Shadowplay

by Nigel Findley

  Another step, then another. Increasing tempo, faster and faster, until she was into a shambling run. The air hissing in and out stung her dry throat, but the pain felt good. Who knows? she thought. Maybe they’ll forget to turn the simsense off. Wasn’t a convincing illusion of freedom as good as the real thing, as long as it didn’t end? If you couldn’t tell reality from illusion, why favor one over the other? Maybe her whole life had been simsense. . . . She ran on.

  Her lungs hurt, her legs felt like they were on fire. The impact of each step pounded up her legs, through her spine, into her brainpan. A rushing filled her ears. The tunnel—with its flickering walls—drew tighter. The size of two fists at arm’s length; one fist; a fingertip . . .

  And then there was nothing but blackness and drifting stars ahead of her. A phantasmagoric starfield.

  With something like relief, Sly fell headlong into it.

  30

  0310 hours, November 16, 2053

  With a gasp, Falcon “fell” back into his body.

  That was the only way he could describe it. One moment he was with Sly, running along beside her as she lurched down the back alley. The next he felt a kind of psychic wrench, then was back in his meat body, sprawled on the floor in the back room of The Buffalo Jump. He lay there for a moment, tingling all over. It felt like those times when you’re half-asleep and you dream you’re falling, but instead of hitting the ground you find yourself startlingly awake, staring at the ceiling, with strange sensations coursing up and down your nerves.

  He turned his head. Mary was still in full lotus, swaying slightly. She still seemed to be . . . What, in a trance? Was that it? And then her eyes jolted open too. She stared at him. “What the frag just happened?” she asked quietly.

  He forced himself to his feet—tested his sense of balance. The tingling was already fading. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is your thing, not mine. I’ve never done it before.”

  “But ...” She paused. On her face was a strange expression, something close to awe. “But what you did . .

  “What did I do?”

  “You tracked your friend from the astral," the young woman said slowly. “You went to her. You slammed a spell into that shaman’s fetish. . . .”

  “No!” he yelped. “That was you.”

  She shook her head. “It was you. You cast a spell. Think back.”

  He tried to. He remembered seeing the room, seeing Sly strapped into the chair. The song of Wolf was still thrumming through his nerves, sinews, bones. He remembered the outrage, the horror, as he realized Sly was being tortured. And then . . .

  And then Wolf’s song had taken on a different tenor. No longer the quiet, steady power—like that of a slow-flowing river. It had changed, become angrier, fiercer-more like a storm-tossed sea. The song had filled him, overwhelmed him. He’d become one with the music, singing along with it.

  And then the fireball had burst.

  I cast a spell? Is that what a spell is?

  “I did it?” he mumbled.

  Mary nodded.

  “What about . . . what about the shaman when he let Sly go?”

  “That was me,” Mary acknowledged. “A simple controlling manipulation. By that time I kind of understood what was going down.

  “But then you manifested on the physical, didn’t you?” she went on. “You made yourself visible to her, and you spoke to her. Didn’t you?”

  He nodded. “Shamans can do that, though, right?”

  “Yes, but . . . drek, Falcon, they’ve got to learn to be able to do it. Everything you did tonight . . . It’s like, it’s no big fragging deal to ride a bike, but what you did— it’s like some guy who’s never ridden before swinging onto a combat bike and doing trick riding stunts!” She shook her head in amazement. “We’ve got to talk about this.”

  “Later.” He jumped to his feet. “Sly went down. We’ve got to find her. Where the frag was that?”

  Mary paused for a moment. “That place we saw—Cheyenne Chain and Wire. I know it. It’s south of town, near I-80. Industrial area.”

  ”Take me there,” he said flatly, heading for the door.

  Mary hesitated for a moment, then, with a shrug, followed him out.

  * * *

  Falcon didn’t know how Mary had sweet-talked the bartender—Cahill, she said his name was—into lending her his bike, and right then he didn’t care. He sat on the back of the rumbling hog, his arms locked tight around the shaman’s waist.

