Shadowplay

by Nigel Findley

  Falcon found himself wondering just how effective those autopilots were. What if I’d drifted over the center line? he thought. Would the big truck have dodged the Callaway? Would it have hit the brakes? Or would it have just blasted on through, turning the Twin Turbo into metal confetti? Quite possibly the latter, he decided. Considering the difference in mass, a head-on crash would total any oncoming car, but probably wouldn’t leave more than a scratch on the tractor. And the cost of touching up the paint job was probably less than the cost of any delay. The thought was chilling.

  Another road train rocketed by, shaking the motel to its foundations. Not a living thing on the freeway, but the freight still moved.

  “How did you know?”

  He jumped at the voice, looked over at Sly. She was still lying in her fetal position, face toward the far wall.

  “Huh?” he asked.

  She rolled over, sat up, resting her head against the stained and scratched headboard. “In the Sheraton. How did you know about the raid?”

  It was the same question he’d been asking himself all the while he’d herded the Callaway through the night. Sly had been dozing in the passenger seat, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He shrugged. “I heard something,” he said uncomfortably.

  “What did you hear? Somebody cocking a weapon? What?”

  He hesitated. If he told her the truth, would she think he was losing it? Then he wondered if maybe he was. “I heard a voice,” he said slowly.

  She shook her head in dissatisfaction. “We heard that, too,” she reminded him. “He said, ‘Room service’.”

  “No. I mean, I heard that too. But . . .” His voice trailed off.

  She didn’t press him, just watched him steadily. The light from the motel’s neon sign leaked in through the badly fitted blinds on the front window, tracing straight lines of yellow-red across the room, across the beds. Her eyes reflected the light, making her look like some kind of fire-eyed creature from a horror trid.

  He tried again. “I heard ... I heard my own voice, but it was in my head. I didn’t hear it with my ears. My own voice ... It said, ‘Danger.’ And I knew. I knew it was a setup.”

  To his surprise—and relief—Sly didn’t call him a liar, didn't say he was a deluded idiot. She just nodded slowly.”Are you a mage. Falcon? A shaman?” she asked quietly.

  He shook his head, chuckled wryly. “No,” he replied. Not yet.

  And then he hesitated. Did he know the answer? What was it really like when the totems called? Did you hear it as an outside voice? Or was it your own voice you heard? Was he now treading the path of the shamans, only he didn’t know it? He shrugged, pushing the thought aside. He’d worry about that when this was all over. If it would ever be all over.

  “Were you born in Seattle, Falcon?” Sly asked. Her voice was soft, relaxed. She seemed still half-asleep, calm and unworried for the first time since he’d met her. Her face was smooth, unlined. It made her look much younger.

  “Purity,” he answered, “out in the Barrens.”

  “I know Purity,” she said. “What about your family? Are they alive?”

  “My mother is, I know that.”

  “Still in Purity?” He nodded. “Why'd you leave?” He was silent for a while, remembering. Remembering the woman who’d raised him and his brothers, who’d taken care of them, who’d worked herself to a nub, prematurely old, to try to give them what they needed, to give them a better chance than she’d ever had. Remembering the guilt he’d felt when he first realized just how much it was costing her to feed another mouth, to provide for another person. “I needed to get away,” he said at last, disgusted by the note of suppressed emotion in his voice—the sound of weakness.”I just wanted my own life, you know?”

  He lay there tense, waiting for her to probe for more information, to open up painful topics, to bring up painful thoughts, with her questions. But she remained silent. He looked over at her. There was a gentle smile on her face, a smile of sadness. Of understanding.

  ”Your father?” she asked gently.

  He shrugged again.”He . . . he went away when I was young.” To his surprise, it didn’t hurt as much to say it as he'd expected. “He was a shadowrunner.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. He went away when I was six, and he wasn’t around much before then. But my mother talked about him a lot.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Falcon answered honestly. “Mommy mother—doesn’t either. She said he went on a run but just never came back. She told us it was some big thing, a run on some major corp. She thought maybe he picked up too much heat and went underground to keep from bringing that kind of grief down on his family. She said when the heat was off, when the corps weren’t gunning for him anymore, he'd come back to us. Take us away from the plex. That’s what she said.”

  He waited for the next question—Do you believe that?—but she didn’t ask it. Just watched him quietly, nodded.

  So do I believe it? he asked himself. Did I ever believe it?

  At one time, yes, of course. When you’re young enough, you always believe your mother, don’t you? When she tells you about Santa Claus, about the tooth fairy, about the Easter fragging Bunny. And about your dad the high-class runner making the big score against the corps.

  So, was Rick Falk—who’d also used the street handle Falcon—hiding out in the lap of luxury somewhere? Waiting for the perfect time to come back to Purity— probably in a Rolls Royce Phaeton limo—to whisk his family away to a life they could never have dreamed? Was he thinking—every day and every night—of the wife and kids he left behind?

  What were the fragging odds, huh? His dad had died nine years ago, that was the truth. He went up against a big corp, and the corp swatted him the way Falcon might swat a fragging mosquito. That was the truth.

  Like father, like son?

