Shadowrun: Borrowed Time

by R. L. King

  Regardless of the real reason, it had become so ingrained in the local folklore that you didn’t mess with the Wharf Rat that almost nobody did anymore. And so, one of Seattle’s most infamous underground fight clubs continued offering a choice of attractions, depending on your particular inclinations: the opportunity for anyone brave enough (and willing to pay the entry fee) to step into its pit and test his or her skills against everything from bone-stock troll brawlers to cybered-to-the-gills young razorboys in single combat. Or, for those who preferred their thrills a little more vicarious, the chance to watch it all go down in all its bloody glory. And to bet on it, of course, which was where the Rat made most of its money. There were only three rules, and Frank enforced them with an iron hand: No magic, no weapons, and no intentional killing.

  As might be expected, that third rule got tested more than the other two combined. The fine line between good, clean, illicit mayhem and casual murder was a thin one, and it was the combatants’ responsibility to pay attention to it, or risk being banned from the Rat for good.

  The man slouching against the rough, graffiti-strewn wall of the dimly-lit tunnel, flexing his hands and watching the AROs flitting across his field of vision, was early for his bout. From his vantage point near the exit, he could barely make out the bottom of a familiar set of old, wooden steps; they led down past a series of banked terraces arranged in a circle around a dirt-floored central pit about ten meters in diameter. The spectator area had no chairs, just narrow metal rails to keep drunken patrons from falling onto the lower tiers.

  Directly across the pit from his own tunnel was its mirror-image counterpart. It wasn’t good for business to put the night’s opponents too close to each other. The fights were supposed to happen in the pit where the customers could see them, not in the waiting area.

  He’d checked a few moments ago: the terraces were about three-quarters occupied, the mostly male crowd yelling and cheering, pumping their fists in between guzzling their drinks. The mingled stench of unwashed bodies and cheap beer was strong here, overlaid with the faint tang of blood.

  In other words, a typical night at the Wharf Rat.

  He wasn’t looking at any of this now, though—just the AROs. Even then he’d filtered out everything but the important stuff: who was currently fighting, the status of that fight, and how the odds were firming up for his own upcoming bout. As usual he was the favorite, and as usual it was by a fair margin. His opponent, some guy who went by “Julio,” was a newbie: he’d never seen him around here before. Might not again, either, after tonight. The new kids came and went, most of them flaunting their fancy new mods and thinking a little surgery and a few street scraps gave them what it took to be number one.

  They’d learn. Or they’d die. He often felt like he was performing a public service, showing the new crop of wannabes just how much they didn’t know before they tried to take their attitudes off the street and into the big leagues, and ended up getting themselves geeked.

  That, and he just got a rush out of the whole thing. It was a habit these days, more than anything: a way to blow off steam. Some guys played pickup ball or hung out at the gym. He went to the Wharf Rat and beat people up for money.

  “Seriously, Ocelot, chummer—what the hell are you even still doin’ here?”

  Ocelot turned. Frank stood at the end of the tunnel near the dressing rooms; his arms, gnarled with age but still ropy with bulging muscles, were crossed over a chest barely contained by his black TROG’S GYM t-shirt. The old troll wore an odd expression: half amusement, half sympathy.

  Ocelot shrugged. “Why not? I was bored. Figured I’d pick up a little cred teachin’ greenies they’re not half as good as they think they are.”

  “Yeah, like you need the cred.” Frank snorted. “Not like I don’t love ya, kid. You put on a good show. People actually show up special on nights they know you gonna be here. But—” He spread his hands, looking past Ocelot to the pit, where a bloody, dark-clothed figure reeled back across the tunnel opening and crashed into a wall. “Ain’t it gettin’ time to think about hangin’ it up? Ain’t none of us gettin’ any younger, you know.”

  “Screw that,” Ocelot said, narrowing his eyes. “Day I hang it up is the day they haul my carcass outta the Sound.”

