Shadowrun 46 - A Fistful of Data

by Stephen Dedman (v1. 0) (epub)

  “The good news is that I think I can get us the guns we need, tonight.”

  “Where from?” asked Yoko.

  “Lone Star.”

  “You want to rip off Lone Star?” asked Lankin, obviously appalled.

  “Not exactly,” Ratatosk replied, grinning. “Just a few slightly bent cops who have a sideline using Lone Star property. You know how any weapons that get confiscated are supposed to be destroyed? Well, some of them aren’t exactly destroyed. The man who runs the junkyard picks out the weapons with good resale value and finds buyers for them. His understanding with the cops is that these guns’ll either go to collectors, or get shipped outside the UCAS, so they never get used in a crime locally and Lone Star never has to explain why they weren’t melted down as required by law. He backs this up by having the cops who deliver the confiscated weapons to his yard also transport to the buyers the guns that’re being sold—that way, in addition to getting their cut, the cops know where the weapons have gone, in case they ever are used again in a way that Lone Star finds embarrassing. The cops who make the run think of it as a perk, and management either doesn’t know about it or ignores it. Same with the city. Anyway, the van is plainwrap, and we don’t hit it on its way to the junkyard, when it’s on official business—we ambush it on the way back, when it’s supposedly deadheading but is actually carrying a load of illegal guns. If we can do it without damaging the cops or the vehicle, they won’t even report it. Of course, the only surefire way to do that is with magic.” Yoko considered this. “You’re sure there’s one of these deliveries happening tonight?”

  “Pretty sure. Deliveries to the junkyard get made a couple of times a week, and there’s one leaving the evidence storeroom at four a.m.; I checked the schedule. The last delivery included some military weapons they took from those Humanis fraggers they convicted last week—plenty of time to pick out the good stuff and find some buyers by now. I think it’s worth a chance.” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, I don’t know where the meet is happening, so we can’t ambush them; we’ll have to tail them from the junkyard to the meet. So we’ll need two cars.”

  Yoko nodded. “Okay . . . but if the buyers are already there, and they’re already armed, just keep driving. I’d rather try buying weapons from the all-night pawnshops than have any of you fail to get back by sunrise. Maggie, do you know any sleep spells?”

  “Of course,” said Magnusson mildly without looking up from his pocket computer.

  “Sumatra?”

  “Only stunbolt,” said the rat shaman apologetically.

  “Okay.” She looked around the circle. “8-ball, you’re the team leader. Ratatosk, you cover them from the Matrix. Let’s roll.”

  Cooper yawned. He disliked night shifts, but he also disliked day shifts and most other forms of work, and at least the night shift paid better. Particularly these milk runs to and from the junkyard. He’d had the Roadmaster on autopilot on the way there, and even though he was yawning his head off he switched it to manual for the return journey so the unauthorized detour wouldn’t be recorded. It was raining heavily enough that the autopilot would have slowed the van down to walking speed anyway, even though there were hardly any other vehicles in sight at this hour.

  Godley had gone back to sleep as soon as the van had been unloaded and loaded, but that was his right as a sergeant and Cooper knew he’d wake up as soon as they reached the rendezvous with the buyer so he didn’t miss out on his cut. He looked at the map projected on the dash; another seven klicks to the Stuffer Shack, the buyer and some coffee that was slightly better than the drek they served at the station. He waited until he could see the familiar double-S sign through the rain, barely a block ahead, then thumbed the radio mic and told the dispatcher they were taking fifteen minutes personal time. Godley stirred and opened one bleary eye. “Are we there?”

  Cooper sped up as he swung into the parking lot, then decelerated and came to a screeching halt a few centimeters from a concrete barrier. “We are now. No sign of the contact, though.”

  Godley closed his eye again. “Wake me up when he gets here,” he muttered. Cooper snorted, pulled up the collar of his armor jacket and stepped out into the rain.

  Magnusson switched on the autopilot, picked up his old-fashioned binoculars and peered through the back window of Patty’s Superkombi as the gray Roadmaster receded into the distance. “They’ve stopped at the Stuffer Shack on 136th Street East and the driver’s gone in,” he said into his earplug phone. “His partner’s still in the van, but I can’t see him clearly enough to cast a spell. Don’t know whether this is the meet or just a pit stop.”

