The Eyes of the Rigger

by Unknown

"You'll go to work by submarine."

  Pandur considered. This aspect hadn't occurred to him.

  "Big squad?"

  "Mini-submarine. Small squad."

  "How many?"

  "With you, three."

  "Drek, that's not enough for AG Chemie!"

  "You're gonna take the fucking submarine in so close to the stinker that you can kick him straight in the balls. Also there're diversionary tactics so that he sees the kick too late."

  Even so, three runners weren't enough. No protection on the flanks. Sounded like a suicide mission again. This wasn't the type of new start he had hoped for.

  "I need first-class chummers."

  "You'll get them."

  "The submarine pilot's got to be a rigger! An outstanding rigger."

  "It's the best fucking rigger you'll find in the whole of the fucking North German Federation. And I'll tell you one thing, chummer. He's not only a top rigger, but a street samurai of the luxury class to boot. Two men in one. What more d'you want?"

  "Hey, who is he? Superman?"

  "No. He's got a heck of a lot of talents. But flying isn't one of them."

  Chapter Six

  "Burned My Eyes"

  A chronological history of Hamburg since the turn of the millenium (1) :

  2001 - Hamburg's population exceeds the three million mark. The Senate resigns in the face of rising crime and the number of drug deaths.

  2002-2004 - Anarchist movements on the rise. Massive environmental demonstrations and intensifying eco-terrorism increasingly dominate the scene in Hamburg, as elsewhere. " Greenpeace", the environmental organization with operations worldwide declares eco-war on oil-refineries and renames itself "GreenWar". Despite the extensive flood protection measures taken by the Senate and the Lower House, Hamburg suffers severe flooding in 2003. Large areas of the port and downtown districts suffer damage running into the billions. The tidal surge claims 4,800 dead. The resulting economic crisis and social unrest are a breeding ground for anarchist movements. Armed street battles ensue.

  2005 - In the wake of armed attacks and Hamburg police force's virtual inability to stem the rising crime wave the Senate passes an emergency decree allowing the private security services of the large conglomerates to equip themselves with firearms. In Hamburg North violent clashes occur between conguardsmen and eco-guerillas. Towards the end of the year construction begins on a top-security tract around the major conglomerates located there.

  2006-2008 - Hamburg experiences a large influx of refugees. In the space of three years about 180,000 Balts Russians and Poles apply for asylum. Social tension increases. The Senate transfers the administration of the police force to the security company "Hanse Security GmbH". The company moves into the former air-raid shelter at Heiligengeistfeld. In 2008 a further wave of refugees inundates Hamburg when the Saar region is contaminated as a result of the cataclysmic accident at the Cattenom nuclear power plant. The population climbs to 3.6 million.

  2009-2010 - In the Hamburg region 170,000 die as a consequence of VITAS.

  2011 - In February, northern Germany (as well as the Netherlands and Denmark) experiences the most serious storm surge in living memory. In Hamburg alone it claims the lives of 90,000 people. Forty percent of the port is destroyed, the downtown area suffers damage running into the billions. Large sections of the Suderelb districts as well as the port and the city center remain inundated. The islands of Neuwerk and Scharhorn, both belonging to Hamburg in the mudflats at the mouth of the Elb are completely flooded and destroyed. Because of damage to the infrastructure Hamburg is initially cut off from the outside world. Hundreds of firms go bankrupt and are bought up by the large conglomerates. A state of emergency is imposed on Hamburg until the end of the year. Entire districts are bought up by the conglomerates. Smuggling, slavery and piracy celebrate a comeback. The Senate capitulates and on June 24 the Federal Armed Forces take control.

  Dr Natalie Alexandrescu: Hamburg Venice of the North German History on Vidchips VC 5, Erkrath 2051

  During the night, Pandur dreamt of AG Chemie. The upcoming run and his occupation with it might have been behind the dream, but this had no influence on the course it took. The run played no part. Pandur wasn't a runner. He found himself in the role of an exec in the megacon. He had no name. He had no face. He didn't know how he had become a megacon exec. But he was himself. In his feeling and thinking. Yet he had no past as a runner. He was a manager. He was what he could have become if he hadn't gone into the shadows. At Renraku. But Renraku played no part in this dream. He was an exec at AG Chemie. Without a past.

