“Not really.” Mack patted Renault’s shoulder—which was a good foot above his own—as he turned to join the conversation. “Blackwater wasn’t a double anything. He was and is out for his own agenda. And right now none of our contacts in Los Angeles have been able to find him, or that nasty little hobgoblin he’s with.”
“Clockwork.” Slamm-0! sat back down. “They’ve probably already left town, taking her to NeoNET. That’s who was going to buy her before.”
“I doubt that,” Delaney said as Mack stood beside her. She glanced at Renault, who was busy connecting whatever was in his briefcase to Mack’s system. The vids activated. Four of them appeared on the left of the desk, and Kazuma felt their static as they came online. He looked at the small projector in the center of the table before it activated, and a flat projection appeared. It would show the same thing on either side, as if looking at a mirror.
“You were undercover?” MoonShine prompted.
“Yes. Investigating Horizon’s recent activities.”
“What activities?”
“Their hiring of Knight Errant, and not using PCC security to clear that Annex before it was destroyed. And it was destroyed on time early this morning.”
“Why is that a reason to be investigated?” Slamm-0! asked. “Corporations hire private security all the time.”
Kazuma opened a protein bar and took a bite. It was as bland as he remembered, but he was hungry enough to eat cardboard. “That’s why you were curious? The Pueblo Corporate Council runs Los Angeles, and essentially the city’s security. Why hire a private company?”
Delaney nodded. “Exactly. I was put there to investigate that reason. Was there something to hide in that Annex? Did Horizon have someone inside Knight Errant in their pocket?”
Kazuma drank some water to wash the bland down. “Did you find out why?”
“Mr. Tetsu, did you know about that data prior to being put in charge of wiping that host?”
“No. I thought all three hosts had already been archived. That’s what we were given as specs.”
“Did you volunteer for the project?”
“No. I was promoted and assigned—” He stopped and stared up at her before continuing. “I was assigned the host, and given full authority in overseeing its destruction.” He looked from Delaney to Mack to Silk, and then back to Delaney. “Someone wanted me to find that data?”
“Tell me how you discovered it was there.”
“Well, it’s routine to do a full diagnostic of a host before it’s destroyed. To see if any of it can be used in small, redundant systems—which this host had been used for before. That’s why it was there. To store archived records for Horizon. And I’d gotten in the habit of plugging in my own parameters when I searched, piggybacking it on the KE regulation monitor.”
“And that’s when you found your sister’s name?”
“Yes. And when I found the name Caliban.”
Delaney and Renault glanced at each another.
Mack shook his head. “Not familiar with that one. Was that your sister’s online persona?”
“No. It was a name given to me by a private investigator I’d hired a few years ago, the first time Hitori disappeared. After she showed up again, I tried to find him to let him know she was fine, but he was hard to get hold of. When she disappeared again a few months ago—he contacted me in the Matrix. He showed me a host…” Kazuma cringed as he remembered how it looked, how it felt and tasted. “A place where those that had experienced dissonance could go and express the horror and sickness they saw. He called it dark resonance—resonance tainted with the darkness of dissonant technomancers. He said more of the dark resonance was coming, that Caliban would create more hosts with real dissonance. He told me to change my persona name to Soldat, and to start searching for Hitori and Caliban.” He licked his lips. “And then something else was in the host with us, and we severed our connections.”
“You ever try to find this host again?”
Kazuma looked at Slamm-0! “I did, but instead of the exhibition of dark resonance, I found a host corrupted with it. I barely got out of there. Silk had to come get me.”
“He was sick for days after that submersion.” Silk looked around Kazuma to see Slamm-0! “I wanted to find it again. I wanted to see it for myself, and I did after a week of looking. But what I saw was a little different.”
“Are you a technomancer?” Delaney asked Silk.
