Wolf and Raven

by Michael A. Stackpole

  “Don’t fight it, Longtooth. It won’t hurt so much,” the Old One whispered.

  Gotta retain some control! Can’t let you run wild!

  My long bones telescoped back down, shortening but strengthening my limbs. The muscles flowed into protoplasm as the transformation continued, then congealed into new muscles with new insertions able to exert more powerful pressure and leverage than before. My fingers and toes likewise shrank—the latter far more than the former—and organic claws grew to give me some new weaponry.

  My head felt as if it were exploding when my jaw and facial bones broke. My whole face grew into a muzzle and my tongue lengthened along with it. The top of my head flattened somewhat and my eye sockets sank back to a more protective position. According to the only person to watch me go through this lunacy, my eyes do not lose their silver color or the Killer Rings.

  The bodily transformation almost complete as my pelt thickened and ears lengthened, I felt the Old One begin to gnaw on my resolve and humanity. I clung to the image of Dr. Raven sitting across from me as I changed and the sound of his voice telling me how to concentrate so I would not surrender to the beast inside me. “You have been blessed by Wolf, greatly blessed, but that blessing will be a curse if you surrender yourself to him.”

  The Old One whimpered with disgust. “Someday Raven will fail you and you will become mine.”

  Stuff it, you mangy mutt. I’ve won this round.

  The advent of three grunges storming through the warehouse door precluded any remark the Old One might have made. I gave them a toothy grin from the shadows. “My, my,” I growled in a voice that even grunges knew to fear. “What fine little piggies we have here.[7]”

  * * *

  It took a bit more than a fairy-tale huffing and puffing to blow them all down, but the grunges didn’t offer much more than that for a fight. They’ve never been much for hitting a moving target, and in my more compact wolf form I don’t stay in one place very long. I left them in a broken heap on the warehouse floor, then dashed out into the killzone, doing my best to spit out grunge blood.

  I couldn’t have been much more than a gray blur as I streaked across the opening, but I felt The Chauffeur’s eyes on me the whole time. I paused for a second at the place from where the rifle shot had come, but a yakuza forced me to tear out his throat before I had finished nosing around. I almost lost control with that kill, but, fortunately, the yak had some sort of augmentation that meant I got hydraulic fluid in addition to blood when I took him down.

  Despite that hardship, I learned what I wanted to know and took keen delight in watching The Chauffeur shudder when my joyous howl filled the warehouse district like the fog rolling in from the coast.

  IV

  Ronnie Killstar’s eyes grew as wide as the hole in my leg had been when he heard me release the charging lever on the MP-9. Seated in his favorite chair, nestled deep in the shadows of his unlit living room, I spoke to him in a husky whisper. “Close the door. Sit down at the table.”

  “What’s this?” He stared blankly at the little repast I’d prepared him while I waited.

  I smiled at him. “That’s your last meal.”

  The punk stared at me. “Milk and cookies?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the perfect thing for a little boy who doesn’t know when he’s not supposed to play adult games. If you’d have been content to just sell us out to Fujiwara, that would have worked fine.”

  He tried to look offended, but his nervousness betrayed him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Can it, joeboy. Val and I cracked your personnel file and it concluded with the last telecom number you called. Later, when we broke into Fujiwara I recognized the number. There was a connection.”

  Ronnie straightened up in his chair. “Circumstantial evidence.”

  I shook my head. “It would have been if you could have kept your ego in check. In the Weed you told me you could ‘bull’s-eye a rat’s ass’ at a klick in the dark. A chip’s got to be four times the size of your average rat’s ass, and the range wasn’t nearly that long.” I sighed. “And to top it off, you were still wearing that cologne of yours.”

  It suddenly dawned on him that I was going to kill him. The color drained from his face and he looked at me with big puppy-dog eyes. Yet before they could have their full sympathetic effect on me, his features sharpened and a bit of the old defiant fire returned. “Wait a minute. I destroyed the chip you never really wanted to give to La Plante anyway. That’s gotta count for something!”

