by Lisa Smedman
Tonight at midnight, gods willing, Alma would do just that. She'd stake out the restaurant from across the street, follow Abby until she found a place to waylay her, and administer a dose of gamma scopolamine. She had to assume that Hothead would tip Abby off. But Alma had confidence in the training she'd received from the Justice Institute and the skills she'd honed over twelve years of security work. Even if Abby was looking for Alma, she wouldn't see her.
Alma replayed what the fixer had told her about Poppy's death, running it over and over in her mind until she convinced herself that it was really possible. Poppy hadn't died of a heart attack. He'd killed himself. Just like Aaron.
No—not just like Aaron. The Superkid had jumped off the top of the New Horizons building, and Poppy had slit his throat with a monofilament wire.
Once again, Alma paused to correct herself. No: not slit his throat. Poppy had sliced his head clean off . . .
Alma caught herself, recognizing that she'd subconsciously mixed together in her mind the way Poppy had died with the way in which Gray Squirrel had been murdered. The realization nagged at her a moment longer, and then she saw a second parallel:
Akiko, who was on death row in a Texas prison, had also killed her victim by slashing his throat. It had to have been more than mere coincidence: studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and reared independently of each other kept turning up lengthy strings of correspondences. Twins—nature's clones—married partners with the same names, chose the same professions, had the same hobbies and even bought identical pets and gave them the same names. The Superkids had been reared as a tightly knit unit for the first eight years of their lives. It made perfect sense that, when it came to murder, they'd have the same modus operandi.
That wasn't all of it, though. Not all of the Superkids had become murderers. Ajax and those Superkids he was in touch with had gone on to become honest citizens—not just law-abiding, but in some cases law-enforcing. Something environmental must have steered Abby and Akiko down the wrong path. Probably something that happened to them during the years they were fostered . . .
Or during their final days in the New Horizons creche. What was it that Hothead had said? Abby was the first Superkid to find Poppy's body. If she was the first, it begged the question: who was the second?
Pulling out her cellphone, Alma punched in a number. Three calls later, she had tracked down the Texas prison in which Akiko was incarcerated and was speaking to the warden. Somewhat reluctantly, since the sentence of capital punishment was to be carried out in just two hours' time, he listened to her request for a telecom link with Prisoner 2897436, Jacqueline Boothby. Only when Alma succeeded in convincing the warden that she was Akiko's long-lost sister did he finally relent.
After a five-minute pause, Akiko's face appeared on the monitor of Alma's cellphone. It was like looking into a mirror from the future—Akiko looked twenty years older than she really was, her face drawn and haggard, with deep worry lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her hair had been shaved down to stubble, and she wore prison grays. She looked at Alma with open skepticism for a moment or two, as if not really believing that another Superkid had actually telecomed her, and then gave her a grim smile.
"Hoi, Al," she said. "I like the blond hair." Akiko's voice was much harder than Alma remembered, and her body language was all wrong—different from the poised grace that Alma remembered. She supposed the two years Akiko had spent in prison were responsible.
Three days ago, when Ajax had broken the news that Akiko was on death row, it hadn't really sunk in. Akiko had been a distant memory that had paled in comparison to Alma's joy at finding Ajax again. But now that Alma was looking into the eyes of the condemned woman, it was hitting home. She was suddenly sorry that she was bothering Akiko with a frivolous question at a time like this.
She gave Akiko the heartiest smile she could manage. "Hello, Akiko," she said. "I just heard about your . . . about what's happening today."
Akiko was blunter: "My execution."
"Yes. Ahmed was the one who tracked you down and told me where you were. I'm sorry that—"
"I'm not. This place chews. I'll be glad to be out of here. Now quit the bulldrek and tell me what the frag it is you want."
Alma fought down the lump in her throat. She might as well get to the point; Akiko looked as though she'd like to cut the connection.
