“Preferably someone strong enough to push the van if it breaks down,” said 8-ball a few seconds later. He looked straight at Pierce, who did his best to avoid his gaze.
“Where are we going to go?” asked a young girl.
Boanerges sighed. “That’s up to Ms. Hotop, but right | now the best option is the squatter camp near Petrowski ij Farms. There’s a soup kitchen there, and no racial bias: they dislike everyone more or less equally.”
“I’ll drive the van,” said Crane awkwardly. “Can you give me a couple of minutes to pack my gear?”
Boanerges nodded. “You can have ten. Ms. Hotop, can you get the kids and your stuff ready, and meet Crane back I here by then?”
“Can we make it fifteen?” asked the teacher, who’d had more experience in trying to herd children.
“Fifteen,” said Boanerges. “And anyone else who wants to leave before sunset—speak to Crane or Ms. Hotop, and they’ll work out a roster.” He sighed inaudibly. “Okay, we’re done here.”
8-ball cornered Pierce as they filed out of the hall. “You’ve been a roadie, haven’t you? Surely you can drive a manual transmission.”
“Can we talk about this later?” asked the ork, trying to dodge past him. “I’d like to get to the can before the kids start lining up.”
8-ball stepped aside, then followed him toward the alcove euphemistically known as the downstairs bathroom—a stolen Porta-John, a compost toilet hidden inside a cardboard spiral, and a trough filled during wet weather by seepage from the rainwater tank. “You can’t possibly drive any worse than you shoot,” the dwarf said. “And you don’t seem to have a major problem with sunlight. Why are you staying?”
“ ’Cause I’d rather be shot than spend a couple of hours with the Gravedigger,” Pierce replied. “ ’Sides, I’d feel like a coward, an’ a louse. I’d rather be the next one carried out of here than the first to walk. Got it?”
“Someone has to go,” said 8-ball. “No one would have thought you were a coward. And nothing personal, Pierce, but I’d rather Crane had decided to stay, and not just because he can shoot. You’re safer out there than in here, and he isn’t. In fact, he’s going to be in much deeper drek.” “What?”
“Why do you think he came here? He went up against Pok Moon, and they don’t call his syndicate the Divine Revenge Ring for laughs. They’re staking out his apartment and his garage; he was lucky to get out alive with what he had in the car, and he had to dump the car before they traced it and get a friend to drive him here. He was going to head off for another city when he’d finished healing.” Pierce digested this unpalatable news slowly. “Could Pok Moon have hired those meres outside?”
“I guess so, but it’s not likely. They’ve put a bounty on his head, but it’s only ten thou, and Wallace and his squad would cost at least twice that much a day, not including expenses. No, I think this is something else.” He lowered his voice. “Look, you want to go on a run when this is over?”
“Sure!”
“We're getting a team together to hit Crane’s place. Most of the stuff is still there, because the place is booby trapped to hell. Crane's told us how to get past the traps and move the stuff out; we just have to take care of any Seoulpa who may be waiting for him to get back.”
The ork’s eyes lit up until they were almost gleaming. “You’re serious?”
“We can find a job for you, even if it’s only guarding the meat. But there’s one thing you’ll have to do first.” “What’s that?” asked Pierce warily.
“Not get killed.”
Easy looked at the shabbily dressed troll as he made his second orbit of the block, singing an old-fashioned-sounding song. Then she glanced at her “mirror,” the human mere standing guard on her corner. He was also watching the troll, though his gun was still pointed at the sky. The troll segued into another tune, then ambled across the sidewalk and stepped over the remains of the brick wall onto the Crypt’s ground-level rooftop garden. The sentry stiffened and brought the gun down slightly, but didn’t shoot. Easy turned around to watch the troll, who was looking around as though lost. She considered challenging him, but reached for her radio instead of aiming her gun. “Intruder alert!” she whispered.
Yoko, in the dining hall, picked up the radio. “How many, and how armed?”
“One. Troll. No weapons. I—”
Haz turned around and grinned, and Easy was hit with the full force of the toxic spirit’s terrifying power. Whimpering with fear, she dropped the radio and gripped her Roomsweeper with both shaking hands, trying to raise the muzzle high enough to take a shot at the troll. Her nerve failed her before she could get her fingers to cooperate fully, and she ran from her camouflaged sentry post onto I he sidewalk.