  She was a good driver, not aggressive, not into high speeds or anything flashy, but stable and steady. Safe. Right now Falcon would probably have wanted to trade a little safety for some more speed. He knew enough, though, not to be a back-seat driver.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the industrial area. The feel of the place—abandoned buildings, industrial trash, scavengers in the alleys—was right, even though he didn’t recognize anything directly. Then Mary was cruising slowly past the front of Cheyenne Chain and Wire.

  “She started off into the alley behind this building,” Mary said.

  “Which way did she go?” Falcon asked. “And how far?”

  Mary shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll just have to search.” She turned the bike down the next street, cut into the alley behind the foundry.

  A few minutes later—the minutes feeling like hours to Falcon—they found her. Face-down in a pile of refuse, a rat the size of a malnourished beagle sniffing at her. As Falcon ran up, the rat seemed to consider taking him on to protect what had to be enough food to last a month. But then the creature apparently decided discretion was the better part of valor, and made itself scarce.

  Falcon crouched beside Sly, grabbed her wrist, felt for a pulse. It was there—fast, but not strong. Mary squatted next to him, laid a hand on the fallen woman’s shoulder. “How is she?” Falcon demanded.

  “You could probably find out yourself,” Mary said cryptically. But then she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. After a moment she looked up. “Not good. Alive, but drek-kicked.”

  “Can you help her? Shamans can heal, can’t they?”

  “I can help her,” Mary acknowledged. She glanced around. “But this ain’t the best place.” She hesitated. “We can carry three on the bike—just—but we can’t go fast and we can’t go far. Where do you want to take her?”

  It was Falcon’s turn to pause. The motel was too far and perhaps too dangerous, but what other choice did he have? If Sly still wanted to go through with this drek about cracking into Zurich-Orbital—assuming she didn’t flatline, of course—she’d need her deck. Which was back at the motel. And the motel was much too far to take a wounded woman three-up on a bike.

  “Can you wait here with her?” he asked. “I’ll take the bike and go get the car.”

  Mary nodded.

  “They might come looking for her.”

  The shaman smiled. “If they do, they’ll find more than they bargained for. I’ll summon a city spirit. It can conceal and protect us while you’re gone.”

  “Good,” Falcon said. “I’ll be back quick as I can.” As he swung aboard the bike and peeled out of there, he heard Mary begin to sing a strange, rhythmic song.

  He was expecting some kind of trouble. Somebody trying to stop him from returning with the car, loading Sly into it, and cruising back to the motel. Hell, he was almost looking forward to it. He was cranked up, out on the pointy end, ready to kick some hoop. His machine pistol was locked and loaded on the seat next to him, and he found himself humming the song of Wolf through his clenched teeth.

  But nobody tried to slot with them. In fact nobody paid them the slightest heed. Even when he carried the limp figure of Sly from the car into the motel room. Somebody was walking through the parking lot during the whole procedure, but the slag didn’t even look their way. Falcon wondered if maybe Mary’s city spirit was still looking out for them. He set Sly gently down on the bed, while Mary locked the door behind them.

  Sly looked like drek—face pale
and drawn, skin almost yellow. While carrying her, he'd felt tremors shooting through her muscles. And her flesh was cold. Like Nightwalker when he died. With an effort, Falcon forced that memory away.

  He turned to Mary. “Fix her up,” he said gruffly. Then, more tentatively, “Please?"

  He tried to watch and learn as Mary sat cross-legged on the bed beside Sly, ran her small hands gently over his chummer’s body, and began to sing.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t sit still. He was filled with energy—energy to burn—and nothing to burn it on. So he paced and he fumed. He pictured Knife-Edge’s face twisting in agony as he pumped bullet after bullet into the Amerindian runner’s belly. Pictured him engulfed in flame, screaming as he burned like the woman in the torture room. Pictured him moaning in fear as his lifeblood ran into the gutter and he bled himself dry.

  He couldn’t bear to look at his chummer’s pale face. She looked so young, so helpless, lying there. And that was perhaps the biggest crime of all that Knife-Edge had to atone for. He’d taken a confident, competent woman and turned her into this.

  Why does it matter so much? he asked himself. I didn’t know her from squat a week ago. She shouldn’t mean anything to me.

