SHADOWRUN: Spells and Chrome (shadowrun)

by Anthology

  "Thank you, my impetuous friend!" he said, and he sounded almost relieved. The auroral light was gone, now, the chamber illuminated solely by the flicker of the candles.

  "Fixer!" Thud's voice was bellowing in my ear over the commlink. "Fixer! It's a trap!" Over the link I could hear the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter, the stuttering crackle of automatic weapons. "Fixer!" Thud bellowed again from the roof. "It's-"

  And the channel went dead.

  At the same instant, Dee-Dee and Cammie both raised their weapons, aiming at Zayid… but there was a crack and a flash of lightning, and both women were tossed backward in a sharp, actinic glare of magical light. Scooter was screaming, clawing at his eyes, dropping to his knees…

  "You may place the book on the floor outside of the triangle," Zayid told me, "then step away with your hands high above your head."

  I was aware of doors opening, of light spilling through from outside. M amp;M security people were spilling in, and I heard the click-clack of their weapons as they took aim. They killed poor Dee first, shooting her down as she tried to rise. Gunfire echoed through the chamber, cutting down Scooter and Cammie both.

  My whole team, wiped out in the space of three seconds…

  Cammie…

  She was curled up in a bloody fetal curl, whimpering. Scooter was dead on his back, arms outflung, blood pooling beneath his body.

  "Place the book on the floor outside of the triangle, Mr. Michaels," Zayid said. "Slowly and carefully."

  I met his eyes. How in hell had he known my birth name?

  I looked at the others, all watching me expectantly from the depths of their hoods. One of them, I knew, must be the one called Shifter, our informant. But if they knew my name, Zayid and those working for him must have done a hell of a lot of digging to find out about me. This whole miserable op had been a freaking set-up, for Christ's sake. We'd been suckered here specifically to get this book.

  And maybe it made sense, in a weird, puppet-master kind of way. The protective circle was inviolable. Zayid couldn't drop it or break it without risking some rather nasty metaphysical consequences. Someone outside the circle had to come in and actually lift the Necronomicon out of the triangle, out of the metaplane where it had manifested.

  I suppose they could have hired some poor schmuck to do the grabbing, some rent-a-cop or clueless middle-management corpie… or maybe the spell required an outsider, or even an enemy, someone with his own will, doing his own bidding, doing it voluntarily.

  For whatever reason, the bastards had sought out our Mr. Johnson and, through him, hired us to do the actual grab from the metaplane. And now they had what they wanted. I could feel all those guns aimed at me from around the room, feel the eyes and the sharp magical focus of the chanters, feel Zayid's mad delight.

  I felt that single, nightmare eye peering out from the cover of the book in my hands, looking up at me with its glare of malevolent madness. It whispered to me, in my mind, whispering blasphemous things about God and power and life. Hideous things, things so terrible I can no longer remember the words.

  But I remember their feel. And the fire-charred and worm-eaten and ichor-slimed malevolence behind them.

  "Don't be foolish, Mr. Michaels," one of the chanters said. He brushed back the hood of his robe. I recognized the face-Roger Nakamura. "Put the book down. You will come to no harm, I promise you. Your friend there needs medical help. And you have no place to go."

  "Maybe not." My voice cracked. Cammie! I'm so sorry I got you into this! "But you can go straight to hell!"

  I dropped, falling into a knee-bend crouch, and as I did so, as a dozen fingers tightened on the triggers of those aimed weapons behind me, I snapped out with my right leg, the sole of my combat boot on the floor inside the now empty triangle, and swept in a sharp turn to the left, dragging my foot across the chalk marks, scuffing a gap between triangle and circle where they'd touched.

  Then I lost my balance and fell flat on my face, and that might have saved my life as full-auto gunfire cracked and reverberated through the conference room.

  A few of the bullets meant for me chewed through black robes and thrashing chanters. "Don't shoot!" Nakamura was screaming. "Idiots! Don't shoot!" One of the magicians sprawled back against the altar, knocking the table and both candle stands over. The flames flared, then winked out.

