Makeda moved to the communal bathroom and waved her Party Train band at it. The sensor went green. Thank God it still worked. The door slid open just as she saw the Saeder-Krupp guards bust into the sleeper car.
“Help!” Tojo yelled at them as Makeda grabbed him and threw him into the bathroom. She followed behind, closing and locking the door. This time, she held onto the door handle and braced herself with her back to one wall and a foot to the other.
“What the hell, Tojo?” Makeda growled the question at him as she set herself for a fight to keep the door closed.
He shook his head. “I can’t let them think I went with you willingly. I’m sorry. If they do catch us, I want plausible deniability. I’ve been drugged. I can say I didn’t really know what was happening. I thought it was a game or something. Until you wouldn’t let me go.”
Makeda snarled, but she found no fault in his logic. For a salaryman, he had some weird pockets of street smarts to go along with his general naïvety. “Fine. Get over there and get that window open. We don’t want them to catch us. Even if Krupp Specialist Engineering lets you back in, they’ll never trust you again.”
Tojo stopped messing with the window and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m sure there’s a log somewhere that you downloaded those maintenance codes. It’s possible they were even watching you through the security cameras make your fake credstick. If they didn’t before, they’re probably going to go through their videos now.”
They both jerked at the pounding on the door. “Open up!” The voice was female. “Open up before we’re forced to fire.”
“I’ve got it,” another unfamiliar voice said.
Tojo turned back to the window and fought to get it open. Makeda braced hard against the wall as there was a click and the door unlocked.
“Oh, hell,” Galen said. “Brace for impact.”
Makeda had no idea what he meant. She didn’t have time to figure it out. The train jerked in a downward angle it should never travel, and Tojo went flying into the shower. Makeda’s head bounced off the wall hard, making the world go black as metal screamed.
7
Makeda opened her eyes. The world was upside down, and emergency lights glowed a faint green. She lay on her back, trying to make sense of what she saw. She hadn’t been knocked unconscious— the screaming of torn metal still echoed in her ears—but the blow to the back of the head had rattled her. The door was open and bright white light streamed in. Turning her head, she saw Tojo sprawled on the ceiling of the shower. His eyes were closed, but his hands twitched like he was fighting to regain himself.
“Galen, what happened?” Her voice was a whisper. No answer. “Galen? Galen?” Fear and panic welled up, suddenly large and overwhelming. She did what she always did in a crisis: shunted all the panic to the side and began to work the problem. Time enough for a breakdown later.
Checking her headware, she found it was intact. But when she tried to access anything in the Matrix, there was nothing. Total blackout. Jammer or just a lack of signal, she couldn’t tell.
She fought against the fog, but her brain didn’t want to work. She wanted to stay where she was and sleep. Sleep for days. Let someone else deal with whatever this was.
She heard Tojo moan. Makeda realized that, without her connection to the Matrix, she was the only help she and Tojo had— and something had crashed the train.
Galvanized by this, and the memory that Saeder-Krupp security was on to them, Makeda sat up, shook her head, and got to work. Corpsec wasn’t beating on the door. Wasn’t bearing down on them with guns drawn and cuffs ready. That was one immediate problem gone. Makeda blinked away the fog, clearing her mind. A plan. She had to have a plan.
Something had crashed the train. Why would they crash the train? That couldn’t be good for anyone. Were they in the AIZ? Makeda shook her head. The train route wasn’t supposed to get that close.
She realized the panic had gotten in after all. That’s why all the useless questions crowded her mind. She needed to focus on the immediate.
First things first. Get rid of the tracking devices. No use running if there was a corp GPS tag on them. She pulled her compact out of her boot and opened the toolkit. A couple of small screws later, and she was free. Makeda crawled to Tojo and removed his wristband, too. She stuffed both in her pocket.
Tojo blinked his eyes open. “What happened?”
She shook her head. “Train wreck, I think.”
“You?” His eyes got very wide.