  I hesitated for a second and hope blossomed on his face. Then I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t. Dr. Raven had tipped Fujiwara about what we were going to do anyway. Fuji’s programmers put a Trojan horse carrying a nasty virus in that chip that would have destroyed La Plante’s computer system. The ambush, which didn’t include your shooting of the chip, was just to make sure La Plante bought the whole thing as genuine.”

  Ronnie sank his head in his hands. “Go ahead, shoot me. I deserve it.”

  I lifted the MP-9’s muzzle to the ceiling. “No, I think I prefer letting you wallow in your own mortification. Word to the wise, kid,” I shot back over my shoulder as I crossed to the door. “Remember that you’re not as tough as you think. Don’t let your delusions of adequacy get you in over your head . . . again.”

  * * *

  On the way out I stopped The Chauffeur from going in. “Don’t bother.”

  The plastic-faced man stared hard at me. “I didn’t hear a shot.”

  I gave him a wolfish grin and licked my lips. “You never do.” I patted his cheek. “Ciao—no pun intended. Until it’s just you and me.”

  Quicksilver Sayonara

  I normally define a “rude awakening” as any that takes place before noon, but Kid Stealth gave that phrase a new depth of meaning. Stealth would maintain it was my fault because I was the one dreaming about cuckolding a chrome-fisted underworld kingpin when the Kid clapped his own steel hand over my mouth. The kiss of cold steel against my lips is not something I enjoy at the best of times, and two hours before dawn is seldom one of those.

  My eyes focused on Stealth, and his identity registered in my brain a half-second before my finger tightened on the trigger of the Beretta Viper[8] I’d snaked from beneath my pillow and pressed to his side. Stealth gave me a satisfied grunt and dangled the gun’s clip from his flesh and blood right hand. He pulled his metal hand away from my mouth and flipped the clip back to me. “Good instincts.”

  I pulled myself up into a sitting position, letting the sheets slip down from chest to waist. I pulled the slide back on the pistol, and one bullet popped out into the bed. “I keep one in the chamber.”

  Stealth nodded in the half-light, the laser sight built into his right eye making a small cross on his pupil. “I know. Nine-millimeter, silver bullet with inertial silver-nitrate explosive tip.”

  The matter-of-fact tone with which he delivered his assessment of the bullet that had been aimed at his stomach somehow robbed it of all its deadliness. I’d survived six years with Doctor Richard Raven, and I’d seen aides come and go, but Stealth had to be the strangest of them all. The bullet in my gun, he had decided, could not punch through the kevlar clothes he wore, nor get through the dermal plating that protected his body.

  That, or he didn’t care if it could.

  “What the hell’s going on? Is Raven back from Tir Tairngire?”

  Stealth shook his head. “Still there. No word on his return.”

  I fed the loose bullet back into the clip, then reloaded the pistol. “That answered the second question. What about the first?”

  “La Plante.”

  That one name, spoken in a sepulchral whisper like the rustle of a sidewinder slithering across dry gravel, answered lots of questions. Etienne La Plante was the local crime boss who’d played a cameo role in the dream I’d been enjoying. I’d recently helped liberate an elven princess[9] from him. Unbeknownst to me until the middle of that little adv
enture, it turned out that Moira Alianha was betrothed to Dr. Raven. Raven had returned her to Tir Tairngire two weeks ago, and then had been summoned back there again after the Night of Fire and the battle for Natural Vat. That meant he left Kid Stealth, Tom Electric, Tark Graogrim, Valerie Valkyrie, and I to watch the store while he was away.

  La Plante held a special place in Kid Stealth’s heart. Stealth had first come to Seattle to work as La Plante’s enforcer. Inevitably, La Plante had assigned Stealth the job of killing Raven. Stealth was good enough to get two of Doc’s chummers—my head missed being mounted on his trophy wall by a stroke of luck or two—before La Plante decided to put a pinch-hitter in for Stealth. That individual, known on the streets as The Chauffeur, had fitted Stealth’s feet with a large pair of cement blocks, then dumped him into the Sound.