  But she did, of course. They were working together toward the same goal. They trusted each other, depended on each other. She is of my pack, he’d told Wolf. And that was the truth, simple and plain. He sat on the other bed, facing away from Mary and Sly. The Dog shaman’s song filled his ears, and dire imaginings filled his mind.

  Finally Mary’s song faded away. He was scared to turn, to look. But he had to.

  Sly still lay unmoving, but her color had returned to normal. Sitting next to her, Mary looked tired, her face sheened with sweat.

  “Is she ...?” Falcon couldn’t finish the question.

  Mary just nodded.

  Falcon came over and sat on the edge of the bed beside his chummers. He reached out, brushed a lock of hair back from Sly’s face. “Sly,” he said softly.

  And her eyes opened. For a moment they darted about wildly, clouded with terror. Then they fixed on his face.

  She smiled. A tired, worn smile, but a smile just the same. “It was you,” she said weakly. “It was real.”

  He didn’t trust himself to speak, just nodded. His eyes were watering, and he scuffed the back of his hand across them. It’s all this blasting around when I should be sleeping, he told himself.

  “How are you feeling?” Mary asked.

  Sly smiled up at the young woman. “Good,” she said. “Better than I have any right to expect.” She paused. “You were there too, weren’t you? I felt you.” Mary nodded. Sly turned to Falcon. “How?”

  It was Mary who answered. “Your chummer’s walking the path of the shamans,” she said quietly. “He sings the song of Wolf.”

  Falcon saw Sly’s eyes widen, full of unspoken questions. Then she smiled. “Hidden depths, Falcon,” she said. “Hidden depths.” Cautiously, she pushed herself upright. “Anything else happen that I should know about?”

  31

  0521 hours, November 16, 2053

  At the suggestion of the young woman whose name Sly learned was Mary Windsong, they picked up and moved. Sly was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything to her torturers about the motel—if she had, the three of them would already have been blown to drek—but it didn’t make sense to take any chances they could avoid. Mary led the way, riding a hog much too big for her, her long braid trailing back in the wind. Falcon had driven the Callaway, Sly sitting in the passenger seat, her cyberdeck clutched protectively in her lap. They’d gone to some little tavern with the improbable name of The Buffalo Jump, then installed themselves in the tiny back room.

  Sly was feeling better—almost back to normal, she had to admit. Sometimes she still felt tremors in her muscles, and sometimes when she shut her eyes—even if just for a moment—images from the simsense torture came back and she’d have to smother a scream. What would happen when she went to sleep? she wondered.

  Both Falcon and Mary had been solicitous about her health. Maybe a little too solicitous, Sly thought at first, a tad grumpily. But then she realized that their concern wasn’t misplaced. She had gone through a frag of a lot, and still felt like a wet bag of drek, despite help from the Dog shaman's magical attentions.

  A strange dynamic seemed to exist between Falcon and the Cheyenne woman, Sly had noticed. At first she thought it was sexual attraction—the ganger was handsome in an unpolished kind of way, and the diminutive girl cute the way Sly had always wanted to be as a kid. But then she recognized that there was more to it, maybe much more. They had something important in common, something that underlaid their entire lives. Sly wondered if it was because Falcon was now “walking the path of the shaman”—whatever that meant.

  “What do you need?” Mary asked her as soon as they reached the tavern.

  Sly’s first impulse had been to say something flippant like a liter of synthahol and thirty-six hours of sleep. But she put that thought aside at once. Knife-Edge was still after her. He’d gotten her once, and had no reason to stop trying. Holing up and waiting it out would be just plain dumb, she decided, particularly after Falcon told her what he’d learned about the Amerindian runner. The Office of Military Intelligence—no drek. That meant they were playing with the Sioux government, the military— maybe even the fragging Wildcats. No, holing up was not a good idea. This wasn’t going to just blow over. She had to do something, right now.

  And, no matter how much it terrified her, she knew what that something was. Zurich-Orbital again. Sly had to try, even if it killed her. But then, of course, there was the problem of cyberdeck utilities. If she was feeling really militant, she could go “naked” into the Matrix, depending on her skills to whip up the programs she needed on the fly. Five years ago she might have considered it.

