“If that’s it,” said 8-ball, “we’d better get the frag out of here anyway.”
They waited in silence for several minutes until Sumatra opened his eyes again. “There’s something down there,” he said. “Some sort of container—I guess you could call it a vault—roughly in the middle of the floor.”
“How big?”
“A bit wider than my arms, maybe twice that long, and about up to here,” he said, running a hand along the bottom of his sternum. “About half of that is empty space, cased in something manufactured. Metal and concrete, I think, and a drekload of it before you get through to pure earth. Nothing’s alive down there.”
“How thick is a drekload?” asked Zurich dryly.
“Not quite up to my elbow,” said the shaman, holding up a large hand, fingers extended. “It’s fraggin’ dark down there, can’t see for drek, even in the empty spaces. There’s a bit of a background count, some sort of toxic drek, but nothing alive. Nothing magical, either, or anything that was handmade with any sort of feeling, so I think we can rule out the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. And if anything down there still has enough life left in it to be a material link, I didn’t pick it up.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing valuable— it could be full of plutonium, or old-fashioned money, or anything like that. 1 could try a catalog spell, but that’s only going to help if I have some idea of what I’m looking for.” “Did you find a door, or some other opening?”
“Nope. I think it’s been sealed pretty thoroughly, but not magically locked, or anything like that.”
“Hazmat storage,” suggested Zurich. “It makes sense. Could you find it again?”
“I think so. Give me a minute to rest and I’ll look again. It’s not directly under here, I can tell you that much, but if it’s under any of the lodges, or the library, it’ll be a snap. If not, I’ll have to use you as landmarks. You got any ideas on how we’re going to open it if we find it?”
“Do you have any spells that’ll do it?”
“Only powerbolt. You’d do a lot better with shape-charges—or maybe a pick and shovel, at least against the concrete.”
Zurich sighed. “I’ll see if there’s anything around I can turn into a metal detector. That’ll tell us how much metal we have to deal with.” He walked out of the lodge and headed for the clinic. 8-ball watched him go, then turned to Sumatra. “Pick and shovel?”
“There’s gardening drek upstairs, and I saw Patty with an entrenching tool.”
8-ball shook his head. “Okay. But the first person to start singing "Hi-ho’ better be wearing their running shoes.”
Lewis removed his helmet as soon as the Step-Van’s door closed behind him. As a younger man, he’d been handsome enough that some people mistook him for an elf, though he was barely 180 centimeters tall, and some vestiges of this usually showed on his clean-shaven face. Now, though, he looked so tired and drawn that he more nearly resembled a zombie. “Crabbe said you wanted to see me, Chief.” Wallace nodded, noting that the soldier had his rifle slung and, as Crabbe had said, a firm grip on his stun gun. “Yeah. I was about to go see to our, uh, prisoners. You feel up to walking and talking at the same time?”
“I think I can manage.”
“Good. Hartz, keep an eye on the sleeping beauties.” Wallace grabbed his helmet and walked out to the back of the Nomad with Lewis following close behind him. “You know, one of the first things I learned about tactics was that no plan survives contact with the enemy.”
“You think these people are our enemy?” asked Lewis. “Even the children?”
“You’ve seen kids with guns before,” the ork reminded him. He stopped, and leaned up against the side of the Nomad. “Frag, I had kids shoot at me in the desert, and I bet you did too.”
“Not girls.”
“How’d you know? Did you see them all?”
“Not clearly,” Lewis admitted. He turned and stared at the ruins. “We’ve killed two teenagers, taken two young kids captive ... I wonder if their morale’s as low as ours.”
' Wallace shook his head. “Better not let anyone else hear you talk like that. They might think it sounds like mutiny . . . Mr. Christian.”
Even though Wallace couldn’t see it through his visor, he knew the human was smiling his crooked smile. Lewis had been an altar boy for a mainstream religion, and while a phobia of public speaking had prevented him becoming a preacher, he was the closest the squad had to a chaplain. “I’m not going to mutiny, Chief, but I think this might be my last mission. How’ve we been reduced to this? We were soldiers once. We were protecting our country, or at least we thought we were. What are we now?”
