Blood Sport

by Lisa Smedman

  “Gus! What are you doing here?”

  “I need to find Teresa. Is she all right?” Gus looked harried, watchful. He kept glancing around as if he too were afraid of the policía. His hair hung in rumpled curls as though he had not combed it since waking up that morning, and his clothes were wrinkled. Lines of strain etched his handsome face.

  “She’s fine,” I assured him. “She’s in the plaza, walking the paseo with Rafael.”

  The priest’s eyes closed with relief. “Bueno,” he sighed. “Then they didn’t get to her.”

  “Who didn’t get to her? What’s going on, Gus?”

  He paused, as if deciding what to say. “We were . . . betrayed,” he said in a low whisper. “Someone told the policía about the package Teresa was carrying in her bag. The man who was to have taken delivery of it was found dead along the roadside last night—a military-style execution, a bullet to the back of the head. I was worried that Teresa might have suffered the same fate.”

  I shook my head. “She’s alive. But she had a rough time of it last night. We all did.”

  I quickly told Gus about Teresa being kidnapped by the cultists, and about the confrontation at the teocalli in the ruins. I skimmed over the details of what the cultists had been up to, however, simple saying that they had been conjuring up a blood spirit and leaving out the reasons why. I assumed that he already knew Teresa was a shapeshifter—his lack of surprise when I told him of her transformation confirmed this guess. He did seem dismayed when I told him of her part in killing the cultists—but then, killing is a mortal sin, even when done in self-defense.

  Gus’ face was white when I finished. “The cultists took Teresa? But Carlos promised . . .”

  He looked as though he was about to faint. I took his arm and steered him toward a low wall and urged him to sit. I brushed away the paper streamers and foam cups that had been left there after last night's fiesta, then sat down beside him. I could see that something was gnawing at Gus, that he was being tortured by conflicting emotions. My police training screamed at me to pepper him with questions, to grill him while he was most vulnerable. But this was a man who had aided us, helping us to hide from the Azzie military and then candidly telling us the story of Mama G’s past. I decided to let him tell his story in his own time.

  “I am not a good priest,” he said. Tears coursed down his cheeks and his hands were balled into fists. “I am not a good man.”

  I waited, then asked the only question necessary. “What have you done?”

  Gus looked at me with grief-filled eyes. “I am the one who is responsible for the death of the man Teresa was supposed to pass the package to. I am the Judas who gave the policía his name. But it was the only way to protect Teresa. They would have arrested her instead . . .”

  He didn’t have to tell me the rest. “The policía knew Teresa was associated with the rebels and that she was your friend.” I suggested.

  Gus nodded.

  “They cut a deal with you, offering to spare her if you gave them another rebel’s name.”

  Another nod.

  “But why? Why would the Azzies do you any favors?”

  “Mi hermano,” Gus answered slowly. “My brother Carlos is a lieutenant with Aztechnology Corporate Security—the policía. He was the one who made the deal with me. I thought that he would respect the fact that we are brothers, that he would honor his promise not to kill the man who was taking delivery of the package. He said he would simply confiscate it and look the other way while the man fled. But he lied. When I heard of the death, I thought that Carlos must have lied to me about Teresa, as well.”

  “Teresa hasn’t been arrested,” I pointed out.

  “No. That would be too obvious a betrayal. But Carlos knew of the cultists—the policía keep information on all fringe groups. He must have given the cultists her description and hoped that they would do his dirty work for him by kidnapping and sacrificing her. Then he could claim that his hands were free of blood.” He slammed a palm down on the concrete. “Ah, por que? Why did you betray me, hermano mio?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Gus was in a tough spot, no doubt about it. He’d had to choose between the certain death of someone he cared about and the possible death of a stranger, and had made the only possible choice. Now that the Azzies—his own brother, no less—had used Teresa as a lever, it would be only a matter of time before they did it again, and before Gus betrayed still more Cristeros. Or betrayed us.

