by Jak Koke
Jonathon felt like a shadowrunner as he stepped out of the Westwind, activating the auto lock-down mechanism and leaving the car in ready mode so he could rig it or launch the drones remotely if necessary. Since he’d never again be ejecting from experimental aircraft, Jonathon had reprogrammed the transmitter of his head rig to communicate with the car and its drones.
He flipped up the collar of his armored black duster. He was in disguise. Undercover. It wouldn’t do for anyone to recognize him.
But the coat was pristine and too clean. Frag, it was almost new; he didn’t do this kind of drek very often. Anyone with a sharp eye would slot him for a newbie runner or a wannabee, but it was all he had.
On Venice Beach it wouldn’t matter. Here, everyone was in a disguise of some sort.
The large right pocket of his duster held the cool weight of his Ares Predator II pistol, loaded with gel rounds. Probably not good enough if the drek really came down, but Jonathon wasn’t expecting this to be a set-up. And if the time came to put up or shut up, he had several clips of armor-piercing ammo.
His fedora covered the tips of his ears, and his wide mirrorshades blocked much of his face. The glasses jacked in through his temple with a very fine wire hidden under his hat, giving him infrared, thermographic vision if need be. Finally a good use for all my toys, he thought.
He walked the short distance down the road to the boardwalk, surrounded on all sides by the mob of tourists and local vendors. No one recognized him. Excellent.
He passed custom cyberware vendors, street docs, krill fryers, surf shops, costume rentals. The beach on his right was packed to overflowing, the crowd thickening near the spectacles of magic and acrobatics.
As Jonathon walked, he watched a dwarf on three-meter stilts. The dwarf wore a huge, mushroom-shaped hat and a white shirt that shimmered orange in the light from the setting sun. Red-and-blue striped pants extended to the ground, and huge clown shoes had been attached to the base of the stilts.
The dwarf was juggling miniature chainsaws as he balanced. The crowd drew back in front of him as he walked, and the dwarf seemed to stumble for a second, but it was all part of the show; he regained his balance easily, and never dropped his chainsaws.
Jonathon smiled; he loved Venice Beach and felt a tinge of sadness that he was here for business and not the sheer fun of it. He passed a street mage performing an intricate dance with seals and gulls, which Jonathon suspected were illusions.
Dockweiler Gardens was an old-style bar and grill just off the boardwalk. Time showed 04:42:16 pm when he entered. The place was full, but he requested a table on the redwood deck, overlooking the beach and surf. Twenty minutes later, he was sitting, nursing a cold Pyramid cerveza and scanning the flow of people for Grids Desmond.
Grids arrived about five minutes later, his thin body covered in black denim. His dark hair slicked back as though he’d applied grease to it. "You alone?" Grids asked.
"As specified," Jonathon said. "I even ditched my bodyguard for this."
Grids looked tired; the lines of his thin face were drawn tight, wrinkles deepened as though he hadn’t slept in days. "You look like drek," Jonathon said.
"What are you, the fashion police?"
Jonathon laughed. "Whoa, calm down, chummer. It just looks like hiding out has affected you, that’s all."
"You ever lived in East Hollywood?"
"Places like it."
"I doubt it," Grids said, then paused to call the waiter to order a soykaf and some nachos. When the waiter had left, Grids popped a chip out from behind his ear in a smooth and rapid motion, palming it.
Even Jonathon almost didn’t notice.
Grids placed his hand on the table, palm down. "You sure Tam is gone?"
Jonathon heard the static growl in his head, very faint. He nodded. "Her funeral is tomorrow. Lake Shasta."
"You can go there? I thought it was protected. Dragons and shamans and drek."
"I’ve got a permit."
"What?"
"Sorry, not a good time to joke around," Jonathon said. "Shasta is a no-man’s-land, and there’s a dragon—Hestaby—but it never shows up unless there’s a war. I’ve never seen it. Anyhow, Tam’s family, the gypsies, are there for the summer."
"Can I come?" Grids asked.
"You want to?"
