by Unknown
Pandur mulled it over. If no one was lying, then AG Chemie had fired blind and scored a lucky hit. He knew the efficiency with which megacons operated. What was more, he respected them greatly. The efficiency, the competence, not the moral aspects. Megacons were the shadowrunners' opponents. And other megacons the clients. The system worked because experts were involved on both sides. Conglomerates, which tried to protect their data with a huge expenditure of brainpower, ecus and personnel. Shadowrunners, who attempted to steal this data with a huge expenditure of brainpower, foolhardiness and blood. Pandur simply couldn't buy the idea that AG Chemie had seconded one of its hovercraft pilots to fetch back the pirates and that this had almost worked. Why hadn't they combed Stotel? Why hadn't they closed the freeway, the monorail and the Alliance roads? Had they, without Pandur and Druse being aware of it? Had Druse and he hit upon the weakest link by sheer luck?
And yet there seemed to be something decidedly fishy about it. The pirates should have been grabbed when they entered Aldiburger at the latest. What kind of drek was this? You don't rely on a frog-faced orc woman when you really want to bag your quarry.
Either they're just toying with us, or they didn't have time to make preparations. But if pressure of time was the problem, the whole business couldn't possibly have come about in the way Freda had described.
Pandur decided to remain vigilant.
"Honestly, chummers, I got nothin' against ya," Freda protesed. "Always kept outa company politics. Don't give a fuck if you're pirates or anythin' else. But I had to do what I was told or I'd've lost my job."
Pandur waved it away. He believed the orc when she said she had nothing against Druse and him. The megacon guardsmen that shot at shadowrunners had no personal motives either; they were just doing their job. But that didn't alter the fact that the bullets were just as deadly as those fired in anger or revenge.
Since the Renraku run at the latest, Pandur was sick of being used, pushed around and hunted without knowing why. He turned to Druse.
"Way things look, AG Chemie is interested in my ass. But I'm not the only one having to run from a megacon. I want to know why you're so important to Proteus. Now! That's not asking too much, is it?"
Druse shrugged his shoulders. "You'd just be bored, chummer. Ya know the reasons why a megacon would want to eliminate somebody. Ya hadn't oughta try to turn the tables. Of the two of us, you're the one that's deep in the shit. Ain't that right - Walez?"
Drekhead! What did Tupamaro tell him about me?
"So you won't tell me?"
"Nope."
"If we get out of this alive, we go our separate ways!" "
That was the plan anyway."
"I just wanted it said."
"Ya said it. Ya want me to sign for it?"
Druse really was a tough cookie, Pandur had to admit. "Were you an exec at Proteus? Did you do the dirty on them? Syphon off company funds?"
Druse grinned and stayed silent.
Freda was squirming uneasily in her seat. She was probably afraid of getting caught in the crossfire or, conversely, being sacrificed on the altar of rediscovered common interests.
With an effort, Pandur fought through to the decision to put the dispute to one side. In their present situation they couldn't afford trench warfare. Reluctantly he had to admit that he had started it. In the shadows, such persistence in quizzing a chummer would have earned him a bullet. He no longer understood himself. He could only account for it by his repulsion at the thought of being used as a chesspiece once more.
If you're honest it's not about Druse and Proteus but you and your enemies who've risen from the void. You're projecting your impotence on others. Druse knows at least who he's running away from and why he's doing it. You still don't know why they used you and hunted you left you alone for a while and are now hunting you again.
"So ka," he said with a brittle voice. "It really is none of my business."
"Wrong, it is your business," Druse replied to his surprise. " After all, your ass is on the line as well if things change and Proteus gets in on the hunt. And your own ass matters a lot to ya, that's what I think. At least, mine's darn precious to me, ya know?" He laughed and again seemed as friendly as before the quarrel. "Peace?"
Pandur wasn't satisfied but wanted to end the dispute. " Peace."
The men said nothing for a while. Nor did Freda. Pandur kept his eye on the monitor, concentrating on the course data. Occasionally he looked out. Peatbog, swamp, mud. Dead colors. Only slowly was nature reconquering a few niches.
