by R. L. King
“I hope so,” he said. “Can you maybe turn up the heat a little? I’m freezing back here.”
Scuzzy flashed a window on everyone’s AR showing a map of the surrounding area. Two dots, one green, one red, moved steadily along two different streets a couple of kilometers apart. Winterhawk hunched forward in the front passenger seat, gripping the dashboard as if he could make the vehicle go faster by sheer force of will. His attention was divided between the map and another window showing changing views from street cameras as Scuzzy hacked them to follow the Americar’s progress. “What are you doing with them?”
“Diverting them,” Scuzzy said, sounding distracted. “Changing traffic signals. Trying to get them off the main streets.”
“She’s heading east. It looks like she’s trying to get to the 5,” Dreja said, studying the map. “Don’t let her do that, or we’ll never catch ’em.”
“Maya,” Winterhawk sent, “Are you still on their tail? Has the spirit shown up?”
“Still following,” she replied. “No sign of the spirit yet.”
“All right, good.” He had felt his own spirit’s disruption as the other one had overpowered it; it had never been intended to be a heavy-duty combatant, but it had done its job, holding off the opposition long enough for them to get out.
Cosworth flung the van around a corner, narrowly avoiding a slow-moving van in the right lane. “See if you can send ’em here,” he said, lighting up a portion of Scuzzy’s street map. “That’s under construction. It’s a dead end. If she’s not from around here, she might not know it.” He was slumped back in his comfortable captain’s chair, piloting the Bulldog without any apparent effort. “I’ll see if I can get a drone on ’em.”
Winterhawk swiveled around to look at Scuzzy: the decker’s fingers flew over his deck, his face lit with manic excitement. Clearly the kid was in his element, directing the various traffic signals and AROs along the Americar’s path like a virtuoso directing an orchestra. The mage allowed himself the tiniest of hopes that they might catch up with Kivuli and Boyd before they were in the wind. He refused to think about what would happen if they couldn’t.
Toby Boyd was cold, scared, utterly miserable, and beginning to rethink this whole “extraction” thing. “Are we getting close?” he asked in a small voice, afraid to upset the intense elf woman whose hands were clenched on the old car’s steering wheel. “I’m really kinda freezing back here.”
“Almost there,” she said without looking at him. Her voice held a strange tightness that hadn’t been there before. They were driving down a narrow side street, and she swore under her breath as the traffic light in front of them switched suddenly to red. She hit the brakes and took a fast right; horns blared from two motorcycles she’d cut off.
“Is something wrong?” Boyd asked. So far, everything had been so professional, but the elf woman was starting to look stressed.
“Nothing’s wrong. Just be quiet, please.”
Boyd swallowed. He wasn’t sure how far they’d come from the club, but the neighborhood they were in now was nothing like the brightly lit, corporate-chic area where Pandora had been. The lights here were sparser, the cars older, the streets lined with darkened buildings. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he tried to force himself to stay calm. They knew what they were doing. They were shadowrunners, after all, and he was just a poor, scared, little parabotany researcher who wished he was back home in his comfortable little Shiawase-issue apartment with a nice cup of his favorite tea and his fantasies of Lady Desdemona.
“Frag it!” Cosworth slammed a hand on the seat next to him, slowing the Bulldog down to half its previous speed as a bus pulled into the intersection in front of them and stopped, hemmed in behind traffic.
“Can you go around?” Winterhawk demanded, leaning further forward, trying to see whether there was enough space for the big van to slip past the bus.
“Hang on,” Scuzzy said, fingers flying. “There,” he said after a moment. “Switched the light ahead of them—they should be moving in a sec.”
“Did you lose Boyd?” Dreja leaned forward, too, clutching the back of Winterhawk’s seat.
An animated icon of a cartoon face rolling its eyes popped up on everyone’s AR. “C’mon,” the decker said, voice dripping with contempt. “If I can’t multitask two things, I’m kind of a failure.”
The window following the Americar slipped to the front again, alongside the map. The red dot was still a fair distance away from the area Cosworth had marked in yellow, but the green dot was catching up with it. The two vehicles were now only a few blocks apart.
The cross traffic moved again and the bus trundled out of the intersection. The Bulldog gained speed, shooting across between the bus and the car behind it as horns honked in protest. The traffic here wasn’t as heavy as it had been near the club, but it was still enough of a factor that Cosworth couldn’t open up the Bulldog to anywhere near top speed.
“Can’t you do something to their car?” Ocelot asked. “Hack it and make it stop moving or something?”
“Tried that,” Scuzzy said. “They’re off the Matrix. She’s smart—I’m sure she knew that’d be the first thing I’d try. Either that, or that piece of drek they’re driving doesn’t even have a connection.”
“Don’t worry,” Cosworth said in his usual easygoing tones. “We’ll catch ’em. I know this area like my own backyard. She doesn’t. I know some shortcuts. Hold on tight!”
