s accusations.
When she reached the part of the story where she’d handed her commlink to Ed, and Ed told Lightstep that Lotus was telling the truth, and the three of them had developed a plan to ruin the man in green, she told a different story. Instead, she told him that her friends shut up about the whole situation and were strictly business for the rest of the evening, glowering at her all the while. That they had completely shut her out.
“Yes.” He patted her head. “I am sure this strikes you as a malicious twist of fate now, but I am afraid I must play the role of ever-present optimist and remind you that now you have lost your excuse. You must leave with me at once!” He flashed a perfect smile, rose to his feet, and held out his green-gloved hand for hers.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” She scowled at him. “I just told you that my only friends have abandoned me, and you’re still on me about running away together?”
“What better time than the present? I have been here quite a long while,” his voice thickened and his eyes flashed, “and although I adore the vices your world has to offer, I find myself bored with the constant decadence and debauchery, if you can imagine that! Perhaps I simply long for home. It is time. And you are exactly the prize I need to purchase my entrance.”
Lotus stared at him, face inscrutable. After a moment, she said, “How could I let my friends know why I chose to leave?”
“Why ever should you care to tell them?”
“It’s a simple thing. I just feel the need. Maybe it’s my feminine nature getting the better of me.” She pressed her lips together, annoyed with herself for allowing that barb through.
“Mmm, yes, perhaps.” He nodded, oblivious to her tone.
“I mean, how do you send quick messages to people if you hate—I mean, have no need of technology?”
He pondered, tapping his finger to his lips. “Well,” he said, folding his arms and gesturing with his index finger. “There’s a trick I know to get a spirit to deliver a message for you. You know that one.” He nudged her with his elbow and chuckled. “There’s a spell, if the message does not need to reach the recipient’s ears as much as the mind. That won’t work with everyone. Then, if the worst comes to pass and I have to rely on a crutch, I have a fellow downtown who performs any technical duties I may have for him.”
“Oh? That’s convenient.”
“Not terribly. He is simply the best at what he does and charges accordingly.” His mouth twisted.
“What if they’ve blocked my contact information?”
“No need to concern yourself, darling. My man can do anything to communications technology.”
Lotus nodded. “Good. I have another question for you.”
“You have but only to speak, and I am your servant. Ask your question.”
“Where does he work? Were you in contact with him last night?”
“Hmmm.” He made a show of gazing at the sky, caressing his jawline. His eyes flashed as he met hers. “He conducts his business from a rat hole of an office in the center of the city. As for your second question, I find it difficult to fully recollect the nature of my activities that eve, for it was a capricious and yet mercurial time, and the details simply elude me, though they leave me with a faint sense of frivolity—
“It’s not a difficult question.”
His eyes narrowed to slits and glittered. “As I was saying.” He coughed loudly and cleared his throat. “The details simply elude me, though leave me with a faint sense of frivolity and carelessness I find quite intriguing indeed. Can you tell me? I adore a good story.”
The plaza blossomed around them. Where traffic and advertisements darted past, a river flowed. Street lights became trees. Lotus tried to hide her gasp and she bit down hard on her tongue. The city seeped back into focus and her head ached.
Despite the pain, she managed to put on a serene smile. “I’m not feeling like storytelling today. I just needed to get in touch with your computer guy before we leave, is all.”
His gaze softened and he returned her smile. “Of course.”
They walked, arm in arm, out to the street. “That was a rat hole of an office,” Lotus said, chuckling.
“Yes, yes, now we can go.” He snapped his finger and a cab veered dangerously off course, crossed two lanes of traffic, and parked with a screech in front of them.
“Oh, wait!” Lotus patted her pockets. “I left my commlink at your house.”
His eyes blazed. “You won’t be needing it, my dear.”
“I don’t think you fully grasp the urgency of this situation,” Lotus said and smiled at him. “It’s my commlink. I need it.”
The taxi tore across town and dropped them off near his apartment. He unlocked the trio of locks and strode inside the apartment.
Lotus breezed past him and into the bedroom. Moments later, she returned, her head down and arm up, holding up her comm. “Got it. Sorry about that. Now we can go.” She hurried out the front door.
He flashed a begrudging but benevolent smile and closed the door behind them.
“Oh, ghost! The kids!” Lotus clapped her hands to her head. “How could I have forgotten the kids?” She whirled and grabbed the lapels of his fine green coat. “Last stop, I swear. I can’t leave without saying goodbye to them.” Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.
His jaw shifted with the clenching of his teeth. “Last stop. Then we leave.”
“You know what? You deserve a last ‘hurrah.’ Let me bring you a 3T special and a Really Big Drink.”
His eyes locked onto hers and he licked his lips. “I like the way you think. I await your swift return.”