"I just learned something about Poppy's death," Alma told her. "I always thought he died of a heart attack, but that wasn't what happened. He—"
Akiko said something, and Alma had to stop and ask her to repeat it.
"I said, 'You ought to know,' " Akiko repeated impatiently.
"I'm sorry? What do you mean?"
Akiko stared out of the cellphone's tiny screen, shaking her head. "You were the one who found his body."
Alma frowned, confused. "I did?"
"You came running down the hall, screaming something about a head. I looked into Poppy's office and saw a body lying on the floor, minus its brainbox. They tried to tell me, later, that it was someone else—that it wasn't Poppy. But I never believed them."
"That . . . wasn't me," Alma said. "It was Abby."
"It was you, all right."
"It couldn't have been," Alma insisted. "I'd remember something like that. It wasn't until I was placed with a family that my foster mother told me Poppy was dead. You must have mistaken Abby for me. According to the police report, she was the one who found the body."
Akiko gave a harsh laugh. "What do the police know about anything? Half the time they get their data scrambled. If they were even the slightest bit competent, the fragger that raped me would have been put away for good. Did you know that he murdered three other women? If I hadn't been a Superkid, he would have killed me, too. I could have finished him off then and there, but oh, no, I was too honest. And later, I trusted that the cops would be smart enough to collect enough evidence to link the crimes. But they bungled it. So don't talk to me about police reports." Akiko emphasized the last two words with a twisted mouth, as if she was getting ready to spit.
"I see," Alma said, not knowing what to say next. "Uh, if there's anything I can do, Akiko . . ."
"There isn't. In one hour and forty-two minutes, I'm going to fry. But thanks for calling," she added in a sarcastic tone. "Talking about Poppy has brightened up what's left of my day immensely."
The cellphone's monitor went blank.
Slowly, both hands trembling slightly, Alma folded the cellphone shut.
* * *
Later that afternoon, after Alma had done a thorough recon of the restaurant and plotted her best surveillance position, she returned home to her apartment. Out of deference to Gray Squirrel, she'd been religiously following the test schedule that he'd laid down; she was in day sixteen of a twenty-one-day period of leaving the REM inducer in passive mode—the final portion of the beta test. But now it was time to break that pattern. She needed to be as fresh as possible tonight. As a Superkid, Abby would be Alma's equal in terms of strength, speed and intelligence. The last thing Alma needed was to give her an edge by being overtired.
Alma had no choice but to break with Gray Squirrel's orders. She'd have to use the REM inducer to catch a fifteen-minute catnap this afternoon, in order to stay fresh.
So lost in her thoughts was she that she touched the wrong icon when she got into the elevator. Alma only noticed her error when the doors opened on the underground parkade. She couldn't imagine why she'd hit that icon: it wasn't as though she ever came down here, since she always commuted by SkyTrain or cab. She could hardly use the "running on autopilot" excuse.
The elevator gave a soft ping, and then the doors began to slide shut. It wasn't until the last moment that the design on the motorcycle Alma was staring at registered in her brain. Painted on the gas tank was a winking owl, in front of a night sky speckled with stars and a crescent moon. Alma lunged at the doors' "open" icon as two words came together suddenly in her mind: Night
. . . and Owl.
"No," she whispered. "It isn't possible. This is my building."
As the doors opened again, Alma slid into the underground parking lot, keeping a wall at her back. She increased her cyberear's amplification until the hiss of the air vents sounded like the roar of a hurricane, filtered out that and her breathing, as well as the pounding of her heart, and listened for sounds of an intruder. Her cybereyes swept the parkade, both at ground level, where she'd see the feet of anyone hiding behind a car, and higher up, where an intruder could cling like a spider to the pipes.
Nothing. The parkade was clear.
Every sense still on alert, Alma approached the motorcycle. It was a Harley Electroglide—a brand-new 2062 model, by the look of it. Alma did a slow circuit of the spot where it was parked, her eyes searching the concrete floor for clues. A crumpled Stuffer Shack paper cup lay up against the wall where someone had dropped it, and there were a few bootprints on the cement where someone had walked through oil. Otherwise, the area was clean.