  But there was still light…

  Flat on my belly, the Necronomicon clutched beneath me, I couldn't see what was happening very well, but I could see that that cold and sickly illumination was back, all shifting blues and greens, and as I looked up I could see the look of sheer, brain-curdling terror on Zayid's face as something like a sinuous shadow stretched past and over me, uncoiling to reach from the unplumbed depths of that hellish triangle to encircle and grasp the shrieking Arab mage.

  Gunfire continued to bark, but it wasn't aimed at me. I rolled over onto my back, still clutching the evil book to my chest, and looked up into sheerest Nightmare…

  People nowadays think they understand magic. They think they understand the Awakening. Orks. Trolls. Elves. Astral spirits. Elementals. Magic circles. Mystic incantations. It's all frou-frou, man. Fluffy-bunny Halloween dress-up make-believe, robed in black and pretending to be all about power. I looked into the face of that… that thing emerging from the triangle of evocation and I knew that our magic-obsessed and technically adept modern reality was nothing, nothing compared to the eldritch Horror writhing and gibbering at Reality's gates.

  Five of the chanters inside the circle were hanging in the air, now, shrieking and struggling as near-invisible tentacles slowly but inexorably squeezed. Nakamura was among them, his eyes bugging from his face in agonizing, mind-rending terror. The rent-a-cops were running, but the Thing had reached out from the triangle and grabbed two of them as well.

  And tentacles were reaching for me.

  "Here!" I screamed. "Take it!" And I hurled the heavy book at the monstrous chaos emerging from the triangle's rift. The tentacles hovering above me snatched the book from the air, and by then I was scrambling to Cammie's side, scooping her up in my arms, and running, running like Doomsday itself was descending upon us.

  And for all I knew, it was. The entire building was shaking and swaying, as though its century-old structure was barely containing the unimaginable force emerging from that alien plane. Ceiling panels and overhead lighting tubes burst and fell in a shower of glass and plastic. The floor danced and shivered, earthquake-wracked, and I heard shatterproof windows outside the room shattering, the crashes like gunshots.

  It sounded like the whole damned building was screaming…

  I reached the nearest door, pausing just long enough for a quick glance back over my shoulder. Maybe the Thing had what it wanted. One by one, the shrieking, squirming men suspended in the air vanished, though I swear I could hear their fading screams long after they'd gone.

  I could still hear them as I descended the stairwell. • • •

  The surviving guards had rushed out ahead of us, mingling with the late-night crowds downstairs who wondered what the commotion was up in the penthouse. I was stopped a couple of times by white-faced security people, but got by each time by saying, "Special security, with Roger Nakamura! I've got wounded here! Get the hell out of my way!"

  Somewhere in all the confusion, I'd lost my nanny… and I'd peeled Cammie's off her blood-splattered face. They wouldn't track us. The humans wouldn't, anyway.

  Gods of all the Metaverse… what did I see?

  It still haunts me.

  It wasn't a mouth that got Zayid and Nakamura. I don't think it was a mouth.

  Is it true that our thoughts create Reality? That imaginal beings and places and nightmare horrors all somehow take shape and form and mass and seething, malevolent will in some other dimension, some other metaphysical plane?

  Our myths may have more reality than we can credit. Beelzebub and Lucifer. Dark Hecate and Ammit, Eater of Souls. Yog-Sothoth, Keeper of the Gate, and Great Cthu
lhu, dreaming in the depths until the stars are right.

  Perhaps whatever can be imagined is real, somehow, solid and fully manifested, residing just beyond the insubstantial gauze veils of Reality rising around us. Perhaps evil, true evil, arises from the lightless corners of our own hearts and minds. Perhaps even our darkest nightmares take shape and will, gibbering at the gates.

  I have nightmares, now. Nightmares about Dee-Dee and Scooter and patient Thud. Dead names, now.

  The nightmares where I again see the Thing are the worst.

  And at night Cammie takes me in her arms and whispers soothing words in my ear and holds me close and tells me it's all right.

  But it's not.

  I can still hear the screams, the terror-maddened shrieks of souls dragged down into darkness. I still hear the despair. The wrenching agony of dying souls.

  And I can still hear the blasphemous whisperings of the Book.

  The Book of Dead Names.