Makeda shook her head again. “No. I was going to throw you from the train. Remember? Not blow it up.”
She got to her feet and wobbled until she put a hand on the wall. Standing on the ceiling was disorienting. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. She looked up and to the left. The toilet hung above her, already empty of water. Turning her back on the weirdness of it all, Makeda gazed out the bathroom doorway. Across the hall, through the broken glass, she could see snow and sky. “Can you stand?”
Tojo checked himself over. “I think so.”
“Good. Follow me.” She stepped to the doorway and looked out. There were screams in the distance and the groan of metal still settling. The hallway was twisted, the metal ceiling rippled with the damage of landing upside down.
“I’m hurt. I’m bleeding.”
Makeda didn’t look at him. “We all are. Move.”
Her mind was in overdrive. Was her extraction client important enough to crash a train to get at? To injure or kill fifty or sixty of Europe’s richest people? No, probably not. Were those backdoor elevator key codes worth all this damage? Maybe. Probably. With Tojo dead, no one would know they’d been leaked, and that was worth millions, considering how many Thyssen-Krupp elevators were in use. Had this been part of the plan all along? Get the codes and murder the wage slave making a run for it? If she were a ruthless shadowrunner and into wetwork, definitely.
Makeda rubbed her mouth, thinking about the amount of damage done in the name of a job. She did this in an abstract manner, considering what kind of resources it would’ve taken to pull off, rather than the horror of the limbs maimed and lives lost.
She’d been ruthless from time to time, but she would never take a wetwork job. That meant the team she was against was already one up on her. Two, if you counted the crashed train.
Down the hallway, the corpsec guards did not fare as well as she and Tojo had. When the train crashed—Makeda really wanted to know how it had happened—she had been braced to hold the door closed, and Tojo had been thrown to the other side of the bathroom.
The guards, on the other hand, had been thrown to the far end of the half-crumpled sleeper car. They lay jumbled on top of each other.
Icy wind blasted in through the broken windows, and Makeda shivered. She hadn’t gotten her coat from her suite. Judging by the mangled door at the end of the car, she wasn’t going to.
Neither Saeder-Krupp guard moved.
Makeda walked down the ceiling to the guards, careful not to step on any of the glass from the windows, wincing at every noise the train made. Once she got to the guards, Makeda knew both were dead. The dwarf had a piece of metal jammed through his chest. The woman’s neck was bent at an angle not designed for the human spine. She checked for a pulse on each of them anyway.
Nothing.
Another blast of cold wind reminded her why she was here. The woman’s coat. Light armor and a damn sight warmer than nothing. Makeda struggled with the body until she got the coat free. Before she put it on, she pulled the Saeder-Krupp corp patch from the arm, turning the coat from corp property into generic military fashion in a single rip of Velcro.
Makeda shrugged it on, cutting off the wind from her shivering flesh. The guard didn’t have a visible weapon, but in her fight to get the coat off, Makeda found a holdout, a Walther Palm Pistol, at the small of his back. She took it, along with the sheath. The sheath refused to work with her pants. They were too loose and fine for the
thick leather. She abandoned it next to the body and shoved the pistol into one of the coat’s interior pockets. A quick search of the armored jacket came up with nothing but a package of Buzzbuzz and a NutraSoy Energy Cake. Neither had been opened.
“Makeda?” Tojo stood outside the bathroom, looking pale and shaken. “What do you want me to do?”
She stuffed the stimulant and food back into the coat’s pockets. “Stay put. I’m coming.” As she hurried with careful steps back to Tojo, she subvocalized across all her comms. “TechnoGalen? HiddenPlath? Saladin? Code Black-Three.”
If they were receiving and she just couldn’t hear them for whatever reason, she’d let her team know that the plan had had a bad turn, but she was going to press on to the next phase of the operation on her own. That meant getting in contact with the Lucern people to get evac’d out of Switzerland on her own. They could meet up with her at the next port of call in Spain.
