Into the Shadows

by Jordan Weisman

  "What if . . ." Will gnawed at the inside of his cheek uncertainly. "How would it respond if you approached it from two places at once?"

  A tear splashed from the porcupine’s eye. "I don’t know how it would respond, but I couldn’t get into two places at once, now could I?"

  "Couldn’t you?" Will asked. "That surprises me. But then everything about this unnatural place surprises me. Try it. eh?"

  Porky's icon shuffled close to the cube, and he rode back on his haunches to lift his paws high to either side. Grey could see him shaking. "Easy, Porky! Don’t rush it. Let the deck carry you. You can do it."

  The two bars closest to either paw closed in, and Porky kept back just far enough to prevent full activation of the defenses. Between the bowing bars spread a broad opening, an ace of spades entryway in the middle. "Now what, chummer!" Porky yelped. "I’ve got a door, but I can’t go through while I’m holding it. You can’t deck!"

  Will snarled. "Jump, you fat squonk! If you ever thought of motion as a career option, move! Vault in now!"

  Porky Pryne leaped through the lanceolate opening, carrying Will safely sidecar as the black bars snapped to behind them, nearly clipping the bushy tailjacks of Porky's icon.

  Datalight flickered inside the cube, pink and gray like splashed brain matter. Silver, gold, and green slivers dashed past on opal ID waves, monetary transactions flagged for magnitude by the traditional keycolors. Tumbling spheres darted from one intersec to another, slipping swiftly through the network of bargains and agreements to the ultimate satisfaction of the electronic participants.

  The porcupine icon was very still.

  "Porky?" Will Grey would have nudged his companion were there any physical presence to address. "Find Cortez’s account, juice the slot, and be done, man!"

  The porcupine waddled slowly forward, stepping gingerly across the surging data as if his feet hurt. A crystalline sphere paused before him briefly, and Porky called out a different punch from Meg Motley’s deck, putting a peculiar spin on the sphere. It sailed away to an infinite horizon without leaving a ripple behind.

  Porky drew up before a series of amber-orange tapes descending from the silver-gray sky. "What’s the man’s name again?"

  "Sam Cortez."

  Porky scratched at the base of the tape and a rainbow gush of I.D. flags scrolled past. "No, not that . . . not that . . . ooh, she’s a fun one . . ." One name, scintillating, geysered up, and the datalights squirmed like slashed fiberwire. "Samuel Angus Cortez! Gotcha!" Like a light sculptor, Porky rearranged the starbytes into a changing but cyclical pattern different from the eruption that had shimmered on the tape before. He stepped back, admiring his work.

  "It’s done. It balances. It’s got the same feel." Porky smiled complacently. "Not that our extra funds would make much difference to him. "

  Will went cold in the feeling-less Matrix. "What are you talking about?"

  The porcupine’s round shoulders rose and fell. "All these big deposits he’s gotten lately—if we take just one-tenth of those when we come back in. we’ll double our yield. I’ve flagged down that much."

  "No!" Will couldn’t see the spiritwheel, but in his gut, he could feel it spinning. "Don’t touch that money! His account will launder ours, and that's all. Disengage those toggles!" Grey didn’t see the move, but felt Porky pull the plugs. Bewildered and annoyed, the fat man grumbled. "Don’t figure I could pull down the raid, after all, huh? You lied. You kept telling me how good I was. I got all the other work done, didn’t I? Got in here, too. Guess I’m better than you figured, huh? Better than you thought?"

  Will wanted to scream. Instead, he jacked out.

  * * *

  Will Grey took a deep breath, reorienting into the simple three dimensions of Yoshimura’s office. The spiritwheel, still spinning, danced like datalight before his eyes, and his brain struggled with mixed success to separate the cyberspace input from the soulspace sensations.

  A sunspirit in crimson flame rode at the heart of the medicine wheel, and every limb crawled with tattooed forms where it wasn’t papered with nuyen. Eyeless, it searched blindly for something, but the spokes of the wheel shielded Will. protecting him. Will flushed with relief, grateful that the peculiarly large deposits in Cortez’s account were left untouched. Around the rim of the wheel danced other figures, some recognizable, some foreign: a warrior with a crested helm preceded a vision of a nymph astride a dragonfly, then a tatterdemalion waltzed with a Victorian wraith. Skyblue fire exploding in his head pulled Will from the trance and his eyes popped open.

