by Anthology
"Let's go," Mamba said to Pharisee.
"What about-"
"Let's hope we can get off this damn island before he wakes up," Mamba replied, curt. Without a backward glance, she left the room. Another minute to wait for the elevator, then down to the wide lobby. Before they went through the doors, Mamba looked over at Pharisee. "How'd you get your little gun through the MAD scanner?" she asked, curious.
Pharisee just raised an eyebrow, then walked through the scanners and back out into the harsh December winds.
Mamba followed. "Stay here," she ordered the technomancer, pointing to the bench outside the hotel. Mamba took back her breather, earpiece, and AR glasses. "My blades are under that bush. If things get ugly, bring them to me. Otherwise-"
"I know, I know, don't hack your 'link," Pharisee muttered, "As if you could stop me," she said under her breath as she went towards the iced drink vendor.
Mamba shook her head at the technomancer's back. Pragmatically, she snapped her breather on and retraced her steps back to Adua Street and Olabode Lekan's well-guarded mansion.
The drug would last an hour, maybe two at the best. She planned on being off Victoria Island well before then. She was already regretting the impulse that prevented her from killing Medjay, or at least maiming him. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she told herself. She shied away from thinking about why she'd left him alive and whole in his hotel, and as a result, was feeling more than a little pissed when she stopped in front of the guards at number 12 Adua Street.
"I'm hear to see Lekan," she said, curtly, to the man closest to the gate. He was Yoruba, so she repeated herself in his language. Sometimes playing the foreigner card worked, sometimes it didn't. In her current mood, she'd be just as happy taking his gun and mowing all them down before they could react. Carefully, she tamped down the anger. Emotion got you killed in this line of work. There was no room for moods.
The guard just stared at her.
"Tell him Dr. Sierra Madeira is here," she said. "He'll want to see me."
The guard didn't speak, but Mamba bet he was sending a message via his 'link. After a moment, he nodded to her, his expression slightly more polite. A clever, meta-human sized door swung open in the center of the vine-covered gate. The guard in front of it stepped to the side, and with a jerk of his head, motioned her through.
She went in.
The courtyard was laid out in muted red bricks, in a concentric circle around a large reflecting pool. Trees cast some shade, but there was little in the way of gardens or bushes. Nowhere to find cover, a portion of her mind observed. More armed guards, decked out in full security armor, stood around the courtyard. The mansion was set back, a square building that glowed white in the harsh sunlight. Windows glinted, like crystals, and the entire building was sparkling clean. That, more than the size of the building or the small army of men, spoke of real wealth in Lagos. A human man in dun-colored robes approached her, followed by two heavy-set orks in military grade armor.
"Dr. Madeira? If you'll please follow me," he said in English, then turned back towards the broad, double door of the mansion. She followed him up some shallow steps to the doors. Once she'd stepped through, the two orks slid the doors shut with a quiet click.
The man in the robes paused once they were inside the cool building. "I must ask you to relinquish any weapons," he said, politely. The two orks beside him gave unspoken force to his words.
Mamba slid out the plastic case from under her shirt, using very slow and deliberate motions.
"These aren't weapons," she said, flicking the case open. "But something I believe Lekan would like to see."
"If I may?" the man replied, holding out his hands. Mamba reluctantly handed over the case. She'd already lost the damn things once. Now, she was this close to finishing the job she'd given up as a lost cause. But she felt the press of time. Every minute that passed, Medjay would be closer to recovery. He was an able enough hacker, when he used those damn skillsofts. How long would it take him to track her down?
And why hadn't she thought of that when she had the opportunity to slit his throat? Why hadn't she at least left him tied up? She shied away from acknowledging the answer to that question.
The man in the robe took the case, then smiled and led her though the soaring three-story entrance hall, down a dimly lit hall, and into a richly appointed office.
A human male, with wrinkled black skin and a tight cap of snowy-white hair, sat behind a large, polished wood desk. He wore richly textured woven robes, in a variety of bright colors. Olabode Lekan looked every bit the distinguished statesman, and nothing like the warlord he really was.
