Shadowrun

by Russell Zimmerman

  “It was Medea who came up with the plan to grab Mr. Sato.” Takeshi nods at her as she takes over the story.

  “One of my many arcane talents is illusion. I’m very good. The interview you witnessed was an advanced form of illusion.” Medea’s smile is cool and professional. “The rest we left up to Hyperion, SIMaeon, and Hey Jude.”

  Hey Jude clears her throat. “I talked to Gaeatronics. Portex is consulting with them on something big, but they won’t say what. Just that they appreciated DocWagon’s rescue of him and limiting the collateral damage to the campus. Apparently, the assassination squad killed three security personnel and injured eight other Gaeatronics employees.”

  “Then there was the rumor mill.” Simone gestures to her seated guests. “Three days ago, Hyperion, Hey Jude, SIMaeon, and Gunther started letting people know that Corsica was around and willing to talk to Knight Errant. We knew the rumor would reach the ears of the people we wanted to hear it. Fifteen minutes before this show began, I sent one of my interns out for a soykaf and to brag about Corsica being in the studio with us, and that she was going to reveal something amazing.”

  Takeshi shrugs, “And if our ruse didn’t work, then we would have just spent an evening watching the live broadcast.”

  “Not a bad deal.” Simone preens for the camera and then laughs. “Also, we would have continued the interview with Corsica for—” Simone pauses as one of the producers walks out and whispers in her ear. She nods. “Just upload it for me.”

  Takeshi, Medea, and the rest exchange glances as Simone turns back to the camera, assuming a more formal demeanor. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve just received this message from the Shiawase Seattle office. And I quote, ‘Botan Sato was fired from his job in the Marketing Information and Forecasting Department for Shiawase Atomics as of four days ago for insubordination, unwarranted use of Shiawase Atomics resources without permission, and for unacceptable behavior. Shiawase Atomics was not involved in, nor does it condone Mr. Sato’s attacks on DocWagon 19, Gaeatronics, Chrome Holly, the Bellevue Pour House Tavern, or Studio 15 and Miss Hart. Shiawase Atomics sends its sincerest regards to Miss Vonvara’s family for her tragic and untimely death.’ End quote.”

  Hey Jude mutters, “And I got a bridge to sell you…”

  Gunther opens his mouth, but snaps it closed as Takeshi’s clears his throat.

  Simone smiles the insincere smile of a woman making a choice she’d prefer to avoid and nods to her guests. “Studio 15 and Stories with Hart appreciates Shiawase Atomics’s quick response to the actions of their former employee. Thank you to Shiawase Atomics for their candor and information about the state of Mr. Sato.”

  Simone turns to Takeshi again. “Where were we? Oh, yes. I would’ve continued the interview with Corsica revealing…” She stops and tilts her head in a listening pose. A frown creases her beautiful face as she shakes her head at the camera. She listens a moment longer as the DocWagon 19 members glance at each other.

  Finally, Simone sighs and gazes at the camera. “I’m sorry. At this time, my legal department is advising me not to say anything more about Corsica, as it might jeopardize the legal case against Botan Sato as well as possibly—” Her eye twitches in annoyance as she pauses for a moment, then begins again. “—as well as cause Shiawase Atomics to take legal action against Studio 15. Again, I’m sorry, everyone. My hands are being tied.”

  She turns to her guests. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if we can continue at all.”

  “Thank you for having us on your show. We appreciate it. But perhaps this is a good time to end the interview.” Takeshi’s suggestion is laced with the slightest edge of a command.

  Simone nods knowingly. “An excellent idea. Thank you, everyone, for following up with me and helping me solve the mystery of who attacked DocWagon 19, the enigmatic Portex, and why. Good evening.”

  Only Takeshi answers, “Good evening, Miss Hart.” Then the guests are doused in darkness, and the camera moves in for a close up on Simone’s face.

  “I hope you’ve enjoyed this special edition of Stories with Hart. It’s not every day that I become part of the story, and this isn’t the first time that I’ve followed up on a story because the truth required it, but this is the first time that I’ve used this show to capture a criminal. I want to thank the off-duty DocWagon employees who helped make this possible: Takeshi, Hey Jude, Gunther, SIMaeon, Medea, and Hyperion.”