  Frank shrugged. “Your life. I’m just sayin’, I watch. Some of these greenies are gettin’ scary these days, with what they’re stickin’ in their meat. It’s like givin’ a 12-year-old the keys to a fraggin’ Lamborghini. Just last week I had to kick some new cybered-up chica outta here ’cause she unzipped a guy’s gut, right there in the middle of the pit. That drek’s gettin’ harder to handle these days. Not to mention it’s hell on cleanup.” He shrugged again. “Ain’t talked to ya in a while. You still runnin’, or’d you do the smart thing and retire yet?”

  “Retire? Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. Shadowrunners don’t retire, Frank. You know that as well as I do. They stay ahead of the axe as long as they can, till the one day they don’t.” Ocelot flexed his hands again, then clasped them behind his head and stretched out his arms and his upper back. At thirty-six, maybe his body didn’t respond quite the way it had back when he was twenty, but it hadn’t failed him yet. And he had a lot more mods now. That was the way it worked: you kept up with the SOTA, or the world rolled over you, spit you out, and moved on.

  “Ain’t none o’ my biz,” Frank said, holding up his hands. “I’m just here to deliver a message.”

  That was odd. “What message?”

  “Got a call. Guy sez you turned your ’link off, and he needs to get in touch with you fast. Dunno how he figured out you were here.”

  That was very odd. A lot of people knew the Wharf Rat was one of the places he hung out, but he couldn’t think of any of them who’d need to talk to him so urgently that they couldn’t wait for him to check his messages after the fight. It wasn’t like he had any loved ones to worry about. “He say who he was?”

  “Yeah. Strange guy. British accent. Sez you’d know him: name’s Winterhawk.”

  Ocelot let his breath out slowly. Now there was a name he hadn’t heard, or even thought about much, in the last couple of years. “He say anything else? He want me to call him?”

  “Nah, he said he’ll be here. Wants you to meet him in the bar after your fight.”

  It was probably a good thing that this Julio wasn’t anything to be concerned about, because after Frank delivered his message, Ocelot’s mind wasn’t on the fight anymore.

  An ARO beeped for his attention, flashing a status update: the previous bout was winding down, and Ocelot would be up any minute. He pushed himself off the wall, did a couple of indifferent stretches, and glanced down the tunnel toward the pit. The sound was filtered in here, but the cheers were rising in volume. Somebody had probably been seriously hurt. The crowd always loved that.

  Ocelot was about to move forward when the shimmering form of a large black cat winked into existence between him and the end of the tunnel. He leaped back without thought, dropping into a crouch, then relaxed when he recognized ’Hawk’s ally spirit, Maya.

  “The boss is here,” she said, her prim British tones sounding in his mind; he’d forgotten how much having a voice in his head that wasn’t his weirded him out. “Where shall I tell him you’ll meet him?”

  “Tell him he’s gonna have to wait,” he said in a low growl. “I’m busy now. Tell him he should come down here and watch the show. I’ll see him upstairs after.”

  The cat flicked her tail and winked back out again. Ocelot glared at the spot where she had been, but he didn’t have time to think about it any longer. He was up.

  The fight itself was almost an afterthought; they were too often these days. Ocelot wished sometimes that Frank would change the rules to allow weapons in the bouts, or maybe let him fight more than one guy at once. Even the trolls didn’t often provide a challenge for him anymore, not because he had any illusions that he could beat a similarly skilled troll one-on-one, but because
it was a rare day when anybody in his league showed up looking for a fight. Most people who’d been at it as long as him wised up eventually and moved on to bigger and better things, leaving the place to the newbies and the up-and-comers.

  Take Julio, for example. He was a big kid, an Amerind ork with a shaved head and a synthleather vest designed to show off the augmented, tattooed muscle of one arm and the polished chrome of the other. His expression appeared to be set in a permanent sneer.

  It took Ocelot less than five minutes to wipe the sneer off the kid’s face. Oh, he was fast: maybe even faster than Ocelot. He was definitely stronger. But all the strength and speed in the world wouldn’t do a damn bit of good if you couldn’t connect with your shots.