  “There must be some way out of this,” I said. “Some way to protect Teresa, at least until the AFL can smuggle her out of the country. You could hide her in the church until then.”

  Gus shook his head. “I could,” he said. “But the Cristeros will be using it for their ... It won’t be safe.”

  As he paused, I made the connection. The meeting that Teresa had mentioned—it would be held in the boarded-up church.

  Gus shrugged. “Besides, my brother knows that I am a sacerdote. He’ll guess that I’ve hidden her there. It is too dangerous.

  “But couldn’t you hide Teresa with your . . . magic?”

  It had taken me some time to realize that Gus had magical talent. That night in the church, when the soldiers had broken into it to search for us, I’d dismissed the “angel” that I’d seen hovering above us as a trick of the light. I later realized that it must have been some sort of spirit that Gus summoned up through his prayers.

  When I’d first realized this—first admitted that I actually did see an “angel” shielding and hiding us from the soldiers—I’d assumed Gus to be one of those rare adepts whose magical abilities come to them via the sheer power of their religious convictions. Magic as miracle had been the subject of several trideo talk shows of late—it was currently a matter of much debate whether or not pre-Awakening Christian “miracles” and neo-pagan “faith healings” had actually been early manifestations of magic.

  It made me wonder if I should have been going to church all these years. Maybe there was something to the “power of prayer,” after all . . .

  “I have sinned,” Gus said in a low voice, refusing to meet my eyes. “How can I work miracles when I am not in a state of grace?”

  “I guess you’ll have to do penance.”

  It was a flippant remark. I’d been about to sarcastically add that a year’s worth of Hail Marys and Our Fathers ought to be enough, but stopped myself before my anger at his defeatist attitude got the better of me. I decided that encouragement was more in order.

  “You did what they forced you to do,” I reassured him. “You thought you could trust your brother, but you couldn’t. Next time, you’ll know better. And you’ll do the right thing.”

  Gus wiped the tears away from his cheeks and clenched his jaw. “I will,” he said. “I swear it. May the devil take my soul if I do not.”

  I shivered at the passion with which he delivered his vow. He sounded like a man who was looking his own doom in the eye—who was willing to die, rather than fail his friends a second time.

  It made me feel a little bit better—made me feel that I could trust Gus not to betray Rafael and I. But it wouldn’t be long before I’d have cause to wonder whether I’d misplaced my trust.

  20

  I’d known all along that we’d need help if we were to have any hope at all of getting to Vargas in the ollamaliztli stadium. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. Trusting a complete stranger was hard enough. Trusting a would-be shadowrunner was another thing entirely. So even though I knew it was inevitable, I only reluctantly let Rafael talk me into meeting with Fede, the scalper who’d sold him the tickets for the final game and who claimed to know Tenochtitlán’s court ball stadium inside and out.

  We met Fede on Tuesday, the day before the final game, in the “Thieves Market”—a sprawling, open-air marketplace that lies just east of the traffic-circle intersection of Paseo de la Reforma and Lazaro Cardenas, two of Tenochtitlán’s major thoroughfares. For decades this sprawling collection of stalls, ta
bles, and closet-sized shops has offered everything from cheap tourist trinkets to sophisticated electronics parts, all at bargain-basement prices. We passed tables on which ultra-modern micro-camcorders and simsense units sat next to gigantic, old-fashioned video cameras the size of a loaf of bread. Clothing racks held everything from armored jackets and vests to Armante and Mortimer of London knock-offs, complete with fake labels. Innocuous items like breathers or children’s toys sat side by side with tasers, flechette rounds, and high-powered pistols.

  I had to remind myself that anything less than a fully automatic submachine gun could be bought and sold legally in Aztlan, without a permit, even though there was a war on. The Azzie police didn’t even consider pistols a threat—not when they patrolled the street in the equivalent of armored personnel carriers and carried enough personal body armor to stop anything short of a depleted-uranium shell.