Without waiting for anyone to comply, he jerked the Bulldog hard right, making an impossibly sharp turn into an almost invisible alley between a pair of two-story apartment buildings. The van flew down the narrow passage at full speed, alarms blaring as its armored sides took chunks out of some of the cars parked along both sides. A hulking form—troll or big ork, he flashed by too fast to tell for sure—flung himself sideways across a covered dumpster, avoiding impact at the last instant, and bullets spanged off the Bulldog’s rear panels as he took a few parting shots at them.
Cosworth grinned. “That’s the way, Nellie!” he crowed, patting the dashboard.
Boyd leaned forward. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?”
The elf woman had thrown the Americar through a couple more ill-advised turns, and now they were driving down the middle of what looked like a war zone. At one time it had probably been a thriving neighborhood, with businesses on the ground floor and apartments up above. But now the streetlights were out, the windows boarded up and covered in graffiti, the streets lined with derelict vehicles and overflowing dumpsters. The Americar gamely thudded and jounced over the uneven pavement, cracked and torn up with disuse, but the elf woman appeared displeased about having to slow down.
“I told you to be quiet,” she ordered, but it sounded like a rote response: her mind was clearly focused on the terrain ahead. She jerked the wheel again and the car flew around a darkened corner.
“Look,” he said, gathering his courage. “I’m really grateful that you extracted me and all, but I’ve got something you want, too. You could be a little nicer to—”
“Fraaag!” The elf’s yell turned into a scream, and she slammed her foot on the brake as something large and immobile loomed in front of them. That probably saved both her and Boyd’s lives, but even her impressive reflexes weren’t fast enough to completely avoid the impact.
The Americar’s back end slewed around, and the car hit the obstacle—now revealed to be a large, dark-painted bus parked perpendicular across the middle of the road to block most of both lanes—side-first. The passenger side windows front and rear shattered, as did the right side of the windshield.
Boyd was jerked first to one side, then to the other as the Americar came to an abrupt stop. Then something white-hot lit up his chest, and nothing else mattered to him anymore.
Kivuli disentangled herself from her seatbelt and the spent airbag, cursing. She tried to restart the Americar, but knew it was hopeless. The little piece-of-crap car wasn’t going anywhere. She spun aro
und to see what was going on with Boyd, who was uncharacteristically quiet.
She froze.
The dwarf sat upright, still in his seatbelt, his head lolling back and his mouth hanging open. In the center of his pale little chest was a neat red hole.
Instinctively she calculated where the bullet must have come from: since she hadn’t heard the crack of it breaking the Americar’s windshield, the shooter must have timed it to coincide with the car slamming into the parked bus.
Ambush!
Cursing herself for not realizing it sooner, she slid over the front seat and into the back next to Boyd, ducking low to stay out of line of sight of any other shooters, quick-drawing one of her twin Browning Ultra-Powers from its holster. He was dead, no doubt about it: still warm but cooling fast, face frozen in wide-eyed surprise. That didn’t matter, though—all she cared about was the headware. If she could suck down the information she needed from it, Boyd’s death was irrelevant.
Glancing up, she didn’t spot anyone else approaching the car, but she knew she didn’t have long before they would, hunting for anything they could salvage from the car and its passengers. Also, Winterhawk and his team would find her soon, and she couldn’t be here when that happened. She pulled a cord from her coat, plugged one end into her commlink and the other into Boyd’s datajack, and worked with feverish intensity to access the files.
Good news: the files were clearly labeled. Bad news: there were a lot of them, and some were large. Worse news: they were protected by heavy encryption. Kivuli wondered if the dwarf had done something that would corrupt them if anyone tried to access them without authorization, but she didn’t have time to care. She set her commlink to download and switched her focus between peeking out the Americar’s window and watching the progress bar as it crept forward at glacial speed.
The bar had only made it about a quarter of the way to full transfer before her low-light vision picked out glowing forms moving toward the car.
CHAPTER 16
LOS ANGELES
SATURDAY MORNING
As soon as the Bulldog rounded the last corner, Winterhawk knew something had gone very wrong, and was probably just about to go a lot more so.
The street appeared derelict and abandoned, lined on both sides with decaying three- and four-story structures that looked like they might at one point have been businesses with apartments above them—but that point had passed long ago. The only light came from a half-moon trying to force its way past clumps of smog, and the Americar’s single remaining functional headlight.
The car rested where it had slammed into an old bus that had been placed perpendicular to the road, obviously meant to stop anything foolish enough to venture into the area. Someone had also moved a large, wheeled dumpster into position behind the Americar, making a neat little ambush point.
“Scuzz, why the frag did you send them down here?” Dreja demanded.
“I didn’t, I swear!” the decker protested. “She must’ve ignored one of the detours I put up. I can’t even see anything here. There aren’t any working cameras I can hack.”
“So where are they?” Ocelot was already climbing out of the Bulldog, looking around on high alert. He had his Mossberg shotgun at the ready, sweeping it back and forth along with his gaze. “I don’t like this.”
“There’s no one alive in the car,” Winterhawk said. “I just had Maya check it out—she says she’s found blood, though.”
The rest of the group emerged from the car except for Cosworth. “This place is givin’ me the creeps,” he said. “I’m gonna stay with Nellie in case you guys need to make a quick exit.”
