Mute reached for her smartgun as Didge came running into the clinic. “What—”
“Ratatosk,” said the dwarf. “I think he got hit by some black IC. He’s jacked out, but I think it’s more than just dump shock. He looks pretty bad.”
“Is he conscious?” asked Magnusson, who was lying on the dropcloth-covered floor with his eyes closed, recovering from the drain of the healing spells he’d been casting. “Sort of.”
The mage sighed. “Doc? Do you make house calls?”
“Not today,” replied Czarneeki. “If he can’t walk, see if you can get someone to carry him.”
“I can walk,” said Ratatosk more or less truthfully, as he lurched into the room, grabbing on to the plastic shower curtain rod stretched across the doorway for support. It was a trip of barely fifteen meters from the library to the clinic, but the decker seemed exhausted by the effort. “I won’t say I’ve never felt better, but I'm not about to die on you.” The street doc looked at him suspiciously. “Not if I have anything to say about it, you aren't. Sit down and let me look at you. Was it black IC?”
“Just killjoy, I think,” said the decker, moving unsteadily toward a plastic and metal chair older than his grandmother. “Another decker caught me in their system.”
“A rabbit icon,” said Didge. “He knew you. Do you know him?”
“I haven’t run into him before,” said Ratatosk. He lifted his datajack onto his lap.
“No jacking in,” said Czarneeki, touching his throat to take a pulse while shining a mini flashlight at the elf’s face. “No using cyberware if you can help it. These your own eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. The bloodshot effect’s a little too realistic. Bad headache?”
“I’ve had worse, but not by much.”
Czarneeki nodded. “Killjoy, my butt. You think I’ve never seen black IC damage before? You’re lucky your brain wasn’t completely fried. Do you know where you are?”
“The Crypt. Puyallup.”
“I don’t need to ask if you’re dizzy. Any ringing in the ears, or visual disturbances?”
“Some. It seemed darker than it should outside, and brighter in here, and ... I feel like ... I don’t know. Like I’ve shrunk, or everything else has grown. Is growing. And you keep fading in and out.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“October . . . something. Twelfth?”
“Year?”
“2063.”
“Your birthday?”
“No. I mean . . . July twentieth, 2036.”
“You’re how old?”
“Twenty-seven.”
The ork shook his head. From what he’d heard about Ratatosk, he’d assumed that he just aged slowly, like most elves, and was in his forties at least. When Czarnecki was twenty-seven, nearly thirty years ago, he was still living with his mother so he could pay off his student loans. His car, his first, was twelve years old, and he’d had only two sexual relationships worth mentioning in confession. “Hope you manage to get to thirty,” he said sourly, and asked several more questions while he continued the physical examination. “Okay,” he said, when he was finished. “You’re a little disoriented, but you don’t seem to be hallucinating in any serious way, or to have lost any memory or motor function. If I were you. I’d get your scrawny butt out of here and go get a full scan and workup done. Best I can do meantime is to give you some painkillers for that headache and tell you to rest. Anything more will take magic, and we’re a little short on that.”
Ratatosk looked around the overcrowded clinic. “How’s everyone else doing?” he asked softly.
“Yoko’s doing better than I had any right to hope,” said Czarnecki. “Healing incredibly fast, even for an adept getting healing spells. Those tattoos she has—they’re quickened spells, aren’t they? Some of them, at least?”
“Yes,” said the elf, “but I don’t know which ones, or even which spells. And she’s had a nano-symbiote treatment; that probably has a lot to do with it.”
The street doc blinked. “I’ve heard of those, but never came across one before. Are they as good as they say?” “Sure, if you can afford it. I’ve thought of getting it done myself.”
“How much do they cost?”
“Hers cost her sixty thou, not including the extra cred she has to spend on food. That’s a lot less than I’ve spent on this arm—probably less than Lankin spends on shoes.” “And about ten times as much as all the gear in here,”
said Czarnecki sourly; then he shrugged. “Mind you, if we tried keeping anything with resale value in this place, we’d need more doors, with locks, and Boanerges won’t stand for that sort of drek.”
