The Forever Drug

by Lisa Smedman

  The sedative must have knocked me out. The next thing I knew, I was lying face-down on a sidewalk that smelled of city grime and hundreds of different scents—all of the people who had walked on it that day. I lifted myself to my hands and knees and looked myself over. I was dressed in clothes I didn't recognize: a baggy, generic track suit. I was pretty shaky and had no idea how I'd gotten here from the clinic. Had I tried to walk and then passed out? My vision kept blurring in and out. Only by squinting hard could I make out the street names of the intersection next to me: Barrington and Rector, down by the docks. My tongue felt thick and I wasn't able to concentrate. Were these the after-effects of the tentacled creature's attack?

  A thought came to me: Dass would know. She was probably the best paranormal taxonomist the Division of Paranormal Investigation had. She'd be able to tell me what that tentacled creature was and what it had done to me. I lay back down on the sidewalk, resting my uninjured cheek against the cool cement.

  I'm not sure how long it was afterward that a squad car pulled up next to me. The two officers hassled me at first, but once I convinced them that I was an irregular asset, working with Lone Star, they agreed to give me a lift back to the station. The ride helped to clear my head. The heat wave we'd been having seemed to have broken; the city's air was cool and clean. I hung my head out the window, letting the night air whip through my hair.

  By the time I reached Dass's office I was feeling closer to normal again. Not one hundred percent— but better. Dass was on the phone to someone— probably another mage detective, judging by the thaumaturgical shop talk—but she motioned me to sit down and abruptly cut her conversation short. When she turned to me, her scent held faint overtones of relief—and worry.

  "Rom!" she said. "Where the frig have you been all week? The smuggling ring is busting wide open—we found the European connection. The Coast Guard responded to a distress call from a container ship that was caught in the hurricane, and when the rescue teams went in to pick up survivors from the sinking ship, they found it crawling with a dozen blackberry cats. The cats were being smuggled to the UCAS in a container, and escaped when it shifted and burst open during the storm. They forced the Coast Guard officers to take them to shore, made them run the patrol vessel aground, and for the past two days we've been getting cat sightings up and down the coast. Raymond wanted you to track them, and nearly turned purple when your landlady said she didn't know where you were."

  I cringed. When you're an irregular asset, you're on call all the time. I'd never failed to respond to a call before—even ones that involve cats, which I loathe. A multiple containment like the one Dass described would have been worth big nuyen to me. Not only had I missed an opportunity to earn some serious cred, I'd also blown a chance to impress my superiors, and now I could tell I was in deep drek.

  "But the sergeant must have known I was in the clinic," I said. "He'd have been the one who authorized the expense."

  "Clinic?" Dass looked me over more closely, peering at the artificial skin that covered the bare spot in my beard where I'd been burned. "A medical clinic? Is that why you look so banged up? Where were you this past week—off chasing down leads in your Jane Doe case? Did she turn out to be linked with the smugglers, after all?"

  "My what?" This was getting more confusing by the minute. I had no idea what Dass was talking about. "Who's Jane Doe? And who are these smugglers you keep mentioning?"

  I smelled nervous sweat breaking out under Dass's arms. She was looking at me strangely. Her eyes lingered briefly on the inside of my right arm, on the needle puncture marks, and she frowned. Then she got up and shut the door to her office.

  "What's the last thing you remember, Rom?" Her eyes held a worried look.

  "Funny," I said. "That's the same question the doctor asked me."

  I told Dass about the glowing ball of light in the parking garage. Partway through the story, she stopped me. "That's the last thing you remember? That was two and a half weeks ago, Rom. You've got an eighteen-day gap in your memory."

  "I know," I said. "I was in a coma. At the clinic, after the ball of light burned me—"

  "The corpselight didn't burn you," Dass said in a grim voice. "And you weren't in a coma for eighteen days. Nine days ago, you participated in a raid on a boat carrying endangered paranormals. I was there with you. Two days after that, you were here at the station, asking if my interviews with the smugglers had turned up any more information on your Jane Doe.

  "That was the last time I saw you: on August 4. And now you turn up with your memories wiped— just like Jane Doe."

  I wet my lips. This wasn't sounding good.

  Dass pointed at my arm. "It looks as though someone used laes on you. Massive doses. Did you get a good look at this 'doctor'?"

  "Uh ... I'd recognize his cologne," I said. "And his scent: he was an elf. But he was wearing a surgical mask and cap. All I could see were his eyes."

  "Where was the clinic?"

  "I don't know. One minute I was inside, and the next I was kissing pavement."

  "Frig," Dass said. "That doesn't give us anything to go on."

  I had a queasy feeling in my gut. It felt as if somebody had tipped the world on a crazy angle when I wasn't looking. I gripped the sides of the chair I was sitting on.

  "Dass," I said slowly. "You'd better tell me what's going on. How many memories did they wipe? What am I missing?"

  Twenty minutes later, I still wasn't feeling very enlightened. All Dass could tell me was that eighteen days ago I'd gone out on a routine containment of a blackberry cat—and come back with a woman who didn't know who she was or where she was from. We'd run some retinal scans on her, and these linked with those of Margaret Hersey, a woman who'd just been released from prison after serving a three-month sentence in the Citadel for unlicensed use of a manipulation spell. But the Hersey match was bogus, a fabrication. I'd apparently dug up what I thought was the real name of Jane Doe: Mareth'riel Salvail, an elf who was a Tír Taimgire national. But there'd been no scans with that data. And according to Lone Star's databases, Salvail had died in a plane crash in 2057. Even so, I'd insisted that she was still alive, that Salvail was Jane Doe. I'd jandered off to find her...