  Simone smiles. “And that’s all we have for this episode. Join me again next week for another edition of Stories with Hart. Thank you and good night.”

  As the Simone’s face fades from sight, text scrolls up the screen.

  SIMaeon IS AWESOME!

  WARDROBE FOR SIMONE HART PROVIDED BY THE AMINA COLLECTION—STYLE AND SAFETY COMBINED.

  SIMaeon IS THE BEST!

  IN MEMORY OF HARAH “ODDER” VONVARA.

  The screen splits in two. On one half, the show’s credits continue to roll. On the other half, a commercial for the next Stories with Hart episode begins.

  Simone, wearing a couture version of a safari outfit, walks through Seattle’s Woodland Zoo. It’s a wondrous place of flora and fauna, but she doesn’t stop to look at the lemurs or lions or birds of prey as she walks past them. Instead, she stops at a gate with a sign that reads CRYPTOZOOLOGY EXHIBIT and looks at it, then looks at the camera.

  “Next time on Stories with Hart, Woodland Zoo’s special cryptozoological exhibit—educational entertainment for the whole family, or a massacre waiting to happen? You decide.”

  Simone smiles at the camera, then turns and walks through the cryptozoology exhibit gates as a roar is heard in the distance.

  Big Dreams

  R.L. King

  One

  I screwed up again today. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the worst, but this was the day when it finally caught up with me.

  Just so you know: getting fired sucks drek. Even if you hate your job. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

  So does making the walk of shame down to your pathetic little car, carrying your soggy box of meaningless personal crap while your former co-workers watch. At least most of them tried to make it seem like they weren’t looking, which I guess was something. It wasn’t like they hadn’t all known it was coming. Hell, I’d known it was coming, and my skill at office politics didn’t get much past making nice with the admins so they’d let me raid their candy dishes.

  It was raining. What else is new, right? My car’s wipers made sort of a wheezy brown whick-klunk sound like they were going to walk off the job any second now. Actually, the whole car was like that. You can say a lot of wiz things about magic, but it doesn’t help you remember stuff like routine vehicle maintenance.

  I’d probably have to sell the car anyway, since I had next to no savings. After the reaming I got this afternoon, I didn’t think any employers would be tripping over each other to hire me.

  I jammed on my horn, sending a jagged red blast of “Hey, drekwipe!” at the Aurora that cut me off. The guy flipped me off and kept right on going. Yeah, some things never changed, whether you were in the worst part of the Barrens or fighting your way through Downtown at rush hour: people were assholes, and people behind the wheels of vehicles were special assholes. The only difference was that in the Barrens, sometimes you got a bullet instead of a finger.

  Uncle Mason didn’t answer his comm.

  That was weird; I mean, okay, sometimes he let it go to voicemail when he had a client in the shop, but not too many people had his private number, and I can’t remember the last time he didn’t pick up when I called. Still, I just chalked it up to another crappy thing that was happening to me during my exceedingly crappy day and headed over there anyway. I don’t know why, exactly, since the lecture I was sure to get from him would be ten times worse than the one I got from that old windbag Bonner, but I guess I figured maybe it was better coming from family.

  And maybe I was feeling a little bit like I deserved it.

&
nbsp; Uncle Mason was pretty much it for my family these days, ever since my mom had fried her brain on a bad BTL a couple years back. Like it was for a lot of kids who grew up in the Barrens, “dad” was more of an abstract concept than an actual part of my life. According to Mom, he’d made himself scarce as soon as he’d found out she was hosting another mouth to feed. Mom hadn’t exactly been my biggest fan either, since having a kid around tended to cramp your style when your favorite pastimes were watching trid soaps, slotting chips, and sleeping around to prove you weren’t getting old.

