by R. L. King
That lasted until the botched extraction attempt. Sometimes having a sense of honor could get in the way of simply disappearing until the heat blew over, but the fact that she’d failed so spectacularly at what should have been a simple job ate at her. Double-crossing her initial team didn’t bother her, because they hadn’t been her initial team. The whole point of the job was to infiltrate the extraction team and get hold of Toby Boyd long enough to get the information her employers needed. But this failure—and she did consider it a failure, despite the fact that some of the major components had been outside her control—was unacceptable to her.
Which meant that when the employer had contacted her again and told her to prepare to head to Australia and continue shadowing the team in order to find out where they were going, she had agreed without protest.
It wasn’t about the employer, now: it was about her. If she couldn’t make this right, she had no right calling herself a professional.
She initiated communication after doing a careful sweep of her cheap motel room for bugs.
Ah, yes. Lonely young assistants were easy to dazzle with exotic elven charm. Kivuli didn’t like doing it—it seemed beneath her, somehow, to resort to something as crass as seduction. It was almost unfair. But when one needed information in a hurry, one used the tools at one’s disposal. A tiny application of laes made sure that the assistant wouldn’t have an attack of conscience later, and a few more inquiries in the shadow community provided her with the rest of what she needed to know.
CHAPTER 26
NATIONAL HIGHWAY 94
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
MONDAY MORNING
It was easy for Winterhawk to keep his mind away from uncomfortable thoughts while he and the others were involved in the flurry of activity to secure the supplies they needed for the trip into the Outback. Now, though, an hour or so after a blazing summertime sunrise had ushered them out of Perth’s snarled traffic and onto National Highway 94 leading east, he had settled uncomfortably into his own head.
Their conveyance, they had discovered upon arrival at the appointed location at dawn, was a battered, iron-gray Ford-Canada Bison, heavily customized to make it more fit for the unforgiving Outback travel and plastered with stickers, AR tags, and brightly painted native art. Bodge had insisted on giving them a brief tour of the vehicle, pointing out the plethora of locked exterior storage compartments (though, Winterhawk was sure, not all of them), an impressive collection of tools and spare parts, a large supply of water (“ya never go out to the Big Red without tools, spare parts, and water,” he told them. “Ya do, yer not just a drongo—yer a dead drongo”) and a weapons locker stocked with everything from pistols to a battered but nasty-looking FN MAG-5. He also showed them the exterior weaponry, consisting of a GM Light Cannon as the primary weapon, backed up by a Vindicator Minigun. “Anything messes with us, it’ll regret it,” he told them with pride.
The Bison was divided into three sections. The cab had two seats and an eclectic collection of decorations, including a swaying hula girl on the dashboard, a miniature stuffed wallaby in a tiny red T-shirt, and a collection of well-thumbed hardcopy skin mags that Bodge hastily swept under the shotgun seat. The greasy whiff of old soyburgers lingered in the air. The center section had a couple of bench seats, a trid unit, and a bank of windows with armored covers that were currently closed. The rear section included two narrow bunks, a microscopic head that would likely prove a challenge for Tiny, and several more closed boxes of supplies. “No worries,” he told them as they’d all settled into their places. “I do this all the time. I’ll get ya there quick-like. Just sit back and relax. I’ll let ya know if there’s anything ya need to worry about.”
Winterhawk doubted that Bodge had any inkling of what he was worried about. He slumped in the front passenger seat, looking out the window without really seeing anything, his thoughts far away. Only an hour out of Perth, the road was still paved and the scenery relatively unremarkable. He was sitting up here because he didn’t feel like fielding the sort of questions his team would likely come up with given time to consider them. He wished he could just sleep for the entire trip: he was constantly tired now, with a low-level ache in his chest that hadn’t risen past “annoying” yet, but which no amount of adjusting position, tossing back mild painkillers, or pain-mitigation spells would alleviate. Add the headache to that, and he wasn’t feeling at all social.
Bodge, however, was. “So,” he said, “What’s up with this sheila ya wanna talk to? She a friend or something?”
“No. Never met her. We knew her brother, back in Los Angeles.” It was always odd looking at riggers while they were working: since they directed their vehicles via wireless connection, there was no steering wheel or other controls, which gave the unsettling impression that they were either asleep or drugged out in their seats. Bodge had given the team limited privileges on the vehicle’s PAN, allowing them to follow its progress to their destination and monitor some aspects of the Bison’s operations and sensors, but the only thing Winterhawk was paying attention to was the map, and the progress of the green dot that represented them as it crept with agonizing slowness toward their far-off destination.
The rigger nodded. “Don’t look to me like ya had much preparation. Kinda sudden thing, eh?”
Winterhawk didn’t answer. Deciding the chatty rigger wasn’t going to take a hint that he didn’t want to talk, and that it would be a bad idea to offend the man who could potentially strand them in the middle of the Outback, he said instead, “You seem quite comfortable out here.”