  Oh, gods! Gods in whom I've never believed, help me! The Art of Diving in the Dark By Ilsa J. Bick

  Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling writer of short stories, ebooks and novels as well as a child psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe and former Air Force major. (She is also fairly peripatetic and easily bored, but no fair diagnosing her until she's left the room.) She has published extensively in the Star Trek, BattleTech and MechWarrior: Dark Age universes, as well as original science fiction, fantasy and mystery. "The Key," a supernatural murder-mystery about the Holocaust and reincarnation, was named "distinguished" in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (edited by Joyce Carol Oates); a novelette-length sequel, "Second Sight," has just been released in Crime Spells (eds. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman); Locus's Rich Horton calls the novelette " the best (in the anthology)… heady and involving."

  Forthcoming are two young adult novels, in hardcover, from Carolrhoda Books: Draw the Dark, a paranormal mystery Publisher's Weekly called "inventive" and "riveting," which also made the semifinals of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter); and The Sin Eater's Confession, revolving around the murder of a gay high school student in rural Wisconsin.

  Currently, Ilsa and her family live in Wisconsin where theirs is the only mezuzah in town.

  – Kupau wau i ka mano ka mano nui ka mano nui kupau wau i ka mano:

  I am finished to the big shark, all consumed by the big shark, I am finished.

  (Old Hawaiian saying)

  I

  Somewhere off the Kohala Coast, Hawai'i

  May 9, 2070

  Something wrong.

  A beautiful day, a light breeze, the sea placid as blue glass, the auras of dolphins shimmering like comets screaming to earth.

  But something was definitely wrong. A distant hiss of evil whispering from the depths like a murder of crows muttering on a naked limb above a newly-turned grave. The water's fingers stroked the hairs along his arms and neck into stiff hackles through his drysuit. Something snagged the meat of his brain like the set of a hook. Reeling him in…

  Knows we're here. Maybe that's what it wants. Beneath his vest-definitely not standard-issue-a cold sweat pearled his chest. A new and more troubling thought: Jesus, can its magic reach this far? Can it see what I think?

  Not good. He'd have to watch himself. No use tipping it off…

  These are the demons. Daniel Ben-Yusuf raised a finger to his throat. Rachel's mezuzah hung around his neck-a focus, or simply a protective amulet of silver and amethyst, he was never sure-but his gloved fingers met only chilled trilaminates and butyl rubber. These are the princes of enmity dwelling in the abyss…

  With the sleds, the light went fast, turning thin and watery at twenty meters. There were still plenty of fish-a rainbow of gobies and triggerfish and angels-darting in and around dense pinkish-white forests of elkhorn coral and the bristly quills of sea urchins. By the time his HUD said he was at twenty-five, the water was a weird blue-gray, and by thirty, as they stopped to purge their low-pressure lines and switch out to heliox, the reef was completely vertical, the fish petering out, the anvil of water palming Daniel's body dense and heavy. Far below, the sea was a very cold cobalt blue, the color of a lost day slipping inexorably toward night.

  At sixty meters, they tied off their bail-out tank, double-checked their spare air canisters. (Hey, call him a cockeyed optimist, but if something went wrong at depth, the spare air might get one, or both of them to the bail-out.) At ninety-seven meters, a click sounded in his full facemask, and Alana's voice fizzed through, tinny and flat because of the depth: "Oh shit. Look down, your two o'clock."

  The maw of the cave-a dead, unknown undersea volcano between the Big Island and Maui-yawned deep and fathomless, a nearly perfect circle as black as an empty eye socket. Just below the rim, a pair of motionless dive sleds was suspended on tethers.

  But that kind of paled when you considered the sharks.

  A school of white-tip reef sharks spooled up in a silent swirl, their auras ghostly, nacreous penumbras as insubstantial as cobwebs.

  "Oh my God." Alana's voice was shaky. "Daniel, what…?"

  "I don't know. Take it easy." He watched the phalanx of animals ascend, saw them veer as one toward Alana.

  "Daniel?" A note of panic now. Her hand moved to her dive knife.