  “I’m tired,” he told Sly, then rolled over and closed his eyes. Another road train hurtled by, its engine noise and shock wave seeming to shake the entire fabric of reality.

  23

  1945 hours, November 15, 2053

  The city of Cheyenne, Sioux Nation, was larger than Sly had expected, but much smaller than Seattle, of course. The downtown core was about the same size, but the outlying areas were less extensive. No great, sprawling suburbs, decaying and going to hell in a handcart. As they cruised in on Route 80, then taken the Central Avenue off-ramp into downtown, she’d seen hints that there probably had once been the spread-out bedroom communities, the rows of car dealerships and fast-food restaurants, the strip malls and the bowling alleys. But all that had been before the genocide campaign, before the Great Ghost Dance and the Treaty of Denver. Now the Native Americans had torn down all those signs of “whiteskin oppression,” and the land had returned to its natural state. Scrub grass and trees had grown over the remains of the razed buildings and their foundations.

  The downtown itself was something of a contradiction. The buildings were tall, competently built, and much better designed than those of Seattle. There was a kind of coherence to the look of the city, a kind of totality, with each edifice playing its part. Instead of resembling some kind of architectural dog’s breakfast, the individual structures meshed with one another, creating a sense of unity. Sly found it strange, and wondered if this was how cities were meant to be.

  They’d cruised right through the core and out the other side. The city had a busy, bustling feel, its roads and sidewalks crowded. But somehow it didn’t have the same kind of keyed-up, frenetic, on-the-edge feel that marked Seattle. Or Tokyo, for that matter.

  They’d driven past the Cheyenne Municipal Airport, ducked onto Route 25 heading north. And there they'd found a place to set up a base of operations. A small motel just off the highway to the west, right on the edge of a massive military airbase. It used to be called Warren Air Force Base or something like that, Sly recalled, dredging that bit of trivia from the depths of her memory. Now, according to th
e big signs near the main gate, it was simply Council Air Base (”Peace through Vigilant Strength”).

  The motel was the Plains Rest, a two-story ferrocrete building constructed in a U-shape around a tree-shaded swimming pool. Most of its trade probably came from traveling businessmen who needed a place to flop near the airport but not too far out of town.

  Checking in had been no problem. The woman at the front desk had been more alert than the slag at the Crystal Springs, actually reading the personal data from their credsticks when the computer monitor displayed it. The fake IDs and other documentation had stood up to her scrutiny, however. With that she’d handed over the pass-card to room 25D, a “housekeeping suite” with a minuscule kitchen alcove, overlooking the pool.

  Now Sly sat at the small table, plugging Smeland’s cyberdeck into the phone jack, and powering up the system. Falcon was sprawled on one of the big double beds, playing with the controls for the massage system. He rolled his head from side to side, obviously trying to work a kink out of his neck.

  “What now?” he asked.

  Good question, Sly thought. “I’m just going to deck in and see what’s buzzing in the Matrix,” she told him, trying to keep the nervousness from her voice. “Keep an eye on me while I’m gone, okay?”

  He nodded, patted the machine pistol he’d set on the bedside table. “Watch yourself,” he told her quietly.

  Yeah, watch myself. She snugged the brain plug into her datajack. Hesitated for a moment. I'm not going in deep, she reminded herself. Just a surface scan. There’s no ice on public datanets. Nothing to sweat over. Then, before she could have any second thoughts, she hit the Go key.

  * * *

  Half an hour later Sly unplugged the lead from her datajack, sat back in the uncomfortable chair and stretched. More creaks and clicks from her back. Drek, she was getting too old for this.

  Falcon was watching her from the bed. “What gives?”

  “Nothing,” she said, extending the stretch a touch more, wincing from the pain of misused tendons. “We’re in the clear. No wants or warrants out for Sharon Young or Dennis Falk. Or for Cynthia Yurogowski or David Falstaff either, for that matter.”

  The kid looked surprised. “You expected there to be?” he asked in disbelief. “The UCAS and Sioux are too busy drekking around on each other’s borders to have any kind of cooperation.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I know. Officially, no extradition treaty, only limited diplomatic relations. But I was worried about official cooperation. As in some Seattle-based megacorp makes a big donation to the Sioux Policemen’s Benevolent Fund—contingent on them scooping up those desperadoes Young and Falk, of course.”

  “They could do that?”

  She wanted to chuckle at his naivete, but didn’t let her amusement show. “They could do that,” she replied levelly. “The fact that they didn’t probably means they don’t know we’re here.”

  “Probably,” he echoed.

  “Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.”

  He was silent for a few moments. “How long’s that going to last?” he asked casually. Only his eyes betrayed the intensity of his concern.

  “Before they track us here?” She shrugged eloquently. “Probably not long. At some point some body’s going to notice that one of Agarwal's cars is gone, and then trace us through the borders.”

  “We should have stolen some other plates.”

  Now she did chuckle. “What good would that do?” she asked. “How many 1991 Callaway Twin Turbos do you think are out there?”

  He sank back into morose silence. Sly left him to his thoughts.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked eventually.

  And, as always, that was the big question.

