House of the Sun s-17

by Nigel D Findley

  The floor jolted under me, and I almost lost the Suzuki, whose kick-stand wasn't down yet, as the "alcove" started to rise. A freight elevator. As the elevator continued up, the two orks dismounted, and Kat stripped off her riding gear. The floor eventually stopped moving, and the two shadowrunners-what else could they be, neh?-led me out into the low-ceilinged second floor of the warehouse.

  It was set up as a large ops room, I saw at once. Over against one wall was a weapons area-a fragging arsenal with various and assorted implements of mayhem mounted on hooks. In one corner was a sophisticated-looking commo suite; in another, a collection of computers and miscellaneous other tech-toys connected by a medusa's-head of wiring harnesses. Moko led me over toward a briefing table-the high-tech kind with a complex array of flatscreen display panels built into the tabletop-and slumped down in a swivel chair.

  For the first time in a long time I felt my muscles start to relax. I was among professionals. I could feel the "vibes," and I recognized them. I knew Argent, the sole surviving street op from the late, lamented Wrecking Crew, would feel very much at home here.

  And as I relaxed, my brain finally acknowledged various physical signals that parts of my body had been sending for some time. I glanced over at Kat, suddenly a touch embarrassed. "Where's the… um, the…" She chuckled and pointed.

  That part of the ops facility was sophisticated, too. I took care of immediate needs and did a little damage-control on my appearance before I re-emerged.

  Another member of the team-so I assumed, at least- was waiting to use the facilities. Yet another ork, yet again with a Polynesian cast to his features. His large eyes narrowed when he saw me-suddenly encountering a stranger in a place like this was probably as disconcerting as catching an unidentified tourist using your drekker at home-but then I saw understanding dawn. I stepped aside to let him into the facilities…

  But he didn't go, not immethately. "You were with Scott, huh?" he asked me without preamble. His voice sounded like a bunch of rocks in the hubcap of a moving car.

  I hesitated, men, "Yeah," I admitted slowly.

  "How'd he go out?"

  I glanced over toward the briefing table, where Moko and Kat were, for guidance. But they were deep in conversation with each other. I shrugged and said, "Belly-bomb, I think."

  "Yeah, but he got the oyabun first, huh?"

  "He did that," I confirmed.

  The ork smiled. "Good. He did it up right, then, the way he wanted to go out." And he strode past me into the drekker.

  I blinked in surprise at the closed door. That certainly hadn't been the reaction I was expecting. I didn't get any time to think about it right then, though, as Kat called, "Hoi!" and beckoned me over.

  A third figure had joined them at the table by the time I'd crossed the open floor. Hawai'ian or Polynesian or whatever in coloration, but this one was an elf, complete with the pointed ears and almond eyes. (For the first time, I realized just how few elves I'd seen here in Hawai'i.) Apart from the coloration, he wouldn't have looked out of place in Seattle… or in Cheyenne, for that matter. Instead of what I'd mentally labeled as "tropical adventure gear," he was wearing close-fitting black leathers bedecked with a fashionable assortment of chains, studs, and plates. His quasi-Mohawk coiffure left his forehead and temples bare, and three datajacks and a chipslot glinted in the overhead lights.

  Kat indicated the elf. "Poki," she told me. I nodded a greeting. The elf just looked right through me, too chill to even acknowledge my existence. Like all too many elves, I added mentally.

  "I hear from Marky you got a chip you need decrypted, huh?" Kat said.

  I hesitated for a moment. Then-this was what I'd been looking for, wasn't it?-I reached into my pocket and pulled the chip carrier out. I slid it across the tabletop to Poki.

  He picked it up, again not acknowledging my presence. It was Kat he asked, "What's the scan?"

  "Seventy-bit public-key," I told him.

  That got him to actually look at me rather than through me. "Yeah?" He grinned, a real predatory expression on his thin face. "Meat for the beast, hoa. By when?"

  "Soonest." Kat and I spoke the word almost simultaneously.

  The elf picked up the chip carrier. "When are you going to get me something tough!" he asked Kat with a decidedly evil chuckle. And with that he strode over toward the computer corner.