Grids stared at Jonathon with his black eyes. "I know you don’t like me," he said. "I’ve never understood why, but—"
"You’re unstable. You have a history of bailing out when the drek gets too deep. Women, jobs—you can’t keep ’em. You always retreat into the sim or something like it." Jonathon held up his beer to show Grids what he meant by that.
Grids just stared at him and said nothing for a minute. Then softly, "I loved her. I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone." His voice cracked and he looked away, out at the ocean.
Jonathon sighed. "I know," he said. "And I know she’d have wanted you to come to the funeral. So you can come. Now, tell me why I’m here."
Grids took a deep breath. "The night before the game in New Orleans, Tamara and I made this sim."
"What—?"
Grids held a finger to his lips for silence. "Maybe you know she’d been sleeping with a Saeder-Krupp exec named Andreas Michaelson." Grids quickly glanced around, but the place was bustling; no one was paying them any attention.
"Yes," Jonathon said. "She thought he was going to make her a simsense star."
"Bingo. Well, Michaelson kept putting off her requests to arrange an audition, so Tamara got tired of waiting."
"Patience never was one of her virtues."
Grids gave Jonathon a sad face. "She thought a more direct approach was necessary."
"Blackmail?"
Grids nodded. "She had me record their sex that night." Jonathon frowned.
"So she could threaten to reveal it to his wife and the corp if he refused to get her a deal."
"So he killed her? Seems a tad harsh."
Grids shook his head. "There’s more." The waiter arrived with the soykaf and nachos. Grids sipped the black liquid and gobbled down a few bites of the cheese-slathered chips.
Jonathon sipped his cerveza.
"You got a chipjack?"
"No."
"Null sheen. I brought a Senseman." Grids pulled a tiny simsense deck from his black leather satchel. The unit was about the size of his hand, could take CDs or chips. Grids pulled the thin fiber-optic cable from the unit and gave it to Jonathon.
Jonathon snapped the ’trode into place while Grids faded him into the sim.
Satin sheets caressed Tamara’s naked body as she awoke in the huge bed. The chip was a wet record, though not as crisp as Jonathon got from the team’s equipment. Plus, here there were no emotive tracks, only sensory, which left him feeling empty, like he was simming a hollowed-out person, a shell devoid of soul.
A ghost.
The bed shook and a huge, bearded face filled her vision, then the stench of stale morning breath filled her nostrils, and his mouth was over hers.
Jonathon cringed and nearly sprayed his cerveza.
"Good morning, my pet," the man said. "I’m going to get a shower."
Tamara mumbled, rolling away from him and closing her eyes.
A minute later, the distant sound of spraying water came through the bathroom door. Tamara snapped open her eyes, wide awake, and got up. She pushed her long, black hair from her face and walked, stark naked, to Michaelson’s desk.
Jonathon wondered at that moment why they’d never made love. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. A goddess. But this wasn’t really her; this was only her body, her sensory tracks. Tamara was like a sister to him; he felt a tinge of guilt at this sudden burst of desire.
She was gone forever. And she had taken part of him with her.
Tamara scanned the desk. "Grids," she whispered, "you better be getting this." Most of the stuff on the desk was mundane—memos, chips, the telecom. None of that was important.
But then she was searching through the briefcase. Inside were documents. Some progress report on a corporation called Magenics, Inc. based in Long Beach. And underneath, what was obviously a top-security hardcopy in a magnetically sealed binder.
Tamara tried to open it, her heart racing. Her breath coming quickly.
The seal wasn’t locked. She opened the binder, reading the cover page. "The Magus File: A compilation of data concerning genetic loci relevant to the Magus Factor, and how those loci might be incorporated into a stable AZ54-type biocomputer."
Jonathon had no idea what it meant.
Tamara quickly paged through the document, not pausing to read each word, but looking at every page. "I hope you’ll be able to decode this," she whispered.
She finished just before Michaelson emerged from the shower. She closed the file and brushed away any fingerprints with the corner of a pillowcase, her hands shaking and sweaty. She left everything as she found it.
She jumped back into the bed just as the big, hairy man lumbered from the bathroom, his white cotton robe flowing around him, open in front.