"Kinda boring," said Druse in an attempt to rekindle conversation.
He didn't succeed. But he couldn't complain about boredom anymore.
A sound was born. It swelled. In an instant everything else was swamped by it.
Close above them, rotor blades were thrashing the air. Then a machine gun started to bark.
A low-flying helicopter. It came out of the sun. Only an outline was visible. It seemed AG Chemie had noticed the change of course and taken up the pursuit. Or was it the turn of Druse's pursuers for a change?
The men and the orc ducked down in their seats. Bullets bounced off the Manta's rear.
"Fuckin' drek! They can't do that!" Druse thundered.
"Why not?" asked Pandur. "Proteus already put one hit squad on your tail. Did you think they'd only be throwing stinkbombs the second time?"
"Ya think they're from Proteus?"
"No idea. Doesn't matter, does it? Or d'you insist on bullets with a monogram?"
Freda was trembling. Real ammo had that bit more penetration than on trid. And Freda wasn't even a zombie that could have a few already putrefied lumps of flesh blown off its bones by one or two bullets.
The helicopter had thundered over the Manta, turned and was approaching once more, this time from the south. Pandur recognized it as a MK Kolibri, painted light-blue, bearing the emblem of a rental company. Not a combat helicopter at least. In the half-open cockpit three uniformed figures sat next to and behind the pilot, waving their guns around. Security men.
"Autopilot off and zig-zag!" Pandur yelled at the orc. "Come on, what're you waiting for? They won't draw any distinctions. For them, we're all three of us rats and they take themselves for the pest controllers. Would you ask a rat about its religious denomination before you killed it?"
That seemed to have the desired effect. Freda pulled out the steering wheel housed in the console. Her fingers sped across the keys of the on-board computer. Suddenly she appeared controlled and professional. Contact with the familiar controls seemed to have transformed her, seemed to transfer the hovercraft's energy to her. There was no longer a trace of uncertainty. Fear had made way for the naked will to survive.
The jets howled louder. The hovercraft swerved to the left. Water showered up. Bog was churned up. Lumps of dirt and uprooted clumps of grass flew around.
The helicopter was almost close enough to touch, but it thrust into emptiness as a result of the Manta's change of direction. Bullets struck the tank and made it clang. It was a muffled sound. It was evidently full.
"What's in the tank?" Pandur called. "Explosive material?"
Freda was grasping the steering wheel as if it were a crucifix she was holding to fend off Count Dracula. She was sweating and her eyes seemed to be popping out of their sockets. "Feed solution for breeders," she got out. "Nonflammable ."
Pandur had the impression Freda was doing a good job. She herself might have an immobile body but she moved the broad Manta with an astonishing virtuosity. Pandur wouldn't have thought the heavy hovercraft could move so elegantly. It was skipping like a flat pebble over the peatbog's ponds, which glistened in the sunlight. The enormous mass of the Manta bore no comparison with the maneuverability of a wamo, but the orc woman did her best to set the Kolibri insoluble tasks.
"Breeders?" Pandur asked. "What do you mean by breeders?"
"Breeding vats in the gene department," answered Druse for her. "Proteus."
There speaks
an insider, thought Pandur.
The Kolibri was making its third approach. Again ricochets whistled around. The cockpit was hit for the first time. The bullets failed to penetrate the safety glass, but created cracks and blind spots.
"Still object if I take my Beretta in my fist?" Druse asked.
Pandur shook his head. The situation had changed. He needed assistance. He waited until Druse had drawn his gun. Then he wrenched open the side window and fired a clip of ammo at the Kolibri. At the front, Druse followed his example. It was pointless. They didn't even hit the helicopter, never mind the pilot or one of the gunmen. They stood no chance with their pistols.
"In the case under the bunk there's a rifle," Freda managed to get out in a strained voice from between tight lips.
Pandur put his Secura back, crawled to the rear, flipped open the case and pulled out the weapon. A Ruger 100 sports rifle. A light weapon, but better than his pistol.