  One vendor sold garishly colored portable phones shaped like holo-toon characters whose speakers transposed the voice of the caller into the cartoonish voice of the character. All had their demonstration programs activated, and a collection of squeaky mouse voices and deep, breathy villain voices blared out at us in an unintelligible cacophony as we passed. For the do-it-yourselfer, there were bits and pieces of telecom units and everything you’d need to build your own personal computer, including monitors, peripherals, voice synthesizer and recognition chips, datastore cartridges, printers, and processors. There were also boxes and boxes of simsense chips—many of them pornographic—and skill-softs, knowsofts, and other optical chips. I shook my head. Only a fool would slot a used chip sold on the street. I’d once met a street kid who’d done just that, and then wound up suffering epileptic seizures as a result. But I suppose some people found the prices too good to resist.

  Even more frightening were the stalls that sold medtech supplies. According to the hucksters who stood behind them, the auto-inject vials they offered for sale held everything from tailored pheromones guaranteed to enhance your sex life, to mnemonic enhancers for university students needing to cram, to toxin binders, to nanite symbiotes guaranteed to cure whatever ailed you. Other vendors hawked bits and pieces of used cyberware, from softlinks to entire limbs. I didn’t want to know where these had come from—or why their original owners no longer required them.

  The Aztlan policía did not patrol the marketplace in person, or even in vehicles. They probably felt it more important to maintain a presence at more upscale locations—especially since yet another rebel bomb had gone off in the capital last week, exploding outside the Cero Cero, a posh nightclub. And so the Thieves’ Market was monitored only by remote-operated airborne surveillance drones. But all were mounted with nasty looking rapid-fire light machine guns and gas canister tubes. Given the Azzies’ penchant for overkill, I suspected that these weapons weren’t equipped merely with stun rounds or tear gas, but with something much more lethal.

  The locals ignored the drones, going about the fast-paced and very vocal business of buying and selling. Everything was done on the barter system and many of the transactions were in hard cash, either metal-coated peso coins or plastiweave bills.

  We found Fede in the same spot where Rafael had contacted him earlier—inside the storefront office of the Pronosticos Deportivos Para La Asistencia Publica. The title translated roughly as Sports Predictions for the Public Welfare. It was Aztlan’s only legalized gambling operation, a subsidiary of the all-powerful ORO Corporation.

  The office itself consisted of a battery of automated gambling wickets. Long lines of sports fans lined up to slot their credsticks, place their bets and receive a “ticket”—an electronic notation of the bet, recorded on the credstick itself. A battery of monitor screens, located over the betting wickets, were broadcasting both live tridcasts of various sporting and racing events in progress around the world, and long listings of the odds for the various teams and competitors in upcoming matches.

  The entire system was automated, but provision had been made for those who wanted to place bets using peso coins or bills. These had to be verified as authentic and then converted into temporary credsticks. The employee who performed this task sat in a bulletproof glass cubicle, off to one side of the betting machines.

  Fede worked the nine a.m. to noon shift and supplemented his meager income by scalping tickets to upcoming sporting events throughout Aztlan. How he obtained the tickets was a mystery—Rafael said that Fede claimed to be able to get his “customers” a ticket to any event in any stadium at any time. His prices, however, reflected this ability.

  Although Fede wore a breather, I could see why he’d gotten his nickname. His face was indeed ugly—a puckered mass of pink and white scar tissue that looked like the result of a severe burn. His hair grew in wispy patches on his head and his eyebrows were missing. His ears were twisted ruins, and I didn’t want to imagine what his nose and lips looked like. The breather that hid them was as plain as our own—a basic Fellini-Med model, decorated with an overlapping collection of frayed sports team logo stickers.

  As we made our way up to the booth, Rafael raised a hand in greeting. “Hola, Fede,” he said. “Remember me? You sold me two tickets to—”

  Fede finished the sentence for him. “To game five of the ollamaliztli national finals.” He shook his head. “I should have charged you more. Now that the series is tied, I could have gotten ten times the price for them. Would you like me to sell them for you on consignment? Or are you still planning to go to the game? If so, my offer of accompanying you and explaining the ah . . . game to you still stands.”