Within a half-hour, someone rapped the knocker on his door. He flung the door open and narrowed his eyes at the—what is it, a page?—standing on his front stoop.
“What are you and what do you want?”
The delivery boy thrust a fat Taco Temple bag forward and pulled up an AR display. “Here is your food,” he read the words haltingly, “‘I need a little more time with the kids. Enjoy your meal and I’ll be back in an hour. Love, Lotus.’”
The delivery boy glanced back and forth between the man in green and the message he had just read.
From within the hood of his fine green travelling cloak, the man’s face distorted into an expression of rage, then smoothed out just as quickly. His eyes flickered from the food to the delivery boy, who jumped when the man snatched the food from his hands, took one enormous and improbable step backward, and slammed the door.
One hour later, the man in green sat before his fireplace, his table laden with the remains of a Tres Tacos Time special. Condiment packets, wrappers, and water from the sweaty Really Big Drink littered the table. He puffed on a cigar, belched, and glared at the clock on his mantle.
There was another knock at his front door. He scowled toward it and stretched his arm toward an ashtray, but before the cigar touched the glass, his gilded front door splintered into shards strewn toward him. Several black-clad figures, with large heads like beetles, rushed in. They carried batons and tower shields and their shouts were like the grunts of animals to his ears.
His eyes flashed at the lead beetle. The figure stopped its charge and stood, swaying. Maintaining concentration on the beetle, he glanced at the rest, envisioning jarring lights, sounds, and shadows in one chaotic burst. He bared his teeth at them. “What more do you have for me, insects? I cannot begin to fathom how—”
A rifle butt struck him in the back of the head and he fell in a heap.
Two hours later, he sat, alone, draped in a magehood and bound with magecuffs as a tinny voice informed him he was found in possession of an illegally modified commlink and was being held for questioning by the Grid Overwatch Division.
His eyes flashed, but none could see him.
LOVERS IN A DANGEROUS TIME
(Discipline, the Hanged Man, 3 of Batons)
O.C. PRESLEY
I have killed very much, but changed very little.
Aufheben could have nuanced that thought further, but the assassin tossing fireballs at him was keeping his higher brain functions off balance.
Just moments ago, he’d been meandering down the streets of the Dubai sprawl during a sweltering late afternoon, noting how it had changed in the two decades since he’d last been here. Preferring the parts of the city tourists weren’t supposed to see, he spent most of his time in the Sonapur district, where the lower class fled to when they weren’t working for pittance. He enjoyed the squalor, not because it gave him any pleasure as such, but because it was honest, and in his experience, the people in these places were more honest than their wealthy counterparts. He enjoyed it, right up until he heard a group of children gasp behind him. His years of dodging would-be assassins took over, and he spun just in time to evade the magic fire headed his way.
He threw himself behind one parked car, and then another. This fight would already be over if he could have brought his sniper rifle into play, but the mage was too quick. The fireballs weren’t elegant or even that large, but at the end of the day, they were still balls of fire hurtling toward his blond, German head.
“Which corporate master are you slave to, Herr mage?” Aufheben called out, his face wrinkling as if smelling sour milk at the answering silence.
Taking out a frag grenade and arming it, he switched on its wireless control, shoving it underneath the back-rear tire of the Gaz-Willys Nomad he crouched behind. Aufheben sprinted and rolled behind a Matrix repair van, but didn’t stay put. The van’s height gave him cover enough to throw himself behind the corner of a brick fountain.
The mage repeated the same pattern of fireballs, not powerful but reckless, and gained ground at a relentless pace, obviously hoping to keep his prey on the defensive as he closed the gap.
Aufheben signaled the grenade to detonate as the spell-slinger ran by. After the initial concussion passed, he grabbed his rifle, lurched to his feet, and jogged toward the wreckage while taking aim at his enemy.
Only a few steps brought him closer to the mage, now missing his legs. Blood pushed itself out around shrapnel that had shredded his chest and arms. Aufheben winced at the dying remains, his lips pursed.
He can’t be more than sixteen, he thought. Not much like a corp to have kids working as assassins. Too much bad PR. He was struck by the worn-out armor the mage wore. Looks older than he is, Aufheben thought. Surely whoever was trying to kill him could have sent someone more professional and better-equipped. The young man was Arabic, from the looks of him, making it unlikely that this had anything to do with his past trying to catch up to him.
“Sorry, magischkind.” Aufheben said as the mage breathed his last. Slinging his rifle across his back, he ran toward the shadows. There was something about the kid’s face that bothered him. It was somehow familiar. A mystery for another time. Because if someone as green as this kid knew he was in Dubai, others surely would as well.