Tojo had a towel pressed to the back of his head. It came away bloody when he looked at it, but not too bad. However, the sight of blood made him go grey. Ignoring it and the blood, Makeda took the towel from him and tossed it into the bathroom.
“You have your bag. Good.” Makeda looked out the broken window. Mountains, trees, and snow as far as the eye could see. All of it was filled with the debris of the train crash. She eyed a piece of the maglev track. An explosion. That was the only thing she could think of to cause this amount of damage. A definite attack.
“Right, let’s go. Mind the glass. Don’t cut yourself.” Makeda climbed out the broken window, wishing she had warmer pants. Once in the snow, she threw the first of the Party Train bands as far forward as she could. The other one, she threw over the top of the train. That would separate them from everything else. Maybe.
“Makeda…” Tojo stood half-in and half-out of the window. He held to the side of the train while dabbing his foot to the ground as if it were water. He shook his head and reached for her.
Makeda grabbed his hand and helped him out. Tojo wobbled next to her. He must have taken one hell of a shot to still be unsteady. That was going to make moving through the mountains difficult and slow. She pulled him with her as she stepped back from the train to get a good look at their situation.
It was a disaster. The more she looked, the more damage Makeda could see. All of the train was off the track. Beyond the main train, the security cars had been launched into the air and come down hard on a rocky hill. The two cars had rolled down the hill and crashed into a copse of trees. There was no movement from either of those two cars.
The front four Party Train cars were tumbled on top of each other, with more than half a dozen slammed in behind at odd angles. The middle set of cars were on their sides, jammed together, with one car deeply indented. The last third of the train had rolled and was twisted, with the cars at the back rolling 270 degrees from where they had started. Not a single car was undamaged, though the end of the train had fared better than the front by a long shot.
Behind the Party Train, the following security car had used the back end of the train like a ramp. It had flown forward and landed on top of the Party Train, then rolled off. The middle car it had landed on had buckled almost in two. As Makeda looked back and forth over the shattered train, it was the only scenario she could come up with.
She realized she was on the edge of panic again. Makeda turned to what was moving. This was where the greatest danger was.
Among the debris, bodies lay bleeding, moaning, or still. It looked like some had been thrown out of the train through the windows. Some had crawled out. People stumbled around, screaming and crying. All of them were stunned and panicked. Even the Party Train personnel.
Makeda forced her mind into work mode. None of this mattered. None of it was important unless it was a danger to her or her client. Where was the danger?
No one was looking at them. No one watched them in particular. They were not important, and that was the way Makeda needed it to be. She scanned the tops of the trees and then the line of the train’s single rail.
The maglev track was twisted and broken. Scorch marks traveled up and down the trestle. Either someone had set off a bomb or shot the track with a missile. Makeda didn’t know enough about demolitions to tell which was true, but from the amount of damage, whoever had caused the explosion meant business—business she didn’t want any part of.
A helicopter flew overhead.
Makeda ducked her head as she watched it go by. Panic welled again, and again she shunted it into the background. The rational side of her recognized the cross of the DocWagon symbol. That gave her an idea.
“Do you have a DocWagon contract?” Tojo frowned at her, confused.
“DocWagon? Crashcart? Any medical contract?”
His face brightened with understanding. “No. Never needed it. Never was sick or anything. Plus, we had local corp clinics.”
Makeda nodded. “Good. Stay here.”
Tojo clutched her hand, shaking his head. “No. I’m not leaving you.”
She resisted the urge to slap his hand away or to roll her eyes. Then again, if he stayed with her, she could continue to protect him. Safety over expediency. “All right. Just keep your mouth shut and go along with anything I say. And keep up.”
A second helicopter flew overhead. She didn’t recognize the symbol on it. Could be the Swiss version of Crashcart. Could be corpsec. Could be an assassination team.
Makeda took off as fast as she could over the uneven ground and snow, pulling Tojo behind her. It wasn’t much more than a fast run. She headed toward the middle of the train, where most of the people were. As soon as she hit the first knot of people, she grabbed a dwarf man by the arm. “Run, they’re still coming for us!” She pointed at the circling helicopter.