Silk put her elbows on the table. “I am and I’m not. I have too much cyberware to be fully functional, and my ability to travel into the resonance is pretty much nil. I can see it, but I can’t touch it. Not the way Hitori or Kazuma can. But I can connect without the commlink or a deck, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Oh, wow,” Shayla piped up. “Do you use a RCC—wait a minute! Was that you who hacked my RCC?”
Silk laughed. “Guilty. And I’m sorry. But I wanted Kazuma out of there in one piece. I hope I didn’t damage anything.”
“No…but you did that using a techno’s ability?”
“Yes. I sent a machine sprite into it. Messed up your connection a bit, and sort of did my own thing.”
“Okay, that’s great,” Mack interrupted. “But we need to get back to the point.”
“Which is?” Preacher asked.
Delaney continued. “That there were forces at work behind the scenes, driving Kazuma to his ultimate destination. Strings were pulled and manipulated so he would find that data and take it.”
Kazuma and Silk looked at one another, and he took her hand in his before he looked back at Delaney. “Who?”
“Hang on.” Slamm-0! held up his hands. “I just got a message from Blackwater.”
“Put it on the screen.” Mack released access to Slamm-0!.
Blackwater’s face appeared in sharp, defined living color. Kazuma leaned back and glared at the image. It was a recording.
“Hey chummers, miss me?” He laughed, showing silver and yellow teeth. “I’m pretty sure about right now you’re all wondering what we did with your little elf techno freak. So, me and my new omae got a little proposition for you. I suggest you take it, or according to Clockwork, NeoNET gets a new hire.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Unknown Location
The world Netcat woke to was destroyed. She stood on the precipice of a cliff, looking out over a desolate, bleak landscape. A cold wind whipped debris into her fur and roared in her tiny, pointed ears. Did someone finally drop the bomb? Is this all that’s left?
Below and to her right, she saw metahumans emerge from the bombed-out rubble of what once might have been a library—the dusty remnants of books, paper, desks, and lamps were strewn in all directions, constantly whipped up by the wind. The gray sky swirled with orange and purple clouds, over a world caught in an apocalyptic twilight.
A warehouse loomed in the background with metal cans outside, each ablaze with a warming fire. She held her paw up to protect her face from the wind as she climbed down from the cliff’s edge and took a road beaten into the dry and cracked earth. As she neared, others took note of her and watched as she came closer, but no one came to greet her, nor did they look at her as if she were an enemy or a stranger.
Netcat thought she saw pity in their eyes.
People, dressed for all walks of life, stood around warming themselves. Some talked quietly. Some sat against the ruined library. An elderly man with long, white hair fluttering in the wind smiled at her and pointed to the library door. He was dressed the nicest. Clean, unmarked by the landscape.
The library’s interior was as stark as the outside. Lights buzzed overhead, and in every corner were groups of people. No…these were icons! Some were actual images of metahumans, while others were personas. Some were out of the box and less-detailed, while others were high-definition renderings of different creatures, from wolves and bears down to a lone duck and complaining squirrel. A medieval knight paced endlessly back and forth, and in one corner sat the saddest clo
wn in—wherever the hell they were.
When she finally looked down at herself, she realized she was in her black cat persona.
I’m in the Matrix! But how? I didn’t submerge. And if I did, I didn’t prepare my body. I need to sever the connection.
Her AR didn’t respond to her. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t pull back out of the Matrix!
“That’s not going to work,” a voice said to her left. She looked up into the fine features of a warrior elf. His dark hair flowed over his battle armor and the hilt of a sword stuck up behind him. His eyes were amber, and had a slight wizened look. She knew the player was much older than the persona when she looked into them. “The commlinks don’t work.”
“Where are we?” Netcat sat with her paws firmly planted in front of her. Her tail twitched behind her.
“Most of us assume we’re on a Contagion host. Private access. You can’t log into it, and you can’t log out. We’re stuck here.”
“How many of us are there?”
“Oh, close to fifty or so. There were more—but with Caliban’s last temper-tantrum—we lost about thirty.”
