Lone Wolf

by Nigel Findley

  There’s a rage inside me, a terrible, burning thing I’ve never experienced before. It feels almost like it’s separate from me, with its own needs and wants and personality. Just like the wire feels sometimes, but more so. The rage wants nothing more than to wade out into the road, emptying my H & K into the figures—into the killers—before I’m cut down myself. So does the wire.

  But I can’t do that, I can’t die. Not yet. I’ve got things to do, I tell myself, and the rage inside me understands that. I’ve got to find out the why, and I’ve got to confirm the who (though I think I’ve got a pretty good fragging idea), and then I’ve got to pay a few less-than-social visits. Once I’m done with that, then whoever wants to can cut me down.

  I fake right, then cut left with every joule of energy in my body. The Mossberg devastates a lamppost a good half-dozen meters away from me, only now the SMGs are joining in the fun. Too late. I’m down an alley, out of the well-lit street, back into the darkness and the shadows that I know so well. Let the Lone Star Fast Response Team troopers clean up the mess. There’ll be an accounting soon enough.

  But not now.

  I run on into the night.

  Book Two

  14

  Insanity. Fragging insanity!

  I'm lying on a creaky, uncomfortable bed in Room 2LR in one of the drekkiest flophouses I’ve ever had the bad fortune to encounter. There are honk-stains on the carpet, bloodstains on the mattress, and when the heater kicks in the reek tells me a previous occupant didn’t bother making the short walk down the hall to the drekker. Still, it’s the closest thing I’ve got to home at the moment. I needed sleep and I needed the sense of security—false or not—of a roof over my head and walls to keep out the wind and rain. If it wasn’t safe crashing in a flop when it was just the Cutters out after my hoop, it’s even more risky now. Maybe I could have kept wandering the streets until I got so fragging tired I started making drekheaded mistakes and didn’t have the mental wherewithal to compensate for them, but dossing down for a day or so seemed like the more viable alternative.

  Frag knows, I didn’t get that much sleep anyway. It was just short of 0430 by the time I'd boosted a car—my bike’s still behind a restaurant in Montlake, assuming nobody’s managed to defeat the lock and security system yet—and rolled out to the Tarislar area of Puyallup. A major selling point for this whack of turf was that it’s about as far as you can get from downtown and not be in Salish-Shidhe territory, but that’s not all I had in mind when I headed south. Though the Cutters are everywhere, their presence in Tarislar is only minimal. Add to that the fact that Lone Star rarely patrols this elven neighborhood, and it becomes just about the safest place for me to hunker down at the moment.

  Tarislar’s a hole, don’t let anybody tell you any different. The region between Kreger Lake and Harts Lake, it used to be a flash place to live, or so I’ve heard. Sometime around the turn of the century, it suddenly blossomed from a rural area into a “bedroom community,” sprouting mid-rise apartment blocks like fungus. Then, of course, property rates kinda slipped a tad when Mount Rainier erupted and spewed toxic mud and other drek over the area now called Hell’s Kitchen. They slipped even further when the prevailing winds shifted, bringing the reek of the Kitchen—with all its associated toxins—wafting over it. People moved out just in time to make space for the influx of elves pouring southeastward after the Night of Rage.

  So that’s Tarislar today, a “temporary” haven for elves who’ve never been able to move elsewhere, an area of decaying buildings filled with squatters and cities of shacks built on parks and golf courses. Charming.

  Still, as I say, it was exactly what I was looking for. I don’t know why, but the Cutters have few elves among their ranks. It could be racism, but it probably has more to do with the dominance of elf-based outfits in Tarislar. Non-elven gangs aren’t going to make much of a dent against that. Lone Star, too, is mostly human, and that could well be one of the reasons for low police presence in the area— lower, even, than the “E” level of enforcement throughout the rest of Puyallup. Conversely, as a human, I stand out like a fragging sore thumb in Tarislar, and everybody’s going to take note of the celenit—the “unevolved monkey-man”— walking the streets. But at least the odds are against them reporting me to anyone who cares.