  11

  For the next six hours I sat in a corner well out of the way and watched the shadow team-if they had a name, they (predictably) hadn't told me-go about their biz. Poki, the elf decker, spent all that time hunched over his computers, singing tunelessly along to some three-year-old shag rock fed directly into one of his secondary datajacks. The others… well, they did "shadowrunner stuff." The ork I'd met outside the drekker-his name was Zack, I'd learned-was the team's equivalent of a gunnery sergeant, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy his job of stripping down and cleaning some of the lethal-looking weapons in the team's arsenal. A Chinese dwarf-I never caught her name-helped him from time to time, occasionally going over to Poki and giving him a deep shoulder massage as he worked. Moko slept most of the time away, sprawled in a net hammock hung between too support pillars. Kat and another female ork-Beta, Kat called her-had networked a couple of pocket 'puters together and seemed to be doing administrative datawork. (I'd never really thought about it, but I guess even shadow teams can't avoid that joyless task.)

  Of the seven people in the sprawling ops room, only I had nothing to do, assuming that Moko's current assignment was catching up on his zees. I've never handled down-time all that well, particularly when I've basically put my life in the hands of people I don't really know. The wait should have given me time to think things through, to come to some significant conclusions, but my brain just wasn't up to incisive analytical thinking at the moment. I couldn't stop my mind from churning; I couldn't stop my thoughts from running around and around in the same, well-worn track. I wished I could sleep, but I knew that wasn't in the cards.

  About four hours in a receiver in the team's commo suite chirruped. Beta hurried over and slipped a hushphone head-set on. I could see her lips move as she subvocalized, but I couldn't hear squat of either incoming or outgoing communication. After a minute or two she set the headset down and came over to Kat. Beta glanced in my direction before she spoke, but I'd already made sure I was staring blankly into space, quite obviously paying no attention to the proceedings. I quieted my breathing, trying to hear everything I could and momentarily wished for cyberears and enhanced peripheral vision.

  "It's him," I head Beta say.

  "Neheka?"

  Beta shook her head. "The big'worm," she corrected. (Or that's what I thought she said, at least. It could just as well have been "the bookworm" or "the big word," or even "the bakeware," really…) Whatever it was Beta had said, it was enough to break Kat away from her datawork and send her hurrying over to the hushphone. That piece of hardware did its usual fine job of work, and I couldn't make out a single syllable of the conversation, which lasted more than five minutes.

  When Kat was done and had terminated the circuit, I watched her expression and body language out the corner of my eye as she walked back to the briefing table and the networked 'puters. Nothing meaningful; maybe Hawai'ians have their own body language as well.

  It was something like two hours after the conversation with "the bakeware" that Poki let out a creditable rebel yell. I was on my feet in an instant and hurrying over to him. Kat got there before me, though-chipped? I wondered-and it was to her that the elf decker announced, "Got it."

  "Yeah?"

  Poki smiled nastily at my skepticism and told me, "Hey, slot, seventy-bit's old news. Where you been anyway?"

  I shook my head, isn't there anything that doesn't change so fragging fast you can't keep up? The elf had sliced a corporate code in less than a fragging quarter of the time I'd expected. Whatever is the world coming to, etcetera etcetera drekcetera. I held out my hand for the chip, but the decker just point
ed to a high-res data display.

  I shot a meaningful look at Kat, and she picked up on it right away. "Got a couple of ticks to check my 'puter's memory, Poki?" she asked. 'Think I might have picked up a virus."

  The decker looked absolutely scandalized for a moment, and he opened his mouth to bag about it. But then he saw the hard edge in Kat's eyes, swallowed his kvetching, and nodded. (I'd already scanned that Kat had the juice in this outfit, but it was nice to get a little confirmation.)

  "Yah, okay," he said, though his voice told me and everyone else that it definitely was not okay. He stood up, unjacked, and followed Kat to the briefing table… but not before giving me a solid dose of stink-eye. I shot him my best "Hey, I'm just a harmless idiot who probably won't reformat all your storage" smile, and sat down in the chair he'd just vacated.