During the helicopter's next assault, he aimed at the gunman behaving the most aggressively and leaning out of the Kolibri's side window the furthest.
He missed him but at least hit the cockpit.
Once more bullets rebounded off the Manta's safety glass.
Then something flew earthward from out the helicopter. A bright flash. A grenade exploded. Luckily, it had missed the Manta and merely sent morass spurting into the air.
"If they got more of them they're gonna bust us open from our asses to our hair roots!" Druse shouted above the din.
Their relative strengths were becoming evident. Despite all the driving skills Freda was displaying, the Manta would not be able to lose the helicopter. With the Kolibri, their pursuers had made a good choice. It was light and nippy, and the pilot seemed to know his job. Pandur secretly agreed with Druse's assessment. More grenades or a single well-placed splinter bomb would put the Manta out for the count. If they didn't hop straight up to heaven the moment the fuel tank exploded, they would be lying out in the bog flat as a flounder. Easy prey for the hunter. They absolutely had to find cover from aerial attack.
"Drek, isn't there a wood or a thicket or anything else around here where we can hide?" Pandur flung out.
"Everything died off," Freda replied.
"It doesn't have to be alive, just shelter us from view!" "
This never was a wooded area," the orc said.
"Then a barn, dammit, a factory, any fucking ruin big enough for us to drive into!"
Another swoop, more misses from Pandur. Two grenades. One exploded so close to the Manta's cockpit that the red-hot shrapnel cut welts into the glass. It looked as if Lucifer had laid a clawed hand on the glass and just casually drawn it downward. It was like a promise for the next time. For the thrust of the trident.
Amazingly enough, none of this seemed to make much impression on Freda. After the initial shock, she seemed to have decided to see the whole affair as a kind of TV reality. Maybe it was the only way she knew to deal with her fear. "The idea with the barn would be possible, chummer," she said, sounding almost laid back. "I'll keep my eyes open. See what turns up." Not a trace of uncertainty anymore. Almost arrogance. She seemed to enjoy fooling the Kolibri's pilot with her driving skills. Probably she was surprising herself with her hidden talents. Pandur knew the danger that came from euphoria. You became careless, overestimated yourself, made a stupid mistake which nullified at one stroke all the successes achieved up that point. On the outside, she and types like Wenzel, who had bled to death in Dusseldorf, were worlds apart. And yet Pandur felt suddenly reminded of him.
"Goddammit, Freda!" he screamed at her. "That stuff out there isn't some kinda dumb special effects, it's the real, mean, low-down thing. We need the barn, and fast!"
She didn't let on whether he'd made any impact on her. To be fair, he had to admit that she had her hands full evading the helicopter and any hazards that sprang up. If she saw the whole thing as an advanced course for hovercraft pilots, spiced with flashes and bangs, at least she was doing her level best to score top marks with the judges.
"There's something big over there!" Druse called out, pointing off to the right.
A solitary farmhouse, bowed by the wind and half-destroyed, huddled against a longish, dense wood of crippled trees. The farm contained a huge, half-timbered old barn and another farm building almost as big but which, like the farmhouse, was just a square burnt-out shell. One side of the barn had collapsed.
"In there?" asked Freda skeptically. "The only solid thing about the thing seems to be the entrance door. We'd have to knock it flat and then the whole damn show might collapse."
"We'll leave that," said Pandur, who had just fired another few shots at the Kolibri and was drawing back from the window. He threw the rifle onto the seat. "The barn's not much use to us without a roof. It only makes sense anyway if the opposition doesn't see us taking refuge there."
He looked over to the Kolibri, which was just disappearing behind the stump of an old church spire and would soon reach the furthest point of its turn. It was a good opportunity to act.
"The wood!" he shouted. "Get into the wood as deep as possible. And then switch off the engines!"
He didn't know what tracking instruments the opposition had on board. With a bit of luck, they had neither mass detectors nor infra-red sensors. The expedition seemed to have set off in haste. Otherwise they would have deployed more professional equipment.