Bodge shrugged. “Well, we haven’t hit the real Outback yet, but yeah. I come from out here.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. My people are up north, couple hours outta Alice Springs. They move around, but that’s where they’re based.”
Winterhawk did look at Bodge then, studying his profile. “Forgive me if this is prying, but are you from one of the Aboriginal groups?”
“Yep.” Bodge didn’t seem to think it was prying. “My family’s mostly all still out there, but that wasn’t the life for me, all that movin’ around from place to place, huntin’ and livin’ off the land and communin’ wit’ the spirits and all that. Soon’s I could, I took off for the big city with a coupla mates, and never looked back, except for the ’casional visit to make sure the fam don’t forget what I look like.”
“Ever seen anything like this?” Winterhawk pulled out his commlink and sent Bodge an image of the serpent.
The rigger studied it for a moment, then nodded. “Sorta. That’s definitely Aboriginal art, or a good fake. Never saw one exactly like that, though. Looks pretty old. What is it?”
“It’s what we’re going to pick up from our friend’s sister. He left it with her when he was here.”
Bodge did turn and look at him then, shifting a portion of his awareness away from steering the Bison. “Might not wanna spread that around,” he advised. “Lotta Aboriginal folks out here don’t take kindly to gubbahs makin’ off with their art.”
Winterhawk didn’t miss that he’d said their rather than our. “I take it you’re not among them?”<
br />
“Nah. Don’t matter to me. A bunch of old carvings and cave paintings don’t do nothin’ for me. I don’t care who owns ’em. But a lot of those old pieces are brimmin’ with the mojo. Believe me, you don’t wanna get some o’ them koradji mad at ya. You a spellslinger yerself, yeah?”
“I am. I don’t know a lot about the Australian tradition, though.”
“Nah, I wouldn’t think it’d be yer thing. Ya look like a city boy, like me.” Bodge grinned, showing off those blinding teeth again. Then he sobered. “But those blokes and sheilas got some serious mojo, and they talk to the spirits all the time out here. I seen some o’ them koradji do some pretty impressive stuff. Ya don’t wanna mess with ’em, especially not out here on their home ground.”
“No intention of that,” Winterhawk assured him. That was something he’d learned firsthand on his couple of trips out of Darwin: for magical unpredictability, the Outback made the Mojave area in CalFree look like a controlled lab environment. Between the manastorms popping up without warning, the alchera that faded in and out of existence, and the sheer randomness of magical expression in the area, it wasn’t a safe place for anyone who didn’t call it home to try doing anything more than basic magic in. He hoped that their search for Emmy Boyd was an uneventful one for that very reason.
“I gotta say, I’m glad yer along,” Bodge said. “Usually when I get hired to drive folks out here, if they don’t have a spellslinger with ’em, I either gotta bring one myself or hope for the best. Got caught in a manastorm once, and I don’t wanna do it again.” He shivered. “Took me days to clean all the baked-on frog guts off the rig.”
Winterhawk nodded. He had Maya on standby, keeping a lookout for any approaching manastorms. The cat wasn’t happy about it, saying the astral plane here was “weird, and the other spirits don’t like me,” but she was doing it. So far, she hadn’t reported anything on the horizon, but that didn’t mean anything. Manastorms could come up faster than sudden downpours, and they were a lot more dangerous. He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, hoping Bodge would take the hint this time.
The Bison rumbled on, keeping up a steady speed under the wide-open, cloudless blue sky. Highway 94, which began as a six-lane superhighway in Perth and shrunk to four lanes as it cut through the suburbs, dropped to two once they’d gotten out of the greater Perth area. The scenery changed from dense urban sprawl to residential spread to scrubby vegetation and the red soil that gave the Outback its nickname.
“Settle in,” Bodge announced over the Bison’s PA. “It’s gonna look pretty much like this for the next seven hours or so. Hope ya all brought somethin’ to do.”
“And hope it isn’t on the Matrix,” Scuzzy whined. He’d been complaining ever since they’d gotten far enough outside the Perth sprawl that the Matrix connection became spotty; a couple of hours in, it got so intermittent that he’d given up trying to do anything requiring more than local connectivity. It hadn’t stopped him from continuing to grumble, though, until Tiny, who was trying to take a nap, had threatened to lock him in one of the cargo compartments.
Ocelot didn’t like the situation much more than Scuzzy did, but for different reasons. Being shut up inside the Bison under the blazing Outback sun tripped two of his personal issues: confinement and dislike of being outside a city. All this wide-open space made him nervous, and this whole trip was turning into a series of increasingly smaller metal cages. He glanced over at Dreja, who was once again arranging her gear bag. It seemed like a kind of Zen thing for her, but it also seemed not to be working this time. Her expression was troubled.
She caught him looking at her. “What?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “Everything okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
He held up his hands in a warding gesture. “Stay frosty. Just makin’ conversation. You looked stressed out. You afraid something’s gonna go wrong?”
“I’m always afraid something’s gonna go wrong,” she said, closing the bag and setting it on the floor next to her. “That way, I’m not surprised when it does.”