  Setting the pistol on my nightstand, I threw the covers back, then turned on a light. “What did our friend do this time?” Naked—’cept for the silver wolf’s-head amulet worn at my throat—I padded over to the closet as Stealth puzzled over how to answer that question in his customarily taciturn manner. I looked at the clothes hanging there and almost chose a normal t-shirt and pair of jeans.

  You’re going somewhere with Kid Stealth.

  I opted for black pants woven of kevlar and a heavy kevlar sweater with trauma pads over my chest and back.

  “I don’t know. An ear says a VIP is sprawling and La Plante is calling in some heavy favors to make him happy.” Even as he spoke, Stealth moved his head back and forth, his cybemetically augmented senses scanning for the sound of anything out of the ordinary. I silently hoped the Blavatskys down in 2D didn’t decide to play “I’ve-Been-Bad, Teacher” while Stealth was monitoring the area.

  “Your street source didn’t know who the VIP was or why he was here?”

  Stealth answered me with an exasperated expression that said, “If I knew that, I would have told you.”

  I refrained from answering with my you-never-know-unless-you-ask shrug and zipped up my pants. “La Plante had been holding Moira for some Mr. Johnson from out of town. I bet there’s a connection—I bet this VIP was the one who wanted her.”

  Kid Stealth’s eyes narrowed for a half-second and I knew he’d filed away both my conclusion and the fact that I’d made the connection. As tough as he was, and as much of a perfectionist as I’d seen him be, Stealth seldom advanced theories on his own. He’d study a situation and offer his observations, but he left the guesswork up to others. He’d made his living dealing in dead certainties before joining Raven, and since becoming one of the team, he’d found plenty of people to jump to conclusions for him.

  Most of Stealth’s body part replacements and modifications were made by choice, to eliminate as much uncertainty as he could. His mechanical left arm—the original, I gathered, he’d lost in an old accident—was tricked out with a gyromount that locked a sniper rifle in place rock steady and soaked up all the recoil from a shot. It could also punch through concrete blocks, but that was a bonus that came from its design specifications. Stealth’s eyes had been modified to include a rangefinder, low-light, and thermographic vision—all the stuff any well-heeled assassin would love to have. I knew for certain he had some link gizmo in there, too, which fed him data ranging from the time of day to the distance to targets—I think he could also pick up Seattle Seadogs[10] games if he wanted to. He’d probably have replaced his right hand but he needed it for the “touch”—be it to squeeze a trigger or throw one of the many stilettos hidden on his body.

  He’d even gone so far as to have the upper left lobe of his lungs replaced with an internal air tank that eliminated his need to breathe when lining up those one-klick assassination shots. That special option had saved him the day The Chauffeur dumped him into the Sound—La Plante hadn't paid for it, so he didn't know about it. It had given Kid Stealth ten minutes to figure out how to get his legs out of a rock or become fish food.

  On my list of things to do with a spare ten minutes, having to figure a way out of a deathtrap did not rank real high.

  I pulled on a heavy nylon jacket with kevlar and shock pads sewn into breast and back. “Where?”

  When I saw that hint of a smile on his lips, I felt an immediate urge to dive back into bed. “The Rock.”

  I let my jaw drop open. “The Rock? Did they do a good-sensectomy when you went in for your last lube and tune?” The Rock was the nickname for what had formerly been a seaside resort hotel that La Plante had “acquired” when his organization cannibalized another criminal cartel. It had previously served as a notoriously hedonistic retreat for criminal megabyters and corporate warlords deciding to “do the sprawl.” After word of Stealth’s survival leaked out, The Chauffeur, at La Plante’s request, had fortified the place and made it into an open challenge to the local government, Stealth, or Dr. Raven to close down.

  Stealth looked at me as if I were the one operating in an alternate reality.

  I raised an eyebrow. “We do have Tom Electric going with us, right?”

  He shook his head. “He’s visiting.”

  I hesitated. Tom occasionally dropped out of sight and that generally meant his ex-wife had come into Seattle. The six months between her visits were enough to let Tom forget why they’d gotten divorced, and the week he spent with her always made him more than happy they had split up.

  “What about Valerie or Tark?”

