Her eyes flash, but her expression doesn’t change. “I’d hoped I could convince you merely by describing the carrot,” she says coolly. “Brandishing the stick is so inelegant. Still, if you insist . .
And now her face looks pure predator. “If you don’t agree to my suggestion, I’ll enjoy issuing my own sanction order against you, Mr. Larson. Trust me, the operatives I select will be much better at their job than anyone you’ve ever faced before—than anyone you’ve ever had nightmares about facing. If you’re very good, you might be able to hide from Lone Star’s executioners. You will never be able to escape mine. Trust me on that.”
I do. If there’s one single, solitary part of the slitch’s entire proposal that I believe—wholeheartedly, right down to the core of my soul—it’s the gravity of this threat. I force myself to ignore the sick knot of fear that’s settled in my gut, and struggle to keep my face expressionless. “You’ve got an interesting negotiating style,” I tell her as smoothly as I can.
“Does that mean you accept?”
I sigh. “Yes.” I studiously keep myself from glancing at Argent.
For a few seconds, at least. Lynne Telestrian’s next words break that resolution. “I assume Argent is with you, am I right?”
The runner’s eyebrows shoot up again, and his metal hands click as they clench into fists. For a moment I think he’s going to ignore her. But then he rises slowly and crosses into the field of view of the telecom’s vid pickup. “I’m here,” he says, his voice like oiled metal.
“My .. . invitation .. . extends to you as well,” she says with a faint smile. “Your skills would be of great value in the strike.”
Argent smiles. “I think my comrade put it quite succinctly. No fragging way. Find another fragging pigeon, leal. ”
She looks mildly surprised. “You don’t even want to hear a business offer?”
The runner doesn’t react for a second or two, then he shrugs. “I’ll listen.” I grind my teeth. Of course he’ll fragging listen. He’s a fragging shadowrunner, isn’t he? And now you’re talking his language—biz and credit. Just flash enough nuyen signs and Mr. fragging Argent will jump frosty and do any little thing you say. That’s what being a shadowrunner means.
“I’m willing to offer you a sum of thirty thousand nuyen in bearer share certificates,” the elf-woman says crisply, then smiles faintly. “Telestrian Industries Corporation stock, of course. To give you extra incentive to keep certain matters quiet. Desert Wars veteran and shadowrunner or not, I think you’ll agree that’s fair payment for a single day’s work.”
I shoot a glance at Argent, but don’t say anything. Desert Wars veteran? No fragging wonder he’s such a tough bastard.
The runner’s smile broadens. “Thirty thousand? No way, lady.” He pauses, and his smile fades. “And don’t even bother coming back with a counter-offer.”
Lynne-slitch frowns. “You said you’d listen.”
“Just long enough so I could laugh in your face, scum,” he says lightly. The elf starts to cloud up big-time, drawing breath to say something that’s bound to be poisonous. But Argent cuts her off. “Give me a reason, chummer. Give me a good fragging reason why I should want to come along.’ That knocks her off balance; I can see it in her eyes. She doesn’t answer for a moment, and I can almost hear the thoughts churning wildly. Then she nods slowly. “I think I see,” she muses. “Try this, then.
“Do you know why no magically activated viruses are currently being used commercially or have even been developed?” she asks, her voice deceptively calm. “At first blush, it would seem to be an incredibly rich and useful technology. For tumor treatment or control, perhaps. Or control of other diseases. The virus is insinuated into the body, but triggered only at the opportune moment—when a symptom manifests itself, perhaps, or when the virus is concentrated in the cancerous tissue.” She shrugs. “Those are only a few possibilities, ones that came to my mind over the last hour. I’m sure any viral geneticist or medical researcher could come up with thousands more. So why aren’t we seeing this technology in widespread use?
“Because of the risks,” she answers herself. “All attempts to insert mana-sensitive introns into genetic material have led to a drastic weakening of the DNA or RNA chain. Obviously, if the introns are already there—as they are in species subject to Awakening—there’s no weakening ... or very little, at any rate. But in all attempts to . . . er, retrofit the introns, the results are totally unpredictable.”