  “Understood,” replied Ratatosk, still in the library at the Crypt, and jacked in. It took him only a few seconds to locate the Stuffer Shack’s CPU, take control of the security cameras, and isolate the Panicbutton so that any calls for help would go unanswered.

  “Anyone else in the lot?” asked 8-ball.

  “One three-door Jackrabbit and an old Americar,” said Magnusson. “If either is the buyer, the load must be fairly small.”

  “See you there,” said 8-ball, tromping the accelerator. The two vehicles had been shadowing the Roadmaster from the time it left the junkyard, with one following and one a few blocks ahead. The dwarf looked at Sumatra, who was hunched over in the passenger seat, and grinned. “It’s showtime.”

  Pinhead Pierce rolled the rusty drum into place, blocking a gap in the wall, then thumped once on the lid and listened with the air of a connoisseur. “What’s in these things?” asked Beef Patty, who had picked up a half-empty drum under each arm and was walking across the rubble.

  “Dunno.”

  “Can we empty them out?”

  “That’d ruin the sound. I spent months puttin’ this set together!”

  Patty shook her head. “Hey, d’you know what they call someone who spends all his time hanging out with musicians?”

  “A drummer, right?” said Pierce. “Ha-ha. If I had a nuyen for every time I’d heard that one, I coulda bought this place myself.”

  The troll smiled as she dropped the drums and pushed them into position. “You ever considered working for a living?”

  “What for?” Pierce picked up a length of wire and began stringing it across a gap in the wall. “I got all I need right here. Never had anythin’ else, so I don’t miss it. ’Sides, you can’t be a great musician unless you’re hungry—or even a great drummer, before you say it. You can’t let a day job or anything else stop you goin’ where you need to go. What do you do when you’re not hangin’ around here? Apart from killin' people?”

  Patty shook her head, then picked up another two drums. “I stop people killing my friends, and my friends stop people killing me.”

  “Friends are good,” Pierce agreed, “but no one’s tryin’ to kill me.”

  Patty grunted. “Not yet, maybe. Hand me that entrenching tool. No, the thing that looks like a shovel. Yeah, that one.”

  The Roadmaster’s windows were too heavily tinted for Sumatra to see through, and 8-ball’s thermographic vision showed only that there was someone warm inside. 8-ball tested the passenger-side door, which proved to be locked. The same for the driver’s side and the cargo doors. The dwarf took out his maglock passkey just as a cop came sprinting back toward the van, a cup of coffee in his right hand and the remote key for the car in his left. He hesitated for just a moment before dropping the cup and reaching for his gun, giving Sumatra enough time to cast a stunbolt spell, which he cast with all the force he could summon and no regard for the drain. The cop hit the ground, and Sumatra wavered as though he were about to do the same, but grabbed on to the side of the van. “Grab the keys,” he muttered.

  “You okay?” asked the dwarf, as he pried the keys from the cop’s fingers and ran back toward the passenger-side door.

  The shaman nodded weakly, then looked up as the Su-perkombi drove into the parking lot, blocking the exit.

  “Okay,” said 8-ball. “Get down in case someone start
s shooting.” He drew the narcoject pistol out of his belt, and raised his wristphone to his chin. “Maggie? Get over here and get ready with the magic fingers.” He kept the pistol trained at the door, but there was no sign of movement, so he risked a quick glance at the Stuffer Shack. No one else seemed interested in venturing into the downpour. 8-ball reached into a pocket for two folded caltrops, flicked them open with a skill born of long practice and ran across the parking lot, dropping one spike each behind the front passenger wheels of the Americar and the Jackrabbit. The caltrops were of toughened transparent plastic—difficult to see even at the best of times, and almost invisible in water— and sharp enough to shred ordinary tires. The Roadmaster, he knew, would have runflat wheels, and the spikes wouldn’t even slow it down. Magnusson came running across the parking lot. 8-ball pressed the button on the key chain to unlock the doors, Sumatra swung the door open, and Magnusson hit the cop inside with a stunbolt before he’d even opened his eyes. It made no apparent difference. Sumatra closed the door again, being careful not to slam it, and 8-ball muttered, “Grab the other cop, put him back in his seat. We don’t want anyone running over him.”