  It took me a few moments to make sense of the 'puter's user interface. (Sure, modern systems are supposed to follow the same paradigm, but just because you can drive a Volkswagen Elektro doesn't mean you're immediately competent behind the wheel of a 480-kilometer-an-hour Formula Unlimited racing machine, right?) When I thought I had everything under control, the first thing I did was scope out how many copies of the chip's contents Poki had in memory or in long-term storage. As far as I could tell, there was only the one: a single copy of the file in volatile memory displaying on the screen. Unfortunately, the key phrase was "as far as I could tell." If a nova-hot decker wanted to hide a backup copy from an amateur code-jockey like me, he'd sure as frag be able to do it. Once I'd done what I could in the way of security, I actually read through the message on the display.

  Apparently, Barnard had never learned how to write concise letters. (But then, of course, by-the-bit charges for message traffic don't mean much to a corporate suit.) The message from Jacques Barnard to the late Ekei Tokudaiji filled three screens. I read it over twice, word for word, then scanned again for overall content.

  For all the meaningful content I pulled out of the text, Barnard could as well have kept it down to two or three lines. If I'd been asked to give a high-school-style precis of the letter, it would have come out something like, "Keep on doing whatever it is you've been doing with regard to the subject under discussion, and be aware that some other, unidentified people might take steps to stop you from doing so. Have a nice day."

  Sigh. I should have expected it, I suppose. There are more ways to conceal meaning than by using 70-bit public-key encryption. Veiled language, cryptic references that mean something to no one but the two principals, "closed" allusions to things like "our communication of 12/18/55" and "the matter that so concerns our mutual friend"…

  In addition to my simple precis, I could conclude one thing from the message with a fair bit of certainty. Namely: Tokudaiji and Barnard weren't strangers, and their interests had definitely aligned several times in the past. That's all I knew for sure after reading the message.

  I could make a couple of guesses, of course. First, considering what Te Purewa-"Marky"' to these folks-had told me, it seemed reasonably logical that "whatever it is you've been doing" was calming the populace down when Na Kama'aina and ALOHA tried to stir them up. And second…

  Second… I couldn't be at all sure about this, but I couldn't shake the feeling, gut-deep and so very disturbing, that this wasn't a fake message whipped up just to set the mind of a soon-to-be-dead courier/Trojan horse at ease. If someone had asked me to bet on the instigator of Tokudaiji's death, not so long ago I'd have put a whack of cred on one Jacques Barnard. Now? No bet, chummer. Sure, I've been known to be wrong, but deep down where instinct sends you messages, I just didn't buy it anymore.

  So, what the flying frag was going on?

  I checked that the chip I'd given Poki was still in the 'puter's chipslot, then downloaded a copy of the plaintext message to it. Once I was sure it was safely ensconced on the optical chip, I deleted the copy from memory. Then I removed the chip using the same carrier and slipped it into my pocket.

  Kat and Poki were watching me as I walked back to the briefing table. "Thanks," I said with a nod at the decker. Then I focused my attention on Kat. "I need to go back to my doss in Chinatown." I'd misstated the location of my flop, of course, and I watched her eyes closely for any reaction.

  There was none-none beyond a frown of disapproval, that is. "Your safe-house is insecure," she pointed out. "The yaks might have compromised it." She gestured around at the ops room. "Just hang here, hoa, you're covered here. You scan? If you need to catch some sleep…"

  I shook my head. "There's gear there I need," I lied sincerely. "If I don't get it, I'm dead. Not now, but pretty fragging soon."

  She glanced over at Moko, still sprawled in his hammock. "I can send-"

  "No good," I cut in. "It's secured. Unless I cut off my thumb and give it to Moko…" I shrugged and let the thought hang.

  Kat considered it. The fact that my implication I was using a thumbprint security system of some kind didn't even faze her told me something more about this group's resources. "Moko can come with you," she suggested after a moment.

  I shook my head. "That's just asking for trouble, isn't it?" I pointed out. "It's not as if Moko isn't a memorable type, after all." She half smiled at that and I knew I'd won. "I'll be back in touch the minute I've got my gear," I told her, to soften the victory. "Give me a cold relay so I can contact you."