Freda didn't waste time talking. She acted. She passed the last part of her freestyle display with bravura. The hovercraft reached the trees before the helicopter came into view again from behind the church tower. Swaying wildly and turning on its own axis, the Manta crashed into the wood, flattening dozens of dead trees and coming to rest under a roof of dead trunks and boughs that pattered down on top of them. Freda switched off the power. With a glugging sound, the vehicle settled into the swamp, the water half way up its wheels. The broad pontoon of the hull held it up like a snowshoe and prevented it from sinking any deeper.
The Kolibri was approaching. In the sudden silence, the whop-whopping of its blades sounded like a wildly swung scythe. The Grim Reaper, in his modern, motorized version.
But the Grim Reaper didn't have good eyes.
Apparently he suspected they were in the barn and circled over it for a while. Only then did he turn his attention to the wood.
The Kolibri criss-crossed it. The crew seemed to be undecided. Pandur had thought they would be able to see where the Manta was from the air. It had, after all, cut a swathe. When he looked around he realized, however, that there were countless similar swathes. The gales of recent weeks had been busy and the rotten, decaying wood offered little resistance.
"The pilot's a washout!" Druse uttered. "He must see our trail."
Although in gliding mode the Manta was high enough over the ground not to leave tire tracks, the thrust jets had churned up the morass. Water had trickled into most of the holes immediately, but the trail in its entirety should really have been visible from the air.
"Mist," said Freda and pointed ahead. "They can't see anythin' because the mist's risin' from the ground. That's what'll save us."
Now that the Manta lay like a dead ray in the swamp, without the power of the hissing jets, Freda seemed to have regained a sense of reality. Her face was chalky. She appeared tired, exhausted. Her energy was gone.
"There wasn't any mist before," Druse showed his surprise. " How come it's there all of a sudden?"
Indeed, the mist was thickening at breathtaking speed.
Around the hovercraft only the vague outlines of individual trees could be made out.
"What ya thinkin'?" Druse asked, turning to Pandur. " Probably the same as you," said Pandur. "We've got a guardian spirit."
"D'ya mean that literally? Tungrita?"
"No idea. More likely not. Her home is off Bremerhaven, in the water. She can't be here. Apart from that, I don't know why she would want to help us yet again."
"She seems to have a soft spot for us."
"You guys shamans or something?" asked Freda. "Ya don't look like that."
"Forget it," said Pandur. "We're simply good boys. Give blood, help old people across the street, that sort of thing. You know? Maybe we once did the invalid mother of a shaman a favor. The son always wanted to thank us. Now he sends an elemental spirit. Let there be mist, and there was mist."
"Bullshit!" Freda tapped her forehead. "You two and good boys! Ya can take the piss outa others, but not me."
"D'ya really think it's possible a mage helped us, chummer?" asked Druse. He appeared ill at ease.
"The mages I met were very rarely philanthropic," Pandur replied. "Most of them were even dying to get at me. Besides... "
He broke off. He had been about to say he wasn't aware that mages could monitor a person's every move remotely, whether with good intentions or bad. But then it occurred to him what Natalie's had said about his being marked in Astral Space. And shamans were able to entrust an elemental with tasks remotely.
They then lost its services but it was fundamentally possible. A mage who controlled an elemental could make mist appear somewhere, in a nearby or distant place. If he wanted. But why should anyone want to help him or Druse or Freda?
"What, besides?" Druse followed up when Pandur's silence continued.
"Doesn't matter. Not important anyway. Main thing is the mist holds till the helicopter gives up."
"Is the Manta okay?" Druse enquired of Freda. "We gonna get outa her again?"
"Think so," she answered. "The jets're fitted with special valves 'cos you got to reckon with these situations in the swamplands. And we got enough power to push the trees aside."
The sound of the rotor blades had grown quieter and seemed to come from a greater height. Evidently the pilot was circling the wood several more times and trying to stay out of the mist at the same time.
Then the sound disappeared in the distance.
"They gave up!" Freda was jubilant.