Tamara rolled lazily between the sheets staring at Michaelson’s rejuvenated body. He smiled then and climbed back into bed.
Click; the sim stopped. Tam was gone again. The ghost dissipated, and Jonathon felt whole once more.
"That should be far enough," Grids said, popping the chip out of the Senseman unit and back into the slot behind his ear.
Jonathon snapped out the ’trode and let the wire retract into the tiny player. He looked at Grids. "What do you know about this Magus File?" he asked.
Grids sipped his ’kaf. "At first, nothing," he said. "But I’ve been scanning Shadowland for data on the text I could read. Still don’t have too much, but it looks like the Magus Factor from the title has something to do with genetics and magic. I have a subroutine scanning the databanks for info on it, but I already know that most of it’s way too technical for me.
"I do know a little about biocomputers though. At least in theory. From decker hearsay, some megacorps, especially Aztechnology, are pouring metahuman brains into vats full of an electrolyte solution and wiring them as processors to create some sort of higher, artificial intelligence."
"You’re drekking me."
Grids shrugged. "I’m just telling you what I heard." Jonathon stretched, then downed the last of his cerveza. "Can you reconstruct the text of Magus File?"
"I’ve got Goofy working on it now."
"Goofy?"
"A smartframe I whipped up."
"Oh," Jonathon said. "Well, good. I want to get that bastard Michaelson. There must be a connection between him and Dougan Rose." Jonathon stood to go, then looked at the pale human in black denim. "Grids," he said, "I may not like you, but I need your help. Are you with me?" Grids stood as well. "All the way," he whispered, almost to himself.
"Good," Jonathon said. "Because that’s the only way I’d allow. Now, come on, we’ve got a funeral to go to."
21
Hendrix cracked his neck with a quick, precise tensing of his shoulder muscles, then piloted the van around a slow corner. He snatched a glance at Layla, sitting in the van’s passenger seat. She wore a hat with the Sprawl Repo, Inc. logo on the front patch. The ponytail of gold hair that hung out the back of her hat caught a ray of the fading sunlight.
Dusk approached—the perfect time for shadow work. Twilight, when colors lost their hue, becoming gray and indistinct. When shade and light fused into one.
"Checkpoint," he said. "Get ID ready."
She nodded, then handed him a flat plastic card with a holopic likeness of her and a scanbar. Like Hendrix, she wore a gray pinstriped uniform over her urban camouflage armor.
Hendrix put on his best biz face as they pulled up next to the guard booth protecting the entrance gate to Beverly Hills. The guard inside the booth looked bored, probably because he never saw any action at this post.
Hendrix had come in through Brentwood for that very reason. This guardpost had minimal security back up. Unlike the section that separated Studio City from East Hollywood, the three-meter-high plascrete wall was free of graffiti, and the pointed wrought iron spikes that jutted from the top of the wall were clean of dried blood. Cameras and gun turrets were also sparse.
Hendrix straightened his seat and activated his headphone, opening a connection to the temporary LTG number that Mole had set up so that Hendrix could upload data, including voice and images, directly to the Matrix. One of Mole’s smartframes scanned the virtual space every hundred milliseconds, then encoded and forwarded the data to Mole’s deck.
"We’re approaching checkpoint number two," Hendrix said.
Mole’s response was quick. "I’ve got you on visual. No worries."
Hendrix grunted. That was Mole’s job. He’d better have control of the video. Hendrix looked over at Layla again. "Anything in the astral?" he asked.
"Nothing I can see right here," Layla said, shaking her head slightly as her eyes focused on him. "Except for Juju. He just made a quick scan of the etheric and says it’s all clear. No watchers."
Hendrix nodded. It was a testament to the strange nature of the Awakened world that two of his team could operate without being present physically. The meat bodies of both Juju and Mole were back at the warehouse where they would be safe.
Hendrix pulled out his own ID holopic as the bored guard actually stepped out of the booth and walked up to the window. He must really be hunting for action, thought Hendrix. Never seen that happen before. Normally, the guards just looked through scratched macroglass and punched the gate open if the card scanned true.