  Another shake. “Val’s great, but she’s a decker and doesn’t like guns. Plutarch is still nursing the chest shot he took in the Night of Fire. His ork chummers are reluctant to put him in the line of fire for something that doesn’t directly benefit them, so he’s out.” Stealth forced himself to give an especially broad smile. “I did leave a message for Raven in case he gets back, and I decided not to call La Plante to tell him we were coming.”

  I exaggerated a sigh. “Thank God for small miracles.”

  His grin became purely evil. “It gives us the element of surprise.”

  That and an army division might get us in. Divine intervention and an army division might get us back out again.

  Stealth tossed me the key ring from the top of my dresser. “You’re driving.”

  “Guess again, Stealth.” I shook my head and batted the flying keys onto the bed with my hand. “The Fenris is brand new and I still remember what you did to the upholstery in the Mustang IV.”

  Stealth squatted down in that peculiar way only he can, but didn’t look the least bit contrite. “I’ll be careful.” Balancing on his left foot, he extended his right leg and plucked the keys off the bed with his claws. “Besides, you have that new radarbane paint job and a sunroof.”

  I took the keys from his foot’s titanium talons and suppressed a whole-body shudder. In that ten minutes at the bottom of the ocean, Stealth could only see one thing to do—aside from dying, that is. He’d used his belt and shirt to tie tourniquets around both of his legs above the knees. Then he pulled some plastique from a compartment in his left arm and created some very small shaped charges, which he fastened to his own legs. He set them off and managed to make it to shore.

  Raven found him and kept him alive. Both of Stealth’s legs were gone from the knees down. He’d taken lots of other damage—his left arm showed scarring from a shark hit—but he refused to die or surrender to the depression that would have swallowed anyone else. Though he never said much during that time—or since—I knew it was his hatred for La Plante that kept him alive, and his awe of Dr. Raven that kept the rest of us alive.

  Stealth had worked with Raven to design himself a new pair of legs. The original humanoid design was abandoned when Stealth located a better one while scanning some chips on animal biology. Wearing an expression I’ve only seen on the faces of lottery winners or the criminally insane, he pointed it out to me. “Deinonychus,” he said, reverently chanting the word like a mantra. “Terrible claw.”

  It took some convincing, but he prevailed on Raven to help him. Human thighs grafted down into titaniu
m shins and feet. Birdlike in construction, his new legs featured the elongated foot bones that made it look as if his leg had an extra joint. Each foot had a dew claw and three toes—the innermost of which was truly a thing to behold. Both stronger and larger than the other two, it had a huge sickle-shaped claw that pulled back toward the ankle while Stealth ran. It turned funny-looking legs into razorhook-equipped limbs capable of slicing through foes and, in Stealth’s case, let him climb incredibly sheer walls like a fly on a pane of glass[11].

  No, he hadn’t ripped up the upholstery in my Mustang.

  The claws just dripped blood all over it.

  I tied some rubber-soled black shoes on my street-legal feet, cocked the Viper, and stowed it in my pants at the small of my back, then followed Stealth out to my living room. He leaned over the back of the couch, then turned and handed me my MP-9 submachine gun[12] and a satchel bulging with clips. I felt the weight of the ammo pouch, then shook my head. “Planning quite the little war, aren’t we?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll have surprise, but I don’t know for how long.” He pointed at the satchel. “I handloaded your silver bullets, but I used mercury in them instead of silver nitrate. I wanted to try a silver-nitrate suspension in a gelatin of my own manufacture that approaches the viscosity of mercury, but I couldn’t finish it this quickly. I also boosted the powder up to six full grains so your bullet will have the velocity you need to make a mess of the target. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I felt an odd chill run down my spine. I realized he was speaking about loading bullets for maximum effect in the same voice my mechanic used to describe tuning the Fenris’ twelve-cylinder engine. I headed for the door as Stealth shouldered his Kalashnikov[13], carefully avoiding any bump or jarring to the boxy rangefinder mounted on the barrel. When activated the laser would send out an invisible, ultraviolet beam that would paint a dot on the chest or head of a target. With his eye, Stealth just locates the dot, then pulls the trigger and puts a bullet through it.