“Have you heard how he’s doing?” asked Ratatosk softly.
“No.”
“What about the others?”
“Akira’s going to make it,” said Jinx, who was lying on the floor between two of the cots. “His aura’s actually gotten brighter since this morning. I think he’s been Awakened.”
“He’s a magician?” asked Czarnecki, surprised.
“A magician or an adept. I don’t think he could’ve held off those toxics if he hadn’t been able to assense them. Rove and Ms. Hotop aren’t doing as well . . . but neither of them were as strong as Akira or Yoko to begin with.” “What about the kids who were shot with gel rounds?” “They’re badly bruised, and scared, but nothing worse than that. They’re conscious now, and one of the older kids is watching them.”
“I’ve taken up enough of your time,” said Ratatosk, standing. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Go find a bed and get some rest,” said Czarnecki. “Let me know if you think you’re getting worse. I’m sorry, but walking wounded will have to wait.”
“Cheapskate Chen?” said Pierce between mouthfuls of thin vegetable soup. “Yeah, I know him. Why?” he asked with the wary air of a man suddenly wondering whether it’s too late to invoke the fifth amendment.
“How good is his security?” asked Lankin, unwrapping a small block of chocolate and breaking off a chunk for himself before placing the remainder on the table between them. The other diners looked over hopefully, but none of them spoke or approached him.
“He’s prob’ly got a gun or two under the counter, and he uses one of the bouncers from Pualani’s Pink Pagoda when he needs muscle,” Pierce replied. “It’s right across the road, and I think he’s a regular there.”
“I gather you’re not talking about a restaurant.”
“The sign outside says it’s a noodle bar,” said Pierce, finishing his soup and reaching for the chocolate, “but it has rooms upstairs, and a lot more waitresses than it needs. I suppose it depends how well you tip. But the bouncers are pretty tough, and if Chen has any kind of alarm system, it probably rings a bell there. You thinking of hitting the place?” he asked softly—and rather incredulously.
“No; I think a phone call should be enough,” said Lankin. Though a master at buying low and selling high, Chen was strictly small-time, his dreams of becoming a fixer hampered by his miserliness and his aversion to taking risks . . . which also stopped him leaving anything of value in his shop for more than a few days. If he had any sort of security other than a part-time bodyguard and the protection he paid to the Yellow Lotus Triad, it would have been bought cheaply from a shadowrunner desperate to sell.
Intimidating him wouldn’t even be a challenge.
The 38 Special was one of the best cafes in the Aztechnology Pyramid’s residents’ mall. On a clear day, clients had a view of Lake Washington and Council Island, and sometimes even a glimpse of the mountains farther east. The Hatter didn’t much care about the view, or the art-deco furnishings, but he liked the food and the staff knew him—and they often sold him valuable information they’d overheard at other tables. The Hatter sipped at his tea and pretended to be reading the daily newssheet while he looked around the cafe to see who was talking to whom. He noticed Hare walk up to the hostess, and leer at her cleavage while she no
dded toward the Hatter’s booth, and pretended to study the menu as the decker walked toward him.
“We may have a problem,” said Hare without preamble, as he sprawled across the bench on the other side of the booth. “There was an intruder in the system. Ratatosk. He was downloading the sign-out sheet for the vehicles.”
The Hatter sipped at his Earl Grey tea, which suddenly seemed to taste of metal dissolved in acid.
“I don’t think he’ll be back in a hurry,” said Hare, but his tone wasn’t reassuring. “I hit him with black hammer, fried his bod as well as his deck. Unfortunately, he jacked out before I could finish him off—or finish tracing him.” “How many other cars were checked out?”
“Not including ours, fifty-six. Most of them routine stuff, but I suppose the data could still be worth stealing.” He didn’t sound convinced. He smiled at the waitress who brought him his carrot cake and pot of tea, and smiled even more broadly as she walked away.