  The office door opened slowly and Samuel Cortez scuffed in, head bent over the open book of paintchips. He blinked, befuddled, glancing up at Will Grey, then back down at the book.

  "I’ve never had such a hard time deciding anything." Cortez scratched his ear, then squinted into Grey's face. "Boesky’s Blue is hot right now, but does it have legs for tomorrow? No point in getting a color we can’t live with for a little while, at least. Yet, I think I like this pink. It’s so subtly neon."

  "It does go nicely with your shirt." Will suppressed a grin and cracked open a tin of gray-white paint. Taking a case of tube concentrates from a thigh-pouch, he clicked the lid off one and dripped three measures of blood-red into the large tin. Depressing a button on the side, Grey set the paint swirling, the red spinning like a carnival ride gone murderous, until an overall rosy pink was achieved.

  "Just the thing, eh, Mr. Cortez?" Will Grey chose a broad brush from the satchel and pounded the bristles on the floor until they separated into something useful. With a slashing motion, he slapped a stripe of paint on the wall beside the door frame, and shoved the paint around until it covered a square meter or so.

  Cortez licked his lips. "I can’t quite be sure. It’s got to be just exactly right." Will detected a whine in the man’s voice, and winced. The manipulation he’d done on Cortez’s thinking obviously hadn't worn off yet, and one whiner a day was already too much.

  "Trust me," he said flatly. "Daimyo Rose is the right color."

  "Maybe." Cortez tapped his foot unhappily. "Boesky-B is such a comer. Don’t you think you could mix that for me too? Just so I could see it on the wall?"

  Grey cleared his throat. "Sorry. The rose is your best bet, believe me. Don’t have the concentrates for that particular blue."

  "What an excellent pink!"

  Cortez snapped around toward the vast block of a man moving out from behind the cloth-draped desk. Will Grey took a deep breath and held it, beseeching the spirits to keep Porky under control.

  "If you had any doubts about choosing that lovely shade," Porky exclaimed exuberantly, "why, Mr. Cortez, you just put that right out of your mind. Daimyo Rose makes the perfect statement. It says, here’s a man who knows what’s what!" Will scraped up a smile when Cortez turned his confusion on him. "My partner. Makes the color decisions." He fought the surprise drying his mouth. "Wonderful eye. Really." He loaded the brush with more paint and slap-sketched the Nat Vat logo on the wall.

  Cortez smiled weakly. "I suppose you’re right. You work with these things every day ..."

  "Every day!" seconded Porky.

  Cortez chewed his lip, then shrugged his dark wool suit into a more comfortable fall. "I’ll be going back to my desk, then, but there’s something else ... I was thinking about getting the carpet changed, too, and it’s going to be quite a task to decide ..."

  "Quite a task to decide what?" A tall woman with short, dark hair filled the doorway imposingly. Her voice iced the conversation, even as it resonated delightfully into Will Grey’s bones. His jaw dropped a few centimeters before he caught it and returned it to its place.

  Cortez stepped sideways in alarm. "Nadia! Uh. Ms. Mirin. Quite a . . . quite a task . . . quite a job to choose."

  A narrow crease appeared between dark winging brows. Her green eyes hardened. "Choose what?"

  Will Grey raised his hand. He didn’t want to face the woman’s icy glare, but he felt he’d do anything, anyt
hing at all, to get her attention. "I think Mr. Cortez wanted to expand Mr. Yoshimura’s contract for redecorating this office, now that Mr. Yoshimura has left the company."

  Something flickered briefly in Nadia Mirin’s eyes. She straightened the sleeve of her purple-black brocade dress, pulling the lavender-shot cuff over a bracelet of silver. "Mr. Yoshimura is recently deceased."

  "I understand," Will said with a proper lamenting overtone. "But the contract still binds us to repaint. Mr. Cortez, fortunately, explained that the office was going to be his . . ."

  "Really?" Nadia looked away from Will to pin Cortez against the wall with a harsh stare. Cortez took a last step backward, and Will tried to catch the woman's attention again.

  "Since we’re being such an inconvenience, why don't you let us do your office while we’re here?" Will Grey smiled, his gold canine winking. "No charge."

  Another woman might have shyly dropped her gaze, but Nadia Mirin just shook her head, amusement peeping past her sternness. "No. But thank you. I’m quite sure your papers are in order to finish this job, or you wouldn’t have those visitor’s passes. So continue your work as scheduled, then go.