Dazed and already panicked, the dwarf ran to another dwarf, a woman. “Run!” he cried, grabbing her hand. The two of them took off toward the nearby forest.
A bloodied elf woman looked between the dwarfs and Makeda. She pointed at the helicopter. The woman stumbled as she looked up and almost fell. Then she, too, took off running. Three more people followed as the herd instinct kicked in.
Makeda hurried to the next set, a group of Arabic men next to the Japanese man and his pack of cat girls. “They’re coming for us. Get out of here! Run!” This time, she pointed at the fleeing dwarf couple and the elven lady. Not stopping, Makeda pulled Tojo with her to the next group of people. Behind her, there was a smattering of Arabic and Japanese, then they, too, were fleeing into the forest.
As more and more people headed toward the forest—running, limping, stumbling—more followed. No one knew where they were going, but with so many people heading in the same direction, it made sense that someone did, someone in charge, and that was where they all needed to go.
The next set of people all wore Party Train uniforms. They milled about in confusion. Some watched the mass exodus into the forest. A couple tried to check on some of the injured, but most were crying and hurt. Makeda grabbed the arm of an Indian woman in a concierge’s uniform who seemed dazed but uninjured. “Please, they’ve cut us off. We can’t call for help. They’re still attacking! We’ve got to get the people away from the train.”
Two large black drones, Strato-9s by the look of them, buzzed the train. The already-dazed train wreck victims, primed by Makeda’s warning, panicked. A cry went up, and those who could run, did.
The concierge nodded. “I’ve got this, ma’am. Run!” She turned to the rest of the uniformed train personnel and gave orders to evacuate everyone who was still alive—carry them if they had to.
Pleased, Makeda also ran in the direction of the forest, but she moved in a diagonal pattern, away from the crowd of panicked and hurt passengers. Tojo hurried alongside her. “Why did you do that?”
As soon as they hit the tree line, Makeda slowed them to a fast walk. “Two of us running away from the train would be found immediately. We would be under suspicion of causing the crash. A hundr
ed and fifty of us? Some really hurt while we’re not? Not so much. I wanted to cover our tracks for as long as we could. Crashcart and DocWagon will go to the most hurt first. The local law enforcement will tap into the Party Train bands for the GPS to find the rest.”
Tojo stopped and touched his wrist. “Mine’s gone.” He blinked at her in wonder. Panic hovered on the edge of his eyes.
Makeda paused, working to catch her breath. “I know. We don’t want to be found. We need to escape the train and whoever attacked it.” She didn’t say that she thought Tojo had been the target of the attack. That probably would have broken him.
They continued to move away from the train and the mass of people as they headed through the forest. It was mostly even with an uphill angle, covered in dead leaves and soft ground. There was less snow but more branches to deal with—both on the ground and at eye-level. Makeda kept an arm up in front of her face to protect herself as she pushed through the foliage.
Tojo stumbled over a tree root. Makeda whipped around and caught him before he hit the ground. She lifted him up and gave him a smile. “Okay?”
He nodded, breathing hard. “Yeah. Didn’t see it.”
Behind them, a voice yelled, “Makeda, wait! Take me with you.
You have to.”
Both of them turned to see Imre, mint-haired and bloody-faced, weaving through the trees, closing in fast.
8
Makeda pushed Tojo behind her and yanked the Walther out of her jacket pocket. “Back the frag off, chummer.” She put her shoulder to the tree next to her, ready to dive for cover if needed. Her eyes darted all around, looking for the other attacker. The man in front of her was obvious to the point of distraction. If this was an attack, that was his job.
No one else was near them. To the right, the sound of crying and shouting people. To the left, nothing. Makeda heard the drones and helicopters. They were also to the right. Flashes of color appeared and disappeared through the trees more than five hundred meters from them.
Makeda Red Page 7