“Still alive?”
“Is that enough?”
“It—” Wallace hastily censored himself; he knew Lewis disliked swearing almost as much as blasphemy. “Beats the alternatives. We’re not all as confident as you are of getting into heaven, Lew.” He looked down at his shadow, then at the wasteland around them. “It’ll be over soon, anyway, and we can go home. Look for some other sort of work then, if that’s what you want to do . . . But right now, I still need you here. If you think morale is bad now, imagine what it’d be like if someone deserted.”
“Especially if you had to shoot them.”
“I didn’t say that. And I wouldn’t shoot you. Well, not to kill, anyway.”
“Thank you.”
“Thought about what you’d do if you quit?”
“A little. I have a brother-in-law working for Ares, who says he can get me a job as a security guard.”
Wallace grimaced, but he kept his tone neutral. “Well, it’s your decision, but I’d hate to lose you. Let’s see how you feel when this is over. Now, we’ve got plenty of water for these kids to drink, if they’ll take it from us; pity there isn’t enough to wash them too. And they look like they haven’t been eating that well. What have we got to feed ’em?”
Leila was badly allergic to sunlight, and usually slept during the day—but like many of the Crypt’s residents, she’d been too keyed up to sleep. By noon, she’d given up on lying on her lumpy mattress and was wandering around the basement looking for something to distract her. She’d worked out with the Wing Chun dummy until her once-white gi and once-black track pants were damp with sweat, and been unable to go upstairs and wash because the shower stalls were being used as a temporary morgue. Instead, she’d put on her other clothes—a black synthleather jacket, tight black jeans and T-shirt, and knee-high boots— and wandered out to the kitchen. She walked toward the water purifier, and nodded to Lankin as she passed him. “You look as though you’d rather be almost anywhere else.”
Lankin stared at the ersatz coffee in his mug and shrugged. “Wouldn’t you? No, don’t tell me. You grew up here.”
“You could say that,” she said as she decanted herself a cup of cloudy-looking liquid, then sat down opposite him. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“If I can ask you one.”
“How tall are you?”
“Why?”
“I asked you first.”
“Two hundred and seventy-four centimeters, last time I was measured. Or maybe it was two seventy-six. It was a while ago.”
“College basketball?”
“Yes, but don’t pretend you remember me. You couldn’t have been more than three or four at the time.”
“It was just a guess. I’ve heard a little about you, the way you work. How do you get away with it when you’re so easy to recognize and so easy to find?”
Lankin looked at her fine blue-black fur, and realized that her interest might not be entirely academic. “I buy mask spell foci from talismongers when I need a new look, and I have a modest collection of fake IDs, but to be honest it’s rarely a problem. There’re a lot of ways to survive, even thrive in this world, and you’ve just got to decide how you want to live. I figured I had a choice between trying to hide who and what I am, or use it. I was born with the gift of gab, and
the intelligence to make it count for something, so I decided to use my appearance to my advantage. People get excited about being associated with someone as unique as me, and that’s my angle.
“There’s an old saying that you can’t con an honest man. That’s not actually true, but the best cons depend on your victim being just as crooked as you are, but not as bright— or at least too crooked to go to the cops if he realizes he’s been stung, and preferably too embarrassed to warn his friends. So you let someone think he can double his money or better, but you make sure he knows that it’s illegal. It used to be gambling or prostitution, and now it’s insider trading or funding a shadowrun. Or letting him believe he’s buying stolen or counterfeit goods. But make sure he believes you can deliver—and the best way to do that is to have a reputation as a winner, and look like a winner.
“The reputation isn’t as difficult as it sounds: you can have accomplices recommend you, or actually pay off once or twice and know the winners won’t be quite as secretive as the losers. That’s how pyramid schemes work, and they’ve never managed to stamp them out.
“Now let me ask you something. Have you been on any runs?”
“Nothing very big,” Leila replied. “I’ve helped shad-owrunners get away from skiptracers, and gone with Pierce on a couple of structure hits. And we’ve done some stuff for Chopsticks Chen—shoplifting, courier work, a couple of warehouse B and Es—but I think the most I ever got from that was these boots.”