  The ork shrugged, picked up the unconscious body and ungently dragged it toward the driver’s side of the Road-master, while 8-ball opened the cargo compartment and stared inside. “Not bad,” he said, quickly opening two duffel bags. “A couple of silenced HK-227s, a Skorpion, and . . .” He counted quickly. “Six FN HARs. Eight guns and a piece of drek, and no ammo.”

  Magnusson shrugged. “It’ll do. I hope we won’t have to use them, though if you and Yoko could give a few quick lessons ...”

  “There’s a shotgun in the cab,” said Sumatra, “and they’ve got pistols, stun guns, armor vests—”

  “No,” said the 8-ball. “If we take those, they’ll have to report that they were robbed, and there’ll be an investigation. This gear doesn’t officially exist anymore, so they’re not going to tell anyone it’s gone.”

  Sumatra let it drop, though he clearly wasn’t happy about it. “What about the buyer?” he asked. “Whoever it is is bound to be carrying money, and maybe some guns as well.”

  “I suggest we get out of here before that becomes an issue.”

  “Right,” said 8-ball, picking up the heavier of the duffels. When he’d loaded both bags into the Land Rover, he tossed the keys to the truck into the Roadmaster’s cab and shut the door. “Pleasant dreams,” he said, smiling.

  The shadowrunners were a block and a half away when a Eurovan pulled into the parking lot and four orks in camouflage armor jackets climbed out and surrounded the Roadmaster.

  For security reasons, the meres had flown in on five different flights, meeting up again in the cheap hotel the Hatter had booked for them. They’d all stayed in worse accommodations before, but even the largest bedrooms were small, and while the ceilings were high enough for ogres or elves, the building obviously hadn’t been designed for trolls, and Crabbe had bumped his head trying to get through the doorway. The rooms hadn’t been designed for meetings either, thought Quinn sourly, but she knew that it would be a mistake to ask the meres to gather in the bar.

  She looked around and mentally did a roll call. She was relatively new to this team, and she was still amazed by the motley mix of humans and metahumans Wallace, their leader, had managed to gather around himself. Hartz was eating something that stank like pepper spray; she didn’t know whether it was characteristic of all ogres, but it seemed that if he wasn’t actually on duty, he was feeding his misshapen face. Dutch was sitting upwind of him, sharpening his second-best knife. Quinn considered him one of the best at knife-work she’d ever seen—and that was saying something, considering how many places she’d served where knives were the enemy’s primary weapon. Crabbe was dozing beside the door, sitting up because there wasn’t room on the floor for his three-meter frame and beautifully curved horns. He would have been difficult to miss at any time, even without his habit of drawing attention to himself by affecting a muscle shirt and board shorts in any weather.

  With the ogre, the ork and the troll checked off her list, Quinn looked around the room for her fellow humans. Lewis was sitting at the writing-desk, reading an old-fashioned paperback book—or photographing the pages and storing the images in his headware memory for later reference. Knight was cleaning the gun in his gleaming custom cyberarm. Kat was asleep with her eyes open but switched off; her hand razors slid out as she dreamed, then retracted. Wallace, Lori and Griffin were still at the meet with the Johnson, so that left four team members unaccounted for. “Has anyone seen Lily?”

  “Here,” said the dwarf from behind the telecom. She raised her manicured hand so that it was visible, and waved. “Okay. What about Carpenter, Severn and King?” “King and Carpenter are waiting for the pups to pass through Customs,” said Dutch. He yawned—always an impressive sight, because his mouth was huge, and his sharp tusks protruded almost to the tips of his pendulous earlobes. “A vet’s looking them over. King called in, said they’d probably be another half hour, an hour at the outside. He couldn’t decide whether the vet was scared of the barghests, or just hadn’t seen very many in his career so was taking his time. Severn was on the same flight, and he’s hanging around to catch a ride with them.”