  Uncle Mason was Mom’s older brother, and I’m guessing he got the full allotment of “sane and responsible” genes for the family, since there sure as hell weren’t any left by the time Mom came along. I guess this was a good thing, because he helped her out when he could—at least as much of my childhood had been spent playing in the cluttered back room of his lore shop as in the crumbling doss that was all Mom could afford. When I got older, he let me spend afternoons there helping him catalog the collection of weird stuff he took in. When my magic made a dramatic appearance at school during one of my frequent run-ins with the local lowlifes, he took me under his wing, helped me get my talent under control, and when the time came, put me in touch with the right people so I could score a scholarship to U-Dub and a ticket out of a dead-end life.

  All that, and here’s how I repay him: getting my ass fired from my first job for letting my mind wander and fragging up a critical ritual. Again.

  Yeah, I’m a real prize. Twenty-two years old and already a failure. The disappointment on his face would be bad enough, but his voice would be worse. Normally, Uncle Mason’s got this gravelly growl, all dark reds and grays with little jagged spikes. When he gets disappointed with me, the gravel turns to mud, the spikes to shapeless lumps of clay. They don’t hit me—they just ooze over me, engulfing me in a kind of cocoon of worthlessness. “Again,

  Cody?” he’d say with a sigh.

  The sighs were the worst. Those sighs burned.

  I guess I should say something about what I mean by all this color stuff I keep tossing off. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been able to see sound. It’s not something I do on purpose or have to work at—it just happens, like breathing. For a long time I thought everybody could do it, until this ork girl called me a freak when I was twelve and nearly kicked my ass for telling her that her voice was wiz: all sort of yellow with bright little blue waves. It was a long time after that before I found out that what I have has a name—synesthesia—but even before my magic showed up, it made listening to music pretty fragging awesome. Combine it with what you see on the astral during a really good concert, and it’s way better than drugs. It’s probably the main reason I made it out of the Barrens without some kind of monkey on my back.

  The shop’s front door was locked.

  This was getting weirder. It was only a little before 1900 hours; Uncle Mason was one of those types who couldn’t rub two brain cells together before noon and sometimes kept the shop open until close to midnight. I tried his comm again, and again it went to voicemail.

  I decided against taking an astral look-see for two reasons: first, leaving my body unprotected around here was asking for trouble, and second, I’d never bothered to ask how to get past the wards he kept up, and he’d never volunteered the info. I had the door code, so it wasn’t like he didn’t trust me. I punched it in and slipped inside, closing and locking the door behind me.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell.

  The shop had its usual odors, stuff so familiar I barely registered it: musty old paper, a little bit of the preservatives Uncle Mason used for some of his reagents, and whatever he’d had for lunch that day. All of that was there, but there was something else, too: a sharp, coppery tang.

  That wasn’t good. You didn’t grow up where I did without learning what blood smelled like. My heart beat faster.

  I froze, listening. The shop wasn’t big—just the showroom out front and the little combination workroom/storage area through a door in the back. I didn’t hear anything: if anybody was still here, they were keeping quiet. A quick assensing showed no glowing auras. That meant either nobody here, or they were better at hiding than I was at finding them.

  I headed toward the back, not bothering with a light; I could have done it blind. The door to the back room was cracked open, which was another red flag: Uncle Mason never left the storeroom door open, because that was where he kept the good stuff. He even kept separate wards around it.

  I braced for the familiar tingle as I eased the door forward. It didn’t come.

  That meant the wards were down, and that was very bad.

  Right about now would have been a great time to just step back to the front, pull out my ’link, and whistle up Knight Errant to come check things out. That’s what most of the good citizens around here would do.

  I’m not most good citizens, though. For one thing, I trust the Knights in Black about as far as I can dropkick them, since as a rule they tend not to be best chummers with people like me. You can take the boy out of the Barrens, but the Knights were great at sniffing out the Barrens in the boy. If anything was up, they’d be more likely to arrest me first and ask questions later than to try to figure out what had really happened.

  Mostly, though, it was because I knew how long it would take them to get here, and Uncle Mason might be in trouble. I didn’t know what I was going to be able to do if he was, but after today’s disappointment, I felt like I owed him at least a try.

  I reached out to pull power to me, feeling the familiar ripple settle over my body as I faded into invisibility. Then I pushed the door the rest of the way open.