“Weakening.” The word’s out of my mouth before I know I’m about to speak. “What kind of weakening?”
“It manifests itself in terms of vastly increased susceptibility to micro-and macro-mutation,” she says flatly. “The genetic code is very unstable, and can shift drastically from generation to generation.”
“Antigenic shift,” I murmur, remembering Doc Dicer’s description of the virus that killed Paco.
I didn’t think I’d said it loud enough for anyone to hear, but Telestrian picks up on it. “Yes, antigenic shift is one consequence, but more drastic changes are also possible. The reason magically activated viruses aren’t used is that nobody knows what they’re going to turn into.” Her voice is cold—or maybe it’s just my reaction to what she’s saying. “The antitumor virus, tailored to attack cancerous cells exclusively, shifts and starts attacking only those cells that aren’t cancerous.
“Think of the potential consequences,” she goes on. “As you stated in your report, Mr. Larson, the virus that infected the Cutters is closely related to the VITAS 3 retrovirus. Not VITAS 4 . . . not yet. I’m no viral geneticist, but it seems to me the transition between non-infective and infective— between targeted bioweapon and lethal pandemic—isn’t a particularly big one.
“The raid will go on, with or without you, Argent. But I’d say the chances of success—of blowing the lab and destroying all stocks of the virus—are much greater with you along.
“And that,” she concludes, “seems to me to be a good enough reason.”
Silence. Nobody moves, nobody talks. It stretches longer and longer—probably only seconds, but it feels like half a fragging hour. Finally Argent nods once, briskly. “I’m in,” he says.
“Good,” Lynne Telestrian purrs. “Hold for details.”
28
Fragged if I know what to make of it. I’m starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that the whole fragging world is conspiring to take my preconceptions and cherished attitudes and drop them into the drekker. Like, “The Star’s different from other megacorps.” Wrong! And like, “Shadowrunners care about squat except money.” Wrong! They’re both hard to swallow, but I think I’m having more trouble with the second one.
Well, actually that’s not true, since the second one’s connected to the first. Here’s how it scans out in my mind. As a Star undercover op, I’m working out of the light to further the ends of the corp that pays my salary. Kind of like a shadowrunner, neh? The only thing that sets me apart is that I’m doing what I’m doing for reasons other than improving my cred balance, and runners don’t do that ... Except that Argent, the quintessential shadowrunner, is taking on something because it’s important to him even though it won’t net him any cred at all. So where, then, do you draw the line between me and Argent, tell me that? It’s a tough fragging question, and one that’s twisting up my guts.
Okay, yeah, that’s not the only thing that’s twisting up my guts. There’s a healthy dose of pre-op tension as well. And why not? I’m sitting on one of the rear benches of an assault-rigged GMC Riverine, crushed between Argent to my left and the boat’s gunwale to my right, wearing a suit of medium body armor that feels half a size too small, holding a smartgun-modified assault rifle. Ironically enough it’s a vz 88V; I wonder if Lynne Telestrian bought it from the fragging Cutters. On top of all that, I’m trying to bend my mind around an unfamiliar datachip in my skillwire chipjack. Beyond Argent, and across the rear deck area, are the other elements of Assault Team Able—eight hard-bitten
merc types, wearing the same kind of armor as mine and packing a frightening assortment of weapons.
It’s just like those few minutes in the Bulldog with Paco, Bart, and Marla—all dead now—as we’re coming up on the Eighty-Eights’ warehouse by the docks. Like, but unlike, too. There’s the same level of tension, but it’s much more focused here and now. The quantity of chatter is a lot less, and and so is the forced bravado. All the slags sitting around me—most with their face-shields down, looking not quite human—have done this before, many times, and probably under worse conditions. Sure, there’s some degree of checking out weapons and sharpening knives, but it’s not for show like it was among the gangers. These slags—men and women, humans and other metatypes—have gone through enough drek that they’ve got nothing left to prove to anyone, even themselves. That’s the way I read it, at least.