  He loved his work. He had power. He loved AG Chemie. AG Chemie was powerful. He knew there were competitors. He could understand them well. Envy, The yelping of those who weren't as successful. Execs of other megacons. Not as powerful, not as efficient, not as innovative.

  In the dream, he made decisions he understood and seemed crystal-clear to him. Later he couldn't remember them. He was up on all the ramifications of the megacon's interests, had everything under control. He surveyed from above a structure that he found transparent, that was flawless, perfect. A giant machine that turned with an admirable precision. He was this machine, was its head and simultaneously each of its segments. He knew there was no machine that worked better.

  He was tormented by the thought that there were forces that disrupted this perfection, tore the machinery asunder, wanted to smash the magnificent structure. The knowledge dawned on him that he was himself part of these forces. His buried past came back to him. He had been a shadowrunner. He couldn't believe it. Such a contradiction...

  He woke up.

  The dream was absurd. He knew himself well enough to be aware that nowhere within him did he harbor the secret wish to change camps. Maybe he was tired of running the shadows. But he certainly didn't long to be a megacon exec. He didn't regret having taken the path he had. At Renraku he would have long since suffocated.

  He had the impression of having dreamed someone else's dream. He was ashamed of such a dream. In the dark he listened to the sound of breathing from the other three men who were sharing the room with him. He hoped they hadn't heard him talking in his sleep. It would have embarrassed him.

  Before sinking back into sleep, he reflected that he knew far too little about a megacon's structure. He had only ever been interested in the individual data, never the interrelations. Perhaps he ought to try to collect global data for himself. Affiliations, capital interests, participations, risks. At AG Chemie, for instance. That might be interesting...

  Red Cloud didn't want to attend the meeting in the megaplex. For reasons he alone - and perhaps a few state agencies, a few security services, a few megacon execs - knew, he was reluctant to leave the ghetto. Besides, he wasn't a Herr Schmidt organizing the run, but only an intermediary who had mentioned Pandur's name.

  At noon the next day, Pandur was given a ride by a fence fetching goods from the ghetto and bringing other goods in exchange and who was returning to the other bank of the Elb. He dropped Pandur at the Fischmarkt in St Pauli. Pandur covered the rest of the route as a passenger in a pedal-boat rickshaw.

  Finding the cafe proved to be no problem. The other two runners, Festus and Jessi, had been described to him. They were already waiting. Now only one was missing.

  "Our Schmidt," said Festus when a man entered the cafe, quickly found his bearings and headed towards the booth in which Pandur was sitting with Festus and Jessi. "Real hip guy," the rigger added, looking at Jessi.

  The man was tall, slim and wiry. Mid- to late-twenties. He didn't look at all like the usual image of a Herr Schmidt. He wore a dark-green guerrilla combat suit and had a forceful face sporting designer stubble. A headband fought to tame the shaggy, auburn hair. Beneath it was a forehead jack. For an anarchist hang-out, which the Kropotkin Cafe in fact was, his attire was dead on. But Pandur had the impression that it was by no means a mask.

  A few brief, non-committal words of greeting. He ordered Irish coff
ee, walnut ice-cream and a prawn cocktail. A perverse combination and not cheap, not even for anarchists. But anyone with 50,000 to hand out wouldn't miss the small change needed to titillate the palate. First eye-contact. The man had resolute, combative eyes. Maybe a shade too uncompromising, maybe a little too ambitious.

  He seemed to know Jessi very well. In their glances lay both closeness and distance and that on both sides. Pandur read the looks as an expression of a troubled familiarity. The two seemed to have got along better at one time.

  Schmidt paid Festus very little attention. Too little. A stranger is given far closer scrutiny. As was now the case with Pandur. Schmidt studied him with an unconcealed curiosity that was almost offensive. When he finally turned to his Irish coffee and the accompaniments, he seemed to be satisfied.

  A regular family gathering, thought Pandur. They all know each other. I'm the only new one.