Once Mamba was in the room, the man in the dun robes carefully handed Lekan the plastic case, then left, closing the doors behind him. The two orks remained in the room, standing at attention. Two more guards, trolls that Mamba could tell were cybered to the gills just by watching them twitch, stood behind Lekan.
Lekan opened the case without speaking to her. He raised one white eyebrow at the two ancient knives, then clicked the case closed and sat it on the desk in front of him. He looked Mamba over.
"Dr. Madeira has been reported missing by the Apep Consortium in Cairo," he began. His voice was rich and full, almost too robust for the small office; a voice meant to be giving speeches, not addressing low-life shadowrunners. "And at the same time, rumors are that an unnamed Apep dig site was hit by thieves. This, coupled with the fact that Dr. Madeira has no biological augmentations, certainly not to the level and quality of your own, presents an interesting mystery."
Mamba inclined her head. "I've been employed to bring those artifacts to Oni Adegoke," she said. "My employer heard about the Oni's upcoming auction, and wanted to-" she struggled to phrase it politely. "-to send a gesture of good-will."
Lekan tipped his head, considering her. Black Mamba wondered if he was using a spell, emotion-mapping software, or just his judgment. She hated losing control of a situation.
"I see you appear truthful," he said.
Mamba let out a breath.
"Very well. I'll accept this gift on behalf of the Oni. In exchange, I'd be happy to offer you a gift for your employer." The old man stood, more graceful than his age would lead her to believe, and went to a small safe at the back of the room. When he returned, he dropped a small stack of ivory disks on the desk. "Tokens," he said, gesturing to the disks. "Each one will admit one person to the auction. Your employer can contact me directly for more details, if he-or she-wishes." He said it with distaste. The message was clear; don't send any more shadowrunners.
Mamba picked up the small disks. There were five. She nodded to the old man, but he'd already dismissed her. Mamba bristled, but the odds were still against her… and she did have a job to finish.
She was escorted out of the mansion, back out to the street, the vine-covered gate closing behind her.
It'd been just over an hour since they'd left the Nubian in his room. He was probably awake by now. Or would be soon.
Mamba began walking back to where she left Pharisee.
"Everything's frosty," the technomancer said. "I watched through your AR glasses' camera. I can't believe we did it."
"Stop hacking my commlink," Mamba retorted. "And we still have to get these damn tokens back to our employer. Hell, we still have to get out of Lagos. Before Medjay catches us."
"Oh, is that his name?" Pharisee teased.
Mamba ignored her, her mind already calculating, planning the next move. She was in control again. Catch an okada to the mainland, and from there to the airport. Getting through Lagos without tangling with the Igbo-who were probably still out for her blood-would be challenging. Getting out of Lagos before Medjay found her would likely be even more impossible.
Without realizing it, as she walked down the manicured streets and back to the dangerous blight of the feral city, Black Mamba smiled. Out of civilization; back to her comfort zone.
And towards a good fight.
Dead Names
So far, William H. Keith has published over eighty novels, including military novels, geopolitical spy thrillers, and science fiction, writing under his name and several pseudonyms. As "H. Jay Riker" he wrote the long-running SEALs: The Warrior Breed. As "Ian Douglas," Keith wrote the Heritage, Legacy, and Inheritance military-SF series, following the exploits of the U.S. Marines into the far future. Most recently, he's been writing spy thrillers in collaboration with best-selling author Stephen Coonts. Bill currently lives and writes in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.
I have to say right up front that I didn't believe our Mr. Johnson. I mean, I've seen some freaked-out scat in my time, but this was just too hardwired weird for school.
"What?" I yelped at the guy. "You're doodoodling me, man, right?"
We were sitting in the High Tox, the bar I'd chosen for the face-to-face. I guess I yelped a bit too loud when I heard what the op was, because I noticed Tony surreptitiously reaching for the scattergun he kept behind the bar. I met his eye, shook my head a little, and he relaxed.
But it was good knowing I had back-up with this bozo. He just meatjackin' couldn't be cruising the Real!