  So, to continue, it was about 0430 when I hit Tarislar, and close to an hour later by the time I’d found a flophouse that would take me. I didn’t have much choice, which is the only reason I ended up at the rat-infested flea circus called The Promise. (Promise of what? Bed bugs, or a nice skin rash maybe?) Into bed by 0540, call it, for twelve-plus hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep . . .

  Which categorically refused to come. Oh sure, I did drift off now and again—for five or ten minutes at a time, before the nightmare woke me up. The same nightmare, every fragging time, a replay of the ambush on Montlake Boulevard. The missile hitting the car, the FRT troopers on the roof and advancing across the street. Cat’s screams as she burns alive. Sometimes the car raptures under the missile’s impact, throwing me free. Sometimes it doesn’t, trapping me inside while the flames rise up around me and Cat shrieks in my ears and I can see the satisfied grins of the troopers as they come forward to watch the fun . .. I shake my head, hard. Even just remembering those nightmares is unbearable. I check my watch—1300 hours, or close enough, which means I've had seven hours of something you couldn’t quite call sleep. It also means the gutterpunk elf who opened the lobby door when I pounded on it, and charged me entirely too much for a room, has had seven hours to rat out the celen in room 2LR to anyone who’s expressed an interest. The facts that my skin’s unpunctured and I’m still alone—not counting the multilegged creepy-crawlies—hints that I’m safe enough for the moment.

  I sit up, slide my butt up toward the head of the bed so I can lean against the wall. My gaze settles on my black jacket, hung over the back of the room’s single chair. The back of the jacket's scorched, the synthleather delaminated and blistered in places by extreme heat. All I can figure is that the fireball from the exploding missile spread forward through the passenger compartment, was deflected downward by Cat’s raised seat, and hit me in the small of the back to lick up toward my shoulders. Same with the shock wave, except it probably “echoed” in the space under Cat’s seat, delivering enough energy to crack the monocoque at its weakest point, the front wheel-wells. Pure luck I’m still alive, then. Luck that favored me and deserted Cat.

  The rage churns and twists inside me like a live thing made of hot metal, but it’s under better control now. It’s not going to go away—I don’t want it to go away, not till it’s satisfied—but at the moment it feels more like a useful tool. Something I can control, whose power I can channel and focus, instead of it controlling me. That’s what I hope, at least. It’s an extension of something they taught us in the Academy: get angry when you have to, but use the anger. I don’t think my instructors were thinking about anything like this, but the result’s the same.

  The Star. Thinking about the Academy rips off the ... well, call it the mental equivalent of a scab over a painful train of thought. My eyes burn, and my throat tightens like someone’s got me by the windpipe.

  The Star’s betrayed me, there’s no other way of reading it. They’ve put me “beyond salvage”. Like the Cutters, Lone Star has decided that Richard Larson is “out of sanction,” to be eliminated with extreme prejudice. And like them, the Star sent out the equivalent of a hit team to fry me. And, still like with the Cutters, I recognized them—after the fact. The biggest difference from the gang is that the Lone Star attempt brought with it a higher level of collateral damage than I really want to remember right now . ..

  Why, frag it? Why? The questions parallel those I wracked my fragging brains with after Marla and friends tried to scrag me at the Wenonah. Why did the Star decide I must die? And why did it have to be an ambush? Frag, they could have brought me in, debriefed me, then fragging poisoned me, if they had a mind to.<
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  No, wait, I’m missing something here, aren't I? I’m talking about “them” and “the Star” as if it’s a definite, known group. But is it? By frag I think so. I think it’s Layton, Drummond, and McMartin, that fragging unholy triumvirate who strung me along and kept me from coming into the light, then set up the parameters of the meet. Cat even said it was Drummond who sent her out to make the pickup. Doesn’t that lock it in? Doesn’t it prove Drummond’s fragging complicity?

  It’s so tempting to say “yes,” to pick out a nice, defined well-known target for my hatred. But it’s not necessarily the case. Remember, we’re dealing with someone—or some faction—that has penetrated the Star’s data fortress, that has gotten in deep enough to dig up my connection with Nicholas Finnigan. That kind of penetration gives them more power and control over Star operations than I really care to think about.