Two months ago, Jinn’s motionless body sat in a luxurious chair whose comfort level bordered on obscenely pointless. Two chromed datajacks interrupted his smooth, Middle-Eastern elven features. One connected him to the Shiawase Cyber-4 cyberdeck in his lap. He wore a silk suit, decorated with red and purple whirlwinds, and pointy, crimson boots with five gaudy gold buckles along the side. His long, dark hair was pulled behind his head by ornate wooden chopsticks with gold trim.
Inside the Matrix, however, he looked much different. In the artificial, interconnected, digital realm, his icon appeared as an enraged, purple genie whose bottom half was replaced with a violently-spinning red and purple tornado.
Shadow work had been slow lately, but his luxurious lifestyle left him with a need for constant cash flow. That was why, between runs, Jinn pushed his skill to the limits testing himself against corporate countermeasures, looking for top secret paydata he could sell to the highest bidder.
He knew if he spent as much nuyen upgrading his cyberware and deck as he did on clothes and shoes, he could compete with the best deckers alive. Well, maybe once upon a time he could have, but lately, he spent as much time shopping and attending expensive parties as he did on the Matrix. Be that as it may, he still took pride in being able to brute force his way into nearly any node, no matter how tough their intrusion countermeasures were.
Nothing about his decking was subtle. Lightning and flames erupted out of the whirlwind he rode when he smashed through Global Sandstorm’s classified data collection node. Its Matrix sculpting gave the appearance of an oil refinery, with tributary pipelines feeding into it from around the world. This was a sort of digital hopper for collecting audio calls, video, news, and other information that may be of use to Global Sandstorm’s intelligence ops, but which hadn’t been organized or analyzed yet. Boring economic contacts and data from other corporations, bombings of small villages in Central Aztlan, conspiracy theorists on the radio in Chicago…yawn, he thought.
Then, he saw something of interest. The subject line read: SUFI MEVLEVI (DERVISH) MYSTIC CLAIMS LEGENDARY ARTIFACT NET OF MARDUK FOUND IN DUBAI.
That’s certainly enough to get the attention of the corporation’s higher ups, he reckoned. It may be nothing, but they’d surely investigate, seeing as Dubai is one of Global Sandstorm’s most influential markets.
Jinn copied the file and placed the copy inside his tornado. He had just decided to watch the attached video later when he was slammed by a blast of fire from the mouth of a mechanized sphinx that had materialized behind him.
IC already? Jinn puzzled. This must be hotter than I thought. He spun around and checked his icon for damage. Time to get my fearsome self out of here before I get more than singed.
The wind beneath him grew and thundered as Jinn fired up his Hammer program and pummeled the sphinx with hails of lightning. The IC was no match for what he did best: Matrix beatings. With one virtual monster down and more on the way, Jinn knew it was time to jack out. What have I stumbled onto? was the last thing he remembered before he passed out for a long time.
A scorching wind whipped across the street below, and Aufheben watched shapeless trash scrape against weathered building walls. Refocusing his attention to the door of the building, he waited until his target appeared. He tracked her movement away from the apartment where she was staying, north along the narrow street. She wore her long, dark hair mostly around her shoulders, but the top half was pulled back in a bun. Its normally red streaks appeared dark, almost black in the moonlight.
Climbing down the fire escape, he silently followed. She turned a corner into an alley between two large buildings. As he passed, a lone devil rat hissed at him, guarding a half-eaten meal behind a restaurant. She picked up her pace, and he found himself almost running to keep up.
At the alley’s dead end, which smelled of urine and curry, she paused, turning around only when he was within arm’s reach.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you even remembered me.”
“Please. You knew I’d come. It happens that I was looking to leave Bogota anyway.”
“I thought your Anarchist Bright Star was still fighting the fight?”
“They are, but the bounty on me is so high that every few weeks we were fighting off bounty hunters and wannabe shadowrunners trying to make a name for themselves. I thought it best to leave for a while.”
“Why’d you start Bright Star in the first place? Black Star kick you out?”
“Black Star is dead. Only Liberator and I survived the war, and neither of us left Bogota.”
“Odd that you say that. I ran into some runners not two weeks ago that said they were with Black Star.”
“Pretenders, I’m sure.” Aufheben paused, and his eyes widened with the faintest lift of his lips. “It’s good to see you, Mara.”
It was strange saying her name again after so many years. With effort, he pushed those feelings back into the past.
Mara took her commlink out of her bag and tapped the display. She motioned for him to check his messages. “That’s why I asked you to come.”
Aufheben scanned the file she’d sent, and a childlike excitement welled up in him. “These people: Shaheed Zahir, the Shura, the Sharif of Mecca, and representatives from Jamil Islamyah, the IUM, and Global Sandstorm. They are all going to be together, here in Dubai, in two weeks.”
“Yes! The Caliph, the tribal leaders, and the political, spiritual, social, and economic leadership of the Arabian Caliphate are in one place at one time. And we know where and when.”