Netcat leaned her head forward. “Caliban?” Why was that name familiar?
He stood up, and she noticed his lower half didn’t match his upper. From the waist up he was an elf warrior. But from the waist down he wore calf-length shorts, white socks and house shoes. He saw her looking and pointed at it. “It’ll happen to you too, the longer you’re here. Come on.”
She padded behind him, over the rocks and debris inside the library to a back area. A woman who looked a lot like Quan Yin in all her glory, from the silk robes to the floating scarves about her hair, sat in a chair talking to a semicircle of icons. Most of them were still in their persona forms, but there were a few that looked as they probably would in the physical world.
Something cold brushed past her as she followed the elf warrior. She jumped and hissed when she turned, and then bounded up onto the elf’s shoulder. Looking back, she tried to focus on whatever it was that had unnerved her, and though she sensed something was there, she couldn’t quite see it.
“Ah…e-sense. You know he’s there.”
“Who is he?” She remained on his shoulder as he pulled a chair out at an empty table in the back. She leapt onto the table and faced him.
He shrugged. “Who knows? Only the ones who’ve been here for the longest can say because they can still see them. But they tell me I should be happy I can’t, because what they are is what we’ll become.”
“I don’t understand. What’s going on? How come all the personas look half-finished and what is it on a host that I can’t see but sets off all my nerves?”
He stared steadily at her. “I think introductions first. My name’s Harold Tremere. My Matrix persona was HipOldGuy.”
Netcat’s tiny jaw dropped. “Hip! I’m Netcat!”
The look in the elf’s eyes brightened, and he held out his arms. She jumped into them and gave him the best hug a cat could. Once done, she returned to the table, but kept a paw on his hand. “What happened to you?”
“Did Soldat get my message?”
“Yeah. But we didn’t know what it was. Silk sent it to Shyammo, who uploaded it. Is that really what happened to you?”
“Yeah. I was trying out the TechnoHack game. You know, getting that intel I talked about?” He shrugged. “I’ve been here ever since.”
“What’s happening here?”
He stared at her for a few seconds. “We’re here to build a ladder.”
Netcat frowned. “Say that again?”
“Caliban wants a ladder to the Resonance Realms, and he thinks we can build him one that’ll cross the event horizon and get him there.”
“Who is this Caliban? And—” she leaned in close and again and twitched her whiskers. “Resonance realms? Is everyone here a technomancer?”
“Yes. All of us. And most of the ones surviving here were registered, either with their local government or a corporation like Horizon. And promised to be protected. Everyone I’ve talked to got a demo copy of this game and a free password for a subscription. But once they subscribed and stated to play, they’ve never been able to sever.”
“Is this the game? Building this ladder?”
“Oh. No. I saw the game. The host was full of dissonance wells. Just nasty puddles of them. Corrupted code everywhere. It’s no wonder the game was getting bad reviews. But those blackouts? They happen when Caliban draws too much from us, and the host goes out.”
“Draws too much from us?” Netcat blinked. “I’m not following.”
He patted his shoulder. “Come on.”
Netcat jumped onto his shoulder, and Harold strode past the mismatched icons and personas, even brushing past that cold, horrible presence again on his way to the doors. Outside in the maelstrom, he held up his shield to protect her from the wind as he moved toward the warehouse to another cliff and pointed.
Above them, twisting and swirling, was a resonance stream. It glistened like spun glass as iridescent glints of light twinkled through the orange-gray sky. Something stuck out of the top of the warehouse below it and continued up toward the stream. From where she sat on his shoulder, it looked like it was getting close.
“That is the ladder he wants us to build so he can touch the stream.”
“Is that a real stream?”
“Yes. He found it here by using technomancers. You need to see this.”
He moved against the wind from the edge toward the warehouse and walked inside. There weren’t any locks or guards as they entered. The room was cooler and dimly lit, but her cat’s eyes adjusted easily. Most of the place was empty from what she could see, except for a light in the center. The closer they got, the more she wanted to back up.