  Only to turn up with a big hole in my memory a week later.

  I'd been violated. Mind-raped. I must have stumbled across some serious drek. I was probably lucky not to have wound up dead.

  "There's something else, Rom," Dass said. "Earlier today, the Harbor Patrol found a floater who matched the general description of your Jane Doe: elven metatype, apparent age mid-thirties to mid-forties, dark hair and eyes, medium build. Looks like she jumped from the old bridge, judging by her injuries."

  I sat up. "Her ears... were they ..."

  Dass looked at me expectantly. "What?"

  I'd gone blank. Whatever question I'd been about to ask was gone. "I don't know."

  Dass shrugged, then continued: "The floater's DNA scans didn't match any in the Lone Star databases— even Hersey's. The body had been in the water too long for retinal scans to be done—which was the only way we'd have been able to link her with any certainty to your Jane Doe. She had no dental work— perfect teeth, if you can believe it—and no identifying scars or marks. But Ident did find one thing. They passed it over to DPI to see if our detection spells could pull up any information on it."

  Dass reached into her drawer and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. From it she pulled a silver locket on a chain. I reached out and touched it—then jerked my fingers back as the metal burned blisters on my fingertips.

  "Kusikitika—sorry," Dass said. "That was stupid of me. Let me do it."

  I sucked on my fingers while Dass opened the locket. What had I been thinking? I'd reached out to touch the locket as if it were the most natural thing in the world, all the while knowing that it was silver. That blackout had left me really frigged up. I wasn't thinking straight any more.

  Dass-slipped the silver locket back into its evidence bag
so I could hold it. She stared at me expectantly while I looked at it. "Do you recognize it?" she asked. "It looks like the one your Jane Doe was wearing, but I didn't get a good enough look at hers, that night she was here at the station."

  I peered down through the clear plastic at a tintype—how did I know that word?—of a woman in a long dark dress. Her eyes looked hauntingly familiar. They were black in the monochrome image, but somehow I imagined them to be a dark brown, with tiny flecks of gold. I looked at the locket using my astral vision. It was tinged with a trace of sadness and loss ...

  I handed the locket back to Dass. "Sorry," I said. "Never seen it before."

  "Do you want to try to ID the body?" Dass asked.

  I shook my head. "No point. I can't remember what this Jane Doe you're talking about looked like. I wouldn't recognize her if she walked up to me on the street, let alone after she'd been in the water for several days. And there's no way for me to get my memories of her back, especially if they were wiped by laes. The damage that drug does is forever."

  Dass sighed. "Well, if the locket did belong to your Jane Doe, she's dead. I guess that closes your case."

  "I guess it does," I said.

  And that was just fine with me. I had no intention of putting my hoop on the line for some woman I couldn't even remember. I wasn't even curious about her. Curiosity can be a bad thing in this business— that's why they say it kills cats. Besides, I had biz to attend to. There were blackberry cats to contain—and I had an angry sergeant to mollify.

  I got to my feet. "I guess I'd better ask Sergeant Raymond for the latest blackberry cat sightings," I told Dass. "Unless there's anything better for me." I raised my eyebrows hopefully.

  Dass thought for a moment. "There almost was," she said. "A representative from the New Century Party came by yesterday and filed a missing persons report. One of their campaign workers disappeared two days ago, during a trip to Prince Edward Island. She'd been vacationing there and was trapped on the island during the uprising. The last time they heard from her was on the night of the hurricane. They're worried that the rebels may have kidnapped her as a political gesture. They wanted help in finding her, and asked for you specifically. They're willing to pay all of your expenses. But Sergeant Raymond told them you only handled local cases, and then only for Lone Star—that you weren't interested in freelance work."

  I frowned. Hurricane? Rebels? I had a lot to catch up on. I was tempted by the offer of freelance work, and flattered that my reputation had caused a prestigious political organization to ask for my services. And I was a little miffed at the sergeant for making my decisions for me. But I hated politics even more than I did cats. And Sergeant Raymond was right: P.E.I. was outside of my jurisdiction.

  "I'm not interested," I told Dass. "I have duties here to attend to."

  Then I grinned. "And besides, chasing those little furballs is going to be a lot more fun."

  About the Author

  Lisa Smedman is the author of the Shadowrun® novels The Lucifer Deck, Blood Sport, and Psychotrope. She has also had a number of short science fiction and fantasy stories published in various magazines and anthologies, and in 1993 was a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. Formerly a newspaper reporter and magazine editor, she now works as a freelance game designer and fiction writer. Lisa was one of the founders of Adventures Unlimited magazine. She has designed a number of adventures and written short fiction for TSR's Ravenloft and Dark Sun lines, and has designed gaming products for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Cyberpunk, Immortal, Shatterzone, and Millennium's End.

  COPYRIGHT

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First Printing, June, 1999 10 987654321

  Copyright © FASA Corporation, 1999 All rights reserved

  Series Editor: Donna Ippolito Cover Art: Peter Peebles

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK —MARCA REGISTRADA

  SHADOWRUN, FASA, and the distinctive SHADOWRUN and FASA logos are registered trademarks of the FASA Corporation, 1100 W. Cermak, Suite B305, Chicago, IL 60608

  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."