I glance over at Argent. Like me, he hasn’t yet lowered his face-shield. There’s going to be plenty of time to stare through that transplast plate, breathing in my own exhalations, and hoping I don’t fog up the heads-up display that’s ready to synch up with the wire in my head and the circuitry in my rifle. The wind—sharp and cold, chilled by the gray water of the Columbia River—helps keep me focused on the present, prevents my mind from drifting into catastrophic imaginings.
Argent’s facing straight forward, his cyber-modified eyes shut against the wind and the intermittent spray. But he seems to feel my gaze on him. The eyes open, and he turns to me. He’s got a Panther assault cannon held vertically between his knees, his matte-black hands lightly gripping the cooling vanes on the massive barrel. His expression’s totally calm, almost detached, more like he’s on a day-cruise to a fragging picnic spot instead of headed for a bloody firefight. But of course he’s done this drek before, I remind myself.
He’s military—corp military, that’s what Desert Wars is, but military just the same—so this is just old home week for him, a return to his fragging roots. Suddenly I feel very much alone. I’m no merc, I’m no soldier, and no new optical chip in my slot is going to change that.
“How’d you get into undercover work, Wolf?”
Argent’s low-voiced question catches me by surprise. I shoot a hard glare at him, but his eyes are clear and his expression mild.
I’m so surprised that I answer him—wheeling up the standard response I've gotten down pat after hundreds of repetitions, of course. “At the time it seemed like the best way of making a difference,” I tell him.
The runner’s lips curl in a smile. Not scornful, but definitely with a hint of irony.
“Why not?” I snap.
He doesn’t answer me, just keeps smiling.
I could just dust him off. His opinion doesn’t matter to me, I tell myself firmly. When this drek’s out of the way, the only time I’ll ever see him again is if I happen to arrest him. The answer I gave him has satisfied everybody I’ve told it to—colleagues, acquaintances, even my superiors at the Star. Who the frag does he think he is to dig any deeper into the dirt, huh?
So it’s a total shock when I hear myself bringing up the secondary justification, the one I’ve never had to mention to anyone. “Okay,” I growl, “it’s for the rush. The fragging excitement. Okay?”
His smile doesn’t fade in the slightest, and the rage is twisting in my gut. Or is it the rage? At the moment, it could just as easily be fear.
“Really?” Argent asks mildly.
“You’re so fragging good at asking questions, why don’t you answer one?” I growl. A couple of the mercs around us turn toward us, their semi-mirrored face-shields reflecting distorted images of me and the runner. But I don’t care. “What happened to your fragging arms, Argent?”
The words are out before I even faintly consider their possible effect on the chromed runner. I guess part of me is trying to get a rise out of him, but just what kind of rise am I looking for? An assault rifle isn’t worth squat in close combat, and even though the escrima chip’s slotted and hot, the cyberarms I’m grinding him about could tear out my throat before I could react at all.
Yet, still, his expression doesn’t change. “Voluntary replacement,” he tells me quietly.
You can bet your hoop that sets me back big-time, priyatel. Voluntary replacement? I’d always figured it was a matter of his meat arms being blown or shot or chopped off. When Lynne Telestrian mentioned Argent’s Desert Wars background, I figured for sure he’d gotten too close to an exploding grenade or some drek.
But voluntary replacement? Chummer, that means jandering into a cyber clinic and telling the doc, “Lop off my arms and replace them with machines.” How the frag could anybody even consider that? (Yeah, yeah, okay, I’ve got cyber mods myself, to the tune of skillwires and chipjacks. But that’s augmentation, priyatel, addition to the meat, like bolting a turbocharger onto the engine of your bike. Very different from the route Argent took.)
If he’d wanted to shut me up, he couldn’t have come up with a better way of doing it. He stays silent for a moment, and I don’t think I could talk if I fragging tried. Then he goes on idly, musingly, “I used to know somebody who was a deep-cover infiltration agent. Nobody knew his real name—sometimes I wonder if he knew it—but we called him Steel back then. He was good, chummer, he was really good. But .. .’’