Lewis saw the pistol before he saw the girl holding it and immediately lowered his rifle and fired a three-round burst at her chest. Quinn turned at the sound of gunfire, and with a speed and accuracy borne of special-forces training, military-grade cyberware, and two tours of duty in the Desert Wars, fired another two shots—one in the head, one in I lie side.
Yoko shook the radio. “Easy? Easy?” She waited for a second, then dropped the radio on the floor as she ran loward the ramp.
10
At first, Boanerges thought the clattering sound was his alarm clock: it took him several seconds to recognize the staccato rhythm of a rattlesnake, a warning from his totem. He woke suddenly, rolled off his bed and onto his feet, and ran out of the lodge. He could sense—almost taste—the danger, clearly enough that no one needed to tell him which way to go.
His feet bare, he ran through the twisting corridors toward the ramp as quickly as he could, leaving his lined coat hanging beside his bed.
Mute was watching Haz make his way cautiously toward the ramp when she was suddenly distracted by the sound of rifle fire. “Yoko?” she subvocalised, and waited two heartbeats for a reply.
8-ball was in the dining hall, stripping and cleaning one of the submachine guns they’d taken from the Lone Star contraband shipment; he’d seen Yoko rush out of the room and bent down to pick her radio up from the floor. “Not here.”
“8-ball? Shots fired. And there’s an intruder heading for the ramp. Troll.”
“Fired by who?”
“Whom,” she replied automatically, then, “I’ll check.” She signed off and used her mirror to peer around the edge of her shelter. The guard on her corner, a dwarf, was nervously trying to look in every direction, and the human mere was staring at something to her east. Mute’s thermographic vision showed that the muzzle of the mere’s gun was hot; at least one of the shots fired had come from her. “Easy?” Mute subvocalized.
No reply from Easy’s radio. Mute glanced at the troll and chose the mere as the more immediate threat, holstered Iter pistol, unslung her assault rifle and aimed at the mere’s spine.
Rove leaned against the pillar at the bottom of the ramp and yawned. The gun was getting heavy, and when he’d volunteered for guard duty, it was because he’d hoped to be assigned to watch Ratatosk as he ran the Matrix and maybe pick up a few of the decker’s tricks. He wasn’t sure lie wanted to be a decker—in fact, he’d never decided what exactly he wanted to be, though he knew that he didn’t want to work in the family’s garden and greenhouse growing plants that all looked the same to him. Something a little more exciting and profitable, with lots of travel, involving lots of hardware but not too much time spent in the open.
When the toxic spirits oozed down the ramp toward him. Rove was trying to think of a really cool street name he could use if he became a rigger. He looked around when he noticed a new stench, worse than anything he’d ever smelled in the Crypt’s bathrooms or even its kitchen. Akira, who was standing on the other side of the ramp, looked up.
“What the frag is—”
“Look out!” Akira yelled, firing at one of the spirits. The bullet passed through the spirit without leaving a hole, and the monstrosity materialized as a vaguely humanoid mass of foul-smelling slu
dge and descended on him like a tsunami. Akira dropped his rifle and took up his wooden sword while Rove was still blinking.
“I don’t see—” he began, and then the second spirit materialized and he was suddenly enveloped by a wave of corrosive fluid. He tried to scream, but snapped his mouth shut as the foul liquid filled it, searing his tongue and throat as well as his face. He tried to close his eyes, but the acid was already eating away his eyelids.
Akira struck the toxic facing him with his heavy hardwood stick. The surface of the training sword bubbled and smoked as the chemicals burned it, but Akira continued to slash at the spirit, using the extra reach the sword gave him to maximum advantage. The toxic retreated slightly, and the third spirit hurled a blast of psychic venom toward the young man. Instead of fleeing in terror, as Easy had done, Akira stood his ground and struck at the second toxic again.