“So what makes you think he’s snooping into our business?” asked the Hatter, feeling some of his confidence returning.
“I traced him to somewhere in Puyallup.”
The Hatter spluttered as he choked on his tea.
“It could be a coincidence,” said the decker. “But da-taline access in Puyallup is so unreliable that I don’t think he’d risk diverting through there.”
“What would Ratatosk be doing in a squat like that? He doesn’t get out of bed for less than five figures!”
“I don’t know. He may not be there, just somewhere in the area. Is there anything else in Puyallup worth taking?” “The company doesn’t have any interests there that I know of, unless the mages are getting stuff out of the wastelands. The area pretty much belongs to the Nishidon-Gumi and the Yellow Lotus: Ratatosk’s supposed to have cojones the size of basketballs, but I don’t think even he would take on either syndicate unless the payoff was huge, and it wouldn’t explain him checking our garage. Have you ever hired him, or met him?”
“No, but I think Valdez has; I’ll see if I can get anything useful out of him without giving too much away.”
Hare nodded. “I’ve bumped up the security on the sign-out sheet as high as I can without drawing undue attention to it, though I don’t think he’ll be back. But there is one other possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“What if he’s working with your meres?”
The Hatter blinked. “You think Wallace is double-crossing us?”
“He may be wondering why he’s there.”
“I’ve hired Wallace before. There are plenty of gunmen I could have gotten for less, but he likes to think he’s an honorable man in an honorable profession. That sort of delusion can be very useful, if you know how to exploit it.” “Maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s somebody else in his company who thinks he should be cut in for a percentage. It’s just a thought.”
“Not a very pleasant one,” said the Hatter, scowling. He pushed his ham sandwich and the cup of tea aside, unfinished. “I don’t know of any links between Wallace and Ratatosk, but there’s never more than two or three degrees of separation between shadowrunners. I’ll do a more thorough background check on his team members, as well as Ratatosk. I may want to use Wallace again, so I don’t want to kill him unless there’s evidence against him. Let me know what you find.”
The metal detector—a simple beat-frequency oscillator— had been cobbled together from Didge’s portable stereo. It had taken Lankin longer to persuade Didge to part with it than it had taken Zurich to convert it into a clunky-looking but serviceable device that not only detected the edges of the metal rectangle beneath the assorted improvised floor coverings and the thickness of concrete, but could still play CDs. “Three meters by six, nearly enough,” he said, after several minutes walking through people’s living quarters.
“About the size and shape of a shipping container,” suggested Crane. “Or something else meant to go on the back of a truck.” -
“Or a coffin for a small dragon,” said 8-ball darkly.
“Or some sort of bunker. Whatever it is, it probably won’t be easy to open,” said Zurich. He looked around the group and shrugged. “Where should we start digging?”
Yoko’s refuge in the Crypt was a standard-sized cubicle along the west wall, containing only an elongated futon bed with surprisingly clean sheets, a weapons rack (empty), a medium-sized suitcase (locked) on a folding stand (stolen), a lantern with a hand-cranked battery charger, an incense burner and a few half-melted candles. Ratatosk sat on the bed with his Novateeh Slimline in his lap; the light from the fold-out vidscreen and the LEDs was enough to dispel the darkness but not the gloom.
Ratatosk knew better than to completely ignore Doc Czarnecki’s orders about diving back into the Matrix—not that there was a jackpoint in or near Yoko’s room—but the data in his online memory was potentially useful, maybe even valuable, and curiosity had long been Ratatosk’s greatest weakness. Even his obsessive pursuit of women was driven as much by an intellectual fascination with what made them all different and desirable, as it was by a craving for physical pleasure. If he lived long enough, he hoped to one day come up with a Grand Unified Theory of sexual attraction . . . and even if he failed, he was enjoying the research.