  Now? No fragging way. Her conversation with Moonhawk— the fragging double-crossing drek-eater—had convinced her that she was too out of date for that. Phase loop recoursers—PLRs—wouldn’t do squat against modern ice. What other unpleasant changes had she missed?

  No, what she needed was all the edge she could get. And that meant up-to-the-minute varsity-league utilities.

  Fortunately—and to her surprise—Mary had come to her aid when she’d mentioned the problem. The little shaman had some connections with the Cheyenne shadow community—including, it turned out, a couple of programmers and deckers. Mary took off with a list of the utilities and hardware Sly needed, returning less than an hour later with a collection of optical chips in a plastic chip carrier.

  Frag, Sly thought as she loaded the last utility into the deck’s onboard memory, why couldn’t Falcon have met her a couple of hours sooner?

  She set aside the last program chip, ran the deck through a quick self-diagnostic. The processor was having no problem running the utility code. The utilities themselves were almost implausibly sophisticated—at least, in comparison to what Sly had used five years ago. According to the deck’s internal bench marks, most clocked in at a hair over rating seven. One read out at nine, and one peaked at an unheard-of eleven. (What’s all this going to cost me? she wondered, then put the worry aside. Mary had given the stuff to her on credit, so if Sly got herself geeked, she wouldn’t have to sweat it. And if she made it, any price would be cheap.) With the speed increases Smeland had wired into the circuitry, the combination of wiz utilities plus beefy processor turned the deck into a real ice pick.

  Satisfied, Sly sat back.

  Falcon had been pacing nervously. Now he came to perch beside her, concern written all over his face. “Are you up to this, Sly?” he asked quietly. “You don’t want to wait? Like, give yourself some time to bounce back?”

  She smiled at him, appreciating his apprehension on her behalf. She squeezed his arm reassuringly. “I’m up for it,” she told him. “I’m ready.” As ready as she would ever be. But how ready was that? “What other choices do we have?”

  Sh
e watched him struggle with that, reviewing their options—sadly limited—in his mind. Eventually his shoulders slumped and he nodded. She knew how he was feeling. Helpless, impotent. There was nothing he could do to help Sly directly. She squeezed his arm again, trying to communicate a determination and confidence she really didn’t feel. Maybe this is it. She couldn’t force the thought from her mind. Sly used to think that the next time she faced black ice, she’d get flatlined. And now she was going up against the best. And maybe a military-class decker too. Would Jurgensen be waiting for her when she decked in? Count on it, she told herself.

  Sly turned to Mary Windsong. “Can you watch me?” she asked. “Monitor me magically, or something? If you see something strange happening to my body ...”

  “If you start T-and-F-ing, you mean?” the young woman asked.

  “T-and-What-ing?” Falcon demanded.

  “Twitching and foaming,” Mary explained. “Like if a decker hits some bad ice. Yeah, sure. You hit trouble, I’ll jack you out. I’ve covered for deckers before.” She turned to Falcon. “It’s like watching a shaman’s meat body when he’s gone astral. Yeah, null persp, Sly. I’ll move fast.”

  Sly nodded. There was no more anyone could do to help. Maybe, if Mary was as quick as she thought she was, and if she was watching closely enough, she could jack Sly out before any black ice had time to fry her brain or stop her heart. But how much faster did black ice react these days? How long did it take killer ice to set up a lethal biofeedback loop?

  She looked down at the deck, the plug-tipped fiberoptic lead coiled like a snake ready to strike. No more excuses, she told herself, no more procrastination. If I’m going, go. She picked up the brain plug, snugged it into her datajack. Felt the familiar tingling that told her the deck was on-line, ready to rock and roll.

  She glanced up into Falcon’s worried eyes. Gave him and Mary a reassuring smile. “Well,” she said softly, “here goes nothing.” She checked the deck’s memory— utilities loaded, interfacing well with the MPCP and the persona programs. Ran another quick diagnostic, got a green board. No glitches, no anomalies. No more excuses.