It dematerialized and hesitated for a moment. Its orders were simple enough—find the shaman Boanerges and lead Haz to him, removing any obstacles it encountered on the way—but it was suddenly uncertain how this should best be done. The other sentry didn’t seem to pose much of an obstacle anymore; he was writhing on the ground as another spirit’s caustic secretions burned away his skin and his clothes.
Akira stared at the remaining two toxics, waiting to see whether they would materialize again. He spared a glance at Rove, sickly aware that there was nothing he could do to help him until the spirit was magically dispelled, or moved on for reasons of its own. Suddenly, he was enveloped by a gas so foul and pungent that he could scarcely bear to keep his burning eyes open—and then the toxics materialized again, and closed on him like a pair of horrific jaws.
Angela Hotop was walking toward the ramp with five children in tow. It was fewer than she’d hoped for, but all that she’d been able to get ready by the deadline. Once these were in the van, she thought, with the driver watching over them, she could go back and try to catch some more of her pupils . . . and maybe even some of the younger teenagers who secretly were looking for a way out but had been even more scared of looking uncool or cowardly in front of their friends than of the mercenaries outside.
They were nearly at the foot of the ramp when she saw a human form writhing on the ground so completely enshrouded in a fluorescent green slime that she couldn’t recognize him. She ordered the children to run back to the kitchen and get help, then dropped her suitcase and ran toward the ramp.
8-ball looked at the small screen on his pocket computer, then turned to Pierce. “You know this guy?” he asked.
The ork shook his head. “Nope. Face like his, I wouldn’t forget in a hurry.”
“Not without brain surgery,” the dwarf agreed. He twiddled the trackball until the crosshairs were positioned half a meter ahead of the troll, glanced at the rangefinder readout, and pressed the Send button. The grenade launcher in the back of his Land Rover fired, and the concussion grenade exploded just beneath Haz’s jutting chin.
Most of the nerves in Rove’s face and hands had been eaten away by the corrosive spirit, but there was no release from the agony until he finally slid into unconsciousness from lack of air. The toxic disengaged itself as soon as its victim stopped struggling, and looked around for fresh prey. Akira was backed up against the wall and doing his best to keep the other two spirits at bay with the remains of his sword. Seeing no clear angle of attack, and aware that Haz and a fourth spirit were approaching from the surface, the spirit dematerialized and oozed down the ramp.
The blast from the grenade made no impression on the spirits at all; Akira was temporarily deafened by the explosion, but concentrating too hard on his own fight to really notice. He was unsure whether he was doing any real damage to the spirits, but they certainly seemed to be reacting as though his blows hurt. Even if they were only playing with him, he was at least delaying them, and he was confident that Boanerges or Magnusson or some other magician would soon arrive to dispel the abominations . . . and then one used its power of binding to root him to the spot, while the other retreated out of range of his sword to blast him with stream after stream of corrosive fluid. Unable to parry the attacks, he tried to dodge, but the toxins inexorably ate away the flesh of his fingers and his face.
Haz, at the top of the ramp, looked around to see where the grenade had come from, and noticed the hole in the camouflage netting draped over the car. He considered retaliating with a fireball, but he was still reeling from the concussion and fuzzily aware that the drain might knock him out. Instead, he lurched down the ramp, with the fourth toxic spirit hovering behind him.
Wallace swore loudly when he heard the shooting outside the van, and quickly looked at the tactical display. His five sentries were still roughly in position, and their biomonitors indicated that they were still alive, if breathing a little fast. “Quinn! Report!”
“One of—” his exec began, but the sentence was cut off by the sound of a nearby explosion. She instinctively ducked, and Lewis, who was even closer to the top of the ramp, dropped to his knees and held his gun over his head. ‘Quinn?”
“ ’Mokay,” she murmured, looking around cautiously. “Lewis?”
The sentry muttered something, and Wallace glanced at his biomonitor readout. Heartbeat up, but otherwise nominal. “Griffin?”