  Like, try this as a possible scenario. Drummond and crew want to set up a meet. They figure I’m going to be jumpy—a good guess—particularly after being kept dangling for a day, and decide to send someone I’ll recognize and trust. Drummond knows the Seattle data fortress is compromised, so he accesses the Milwaukee files to find someone I know, and comes up with Cat. Unfortunately, IrreleCorp, or whoever, is in deeper than he thinks, and intercepts the data request—or maybe they’ve already got their hooks into Milwaukee anyway, it doesn’t matter.

  Now Drummond sends Cat out to make the pickup. The order will certainly be logged somewhere, but just as certainly the assignment log won’t say anything about me. IrreleCorp, however, they’re smart; they know Cat knows me, and they figure out what her assignment actually is. They now issue an order, through the computer network, to an FRT team to set up on Montlake Boulevard near Roanoke and take out the Tsarina expected to be heading south sometime after 0255. The rationale's probably something like “magical terrorists, considered extremely dangerous, eliminate before they can get their first spell off.” In other words, ambush.

  Despite the drek you see on the pirate trids, “shoot first, then question the remains” isn’t Lone Star SOP, and ambushes aren’t just another assignment. The FRT team leader would almost certainly have questioned the order, and checked it out through various channels. Unfortunately, those “various channels” would all have been electronic and computer-mediated, and IrreleCorp could have given the correct verifications and authorizations to set the team leader’s little mind at ease that the op was kosher. Off lumber the armed and armored troopers to do their bit to save Seattle.

  Boom! Say farewell to Tsarina, Rick Larson, and Cat Ashburton. The next morning, of course, the drek’s going to hit the pot when it turns out the orders logged and verified as coming from Drummond’s office didn’t come from Drummond at all. Much chaos, but by that point I’m safely scragged—mission successfully accomplished.

  Frag it, it holds together. It could have happened that way. With deep enough computer penetration, IrreleCorp could have turned a nice, clean pickup into an ambush. It didn’t have to be Drummond, Layton, McMartin, and the other suits at all. Frag, just when I thought I knew who to blame.

  I shake my head again. I can run through all the paranoid options and alternatives and possibilities and probabilities till my ears bleed, but it’s not going to do any good without hard data to help me pick and choose between them. I need to know something—anything—about what’s going down. But how to go about it?

  I've still got that bee in my fragging bonnet about the Tir corp-Cutters connection. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with anything, but at the moment it feels like the only thing I can follow up on. Everything else seems just too big, too overwhelming. (Like, how do I get some leverage on the fragging Star?) It’s like somebody told me years ago when I was at university: “If you don’t know what to do next, do what you can.” Good advice, I suppose. With a heartfelt sigh

  I swing my feet to the floor and prepare myself to face the day.

  * * *

  I feel naked and exposed and incredibly vulnerable walking the streets of Tarislar. It’s not just the way the elves glare at me with undisguised hostility or simply pretend I don’t fragging exist—though that’s part of it. No, it’s the realization that I don’t have the wheels to bug out if trouble comes looking for me. My bike’s gone, and cruising in a stolen car is too much of a risk.

  If anything, Tarislar by day looks even worse than Tarislar by night. You can’t see the bonfires and jury-rigged braziers burning in the vacant lots among the wreckage of collapsed buildings, but you can see the shanty-town huts and makeshift shelters on what used to be manicured lawns. There’s a sense of despair that hangs in the air like a bad smell. Not the smoldering, volatile anger you’d feel in an ork-dominated slum, but a kind of dull acceptance and fatalism. It makes me sad.

  After ten or fifteen minutes of walking in the cold gray drizzle, I find the public phone I’m looking for. The hinges are too rusted or jammed to close the door, but at least the booth shelters me from the rain. I sit down on the metal ledge and punch in Cat’s LTG number.