"I'm very serious, Mister, er, Faceman," my contact said. "Roger Nakamura is supposedly paying forty million nuyen to Zayid if he can pull this off. My sponsors wish to intercept the… ah… package. At the source."
I leaned back in my chair and sipped my drink. A banzai boomer, neat, bitter, the way Tony knows I like it. I needed to think this through. The Johnson had to be scamming us, had to have an angle.
The thing is, I'd worked for this Johnson before, and he'd always been a straight burner. He'd been the one who leveraged the Yokahama smartdust deal for us, and that had been pure sugar, a quick in-and-out that netted each of us forty-K nuyens, easy money.
And it had been a while since our merry band had scored. This time, our Mr. Johnson was offering us 200 K. We needed the money, and it wasn't like we could afford to be picky.
The bastard was grinning at me. "You don't believe me, do you?"
"Truth?" I asked. "Hell no. I think someone's playing with your head, man." I didn't add that I was still trying to see how the Johnson might be trying to scam us. This thing just wasn't adding up.
"Ah. But if it's true. If Zayid has found the Gate… think of what it might mean!"
"Look," I said. "It's reality-check time, okay? Has anyone told your sponsors that this thing isn't real? It's a freakin' work of fiction, for the gods' sake!"
"That," Mr. Johnson said, "is a matter of what you believe, isn't it?"
"Aw, c'mon, Slick! The effing Necronomicon? Get real! Lovecraft was a writer, okay? He invented the thing for his damned stories!"
"And if enough people believe in a thing, Mr. Faceman, it takes on a certain amount of hard-cache reality. You know that."
Of course I knew that. Everybody since 2011 knew that. But, damn it… this was fiction!
H.P. Lovecraft. The guy was all but unknown when he was alive, a minor horror writer in the pulp magazines of the day. He acquired quite a following in the years after his death, though, spawning a sub-genre all his own, populated by monstrous gods or godlike monsters that cared nothing for humanity save how they were going to eat us for dessert. Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Hastur the Unspeakable. Azathoth, the daemon sultan bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity. And, of course, Great Cthulhu himself, lying dreaming in sunken R'lyeh.
Jesus. All those stories from the 1920s and '30s, set against a backdrop of hopelessness, nihilism, madness, and despair. God doesn't love you; He's going to squash you like a bug. Or better. God loves you, because you taste great with a little BBQ sauce. Maybe that's why old HP was so popular with the younger set, even now, a century and a half later.
And Lovecraft had invented the Necronomicon as a singular plot McGuffin, an ancient tome of dark magic replete with forbidden knowledge, including the incantations and formulae necessary for calling forth dread Cthulhu and his kind. It was supposed to have been written by Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab. Hell, anyone who speaks Arabic ought to get a clue right there. No Arab would ever be named "Abdul" in real life. That's Western racist ignorance. It means "slave of-" and needs to have a name tacked on at the end. "Abdullah," for instance, "Slave of God." Do you understand? Lovecraft made it up… and he got it wrong!
"Let me get this straight," I said after a moment. "Nakamura has hired this Arab magician or technomage to open some sort of a gateway to… what did you call it? An alternate reality?"
"Or a parallel dimension, if you like."
"And this Zayid character is supposed to find an actual, physical copy of the Necronomicon and bring it back."
"Exactly."
"And you want us to hijack the book before Zayid passes it on to his boss."
"Just so. Can you do it?"
"Not if the book doesn't exist!"
"Ah, but it does exist. It must. Don't you see? For 150 years, millions of readers, the fans, the devotees of H.P. Lovecraft, have read those stories, and they have believed. Believed! Did you know that fifty years after Lovecraft's death, libraries at places like Harvard and Oxford were deluged with search requests for that book? Perhaps a dozen works were actually published under that title, adding to the confusion."
"You… you're saying that because a bunch of losers believed the Necronomicon was real, it is?" I looked him up and down. "That's just whacked! You been doing too much BTL, man?" I was serious. Folks jazzed on better-than-life sims could pick up some weird delusions, sometimes.