  Sly knew what she wanted to do, which was head for the Caribbean League and leave the corps to frag each other blind. Maybe that was the only way out. Let the rest of the world go to hell in its own way, and hope no one decided to nuke Barbados. . . .

  But the old problem still remained. She might decide to opt out of the whole thing, but how could she convince everyone who was after her of that fact? She couldn’t. Which meant there was still only one way out, no matter how much she hated to even think about it.

  “Are you going to try Zurich-Orbital again?”

  She clenched her fists hard to stop the sudden shakes. Turned away, pretended to busy herself coiling up the cyberdeck’s fiber-optic lead. “No,” she said when she thought she had her reactions under control. “No, I don’t think it’s time for that yet.” She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, watching his response.

  He just shrugged, but she thought she saw a hint of something—understanding, maybe?—in his eyes. “The Matrix is your game,” he said reasonably. “Your call.”

  Neither spoke for a few minutes. I’ve got to tell him the truth, she thought at last. I owe him that much.

  “I’m scared, Falcon,” she blurted out. “I’m scared of going back into the Matrix.”

  “Why?”

  She looked away. “Five years ago, I fragged up. I fragged up really bad. Some black ice got me. It didn’t kill me, but it came this close to frying my brain. It took years for the damage to heal.

  “The physical damage,” she stressed. “The psychological damage? A lot of it’s still there. I’m convinced ...”

  She stopped, consciously slowed down the pace of her words. “I’m convinced, deep down convinced, that the next time I hit black ice it’s going to kill me. End of story.”

  “You went into the grid before.” the ganger pointed out.

  “With T. S. running top cover, yes.” She suppressed another shudder. “And even then ...” She forced herself to stop picturing the hulking shapes, the black ice constructs, flanking Jurgensen.

  She paused. Falcon didn’t say anything, just watched her steadily. Did he understand any of this? she wondered.

  “I know I’m going to have to go back and take another shot at Zurich-Orbital,” she said slowly, her own words chilling her to the core. “I don’t have any other options. But I’m not ready yet.

  “I need more equipment—some utilities for the deck. And maybe a phase loop recourser, some other toys.” She paused, added quietly, “And I need to psych myself up for it. Do you understand?” She looked over at him.

  He was still sprawled casually on the bed, but something about the line of his body had changed. His eyes were on her, steady, appraising. And comprehending. Accepting. “Your call,” he said.

  Then suddenly, as if trying to shake off an unpleasant thought, he rolled off the bed. “You do what you got to do,” he said firmly. “But I gotta move, Sly. If I stay here I’ll go squirrelly for sure.”

  She smiled in understanding. How long since she was like that, all energy and need to do something? Ten years? More? It didn’t feel like it. “Take the car if you want,” she said. “But be careful, okay?”

  He shot her a rebel smile. “Hey, careful’s my middle name.”

  Yeah, right.

  He grabbed the keys from the table, headed for the door. “Don't wait up, huh?” He paused. “And be careful yourself.” And then he was gone.

  24

  2200 hours, November 15, 2053

  Falcon walked slowly, enjoying the feel of the nighttime city around him. He’d parked the Callaway in a pay lot off Twenty-third Street, near the corner of Pershing Boulevard. Paying in advance with his credstick—David Falstaff’s credstick, to be precise—he’d discovered something he’d never known about the Sioux Nation.

  They still used hard currency for some things. Not just credit transferred electronically, but real, honest-to-god currency. Coins made of metallicized plastic, bills of coated mylar. The actual base currency was the familiar nuyen, like just about everywhere else on the continent. But it seemed that most minor transactions—like paying for parking and probably bribes—were conducted using coins and bills. When Falcon had pulled out his credstick, the parking attendant, a big slag with a dyed Mohawk cut,
had gotten a mite testy. Falcon played the dumb tourist trip to the hilt, claiming he was fresh into the nation from Salish-Shidhe lands, quickly apologizing for his ignorance. In a flash of brilliance, he asked the attendant if he could rack up a larger bill on his credstick and take the change in coin. After a minute or so of bitching and whining, the slag had agreed, charging him a hundred nuyen for a five-nuyen parking fee, and handing him eighty-five nuyen in assorted coins and bills. (The extra ten nuyen was, of course, a “transaction fee,” required by law.) With the coins an unaccustomed weight in his pocket, Falcon strolled away from the freelance entrepreneur, and started to cruise.

  Pershing Boulevard seemed to be “the strip” in Cheyenne. Near the intersection with Twenty-third were some big, government-type buildings, including one that was billed as the Sioux National Theater. But further west along Pershing, more toward the center of town, the buildings were smaller and a little seedier. Lots of taverns and clubs, many with signs advertising live nude on stage, and others with more elaborate holo displays showing in almost clinical detail the attractions featured within.

  At first he noticed that almost everyone he passed was an Amerindian. Most were wearing clothes that wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Seattle. But every now and again he’d spot someone in traditional deerskin breechcloths, leggings, beaded moccasins. The most common hairstyle was what most people in Seattle called the Mohawk—a fringe of hair down the center of the head, with both sides shaved.