  Julio was clearly used to winning fights fast. That was almost certainly why he was here: one of his chummers had told him about the place, and the lure of the cred you could make if you were any good was enough to entice any street kid with a little ’ware, a lot of attitude, and dreams of moving up in the sprawl food chain. Ocelot had to grin as the kid roared and lunged at him, becoming more and more frustrated as this smoothie nearly twice his age kept not being there when his punishing blows landed.

  Normally Ocelot would have drawn out the whole thing, played to the crowd a bit. Not tonight, though. He glanced up into the stands, trying to spot Winterhawk among the throng of cheering fans, wondering if he’d bother to watch the show, but he couldn’t see him. Julio took that opportunity to take another shot, feinting right and then bulling forward with all his considerable weight and momentum. If he’d connected, he would have clinched Ocelot in a vicious bear hug and, given his clear level of frustration, probably squeezed until he broke something.

  Too bad for him. That was the thing about most street kids with more mods than talent: they might as well be holding up signs announcing what they were going to do next. All you had to do was watch their eyes to see it. Ocelot sometimes took side jobs teaching martial arts to a few carefully chosen students; he knew they were finally making progress when he couldn’t read every upcoming move on their faces.

  Julio hadn’t taken any such lessons. Ocelot neatly sidestepped the lunge, lashing out with a flashy kick that sent the ork off in the same direction he was headed, only about twice as fast. Ocelot wouldn’t have used that kick in a real fight, but he figured he’d at least give the crowd something to look at. Julio, unable to stop his forward momentum in time, slammed face-first into the pit wall and did a slow-motion drop as the crowd jeered and rained garbage down on him. And that was it.

  There wasn’t any ceremony about the way fights ended at the Wharf Rat. The old ork who announced the fights lumbered back in, followed by the troll whose job was to haul out the losers if they couldn’t make it under their own power. Ocelot nodded at the troll, confident that his winnings would be credited to his account, and with a quick wave to the crowd, headed back out through the tunnel.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE WHARF RAT

  SEATTLE

  By anybody’s reckoning, Winterhawk was an odd guy—he’d been an odd guy since Ocelot had first met him, introduced by a fixer who’d been putting together a team for a job requiring finesse, a light touch, and a decent amount of magical firepower. The two of them had hit it off about like you’d see on one of those trid shows where you tossed a thoroughly mismatched pair together and sat back to watch the sparks fly. “Street-bred kid from the Seattle sprawl meets fancy-pants academic mage from London. Let’s take bets on how long before they try to kill each other.” Ha ha, very funny. Maybe they could have sold it to the networks.

  The funny part had ended up being how well it all worked out. He and Winterhawk had stopped trying to finish the job fast and get the hell away from each other about the time they both realized how successfully their particular areas of expertise meshed. When they went back to the fixer, they both allowed that maybe they could try one more job together—just to prove that the first one had been a fluke. The fixer smirked as if he’d expected it all along, and sent them on another run.

  That had been ten years ago, give or take, and a lot of jobs.

  They’d been a good team, both alone and with various others as needed, for five years or so after that. They’d done all kinds of runs, and quickly developed a rep for having the punch to get things done, but also for being smart enough that they usually didn’t have to use it. The kind of people who hired shadowrunners, with a few notable exceptions that Ocelot and Winterhawk stayed far away from, didn’t appreciate a lot of noise. In and out with a minimum of impact was what they specialized in, but when the drek hit the fan, they proved on numerous occasions that they could dish out the pain and get the job done.

  Still, Ocelot had known pretty much from the outset that ’Hawk’s heart wasn’t really in it. The man was an academic at his core: his motor ran on finding out Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, particularly as they related to magic. That was why he’d taken up shadowrunning in the first place: if you picked your jobs carefully, you got to see things that ivory-tower researchers, and even the guys who went on the university-sponsored field trips, didn’t get to see: the kind of things that led to papers that made magical scholars wet themselves. ’Hawk had gamely toughed out the runs that didn’t involve magic to get to the ones that did, but it became clear before long that his days as a shadowrunner were numbered.