  He had already registered the bond between Festus and Jessi. He was unable to judge the nature of the relationship. Runners who worked as a team? Friends from somewhere who just happened to be working together again? Or a couple that lived together in their everday life? If this last was the case, then the two were making a successful effort to separate private from business matters.

  Schmidt didn't seem particularly talkative. He was listening to Festus, who was employing specialist terminology that was probably lost on the rest of the group to expound on the Cybit Fair in Hanover and the refinements of the latest cyberware products on display there.

  So that's our Superman, thought Pandur, inspecting the rigger.

  Festus actually seemed ageless but, on his own admission, was younger than Pandur, in his mid-twenties. At one meter eighty he was small compared to other razorclaws and much lighter and slimmer than most others. But he had a muscular, well-honed body that came across as lithe. He concealed little of it beneath bermudas and an open denim vest which revealed naked skin. What he lacked in body mass he made up for in synthetic muscles. Something, perhaps an environmental toxin, perhaps even an inherited genetic disorder, had turned his hair grey prematurely. He could have easily corrected this small natural flaw with fashionable hair coloring - light-blue and rust-red were considered in at the moment. Instead, he seemed to enjoy his curly grey head of hair. Indeed it suited him and gave character to his somewhat bland features, which were too smooth and too even. However, they were not only counteracted by the grey hair. Festus had cybereyes.

  Maybe his friends had called him babyface once too often. Or it had been purely and simply his enthusiasm for cyberware that had made him have the eyes enplanted. It could be the demands of the shadows were behind it. A tiger needs good eyes. A runner needs the best. Many shadowrunners thought that way.

  If cosmetic reasons had been decisive, the enplant had proved a total failure. The eyes didn't make his face more chiseled, but rendered it more perfect. Seldom had Pandur seen a chummer who looked as if he had been born with cybereyes. This was the case with Festus. They also seemed to be special cybereyes, as if designed by a master craftsman, with an android beauty. Like the eyes of a blind beauty who could actually see better than anyone else. It was these cybereyes that, devoid of expression, registered everything there was to register. Pandur had never seen this make anywhere else. They seemed to be brand new. There was little doubt they represented a further development, although Pandur couldn't assess their special features at the moment.

  Behind the eyes there seemed to be a high-performance brain capable of making good use of the information the eyes supplied. Wetware, but in good shape. This at least was Pandur's impression from the first half hour he had spent with the rigger.

  If, on top of everything, the chummer could handle a smartgun - Pandur had little doubt about this - he really was a heck of a guy, of a type rarely found in the shadows. An allround talent. A rigger with killer instincts. An intelligent street samurai who knew how to plumb a machine's soul. Amazing. But Pandur had wanted one exactly like this.

  And Jessi...? He looked at the middling tall, slim woman with the long, blond hair falling over chest and shoulders. She wore a loose-fitting purple sweatshirt and waisted jeans. On her left cheek she bore light-blue tattoos of a sickle moon and three stars and on her right cheek a rainbow. He knew what she could do. Magic and decking. Also an unusual combination. Jessi seemed as anachronistically versatile as Festus. In contrast to them, Pandur felt almost one-dimensional. But was she also good at her disciplines? He would soon find out.

  Pandur looked up because he had a vague feeling someone was watching him. For a fraction of a second he thought he saw a man at the back of the cafe diverting his eyes at the same moment and submerging in a group of people talking. Probably his imagination was playing tricks on him, but he really believed the man bore similarities with Ricul.

  Stop it, chummer. Don't drive yourself crazy. You're seeing ghosts!

  He pulled himself together and turned back to the others at the table. Schmidt, it seemed, didn't intend to talk about the run in the cafe. He finished his Irish coffee, picked up the tab for all three of them and then led the runners down the steps outside the cafe to the anchorages. The Kropotkin Cafe was located on the second floor of a house that had once stood in a normal, dry street. But after the Great Flood the street had turned into a canal, and what had been the second story was now the lowest floor you could enter without having to don a diving suit.