“Send up a drone so you and Scuzzy can both keep a lookout for anybody showing up,” Dreja said, and the rigger hurried to comply.
“’Hawk, can you get any feel for where they might have gone?” Ocelot asked.
Without replying, Winterhawk started toward the wrecked Americar, assensing the area for any movement from the blasted-out buildings or the bus. Ocelot and Dreja followed; Scuzzy remained close to the Bulldog as if reluctant to leave its safety, and Tiny jogged forward, leaped with casual ease up to the top of the bus and crouched low, assault rifle at the ready.
Winterhawk approached the Americar with caution, magical and mundane senses at full awareness. “Maya, anything?”
She answered just as he spotted it himself: “The blood trail goes into that building over there.”
“Bugger—that’s what I was afraid of,” he said under his breath. The back door of the Americar—the one that wasn’t currently smashed against the side of the bus—was standing open.
Dreja was checking inside the car. “This doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“What?” Ocelot asked them both, still trying to look everywhere at once. Being out in the open like this, even in near-darkness, was clearly making him uncomfortable.
The ork answered first, pointing through the Americar’s shattered rear window toward the back seat. “Look at all this blood back here.”
“So?” Ocelot asked.
“So,” she said, waving toward the front of the little car, “look at the impact. They didn’t hit that hard.” She pulled a flashlight out of her vest and shined it behind the car. “See those skid marks? She hit the brakes and sideswiped this thing. The impact trashed the car, but—”
“But the blood’s wrong,” Winterhawk said, nodding as he saw what she was getting at. He leaned in on the other side of Dreja, holding up a light spell to illuminate the area. “No blood on any of the windows, even where they’re broken. What did he hit to produce that much blood? The seat?”
Ocelot was looking in through the front window. “I don’t see any blood up here. So Toby got hurt but Kivuli didn’t? What the hell’s going on?”
“It gets worse,” Winterhawk said. He motioned toward the blasted-out hulk of an old 2D movie theater, just past the bus and barely visible in the glow from the Americar’s feeble headlight, every surface of its façade scrawled with layers of riotously colored graffiti. “The blood trail leaves the car. It heads inside there.”
Ocelot jumped on top of the Americar’s roof and took a look around. “That’s a hell of a lot of blood, ’Hawk. So what happened? He was hurt and Kivuli dragged him in there?”
“I don’t think he’s hurt,” Dreja said. She was half-in, half-out of the Americar’s back seat, examining the bloodstain in the beam of her flashlight. “I think he’s dead.”
“What?” Winterhawk hurried back over, opening the front door and climbing inside to lean over the passenger seat. A slow chill worked down the back of his neck. “Why do you say that?”
She pointed. “Because this wasn’t an accident.”
He looked where she was pointing. It wasn’t easy to see at first because of all the blood, but after a moment he spotted it: a tiny, neat hole drilled through the synthleather of the seat.
A hole just at the right height to pass through a seated dwarf’s heart.
CHAPTER 17
LOS ANGELES
SATURDAY MORNING
Kivuli perched on the roof of a five-story building a kilometer or so away from where she’d had to ditch the Americar—and her target. She scanned the surrounding area, cycling through the various settings on her cybereyes until she was convinced that no one was coming after her.
Yet.
It would only be a matter of time before they did, though; she was sure of it. She had to get out of here, someplace where Winterhawk or that little cat-thing of his wouldn’t be able to track her with magic. She didn’t think she’d left any of her blood behind in that pathetic excuse for a car, but she couldn’t be completely sure. It wasn’t worth taking chances. Time to get under cover.
First, though, she had to make a report she didn’t want to make. Best to get it over with. She sent out a coded message and resumed watching the area as she waited for a return call.
When it came less than a minute later, there was no video, and the voice on the other end was
mechanically altered to the point where there was no way—or at least none with the technology she had available to her—to tell whether she was talking to a man, a woman, or something else entirely.
“Report,” was all it said.
“I had—partial success,” she said. She hated the hesitation in her voice; it had been a long time since she’d had to admit to anything less than perfection in one of her assignments. Her pride burned with the frustration of being bested by that squabbling group.
“Explain.”
“The target’s dead. I was able to access his headware, but I could only secure part of the data. I encountered unexpected difficulty that required me to abort the mission before I was able to get the rest.”
There was a long pause, which Kivuli filled with all manner of speculation about what the voice would say next. She’d never worked for this particular Johnson before, so she had no idea what kind of reaction he (or she, or it) would have to failure. Partial failure, she reminded herself. After all, the objective had been to get the information from Boyd’s headware, and she’d gotten at least some of it. She hoped it was enough for her employers to find useful.
“Where is the target now?” the voice asked at last. It held no inflection.
She gave him the coordinates where she’d ditched the Americar. “I left his body in the back seat of the car.”
There was another pause. “You’re certain he is dead?”
“Affirmative. I was able to confirm that before I had to leave the area.”
“Will the mage and his team be able to recover the body?”
“Probably. Unless somebody else takes it out of the car before they arrive at the site. There were gangers in the area—that’s why I had to retreat. It was an ambush. But I believe Winterhawk’s team was tracking my location after they realized I’d left with the target.”