"I assure you I'm completely rational," Mr. Johnson said. "And in earnest. Belief is everything. So, will you take the job?"
Belief? Was that all it took to create reality from fiction? Belief?
Nah…
But we did need the nuyen.
"Okay," I said. "We'll take it. But half up front. And it's nonrefundable if this turns out to be a goose chase."
"Uh-uh," Mr. Johnson said. "Fifty-K up front. And you wear nannies."
"Shit. Why?"
"So my people can peek over your shoulders, as it were. What you see and hear, they'll see and hear. And they'll know you're not ripping them."
"Hey! You've hired us before! When did we ever scam you or your clients, huh?"
"Never. And you won't." He shoved a plastic bag across the table at me, with a tangle of equipment inside. "Besides, there's one thing more."
"What?"
"If you can't get the… merchandise, my clients want to be sure Nakamura can't get it either. These will help verify that."
"Makes it more complicated, man," I told him. "Seventy-five kay up front."
He hesitated, then nodded. "Done."
An hour later I was on the streets of Pittsburgh, my collar and hood up against the thin drizzle of acid rain, shouldering through the muggliemasses beneath the neon wink-blink of come-hither signs in twenty different languages, beneath the five-story buildingboards with their smiling, naked women and sleek cars and mindless MadAv babble. Megacorp massage, direct to you from the nuyen necromancers. An alien world, Slick, a billion klicks from the streets.
In my belt was the bag of nannies, plus a credstick worth 75,000 nuyen. Not bad for a morning's work.
I didn't know who our Mr. Johnson worked for, of course. Shadowrunners generally don't. But the guy had the fashion sense and street-cred trust-me feel of a Fed, and I was pretty sure our employers were the good old UCAS.
Nakamura, of course, we knew. Roger Nakamura was Pittsburgh's grand high Pooh-Bah of Mellon-Mitsubishi, itself a branch of Renraku Megacorp.
The team was waiting for me at the Eat 'n' Meet at Fifth and Forbes, almost in the shadow of the M amp;M Tower. Boy, they were just gonna love this…
I'd been working with them for maybe three years, and loved 'em all like siblings. Better, maybe, in Cammy's case. I never banged my sister.
Her name was Camilla Gonzales, but we all called her Cammy. The name fit.
She was a weapons specialist who had this way of blending into the background so perfectly you'd never know she was there. And Thud's name fit too. I never knew what he called himself, but he was eight powerfully muscled feet of rather dim attitude, and those curved ram's horns growing from the sides of his skull gave him a certain in-your-face presence, you cop? Then there was Scooter, our pimple-faced magician, our very own wizardry whiz. And Dee-Dee wasn't just a hacker. She made computers speak, roll over, and sit up and beg.
And me? Well, never mind what my birth name was. Cam, Thud, Scoot, and Dee all just called me Fixer. I was the team's face, the one who talked nice to the Mr. Johnsons and brought in the gigs.
"We're supposed to do what?" Cammie said after I'd laid out the deal.
"I know," I told her. "Sounds a little over-the-top…"
"Over the top? It's not even in this galaxy! Hey! Earth to Fixer! Comm-check!"
"Did you tell this clown the difference between fiction and reality?" Dee-Dee asked, grinning.
"Of course. He told me belief is everything."
"He's right, you know," Scooter said. "Belief is what makes the world we know."
Scoot was using The Voice, and that made us all take notice. Normally, he's got this adenoidal whine that makes him sound like an annoying teen fanboy, but every now and again the adenoids vanish and his tone drops about two octaves. It's what he calls his magical voice, and when he talks that way, you know he knows what he's talking about. Cammie calls it speaking ex cathedra, which sounds like she thinks he used to be a church.
"Scoot," See said, shaking her head. She reached out and rapped the tabletop with her knuckles. "This is real." She tapped the side of her head. "This is imagination…"
He cocked his head to one side. "So… when you run the Matrix, it's not real?"
She scowled. "Of course it's real."
"But it's all in your head."
"No it's not!" She waved vaguely in front of her face. "It's… it's out there…"