  "Alana, no. That's a fight you don't want and can't win." Her aura blazed in his astral vision: a fierce, fiery orange-red sunburst, a supernova. He watched as the sharks angled right and began to circle the woman in a stately clockwise procession, maintaining their distance, never closing, never peeling away. "Honey, listen to me: It's you, don't you see?"

  "Yes, yes, kayn." For the first time during the dive, the Rebbe's voice sizzled through his aural implant. A novel design, the implant could penetrate at depth and halfway around the world if need be. "It is the only explanation."

  "What?" She was startled. "What are you talking about?"

  "It's like the petroglyph. You're calling them somehow." He had an idea, a theory and the Rebbe echoed his thoughts: "She's a latent. The tooth is a focus, kayn? But it's old, there is DNA…"

  Daniel said, "Alana, were they here when you and Harriman…?"

  "No. I don't know. The only thing I remember is the descent and…" She drew in a sudden sharp breath. "You feel that?"

  He did: a tug. Not like the touch of magic this time but palpable, a swirl of current grabbing his body, first gently and then with more insistence like the subtle rush of water upstream that signaled the beginning of rapids just around the bend.

  Something else homing in on her… on us…

  The sharks felt it, too. They closed, their circle tightening round Alana, but he didn't think that would do any good.

  "Okay, here's where you get gone," he said. "I'll take it from here."

  "Lo, lo!" The Rebbe hissed. "No, what are you doing? You must replicate the conditions of her encounter exactly."

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. At that moment, he wished like hell that the Rebbe was psychic instead of eavesdropping. You're way the fuck in Israel. We're the ones on a one-way trip to hell.

  "Not a chance," said Alana. "We go together. Lee's still in there."

  "That wasn't the deal."

  "No, lo, take her. She's…" the Rebbe began but then abruptly cut out.

  What the hell? Then he felt it: how the sea went turgid and thick, the pressure fisting his body. Instead of rising, Daniel's bubbles hung in shuddering silver pearls, caught in a pocket scooped out of time.

  Oh shit… "Alana!" His voice came out as a wheeze, barely audible. His body felt gluey, like a fly upended on its back in a puddle of honey. "Alana, go, swim, take your sled, go!"

  Too late. Alana gasped, and then her body gave a great, convulsive jerk as something clamped round her ankles and yanked, hard. As one, the sharks knotted in a swirl, but they were creatures that must always move, or die and so there were gaps, and he saw what would happen before it did.

  No, he thought frantica
lly, take me! I'm the one you want…!

  "D-Daniel!" Alana wailed. "Help… h-help me!"

  No, no! He wanted to scream, he wanted to hurl something killing, banish her someplace safe-and he should've while he had the chance and damn the drain; what a fool! But too late now: He couldn't move. Blood pounded in his temples. Blackness ate at the margins of his vision. He fought to clear his head, looked down at the seamount-and his heart nearly died in his chest.

  A swirl of astral energy, livid as a bruise, spiraled up from the maw of the cave, twining round their bodies like the sticky weave of a spider's web. At its touch, the sharks writhed, and their formation faltered.

  "N-no!" Alana's hands flew up, her wrists pinned together, and her back arched in a sudden, agonized rictus. Her sled spun away, and then her screams filled his ears as the astral web drew her down, down…

  The web closed round and then he was hurtling, the water roaring, the ring of sharks flying apart and blurring at his passage…

  And then the darkness took them both.

  Four Days Earlier

  II

  Kohala Neuropsychiatric Institute, Hawai'i

  May 7, 2070

  The psychiatrist's voice, brisk, officious: Let's try again, Alana. Go back to the beginning and maybe we can push through some of your…

  Denial? The word was muddy and Daniel thought that, yeah, she'd been medicated up the yin-yang. Understandable, though. The emergency evac records indicated that Alana Kamakua had been distraught, disoriented: her hands pulpy, drysuit in tatters after her mad scramble over knife-edged lava. She hadn't wanted to leave the beach, insisting the evac unit rescue her lover… As if the bits of drysuit washed ashore in a swirl of purple water belonged to someone else.

  Given that, who wouldn't be, well, a little upset?

  I've told you: I remember going into the caves. Alana's voice seethed with frustration. Then our lights went out-and then I don't remember. The next thing I know, I'm on a stretcher…