  Rafael glanced back at me. He probably thought I was still angry at him for telling Fede about our plans. But there was no time for second thoughts now. The game was tomorrow. Still, I wanted some assurance that Fede would actually be an asset.

  “The price you named for helping us was pretty steep,” I told him. “How well do you know the layout of the tla . . .” I’d been about to ask him how well he knew the stadium, but his gesture silenced me. He touched a finger to his eye tooth and glanced behind him. The knowsoft I’d slotted on Aztlaner Spanish included a pictionary of gestures, and the one Fede was using referred to the presence of a third party. I couldn’t see any surveillance cameras, but it was a logical conclusion that the ORO Corporation would be watching over its money-changers to keep them honest. Since Fede scalped tickets from the booth, I’d assumed that he could talk freely. But I supposed that he sold the tickets with the tacit approval of ORO—and probably gave them a healthy mordida, in return.

  “My shift ends in twenty minutes,” Fede said. “We’ll talk then. Meet me outside, in the market.”

  Fede was good to his word. Twenty-one minutes later he approached us in the marketplace, then motioned us to follow him into a nearby herbalist’s shop. Inside the tiny store, octagonal plastiglass jars held everything from dried mescal worms to peyote buttons, from wormseed to loco-weed sleeping teas. Nodding to the dwarf who stood behind a thigh-high counter, Fede led us through a curtain and into a back room that smelled of musty herbs and sweet ointments. Even through my breather, the aromas were a poignant reminder of Mama G—her kitchen had smelled a lot like this. Had it already been ten days since I’d last seen her alive?

  The bittersweet memories that flooded my mind strengthened my resolve. We’d go through with this, dangerous and loco though it might be. Mama G deserved our best effort to at least find her killer, confront him, and find some means of bringing him to justice.

  Fede nodded to us to sit down on packing crates, lifted the curtain to take a quick glance back into the shop, then sat down himself. Now that he wasn’t hidden inside a booth, I realized what an impressive sight he was. He was only ugly from the neck up. From the neck down, he had the sculpted body of an athlete, so perfect that it must have been the result of muscle augmentation. His elbows and wrists bent and rotated with a fluidity that suggested enhanced articulation, and his legs were cybernetic—my cyberear could pick up the faint whine of hyd
raulic implants. I’d once had to chase a suspect with similar hydraulics and had been left in his dust when he’d jumped three meters straight up onto the roof of a building—from a standing start, no less. Fede must have made good money at scalping to have been able to afford all of those mods. And that posed a puzzle. Why hadn’t he hired a plastic surgeon to reconstruct his face? Maybe he liked being ugly—or maybe he carried the facial scars like a badge, a visible reminder of some event in his past.

  Time to get down to biz. I focused my cyberear’s amplification systems on the beating of Fede’s heart and his breathing. Even if he was able to keep a poker face, an increase in heart rate and respiration would give away any agitation that accompanied a lie.

  “We’re willing to pay you half the fee you requested up front, and half upon successful contact with the . . . ah . . . asset,” I told Fede. Even as I spoke, I laughed silently at myself. I was beginning to talk like a shadowrunner. “But we want to be assured that you know the tlachtli inside and out—that you’re able to guide us around the stadium’s security and into the teocalli. And that means knowing your credentials. Every peso we have it going toward your fee. We want to make sure our credit is well spent.”

  Fede nodded. “I see.”

  He paused for a moment, thinking. I wondered if he was making up a story—weighing us to see how much we’d swallow. But his heart rate and breathing remained steady.

  “I used to play on an ollamaliztli team, a few years ago,” Fede said. “Several of our matches were held in the tlachtli in Teotihuacán. I got to know the areas of the stadium that the public does not see, the sections used by the teams and their support staff. The key to getting into the adjoining temple is to access the first-aid rooms—the area where MedíCarro staff stabilize injured players before their transport to hospital. Because the priests sometimes come in to pray over the injured players, there is a connecting passage between the tlachtli and the teocalli.”