  Quinn nodded. She trusted Severn; he and Hartz had served with her in the Desert Wars. She was mildly irritated that King had reported to Dutch rather than to her, but the ork had been Wallace’s exec before she’d been recruited into the company, and King seemed to have an old-fashioned prejudice against female soldiers, especially good-looking ones. Or maybe it was only female officers he disliked, or redheads, because there seemed to be no friction between him and Kat, or Lily, or Lori.

  Well, she thought, that was everyone accounted for, if not exactly present and arguably not correct. It bothered her that Wallace didn’t require his team to show even a minimum of military discipline when off duty. Between the nonregulation haircuts (Griffin’s shaggy blond mane and Lily’s braids) and the nonregulation footwear (Lori’s moccasins, Kat’s sneakers, and Knight’s cowboy boots) it was hard to tell if they were even prepared to go into combat.

  But she didn’t doubt their loyalty to Wallace and to each other, even if she wasn’t sure what most of them thought of her.

  “Okay,” she said, with only a hint of a sigh. “Everybody check their gear, then grab some sack time. Reveille at five hundred hours, breakfast in the dining room at five fifteen, and room service is not an option. Dismissed.”

  The squatters lined up along the street ranged in age from a seventy-one-year-old retired teacher to two of her twelve-year-old pupils. Yoko appraised them, careful to keep her expression neutral; she’d taught unarmed combat techniques to children younger than this, but for this class had imposed an age requirement. Five of the teenagers— Akira, Leila, Easy, Hook and Pike—were promising students; a few others had attended some of her self-defense classes before becoming bored or scared.

  It was darker outside than it was in most rooms of the Crypt; the sliver-thin moon wouldn’t rise for hours, gray clouds obscured most of the stars, and there were no working streetlights for several blocks in any direction, most of them having been used for target practice. This left most of the humans in the class at a decided disadvantage, but Yoko had long suspected that fair fights were almost as rare as military intelligence. She hefted a meter-long stick in her left hand as she walked along the line, and said, “I’m hoping that none of us will have to fight, but the people who are trying to oust us will approach us assuming we will resist. They'll probably have better armor than we do, and more guns, and better night vision, than some of you. The only advantages we have are that there’ll be more of us and we know the ground.

  “Other members of the coven have gone to obtain guns, which will be given to the sentries. Someone else will train you in using those. As for why we are here . . .” She drew her favorite knife, a powerful weapon focus, from her belt with her right hand. “Most
of you have knives of some sort. If you have one, wear it from now on.” She sheathed the knife again and raised her club. “Each one of you should be able to find a good, solid stick, about this length.

  Keep it handy. A stick extends your reach, and you can hit with one of these much harder than you can with your fists. Not only will it hurt them more, it'll also hurt you less. You can hit the soft parts of a body with your feet and hands, if you insist, but for the hard parts, you use a tool. If someone points a gun at you and you can’t reach him with a stick this long, do this”—she dropped the club and raised her hands—‘‘and hope that he won’t shoot an unarmed person. If you have room to use a sword or a spear, then he has room to use a rifle, so that advice still applies. Don’t draw your knife unless there’s no other option, and don’t throw it unless you’re sure of damaging something vital, such as the spine—otherwise, you’re just disarming yourself and giving him another weapon.”

  Didge raised a hand. “How do you hit someone in the spine?”

  “From behind,” she said shortly. “And the only circumstance under which that’s justified is to protect someone else, and it assumes that your knife can get through his armor. Now, his head, chest and groin are where he’s likely to have the most armor, so you’re much better off going for his limbs and trying to disarm him. Armor isn’t much use against an armlock.

  “In case any of you do get into a corner where fighting looks like the best option, I’m going to teach you a few tricks. Most of this is bastardized Escrima, Filipino stick and knife fighting. If you don’t think you can fight like that, to protect yourselves or your friends or your children, then go back downstairs and see if there’s any other way you can help. I won’t hold it against you: I’d rather know who can and will fight before I put you, or anyone else, in danger.”

  She looked along the line. No one flinched, not even the gray-haired teacher. “Okay, then. Leila. Try to take this stick from me.”