“Anything in particular?”
She shook her head. “I just don’t like any of this.”
“How so?”
“Look, it’s nothing, okay? Just got stuff on my mind.”
“Fine, fine. You don’t want to talk, that’s fine.” He stretched his legs out and tilted his head back against the patched headrest. Maybe if he was lucky, he might nod off for a while.
For several moments, the silence inside the compartment was broken only by the rumble of the Bison’s engine, the howl of the tires on the badly-paved road, and Tiny’s not-so-soft snores.
Then Dreja spoke again. “I just hate it when I feel like I’m breaking my own rules.”
Ocelot rolled his head forward again. “You mean about takin’ the snake back to the Johnson?”
She nodded. “I get it that he’s got to do it,” she said, indicating the closed door to the cab, where Winterhawk was riding. “But I’m just not so sure I’ve got to do it.”
“Little late to change your mind now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m in this now. But I gotta live with myself, knowin’ I’m part of takin’ something like this away from the people it belongs to.” She clenched her fists in her lap. “Who am I to put one guy’s life ahead of the right of these people not to have their culture plundered for some rich asshole’s pocketbook? Doesn’t that make me every bit as elitist as I’m accusing ’Hawk of being?”
Ocelot tensed a little, leaning forward. “Having second thoughts?” he asked, keeping his voice even. “We’re not gonna have a problem, are we?”
She shook her head. “Settle down. The one thing I haven’t compromised is that my word’s good, and I don’t intend to now.” She let out a loud sigh. “Besides, I can’t very well have any ideals if I’m dead, and if I don’t pay off my debt, I’m gonna be dead as soon as I get back to Seattle.”
Ocelot didn’t reply. It wasn’t his business what kind of baggage she’d brought to the party, as long as it didn’t affect the run.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” she said, not looking at him, not even seeming to be talking to him. “I should never have taken a job for the Gianelli Family, even if it did give me a chance to skullfrag the local branch of Alamos 20K.”
“Drek, that’s why you owe all that money?” It wasn’t strictly a bad idea to do jobs for the Mob, or any of the other organized-crime syndicates that jockeyed for position and prestige in any large sprawl. If you did your legwork, didn’t screw up the job, and kept everything as professional as possible, there was even good money to be made from it. But you had to be careful, and you had to make damn sure you didn’t screw up. The syndicates had long memories and no sense of humor.
She nodded. “It was a political thing. I was supposed to plant some incriminating evidence on a rival of one of Gianelli’s pet pols—a chica who was in bed pretty hard with A20K. Gianelli’s people were gonna arrange to have the media on hand when KE raided the place on an anonymous tip. Problem was, the rival got wind of it somehow and got a recording of me planting the stuff. Bottom line, I ended up looking bad, Gianelli looked worse, and the 20K people came out smelling like fraggin’ roses.”
Ocelot winced. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. Only reason Gianelli didn’t have me cacked on the spot was that I’d done other jobs for him and he knew I was good. So instead, he just tells me that I need to pay back what he paid me for the job, plus another thirty grand of what he called ‘frag-up tax.’”
“And you didn’t have the thirty grand.”
She looked at him sideways. “I didn’t even have the up-front money. I’d already spent it upgrading some weapons and helping out a few friends.”
She paused a long time, looking out the window as the barren, unchanging scenery went by, then sighed. “So yeah, you don’t have to worry about me fraggin’ you over. Maybe I don’t have the same kinda sword hanging over me as he do
es, but I’ll be just as dead if I don’t get this run done. It won’t get me out of the woods, but like I said, Gianelli doesn’t want to have to kill me. I figure as long as I’m making progress, he’ll cut me some slack.”
“At a generous interest rate, right?”
She nodded without looking at him.
Time passed, and the Bison rolled along. Winterhawk returned to the middle compartment and settled into a chair with Maya in his lap, noting that most of the team was taking the opportunity to catch up on sleep, conserving their energy for whatever might be coming up. It wasn’t like the scenery changed much. The only one who didn’t appear to be dozing was Scuzzy, who once again had the glassy-eyed look of someone whose attention was far away. Winterhawk supposed he must be playing some game that didn’t require a Matrix connection. If it kept the decker quiet, he was all for it.
He felt something under his hand, and looked down to see Maya nuzzling against it. She regarded him with luminous green eyes. “Are you all right?”
He made a little mental shrug. “As much as can be expected under the circumstances, I suppose.” He stroked her soft fur, and she began to purr softly. “Just wondering if we’re going to be able to do this, or if I’m deluding myself.”
“Does it matter?” she asked. “You’ll do what you need to do, and what you can do. I’ll be here with you. I’ll help. You can use my strength if you need it.”
He gave her a faint smile. “I appreciate that, Maya.” He didn’t know if it was only in his mind, but in her presence the pain and shaking didn’t seem to be as intense. “You’re good for me.”
“I know,” she said. Raising up, she nuzzled under his chin, then curled up in his lap. Just save your strength. I think we’re getting close.”