  And I stopped.

  “Oh, frag…” I whispered, the invisibility spell slipping as I staggered back into the wall.

  The storeroom was lined with shelves, each one stuffed to bursting with bottles, jars, books, rocks, plants, bits of creatures, and stacks of yellowing, old-style paper. A scarred wooden worktable about a meter and a half square dominated the middle of the room; I couldn’t count how many school assignments I’d finished at that old table over the years. It was usually cluttered with whatever project Uncle Mason was working on.

  Right now—oh god no—it was cluttered with Uncle Mason.

  I didn’t want to see. I wanted to run, to get the hell out of here as fast as I could and pretend I’d never seen any of this. Instead, I forced myself to take a closer look.

  He’d been—dissected. That was the only way to describe it. I remember reading one time about the old pre-Awakening days, when kids studying biology had to cut up real frogs, carefully pulling out their organs and cataloging them with labels. Uncle Mason didn’t have any labels, but that was about the only difference. I swallowed hard, taking a step closer.

  He was stretched out spread-eagled on the table, each limb tied to a wooden leg with some kind of cord. There was surprisingly little blood. He’d been neatly opened, his inner workings laid bare in a way that was far more obscene than if he’d just been left there naked.

  The skin of his torso was pulled back and pinned to the wooden table surface. On either side of it, things that should still have been inside of him were arranged with the sort of care they’d tried and failed to drill into me at ManaSure. This was the stuff the people who cared about you should never see. When people referred to your “intimate parts,” they were usually talking about things like your junk or your ass, but in a normal life how many people would ever get a good look at your kidneys?

  They hadn’t touched his face. If I just focused on him from the neck up, he looked like he was sleeping, like his sharp bushy-browed eyes would pop open any second now and he’d ask me what the hell I was staring at. But I couldn’t just look from the neck up.

  I felt the soyburger I’d had for lunch taking the express elevator up, and barely spun to the side in time so I didn’t yarf all over my dead uncle. My heart pounded, my breath rasping like a freight train in my ears. “Uncle Ma
son…” I whispered. “What did they do to you—”

  Right about then someone knocked on the door out front: a bright orange bolt against the jagged blue of my breath.

  I froze, paralyzed. My thoughts raced around my brain, whacking uselessly against the inside of my skull: What do I do? They can’t find me here! They’ll think I did it! But if it’s the Knights and I run, they’ll catch me, and—

  The knock came again, harder this time. A male voice called something I couldn’t make out.

  I took another look at Uncle Mason, at his spread limbs, at his yawning gut, at his familiar face with its lines and wrinkles and that silly walrus mustache of his.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Mason,” I whispered, and bolted for the back door.

  As I left, my mind registered something I hadn’t noticed before: Aside from Uncle Mason himself, nothing else in the storeroom looked like it had been disturbed.

  Two

  As usual when I was in trouble, I turned to Dax. Some things never change.

  I didn’t tell him I was coming—figured it would be safer for both of us. I knew where he’d be, even though I hadn’t seen him for months.

  I always felt a little wrong about meeting up with Dax at Big Dreams, where he’d worked the last couple of years as a bouncer. The place was one of the hottest scenes in that corner of the Barrens: a combination bar, strip joint, and dance club that pulled crowds from as far away as Fort Lewis. Its main draw was that it was one of the few venues outside the Underground that catered to trolls, orks, and anybody who loved them. That was why I felt wrong: not anything to do with racism, but more like an overwhelming sense of being different.

  That, and I could never get used to being the shortest guy in the room.

  The joint was in full swing tonight, the pounding beat and wild orgasmic colors and patterns of the latest goblin-rock act refusing to be held in by mere walls. I adjusted my ’link to tone down most of the AROs trying to point me at everything from super-sized drinks to backroom lap dances, though there wasn’t much I could do to filter out the stares from the rest of the clientele. I wasn’t the only human here—I’d found out a long time ago that there were actually quite a few norm guys who liked the ladies with more to love—but we weren’t exactly a majority. I felt like a jockey at a linebacker convention.