  After a moment she nodded once, and recited a string of digits. I committed them to memory. "Get his bike ready," she told Zack. Then she turned back to me. "Hope you know what you're doing, bruddah."

  "So do I," I told her fervently, and that was the only truthful thing I'd said in the past few minutes.

  I had to ride around in circles through the depths of Ewa for almost ten minutes before I spotted a landmark I recognized- From there it only took me another five to make it back to my doss.

  I was cautious going in, of course. I didn't think it particularly likely that the yak soldiers had a line on my flop, but you don't bet your life blindly on vaporous things like "likelihoods." There were no unusual-looking people in the stairwells or the hallways, and when I reached the door to my room all the telltales I'd left were still securely in place. Confident for me first time that I was doing the right thing, I went in and locked the door behind me.

  Then the confidence vaporized. I knew what I had to do- what I thought I had to do, rather-but that didn't make it any easier. I'd lived this long trusting my gut, but one of these days that well-tuned organ was going to let me down, violently and terminally. I sat down in front of the telecom, slipped my Manhunter from my waistband, and set it on the table beside the keyboard. Then I just stared at the screen for a couple of minutes.

  Did I have the jam to do it? Did I have the jam not to do it? Frag, I hate these questions. Finally, I accepted that, a) I really didn't have that much choice; and b) if I played it right, it wasn't going to increase the danger I was in- already maximal-by any meaningful degree. I sighed, and then I keyed in the LTG number I'd taken off my voice-mail back in Cheyenne, what seemed so long ago.

  I fidgeted and fretted as the telecom clicked its way through the intermediary nodes of the cold relay. Finally, the Ringing symbol blinked on the screen. Belatedly, I ran through the math to figure out the time in Kyoto, Japan. Nigh on midnight unless I'd slipped a time-zone somewhere. Would Mr. Jacques Barnard still be in the office? I doubted it. If not, would he have the call redirected, or would I get mat most hateful of voices, me one that says, "Please leave your message after the beep?"

  The Ringing symbol cleared, but the screen stayed blank. Then I heard the electronic click of yet another relay. After a few more seconds the screen cleared, and I was staring into the face of Jacques Barnard.

  He was at home, I figured. Behind him, slightly out of focus, was a nighttime cityscape, viewed from a decent height-like from the penthouse of a downtown skyraker, for example. He was awake and alert, but he looked mentally cooked. When I'd first called him from Cheyenne, he looked
to have aged a good decade in four years. Now he'd added another five years to that figure. He leaned back, brushing an invisible speck of dust from me sleeve of his maroon velvet smoking jacket-a fragging smoking jacket- and he gave me a smile that reminded me of sharks and barracudas.

  "Mr. Montgomery," he said. "I'm so glad you saw fit to contact me. Can you please do me a large favor and tell me just what the frag is going on?"

  I mentally flinched at the ferocity of his words. I'd never seen Barnard lose his temper, and I'd never expected to see it. I wished I'd been able to forgo the pleasure. "Tokudaiji's dead," I told him.

  "I do understand that," he said coldly. "I would like to assume that you were not responsible-"

  "You got that right," I said fervently. Then I went on to give him a capsule description of what had gone down. He didn't interrupt or ask any questions, but I could see his brain spinning at 1,000 rpm behind his eyes. "I thought Scott was one of yours," I finished at last.

  "A reasonable assumption," he acknowledged slowly, "since it was the same one I had made." He paused. "What is the… the tenor of the islands, concerning this matter?"

  "I don't know directly," I told him. "but I can guess how things are going to shake out. You were using Tokudaiji to counter ALOHA's 'corps out' rhetoric, weren't you? When word gets around that a corp hitter whacked him"-I raised my hand to forestall the inevitable objection-"I know you're saying Scott didn't do the dirty deed on Yamatetsu's behalf, but who's going to believe that?"

  "Even you have some difficulty believing it," he put in incisively.

  I didn't have to acknowledge it; he could see it in my eyes, no doubt. "Anyway," I went on doggedly, "ALOHA's. going to be able to play this one for all it's worth. 'Corps cack defender of the common people,' and all that bulldrek. They'll have the people behind them, and they'll be able to give you some serious grief."