Three men lay in the center of a bright white light, their heads together to form a sort of triangle. They were naked, and not in any sort of living persona she could tell. Their eyes stared up into nothing, and their mouths were open in silent screams.
“This is the ladder’s base. These are what Caliban calls the first ones. He’s nicknamed them. Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian. But their real names are Jesus Huerta, Morion Baron and Radcliff Tolen.”
“How do you know that?”
“Quan Yin, back in the library, told me. She’s the overseer of the host. She’s an AI and here to answer questions she can. Of course there’s a price for the question.” He gestured down at his lower half. “She takes a bit of your strength when you ask.”
“Who…are or were they?”
“I didn’t ask that. I wanted to keep what I had left for a bit longer.”
Floating above them, ever threatening to smash their heads, was a flat concrete platform. On top of that was the base of a great ladder. She couldn’t tell immediately what the ladder was made of, but she knew she didn’t want to go near it.
She didn’t want to be in the same room with it.
“Harold…”
“You can feel it, can’t you? Can you hear them, Net? I can. I hear them all the time, and I know that one day, I’ll be there with them.”
She looked too hard at the ladder and realized, as she hissed and jumped down and ran out of the warehouse, what the rungs of the ladder were made of.
Chapter Forty-Six
One of Mack’s clubs
Mack tapped the folders in the display Renault had uploaded to his office PAN. Only Delaney, Renault, and he had access to it for editing. Everyone else could only look at it.
He found the file on himself as fascinating as Delaney had.
As one of Hestaby’s Clutch, his childhood had been good. Protected. Disciplined. He’d been happy—but he’d been most happy when he was enveloped in the Matrix.
For over thirty years, he’d tried to block out the more painful memories—of how his abilities waned when he hit puberty. He remembered the sad faces of the others, the knowing looks the dragon gave him when he could no longer hear the whispers of the da
tasphere. The others were kind to him…
But nothing could erase the shame he’d felt. Others had grown up around him, and lost their abilities. When they left, off to other lives, Mack had boasted he would never lose his connection, that he would always be able to touch and to hear the threads of the Matrix.
It had all changed—just as Hestaby said it would. And eventually it was gone, and he was no longer able to stay at Shasta.
His life as documented in Wagner’s files was pretty much true. A drifter, never a wageslave. He’d gambled and lost and gambled and won. He had three clubs to show for it and enough nuyen squirreled away in accounts Wagner never found to retire off three times over.
But he kept going, he kept searching.
For what? That was Delaney’s question. Something she’d asked after showing him the folder and asking if it was true—that he had been otaku and protected by a dragon.
He decided not to answer then, but now as he mulled over the folder and the information with the image of the woman on the vid near his desk, he signaled the door to open and smiled when Delaney charged in, a determined look on her face.
“Mack—I keep hitting a brick wall. I swear this Ferdinand Bellex doesn’t exist! Maybe Renault’s right, and he’s just a—” That’s when her eyes met those of the woman on the screen.
Mack smirked when he saw recognition on Delaney’s face. Hestaby had a look not many forgot—especially given the events of the past six months. “Delaney Charis, I’d like you to meet Hestaby.”
Delaney looked as if she didn’t know whether to bow or curtsey.
Hestaby’s speaker gave a soft laugh, though her lips never moved. “Delaney Charis, it is a pleasure to meet you. I was just going over the information you and your partner were able to find.”
Mack turned to face Delaney and shook his head. “She won’t bite. At least not from here.”
“I, uh…” Delaney licked her lips. “Is, uh, the information good?”
“Well, of course it is. He has also informed me of Mr. Blackwater and Mr. Clockwork’s offer to trade the elf technomancer for Mr. Tetsu and the packet of information. I know Mack’s thoughts, and my own, but what are yours?”
Shadowrun: Dark Resonance Page 21