  "Now. Mr. Cortez. The handsome exec drew himself away from the wall, standing as tall as he could. Will thought that was another practised move, but not as successfully carried out. Cortez almost stepped forward, then seemed to reconsider. Mirin’s intense presence bound his feet to the floor. "Mr. Yoshimura is not yet buried, and his office is not yet yours. It may never be yours. I suggest you return to your own desk, and see if you can get some useful work done today. "

  Cortez executed a formal and correct corporate bow, then scuttled past Nadia Mirin’s stiff shoulder.

  Will was unable to stifle the chuckle, and he heard it echoed from Porky behind him.

  "What, if you don’t mind my asking, is so funny?" Mirin arched her right eyebrow and Will fought the urge to leap forward and kiss her.

  "I’m afraid that Mr. Cortez . . ." He coughed slightly to restrain his mirth. "The paint, you see, on the wall . . ." Nadia's perplexity staggered his emotions all over again. He jutted his chin forward, pointing to where Cortez stood, his back toward the group, moving a stack of chip-disks from one filebox into another. A smeary pink NatVat logo gleamed wetly from the shoulder of Cortez's neatly tailored black suit.

  Nadia Mirin fought to control her own grin, and Will was devastated by the dimple that appeared on her right cheek. He started to work up a minor lovespell—surely Old Man Coyote would approve!—and almost jumped out of his skin when the spiritwheel smashed down on his hands, immobilizing him from within. He reconsidered, swallowing dejectedly.

  Nadia raised one eyebrow again, her gaze sweeping across the smudged paint. "That," she said turning on her heel to leave, "Is the ugliest shade of pink I’ve ever seen."

  * * *

  Will wiped the last of the Narwhal’s Dreamwhite from his hands. With the glider of equipment beside him. he planted his feet firmly as Porky stepped into the service elevator after him. The cables creaked overhead and the floor sank down three centimeters. The doors closed, cutting off the secman’s bored surveillance. With a grind, the elevator started its slow descent.

  Will Grey sighed, relief overcoming the last of his disappointment at Nadia Mirin’s unapproachability. He’d never had so strong a reaction from the spiritwheel, and considering the ache still in his hands, he hoped never to experience such a thing again. He’d stick to fantasies, and let it go at that.

  "Didn’t I do great?"

  Will turned his gaze to the mountain-sized man beside him. "You did fine."

  Porky nodded vigorously. "Maybe I am a pretty good ice-skater! Meg's deck helped, sure, but I did the run myself.

  I’m a hot wire!"

  Will rubbed his eyes, the stink of the paint still clinging to his hands. "Porky," he said carefully, "you did a fine job. Didn't I say you would? We walk out of here, it’s over. Meg and I’ll go back to being the graverobbers, and when anyone else helps out, we all benefit. But you never have to do this again."

  The fat man heaved himself around, a huge smile hiding his eyes behind rising mounds of mcion-colored flesh. "But. Will, it was fun!"

  Wills brow furrowed darkly. "Porky, you went into this run like a scaredy cat. You’re coming out like the Chesire cat. Think you could explain this to me?"

  "I did good! It was easy and I enjoyed it!" He shifted his shoulders back and forth in imitation of a sarariman’s swagger. "Me, the stupid porcupine of the Matrix. Why, I'll deck with the Steel Valkyrie! Move over, Mycroft! I'll pull the legs off the Glass Tarantula! You won’t be so saucy now, Jack!"

  He balled up a tiny fist and raised it toward the steelbar ceiling in triumph.

  Will's smiled in the cold elevator light as he slapped his arm around Pryne’s vast shoulders. "I'm so glad you feel that way. Porky. And here I was thinking I wouldn’t be able to talk you into the next run I have planned . . ."

  TAILCHASER

  by Paul R. Hume

  Death came out of nowhere. Maybe it was as fast as it looked, maybe not. Only the dead know for sure, and they don’t often talk.

  The dead man had been sitting at a shabby desk. His eyes were closed but his fingers had been clicking rapidly over the keys of a laptop console. A thin cable ran from the console to a socket embedded in his temple.