  Schmidt owned a small, egg-shaped electric launch driven by solar power. A Michel Standard that could be seen in large numbers in Hamburg's waters. The hull was made of green plastic. Before going on board, Schmidt used a remote-signal sender to disable the sensor-controlled shotgun that was hidden in the stern and was pointing at the entrance. After his three guests had climbed on board, he released by chip the coded magnetic anchor that had pulled the stern of the boat against a double-T girder. Your name would have had to be Daffy Duck to have dared simply to tie up a boat outside the Kropotkin.

  Once on board, Pandur discovered some peculiarities that explained why the Michel launch lay so low in the water. She had been lined inside with bullet-proof plexglass and under a streamlined panel, which could be folded up if required, a fixed light machine gun from H&K lay concealed. Herr Schmidt was most decidedly a pro.

  A little later the Michel Standard was moving at a moderate pace up the canal on autopilot. Her destination was a quiet building in Winterhude, half-submerged like many of the old buildings from before the Flood. There, Schmidt's people maintained a depot that had a wide opening into the Alster below water level.

  Pandur kept his eyes out for boats following them. He couldn't get the man from the Kropotkin out of his mind. Whether it had been Ricul or not, the man had stared at him for some reason. But Pandur's concern seemed unfounded. There was heavy traffic on the canals and former streets but none of the boats were on their tack.

  On the way, Schmidt gave a rough outline of the strategy of the run. He didn't dwell on the finer points. Pandur learned little more than what Red Cloud had already told him.

  "Jessi's in charge of the operation. She knows all the details and will go through the plan with you." He looked at her in a slightly mocking way and with a touch of arrogance. " Several times if I know her."

  "Several times because I want to leave as little as possible to chance!" Jessi was still young, twenty-two at the most. She sounded petulant like a girl of only seventeen. She didn't seem to like the way Schmidt spoke to her.

  "So ka," said Schmidt. "Don't louse up, chummers! It's important we're successful."

  It sounded as if he were taking his leave. Indeed, in the next moment he was speaking into a miniature radio set he wore on his wrist. Seconds later a high-powered motor began to turn over ahead of them. Then a superfast Surfglider Quadro detached itself from the shadows below the grounds of a former factory. There were two elves on board. A woman was at the wheel, a man sat with a rapid-action rifle at the ready next to the outboard motor in the stern. Like Schmidt, they
both wore olive combat suits. The Surfglider was level with the Michel launch in an instant, standing thirty centimeters off at the most. Schmidt passed Jessi a file and the code sender. Then he climbed onto the upper deck of the Michel Standard and made ready to jump.

  "Just a moment," Pandur called to him. "We haven't talked about the ebbie. Red Cloud spoke of 50,000. Agreed?"

  "Red Cloud passed on our offer precisely," said Schmidt. "It stands. Payment on delivery. If there're any other problems, see Jessi, chummer. Or Red Cloud - if anything should happen to Jessi."

  Pandur detected a trace of cruelty in Schmidt's voice as he said the last sentence. He was pretty sure Schmidt had been intentionally cruel. He felt vindicated when the man turned to Jessi and said, "Lots of luck with everything, Jessi. And have a whole bundle of fun."

  He jumped.

  The elf in the stern caught him. The Surfglider sped away, disappearing in the shadows out of which it had emerged.

  "The booster chips and the ultra-torps are silicon trash, but I suppose they'll hold out for these few hours," was the first thing the greyhead came out with after jacking into the central unit of the Vulcan Delphin RQ-7.

  Nothing was heard then for a while, but the row upon row of control lamps lighting up showed that the rigger was sending his savvy through the wires.

  "So ka," said Festus, grabbing the cyberhelm, which he needed for perfect all-round vision. "We're going in ten seconds."

  The electric power units, three Saeder-Krupp HighPower 12s set up a barely audible hum. The ballast express pumps pushed the Vulcan Delphin RQ-7 underwater in four seconds. The boat started to make headway, thrust itself through the open gate of the depot and glided into the Outer Alster.

  The tension relaxed for the moment. Pandur leaned back in his seat and tried to see out through the plexdome. A pointless endeavor in the filthy, oily water. Besides, it was slowly getting dark. Only a few dim lights could be made out. But with Festus at the controls he had a good feeling.