  Ocelot had always resented that, and though he’d never told Winterhawk outright about it, he was sure the mage was perceptive enough to see it. When you were a street kid from the Barrens who ran the shadows because it was either that or stay in a gang and end up dead before your twentieth birthday, constant reminders that your partner could step out any time he wanted to and return to a life of relative ease were a little hard to stomach. The dissolution of their partnership had been entirely civil, but not without a certain tenseness on both sides.

  And now, ’Hawk was back. Just like that, here he was in Seattle. Ocelot could have called him back and told him to meet somewhere else, but he hadn’t. The mage could damn well come here if he wanted to talk. It would do him good to interact with the real world for a change.

  The first impression Ocelot got as he approached Winterhawk’s table in the bar was that there was something wrong with his old partner, but he had no idea why. ’Hawk looked like he always did: same thin frame, same dark hair, same cynical gleam in his eyes. As usual, he was elegantly (and completely inappropriately) dressed in a fine suit with an overcoat casually draped over a nearby chair. It was just a fleeting impression, quickly gone, that something wasn’t as it should be.

  The two of them eyed each other in the manner of a pair of neighborhood tomcats who suddenly found their territories overlapping.

  “Been a while,” Ocelot said, dropping into a third scarred thermoplast chair. “Want a beer?” He sat, as he always did, with his back facing the wall, tilting the chair onto its back legs and holding it in perfect balance.

  Winterhawk didn’t even try to keep his distaste from showing. “No.”

  Some things never changed, apparently. Ocelot grinned.

  The mage made a vague gesture that encompassed the place, upstairs and down. “Still slumming, are you? Don’t you ever get tired of outclassing the room?”

  He shrugged. “You have your fun, I have mine.” He paused for a long swig of beer. “So, what do you want, ’Hawk?”

  A brief, unidentifiable expression flitted across Winterhawk’s face. “I have a job. Thought you might be interested.”

  Ocelot’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected ‘Hawk to say, but that wasn’t it. Not even close. “Thought you were out of the biz.”

  “I was.”

  “Your globetrotting professor thing fall through?”

  “Not exactly.” Winterhawk sighed. “Could we perhaps go somewhere else? Charming as this place no doubt is, it’s giving me a headache.”

  Ocelot wasn’t feeling very accommodating at the moment. “Yeah, okay. But fir
st you’re gonna give me some idea what this is all about. You turn up again outta nowhere, I wanna know why.”

  Winterhawk took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly. “Listen—I know this is sudden, but the whole thing’s a bit of a rush, and I need a team fast. Tonight, if possible. It’s got to be done quickly.”

  Ocelot grunted. He knew Winterhawk didn’t need to assense him to see the suspicion rising in his eyes. “This ain’t like you, ’Hawk. You never used to make a move without checking things out from ten different angles first. What’s the hurry? Something goin’ on I should know about?”

  “I have my reasons. Can’t go into them right now. It looks like a fairly straightforward job, but it needs to be handled fast, and I’d like to have someone I can trust on the team.” He met Ocelot’s gaze solidly; he always had that way of focusing on people like he was reading their mind—and for all Ocelot knew, he might be doing just that. It was one of those things you got used to when you ran with mages.

  “What’s the job?” Ocelot did nothing to hide the edge in his voice. “And why the hell are you bein’ so damned cryptic about it?”

  Winterhawk glanced toward the door, but appeared to accept the fact he was going to have to endure the Wharf Rat’s ambiance until Ocelot was satisfied that he was making a sufficient effort. “Two parts,” he said. “First is an extraction in Los Angeles. Then—things get a bit murkier after that. The target has information we’ll need for the second bit. We’ll be retrieving an object, but I don’t know where it is at present, except that it’s likely somewhere in Australia.”

  “And this all has to be done—when?”