A window appeared on the monitor, showing the aerial view from the rotodrone. Wallace saw Lewis pick himself up, and noticed the body near his feet. “Thanks. Can you zoom out? Where the frag is that—okay, I see him,” he said, as the picture widened to show the top of the ramp and Haz beginning his unsteady descent into the depths. “Chief?” said Lewis shakily. “We just—”
“She had a gun in her hand,” Quinn interrupted, “and—”
“I can see it,” Wallace replied. “Are you—”
“She’s dead! She’s just a kid, and she—”
“—hurt? And who fired the—”
“—wasn’t shooting or—”
“—she was running toward—”
“—fragging grenade?”
“It wasn’t either of—”
“Actually, I think it was a nonfragging grenade,” Griffin interjected.
“You didn’t fire it?”
“No.”
“Neither—”
Wallace turned down the volume on Quinn’s and Lewis’ radios to a murmur. “Griff, is that machine gun loaded with gel?”
“Yes. They gave us one belt of gel, one of explosives, and three jacketed, all but the gel mixed with tracers. Did you ask for explosives?”
“No.” Wallace grabbed what little remained of his patience. “I want suppressing fire if anyone comes out of that hole. No one is to get to the sidewalk. You got that?” “Wilco. Uh ... does that include the woman in the northeast corner?” He panned with the camera until the monitor showed Mute, her rifle at the ready.
“Drek. Yeah, her too.”
“And Haz?”
“Yes,” Wallace replied, staring at the screen. He wasn’t sure whose side the troll was on, whether he was working for Fedorov or the Crypt or only for himself, but he wasn’t one of his team. He thumbed a switch and addressed the entire squad. “This is Wallace. Until further notice, ground level of the area bordered by the sidewalks is a no-go area for everyone. Is that understood? Our side, their side, armed, unarmed, young, old, everyone.”
Griffin stared at the view through the camera mounted on the rotodrone’s machine gun, aligned the crosshairs on Mute and pressed the firing button.
Angie Hotop ran through the toxic spirit’s astral form without noticing any more than a vague sense of unease, a faint impression of clamminess and sour sweat. The spirit considered chasing her, then noticed the huddle of children the teacher had left behind. Gleefully, it dived into the center of the crowd, spraying a nauseating stench of advanced decay in all directions. The children scattered, screaming—some back to the kitchen, some toward the ramp', others into the maze of corridors.
Ms. Hotop bent over Rove’s acid-etched body, t
hen glanced over her shoulder as she heard panicked children running toward her. She looked up the ramp and saw Akira locked in a desperate battle with two creatures of sludge and slime. They reminded her of paintings of malignant water spirits that had terrified her as a child. Beyond him, silhouetted against the gray sky, was the monstrous form of a deformed troll lumbering down the ramp toward her. Four children ran past her in blind panic, hurrying toward the exit—and the troll, who was charging in the other direction. The troll decided they were too small to be worth his attention; he roared at them as he swatted them out of his path, but didn’t look back once they were behind him.
Ms. Hotop looked up and down the ramp, paralyzed for an instant by indecision as much as fear, before summoning all of her courage and deciding to follow the children who’d left the relative safety of the Crypt. She took a few tottering steps toward the troll, but another toxic spirit materialized in her path, falling on her like a wave of acid.
This is fun, the toxic spirit thought with sadistic glee as its victim writhed in agony for a moment before lapsing into unconsciousness. The spirit hovered over its broken toy for a moment, waiting for it to move again, then headed farther into the underground area. It saw another woman standing firmly in its path, watching it, her aura glowing brilliantly—partly from the quickened spells tattooed onto her body, but mostly from her own enhanced power. When the spirit blasted her with its toxic breath, she didn’t run, or even flinch. “You don’t belong here,” she said with an eerie calm. “Go. Now.”
The toxic spirit wavered. It could go past her, or it could turn and follow some of the other children through the corridors . . . but that would feel too much like a retreat. Though she could obviously see its astral form, the elf woman didn’t seem to be the shaman it had been told to kill, and despite her obvious magical power, she wasn’t trying to dispel it, cast any spells to destroy it, or create any sort of magical barrier that could stop it. It hurled another blast of terror, but the elf remained unmoved: her serene smile even widened slightly. The spirit sensed someone else approaching, then suddenly felt a magical hand grab its aura and try to disrupt it.
Shadowrun 46 - A Fistful of Data Page 13