Alma squatted and touched a finger to the bike's exhaust pipes. They were cold; the motorcycle had been here for some time. And that, perhaps, was the most worrying thing of all. Was Abby lying in wait for Alma, up in her apartment?
Alma smiled. If she was, that would certainly simplify things.
She told herself not to rush: to be thorough. She continued her inspection of the motorcycle, opening up the seat to look inside its built-in storage compartment, and flipping open the leather saddlebags that hung at the back. Both were empty. On a whim, she peered up the exhaust pipes and spotted something glinting in one of them. Sticking a finger inside, she fished it out.
It was a stylus-thick cylinder of silvered plastic with a magnetic strip down one side: a maglock key. And not just any key, but one Alma recognized at once. The key was identical in shape and size and color to the one in her own pocket, except for a faint X that had been scratched into one end. It was a key to another apartment in her building.
She stared at it a moment longer, wondering what it might mean. Had the tables suddenly turned—was Abby staking Alma out from a neighboring suite? But if she was, what was the key to that suite doing hidden inside the motorcycle's exhaust pipe? If Abby was in the building, wouldn't she be carrying the key with her?
Alma needed answers. Following up the clue in her hand seemed to be the best way to get them. She strode back to the elevator, got inside, and pressed the icon for the twelfth floor. When she got off, she opened the fire door carefully and quietly climbed the two flights up to her floor. After a careful check of the hallway, using the magnification system of her cybereyes to search the most likely spots where a surveillance camera might have been planted, she crept down the hall, trying the key she'd found in each door she passed. It didn't work in the doors of the suites to either side of hers or in the one across the hall. Three doors down from her apartment, however, the maglock flashed green when she slotted the key.
Alma opened the door a crack and listened for any noise coming from inside the apartment. Every muscle in her body was tensed for action; there was a good chance that Abby was just behind the door, poised to jump her the moment she entered. Alma slid a hand into her pocket and drew out the gamma scopolamine injector she'd carried to her meeting with Hothead as a holdout weapon. She flicked the lever that primed it and heard the soft hiss of air compressing. Then she crouched low and to the side and eased the door open.
The apartment was a mirror image of her own—as far as the layout was concerned, at least. The bathroom was on the left, instead of on the right, but the kitchen and living room were one big open space, with no one in sight.
One big mess, was more like it. Everywhere Alma looked, the floor and counters were strewn with clothing, pieces of electronic equipment, piles of newsfaxes, and empty fast-food containers nested together in tall stacks. An enormous handgun lay in its holster on the kitchen counter: an Ares Predator. The bathroom—which Alma glanced into to assure herself that it was also clear—had shelves that were filled with cosmetic containers of every description. Most were tubes of the brightly colored "Beijing Opera mask" makeup that was the latest trend, out on the fringes of fashion.
Alma shut the hallway door softly behind her and slipped the injector back into her pocket. She made a slow sweep of the apartment, picking her way through the stacks of junk. She'd expected to smell rotten food and mold, but the room smelled faintly of sandalwood instead. The fast-food containers had been scrubbed out and stacked—saved for some purpose that Alma couldn't fathom. As she glanced around at the months' worth of accumulated debris, she slowly came to the realization that Abby wasn't just using the apartment as a stakeout. She lived here.
Which was just too weird to be true.
Alma searched the room thoroughly but learned nothing from the clutter. On a desk near the window, she spotted a cyberterminal that looked as though it had been cobbled together from spare parts. Alma powered it up and briefly considered jacking in, but rejected that idea as too dangerous. Lost in the Matrix, she'd have no way of hearing or seeing Abby if she returned to the apartment. Instead she activated the flatscreen display and scrolled through the menu that appeared on it.