Hendrix thumbed down the window and handed his and Layla’s cards to the man. The guard glanced at Hendrix’s face, then at the card. Hendrix smiled at him.
"Destination?" the guard asked.
"Stone Canyon Condos," Hendrix said.
The guard was a plump salaryman, unused to trouble and certainly not prepared for Hendrix and Layla should they decide to go for their weapons. The man straightened his hat and scanned the Sprawl Repo logo on the side of the van. "What’s the take today?" he said.
"Just some fancy simsense ’ware," Hendrix said. "Real ’spensive drek."
When the ID scan came up green, the guard handed the cards back to Hendrix and Layla, then resumed his bored look. "Have a lazy one," he said. Then he was back into the booth, punching the code to open the steel door.
Hendrix pulled the van through, smiling to himself. Next to him, Layla burst into laughter, and it was like sweet music to his ears. For a minute he let her humor infect him and he laughed as well.
"We’re through," he told Mole. "Proceeding to destination."
"Okay, okay," came Mole’s synthesized voice. "I’ll be scanning some data on Mr. Winger. Contact me when you’re approaching ground zero."
"Check."
Layla’s laughter subsided and she glanced at Hendrix. "This one’s easy money," she said.
"Perhaps."
"What could go wrong?" she said. "We’ve checked the angles; the run is easy. The cause is just. This Grids slag stole the information; he should return it."
"But we’re supposed to retire him as well," Hendrix said. "And we don’t know anything about the data he stole. Perhaps it should be disseminated."
She laughed again. "You think too much, babe."
Hendrix just smiled at that.
The drive to Tamara’s apartment went without incident. The traffic lights were flickering to life outside the Stone Canyon Condos as they pulled up. Layla was giddy from watching all the huge, sprawling houses nestled behind manicured lawns and sculptured landscaping. Huge old trees and hundred-year-old ivy almost made them forget they were in the sprawl at all, only a kilometer from shadows so black they’d geek you for a fragging cigarette.
The Stone Canyon Condos were new, set among some evergreen trees along Stone Canyon Reservoir. The structure was built from real redwood and mirrored gray glass so that the trees a
nd sky reflected off the windows.
Hendrix parked in plain sight and scanned the condos, clicking the magnification up on his cybereyes. With their low light and thermographic vision, he could tell nearly everything happening on the grounds.
There was a palm scanner on the front gate, but no actual guard. Null sweat. Nada. Zero opposition as far as he could see.
Lights were on in one of the apartments, but the residents seemed to be watching the trid. Tamara Ny’s apartment was dark. "Mole," Hendrix said, "we’re on site and ready to roll."
"Give me five seconds to get back into the node, and I’ll intercept any alarm calls."
Layla looked over at Hendrix, her fine features shadowed by the van’s overhead lamp. "Juju says there’s a watcher and an air elemental guarding the apartment complex. Nobody’s home otherwise. No Grids Desmond. No nobody."
"Will the spirits disturb us?" Hendrix asked, wishing Juju Pete were here in the flesh.
"Juju says it depends on what they’re tasked to do. Most likely not, unless we have to force entry."
"We’ll be discreet."
Layla grinned at him with white teeth as she slapped the ammo clip onto her silenced Ingram SMG. "Of course," she said, "discretion is the better part of valor." With an impossibly quick move, she slid the Ingram into its holster under her uniform. Accelerated by magic.
Hendrix relied on more mundane ways to keep up. The latest technological advances in bioware and cyber. He’d never gone toe to toe with Layla to see who was faster, stronger, but he had more experience by a long shot. Not even close. Each day that he ran the shadows and lived, he realized with more clarity that experience was what kept him alive. Making the right decisions. Maintaining the right contacts.
Shadowrunning had come fairly easy after his years as a merc. Years he tried to forget. Desert wars. Yucatan. Then the El Infierno invasion as part of the Calfree forces. What a joke that was, but he’d survived again, saved when his conscience and experience told him to bail out of his contract. The army had no right mowing down civilians in the name of keeping the peace. His unit had been captured by a marauding go-gang later that same day. All of them gutted and hung on lamp posts.