“Chen? Skinny ork with really long tusks? Calls himself the Great Fence of China?”
“Yeah. He fences most of the stuff we pick up: he’s convenient, and he doesn’t ask questions. You know him?” “Yes, unfortunately. He was selling bootleg trid movies and counterfeit perfume in parking lots when I was your age. ‘All guaranteed stolen,’ he used to say. I’m surprised he’s still alive.”
“I’m nineteen,” said Leila stiffly. “Stop making it sound like I’m six.”
“Sorry. Where’s he based, nowadays?”
“Shop on 204th Street. I don’t remember the name, but the front is full of fake antiques. Chen comes in sometime in the middle of the afternoon, and he’s usually there all night.”
“Guards?”
“Not usually, unless he’s out back. Why? You think he’s got something worth stealing?”
Lankin shook his head slightly. “Probably not. Do you know where Pierce is?”
The icon for the Aztechnology host was a near-perfect trid representation of the real-world Pyramid, apart from the absence of the perpetual cleaning crews swarming over the steps. Ratatosk knew that this detail, as well as air traffic to and from the helipads, was shown on some realtime computer model somewhere in both versions of the Pyramid, but Aztechnology had good reason not to broadcast this information. Some of those helicopters might be targeted by assassins, and while the windows and exterior walls were said to be impenetrable, one team of shad-owrunners had once managed to extract an Aztechnology magical researcher by opening a forty-fifth-floor window from the inside and escaping in the window cleaners’ lift.
Like the Pyramid, the Aztechnology system was composed of multiple tiers. Ratatosk didn’t know of any trapdoors into the Aztechnology online hosts, nor did he have any up-to-date passwords. With a cloak utility disguising his icon as a gray-suited sarariman, he entered the grid through a system-access node sculpted to resemble Tihua-naco’s Gateway of the Sun, and found himself inside a bustling market for Aztechnology merchandise. Most of the persona icons swarming around moved as slowly as tortoises, including the four Jaguar Guards patrolling the area. Ratatosk looked around for the equivalent of a door with a “Staff Only” sign, and saw a SAN next to a sculpted icon of an Aztec priest’s palace—decorated with nuyen symbols in gleaming platinum, as well as masks of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent. Special .facilities for preferred customers with excellent credit ratings, Ratatosk decided. He looked warily at the masks, then examined the lock on the door. The serpents’ eyes flashed red as the decker slipped a sleaze utility into the keyhole; then the glow faded as the system accepted the software as a genuine platinum cred-stick backed up with a retinal scan. “Welcome, Dr. Gray.”
“Thank you,” said Ratatosk, and looked around the chamber. No colorful bustling market ambience here; this was a bank, all polished brass and hardwood and plush. He ducked into a cubicle, sleazed through the order form into the subprocessor and began interrogating the system until he’d located the directory he needed. An instant later, he was standing in a cavernous underground parking lot. There was only minimal sculpture here, little effort wasted on making things look attractive—not much more than a huge gray space filled with the icons of different vehicles. The decker looked at the icon of a clipboard hanging on a support pillar, and smiled. As he suspected, the clipboard was a datafile, a booking schedule for the vehicles— complete with the names and phone numbers of those who’d borrowed them. He scanned it for IC, and found it protected by nothing more than a low-rated scramble program. Shaking his head, he began decrypting the data, then downloading it—until a shadow fell across the printout, turning the characters to gibberish. He spun around and saw a hare standing behind him. The icon had enormous buck teeth, a face made up largely of scar tissue, ears that added another half meter to its height, and huge mad red eyes.
The March Hare grinned. “What’s up, doc?” he asked, and produced a huge cartoon shotgun from behind his back.
13
Ratatosk stared at the icon of the gun. The twin muzzles looked as big as a pair of manholes, and he hastily began uploading his armor software. Hare was quicker, and Ratatosk shrieked in pain as he was blasted by a black hammer utility that ripped through his icon and sent a current through to his meatbody. An instant later, Ratatosk’s sarariman disguise reshaped itself into the form of a Viking shield. This absorbed some of the next blast from the gun, but not enough of it for the decker to believe that he could survive another attack.