There wasn't much: just a few application programs and eleven download files. Alma clicked on the first one, which was labeled DOURSAVE, and a schematic of some kind appeared. Scrolling down through it, she found a building map of something called the Technology Institute and what looked like laboratory research notes. She clicked on the second file, NUKESPEW, and found a report on the disposal of nuclear waste by the Gaeatronics Corporation, with the logo of the Western Wilderness Committee on the top. The third, labeled FRYBABY, contained a lab report that dated back to 2039, on a piece of headware that was supposed to modify the behavior of delinquent children by making them less aggressive. Alma skipped ahead to the fourth, INPUT, and found it was an e-mail file. She scanned quickly through the dozens of messages it held, but none of them contained anything of interest. They seemed to be tips from other shadowrunners on everything from how to crack a maglock to how to construct a remote-sensing listening system.
One by one, she checked the other files. It was the last one, labeled GRIMREAPER, that made her breath catch in her throat. The first page was a fullscreen digipic of Gray Squirrel, with target crosshairs superimposed over it. Wincing, Alma flipped forward in the file. The next image to fill the screen was a document. At the top was a logo Alma recognized instantly: the curling tsunami of Pacific Cybernetics Incorporated.
The document was a memo from Gray Squirrel to Mr. Lali, dated ten months ago. Heart racing, forcing herself to slow down so she wouldn't miss anything important, Alma read through it. Someone—maybe even Abby herself—had highlighted three sections of it in yellow. The first one read:
Results from the alpha-test unit are unsatisfactory. Seventy-two percent of subjects exhibit progressive loss of muscle tone, which was only halted by removal of test units. In twenty percent of these cases, side effects not only persisted but increased, despite removal. Side effects included narcolepsy, with attacks progressing in number and duration and eventually leading to catatonic state. Mortality rate to date of catatonia victims is ninety-six percent in troll subjects; ninety-five percent in ork subjects. Suggest we relocate testing project away from Yomi to location that offers alternative stock.
It was clear that Gray Squirrel was talking about the alpha-test model of the REM inducer, which had been tested overseas. The reference to "Yomi" told Alma where that testing had been carried out: Yomi was the island in the Philippines that Japan had exiled its ork and troll populations to. It was an odd place for PCI to choose as the site of a testing program. The memo seemed to be indicating that only orks and trolls had been accepted as volunteers to test the device—and yet the REM inducer was intended to benefit all races.
According to what Alma had just read, a horrifyingly large number of those volunteers had died, despite Gray Squirrel's best effort
s. No wonder Gray Squirrel had been so happy to have a subject with Alma's stamina volunteer for the beta-test unit. She glanced at her left hand, wondering how much worse the tremors caused by the REM inducer were going to get. If only Gray Squirrel were still alive . . .
With grim determination, Alma read on through the report, lingering over the next highlighted section of text.
Suggest you continue to stall Salish-Shidhe Council members. Alpha-test version is clearly not ready for testing in soldiers. Battlefield applications at this point seem limited, unless you can persuade Council to up acceptable "friendly fire" casualty rate from ten percent to twenty.
Alma paused. What was Gray Squirrel talking about? The soldiers who would be receiving the REM inducer were already casualties. Their brains had been injured by magic wielded by the enemy, not by "friendly fire."
Suddenly, another interpretation occurred to Alma. What if the REM inducers were intended not for wounded soldiers but for healthy ones? The cyberware would turn them into the perfect fighting machines: men and women who needed only a fifteen-minute catnap between battles to be fresh and ready to fight again. Alma shouldn't have been surprised by this proposed application, and she understood now why Gray Squirrel had done the first round of testing so far afield: if PCI was going to sell it to the Salish-Shidhe military, they certainly didn't want the Tsimshians finding out about the project. She marveled at the fact that Gray Squirrel had found so many test subjects—fifty in all. according to the numbers cited in this report. What would have motivated people who probably couldn't even find Salish-Shidhe on a map to volunteer for such dangerous testing? Certainly not patriotism.