  Frag, I should have known it would hit me like this, seeing Cat’s recorded message. But I didn’t. When her face resolves on the screen—big eyes, copper hair, sensuous lips—I feel like someone’s slipped an ice-cold stiletto between my ribs under my heart. My eyes burn and my vision blurs, and I have to fight to get air into my lungs. For a few moments, I don’t think I can stand it. I want nothing more than to jump up and run. But then the rage reasserts itself, burning and churning in my belly. Somebody’s going to pay, oh yes, they’re going to pay—and then I know I can handle it. My emotions fade away, and I feei cold and hard and barely human as Cat’s outgoing message comes to an end. With fingers that don’t quite feel like mine, I key in the access code for the Special Favors file. My hands shake so much I almost can’t enter the Mayflower password, but somehow I manage it.

  Cat’s little demons or smartframes or whatever the frag she called them have been busy little buggers. The five names—Crystalite, Griffin, and the rest—have become section headings, with paragraphs of text and blocks of numerical data after each one. Instead of a list, it’s starting to look like a biz report. I quickly scan through the file, but the only one thing that catches my eye is that one entry—the one for Telestrian Industries Corporation—is much bigger, two or three times bigger, than the others. Using the phone’s keyboard, I flag that section of the file for future attention.

  Then, working quickly, I insert a blank datachip into the phone’s data port, and key in the instruction to download the file. A second or two later the machine beeps, I extract the chip, break the connection, and head back out into the rain.

  For a few moments I consider finding a good overwatch position, hunkering down and observing the pay phone. I might learn something important. After all, IrreleCorp or whoever set up the ambush must know by now I survived. If I were them, I don’t think I’d miss the trick of putting a trace on Cat’s phone. (But then I’d probably have remotely nuked all data files on her telecom, if that’s possible. Again, I feel like I’m missing something.)

  Then again, I know so little about what’s going on that spotting a team responding to my call—coming to do a drive-by on the phone, for example—wouldn’t help me much. More background information, that’s what I need. I turn and stride off back toward The Promise.

  15

  There are some advantages to dossing down at a fleabag like The Promise. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about maid service breezing in and disturbing your thought processes.

  I’m sitting on the bed in an uncomfortable half-lotus, with a hot new pocket secretary on my lap. (“Hot” designating its origins, certainly not its performance.) My headware isn’t designed for poring over a textual data file like the drek I downloaded from Cat’s phone, and I seem to have misplaced my own palmtop computer somewhere along the way. Pretty careless. I really should keep better track of my toys. So anyway, I obviously needed something that could do the job, and ju
st as obviously I wasn’t going to find a Radio Shack or a Fuchi distributor in the depths of the Tarislar ghetto.

  Fortunately, ghettos and their ilk have their own channels of distribution, and a blind transfer of cred to a hard-bitten elf recommended to me by The Promise’s desk clerk—after another transfer of cred, of course—netted me an “almost-new” Yamaha PDA-5 that had “fallen off the back of a truck” elsewhere in the sprawl. The price was high—two-K, almost as much as I’d pay for a new one with a manual and warranty and such drek—but so was my level of need, and the elf fence knew it. We struck the deal and I hied myself off back “home” to get to work.

  For the third time or so. I’m going over the file that Cat’s demons put together on the five names, hoping that something will ring a bell. So far, no luck. The five names are all corps—Crystalite Environmental Research Corporation, Griffin Technologies Incorporated, Teiestrian Industries Corporation, Margaux Enterprises, and Starbright Advanced Synergetics (a good dandelion-eater corp name if I ever heard one)—all more or less significant players in the Tir and, in some cases, elsewhere in the world as well. As Cat herself told me, none has any official presence in Seattle or UCAS in general. Of the five, Telestrian Industries Corporation—generally known as TIC—is by far the biggest. A big, sprawling, aggressive conglomerate, with its fingers into a hundred different pies. Annual cash flow and assets both measured in the multibillions of nuyen with corporate headquarters in a fragging arcology in downtown Portland. Into everything from genetic engineering to cutting-edge software development, with a few really weird sidelines going on in parallel.

  In contrast, the others are more moderate outfits. Not small—still up in the billion nuyen range—but much less diversified and pervasive than TIC. According to Cat’s demons, all of them have something in the way of “special security” forces—read “covert ops assets”—and hints that they’ve shown some kind of activity in the sprawl at one time or another.