The elf’s long fingers danced across the keyboard, but he still found the process agonizingly slow compared to the way he usually glided through the Matrix, effortlessly moving at the speed of thought. Scrolling through the corrupted data from the partially downloaded file felt more like trying to wade through fast-drying concrete. Eventually, though, he managed to re-create a readable copy of the datafile’s Iront page, a time sheet for that day’s activity in the garage. I le found the listing for the Nomad with the matching registration, and looked at the name of the employee who’d checked it out. Thomas Mather. It was vaguely familiar, and Ratatosk found himself wishing he was back in his apartment among his well-ordered archive of datafiles he’d copied from the different corps.
The roster said that Mather’s office was on the sixty-lburth floor, which Ratatosk remembered as being the lair of their security staff and security-related middle management. He looked down the list of Step-Vans that had been checked out, and found that one of these, too, had been requested by Thomas Mather.
Ratatosk was sure it had to mean something, but his headache was too intense for him to think clearly, and staring at the small vidscreen for as long as he had hadn’t helped matters. Reluctantly, he powered down the cyberdeck and closed his eyes.
* * *
Pierce swung the pick, wondering why it was that anytime a job came up that required muscle rather than brains, it seemed to land in his lap. Still, he had to admit there was something comfortable about the rhythm he was starting to settle into. He started to whistle in time with the chunk the pick made as it bit into the concrete, and while this didn’t seem to please his workmates, none of them actually voiced an objection.
When they’d made a big enough hole in the concrete floor of Pike’s quarters to clearly see something orange that obviously wasn’t concrete, Zurich had knelt beside the pit and tapped cautiously on the object, then reached for his improvised metal detector. “Well?” asked Sumatra, his voice muffled by his filter mask.
“Fiberglass, I think,” said the dwarf. “Or some sort of very tough, hard plastic or ceramic, with similar properties. But there’s some metal underneath it, probably stainless steel.”
“How thick?”
“A couple centimeters, at least—probably three or four. How much of that is metal, I can’t tell yet. Maybe half a centimeter, maybe twice that.”
“Great,” muttered Pierce. “You mean it’s a fraggin’ safe. How’re we going to hack our way through thatT’
“I think the real question is, are we going to hack our way through that?” added Sumatra.
Pierce raised his pick and brought it down on the plastic with all his strength. It bounced off with a flat thud.
“Stop, you—�
�� Zurich began, then looked up at the orks and sighed. “This is some sort of secure containment facility. That’s why it was buried under a quarter meter of concrete. I don’t know what it was meant to contain, but until we have some idea . . . Besides, there has to be some better way to open it than trying to smash through the top. Locks. Hinges. Some other weak point.”
Pierce looked at the unblemished surface and shrugged. “Suits me. I didn’t like its tone, anyway. So what do we do now?”
“Clear away the concrete until we find an edge. If the top opens, we should be able to find a way to open it. The ramp’s over that way, so it would make more sense to have the hinges on the far side. Or if it’s one of the ends . .
“We do even more digging?”
“Yeah,” said 8-ball, taking up his entrenchment tool. “Guess we try to find the northeast corner.” They all went back to work, but with less enthusiasm than before.
Ninety minutes later, they’d uncovered enough of the corner to get a clearer picture of the shape of the object. The lid was recessed slightly from the corner, and sealed with a gasket of nonbiodegrading plastic. “Looks like a fraggin’ big freezer,” said Pierce.
“It may be,” said Zurich, and glanced at the digital clock on his wristcomp. “Three and a half hours before the deadline. Can we get it open by then?”
Chen’s face hadn’t gotten any prettier since the last time Lankin had seen it, nor was his broad smile any more convincing. “Hello, hello. How may I help you?”
“I thought we might be able to help each other, Chen,” Lankin replied smoothly. “I know you’re a man who can find almost anything a man could want, and at a good price.”
“Could be. What is it you want?”
“It’s not for me, you understand. I’m trying to retrieve something taken from an associate of mine. He thinks the people who took it may have tried to sell it to you . . . not that I’m suggesting that you would knowingly buy stolen property, of course. But if you happen to remember any-iiody from the Crypt coming to you with medical equipment . .
Shadowrun 46 - A Fistful of Data Page 17