  The moving hands paused, hung in space, the fingers slightly curled. He exhaled, a long, slow sigh that grew into a hiss, and then into a thin, breathless scream from emptied lungs. His back arched as muscles contracted and he toppled backward, overbalancing the chair. The connecting cable dragged the console after him as man, chair, and machine went down in a writhing tangle on the floor. There was a final, bone-cracking spasm, then stillness.

  The woman had jumped into motion at the first signs of trouble, but events moved with lethal speed. She disconnected the datajack from the man’s head, her fingers probing at his throat.

  "Frag it!" she snapped. "I’m not getting a pulse!" She glanced at the cyberdeck and cursed bitterly. Its screen showed nonsense patterns: fragments of data, scrambled graphics, random instructions. She stood back as two men rushed up and began resuscitation attempts. She watched their efforts briefly, then turned and walked out of the room.

  She glanced up and down the dingy corridor, then dialled a fifteen-digit number into her pocket phone. The instrument chirped as it made the preprogrammed connection. The voice that answered was quick, staccato. The man at the other end of the line had been waiting for this call, and patience was not among his few virtues.

  "What’s your status?"

  "We blew it. Their ice took out our decker."

  "Their security is tougher than you thought, then. And the strike team?"

  "Without a decker neutralizing the site’s automated defenses from inside the computer, they’ll be lucky if they can escape without getting zapped by UniOil’s security," she responded. "They have no chance of reaching the objective."

  "Right, right. O.K., we’ll have to try something else . . ." There was a pause. Then, decisively, "Scrub this hosed up mess. Get your people out of there asap. Report to me in the morning."

  "And the strike team?"

  "They knew the risks when they took the contract. Get out of there immediately. I’ll want proposals for another pass at the target when I see you."

  "Mr. Cortez, this raid is going to have United Oil's security going ballistic. I strongly recommend we postpone any further action. Any operation we mount in the near term is going to be . . ."

  The voice on the phone dripped sarcasm as it cut her off. "That’s just wizard. First your incompetence hoses this run, and now your ‘expert opinion’ is that we should back off like whipped puppies. I have a netflash bulletin for you, sweetheart! We need that material and we need it now. Not later, now.

  "I know that United Oil and Bob’s Cartage are working out a deal that is going to hurt us here at Natural Vat. Mr. Yoshimura agrees with me, but need
s documentation to convince that idiot bitch, Mirin. I’ve got a lead the UniOil has the data we need stored at their R&D facility over in Auburn. Hitting it should be a standard piece of shadow work, but heaven help my bleeding butt, I get an imbecile like you assigned from Industrial Research as my Mr. Johnson.

  "I don’t want excuses. I want results. You better have a proposal for getting me some results when I see you in the morning. Hire whoever you have to. I’ll give you an open account to draw on. And I want that material within a week, tops. Anything else?"

  "Nothing occurs to me at the moment," she said through gritted teeth.

  "Right. I'll see you in the morning." The line went dead.

  The woman cursed bitterly at the silent receiver. Pompous, jacked-up little son-of-a-glitch! Playing little power games with my butt. What the hell do / do now? Then a slow smile began. Stupid question. Find someone else. Now who's it gonna be?

  * * *

  Thorn hauled butt through the streets of the Reds. C’mon elf-boy, he snarled to himself. Move your fraggin’ light-as-thistledown feet! Behind him, he could hear the high-pitched, excited sounds of his pursuers. The Night Hunters affected sonic transformations as part of their colors, vocal implants that modulated their voices into high-frequency sonics, and audio pickups that translated the squeals back into speech. The gang also went in for drastic cosmetic surgery, including lemur-like eyes and assorted attachments for cutting up anyone they disliked into thin slices. At the moment, they disliked Thorn.

  More squeaking up ahead. The elf dodged down an alley, moving from the dim light of the streets into deeper shadow. How did I get into this mess, anyway?

  The trouble had begun ai a meet with one of Prince’s boys on supposedly neutral ground in the Redmond Barrens, the urban combat zone to the north of the Seattle sprawl. After several weeks spent getting the feel of the town. Thorn's dwindling finances and a hard-to-ignore opportunity had spurred him into lifting a useful little load of free-fall-grown, ultra-pure crystals. The ork fence had been pleased with the merchandise Thorn had to offer. While valuable, it wasn't particularly hot, and neither of them had any reason to suspect the meet was compromised. Not until a blast from a shotgun removed the ork’s head, and the shrill sounds of the Night Hunters filled the night.