Hare looked at the squirrel icon and the Norse runes on the shield, and laughed with delight as he recognized his opponent. “Ratatosk! You know, I always hoped we’d meet someday.” Before Hare could fire again, Ratatosk unloaded the armor program and replaced it with a cloak. The black hammer’s next attack missed as Ratatosk disappeared behind the pillar, and then behind the icon of a white Toyota Elite. Hare scanned the room, trying to relocate him.
“Do you ever watch old movies?” Hare asked. “Some of the best fight scenes ever are set in parking garages like this one. Like Highlander.”
He fired another blast with the black hammer. Ratatosk evaded the attack, dodging furiously and hoping that he could get into position to counterattack while he waited for the datafile to finish downloading. If he jacked out now, he might not get enough of the data for it to be useful.
“Mask of the Phantasm. Tomorrow Never Dies. Blood-Soaked Brothers III." Hare fired again. “Pity these cars don’t explode,” he mused “Naked Killer. Did you ever see that one?”
Ratatosk uploaded his attack program and popped up from behind the icon of a bronze minibus. “Which version?” he asked, as the icon of an art-deco ray gun appeared in his hand. A translucent energy field appeared around Hare just in time to absorb the beam.
“The one without the happy ending, of course,” said Hare cheerfully. “The one where they die. I was sure you’d have seen it. You’re a man after my own heart.”
“Actually, I was aiming for your head,” said Ratatosk, shooting again.
Hare evaded the attack easily. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s duck season.” He returned fire, and Ratatosk felt himself flying backwards into a darkness as cold and deep and terrifying as drowning. He fought to keep his eyes open, even though there seemed to be nothing left to see.
Sumatra’s astral body popped up from the concrete floor like a rat swarming up a rope. “Here,” he yelled, as he manifested. He waited impatiently until 8-ball came running into the cubicle and drew a cross under his foot, then peered at th
e satellite navigation reading on his wristphone.
“Okay,” he said. “So it looks like it’s about six meters long. Want to try the next corner?”
Sumatra looked to the west. “I think Mish’s medicine lodge is over there, and she’s not going to be happy about you digging that up. Whose room is this?”
8-ball looked around at the handmade glaive leaning in one corner, the clothes piled on the extra-long army surplus cot, and the color printouts from Playelf that lined the walls. “Pike’s, I think.”
“Well, at least he won’t object to us digging up the lloor.”
“No,” said the dwarf. “But we should probably get someone in to sort through his stuff first, see if there’s anything worth taking.”
“Did he have a family or anything?”
“Somewhere, I guess. Yoko might know. She was his sensei.” He picked up the glaive—an iron bar ground to a rough edge with a corner clipped off to make a point, welded to a length of galvanized metal pipe—and hefted it experimentally. “Can’t help thinking we should be using this as a grave marker, like they did with the swords in Seven Samurai. Not that we have time to dig him a grave.” “I thought that’s what we were doing,” said Sumatra dryly. The Crypt’s dead were usually left outside the church, temple, synagogue or mosque of their choice in Puyallup; those who hadn’t made a choice were taken to the nearest Salvation Army fortress. Police medical examiners identified those with SINs and attempted to contact their families, while the SINless were cremated as paupers. Their only memorial service consisted of planting a tree or bush in the garden, with a few prayers or eulogies usually followed by a wake. The best-loved had epitaphs chiseled into the brick and concrete walls by their friends. “Do you really think we’re going to find anything down there that’s worth the effort?”
“Probably not,” 8-ball admitted, “but we’ve got about six hours left, and I hate sitting around and waiting. ’Sides, if we only went after sure things, we’d be sararimen, not shadowrunners. ’ ’
The rat shaman nodded. “I’ll try the southwest corner next,” he said, and sank back into the concrete floor.
Shadowrun 46 - A Fistful of Data Page 16