He pauses. “But it didn’t take me long to realize why he was good,” he continues, voice softer now. “The same reason he got into it in the first place, I guess. Steel was a loner, the absolute lone wolf. Never had any friends, because he never wanted any, because he couldn’t let anyone in. He couldn’t drop the guard long enough to let anyone close.” The runner chuckles wryly. “He had lots of acquaintances. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a hermit or anything. Nova-hot with the ladies, too. Dozens of people considered Steel a friend, and thought he felt the same. But he didn’t. They were just there, they didn’t mean anything to him one way or the other, even though he always gave off all the right cues to keep them thinking he cared about them.”
Argent shrugs. “I don’t know what made him that way. Yeah, sure, I could guess—all that facile psychobabble about family of origin and that drek—but it doesn’t really matter. He was a ... a social chameleon, that’s the best way I can put it. Drop him into a group—any group—and in a hour hell have the best-looking woman in the sack and everybody else thinking he’s their best chummer ever and that he respects and cherishes them. All without him ever giving the slightest flying frag about a single one of them.
“And I always figured that’s why he went into deep-cover,” the runner concludes. “That’s the way he was, and deep-cover was the only job in the world that actually rewarded him for that kind of behavior.” He turns his slightly silvered gaze on me. “Neh?”
My gut twists—it’s got to be the rage, what else could it be? “You’re saying I’m like that?” I demand.
He shrugs millimetrically. “How many people do you trust, Wolf?” he asks. “How many can you bring yourself to trust?”
“None,” I shoot back. “Just like a shadowrunner."
"Wrong.” Argent’s voice is firm, but there’s no anger in it. “I can trust my chummers. Like Peg, and Jean, and Sly, and Dirk.” I only recognize half the names, but it doesn’t matter. “And there are the ones I used to trust before I lost them—Hawk, and Toshi, and Agarwal. Not many, Wolf, but some. Shadowrunners don’t have many friends, that’s true. But we cling to the ones we’ve got.”
“Frag you,” I snarl. It’s the only answer I can give him. “Just frag you, okay?” I snap down my helmet’s face-shield, and concentrate on the HUD’s symbology.
“It’s gotta be lonely, Wolf.” The closed shield muffles the runner’s voice, but not enough so I can’t hear it.
A voice sounds from the button earphone built into my armored helmet, sharp and tinny. “Point One.”
And again I feel like time’s just this big wheel that keeps turning, round and round. For just an instant, I believe I can shut my eyes, then open them
again, and I'll be in the Bulldog with Paco and the rest, about to bust through the gate of the Eighty-Eights’ warehouse. I force Argent’s words—and the strange effects they’ve created in my gut—deep down into the swamp, to deal with later. Strange time to play the psychobabble game, I think ... but then I realize that those few minutes of conversation kept me too busy to get freaked out about the upcoming op. Was that why he did it?
Who the frag knows, and who the frag cares? More important things to think about at the moment. I stand up, gripping the gunwale to steady me.
The Riverine’s boring west, downriver from our staging area halfway between Skamokawa and Cathlamet, at its cruising speed of about thirty-five klicks. From what Argent told me, it’s water-jet impellers can boot it up to three times that speed at full emergency power, but at the moment anything more than cruising would draw a lot of attention we just plain don’t want. Standing, I can see over the combing that leads to the upper deck, built on top of the main cabin, past the gun position. The gun—a Vanquisher minigun, very nasty—is currently unmanned and safed, its multiple Gatling-gun barrels pointed at the sky, but I know there’s a crewer poised to put it to use at a moment’s notice.
The whole Riverine is painted a vivid green, with yellow-gold trim—the livery used by most companies in the Telestrian empire, including Nova Vita Cybernetics. The transponder is also ready to identify itself as a Telestrian asset to any radar beam that interrogates it. (The livery and transponder aren’t some kind of scam, at least not at this level. The Riverine—and every other vehicle involved in the assault—is a Telestrian asset, owned by some portion or other of the Telestrian empire. The key issue is which portion ... ) To our right—starboard?—and slightly back, I can see another Riverine just like the one I’m aboard. Assault Team Baker. Beyond our sharply raked bow is the gray water of the Columbia, and maybe a klick-and-a-half ahead, the shore and the dark, blocky outlines of the NVC facility. This is where it’s going to get nasty.
Lone Wolf Page 28