Shadowrun

by Russell Zimmerman

  I was just trying to figure out how to deal with the small knot of troll ganger wannabes giving me the stink-eye from the bar when a hand the size of a devil rat fell on my shoulder and a voice the color of fresh earth rumbled, “Hey, look who’s slummin’!”

  Even though I recognized the voice (I never forget a voice—another perk that goes with the pretty pictures in my head) I still would have jumped if I didn’t have about fifty kilos of pressure holding me down.

  Dax Nash wasn’t just a troll: he was a troll other trolls looked up to. Literally, I mean. Three meters tall, inked on every patch of exposed skin, front-facing horns honed to sharp points, and enough piercings to make him think twice about ever going near a metal detector, Dax looked like what you got when a tank and a brick wall got together and made a baby at a scrapyard.

  He was also the closest thing to a brother I had.

  As soon as I turned around to face him, his grin faded and his lumpy brow furrowed in concern. “You look like drek, chummer.” The music was so loud he had to yell even though he was standing right next to me.

  “Uncle Mason’s dead, Dax. I need help.”

  He got me out of there fast, clearing a path through the twisting crowds like some kind of spike-studded bulldozer. We passed in front of the stage, where a grinning, limber troll lady almost as tall as Dax was making the crowd dance to her tune. I followed in his wake and tried not to catch any elbows.

  He took me to the back and into a small office littered with beer cans, sequined bits of strippers’ wardrobes, and crumpled McHugh’s wrappers. “Talk,” he said, plopping down on the reinforced desk.

  So I talked. I told him about getting fired, about heading over to talk to Uncle Mason and get the lecture over with, and how I’d found him cut up into spare parts in his workroom. I realized both my voice and my body were shaking: whatever rush of adrenaline had driven me this far was wearing off, and I was only now starting to realize what kind of drek soup I was in. I hadn’t even had time to mourn Uncle Mason yet. Part of me still refused to believe he was really dead.

  Dax listened without saying anything. He was always like that with me. Sure, he could pull off the “big dumb scary troll” routine with the best of them, but I knew better: the guy was as smart as me, and a lot less lazy. When I finished, he blew out a blast of air that sent the nearest McHugh’s wrappers fluttering. “Drek…”

  “What am I gonna do, Dax?” I asked. “I can’t go back there—not now. Hell, they’re probably already analyzing the puke I left and figuring out who it came out of. They’re gonna think I did it. And who the hell wants to cut up my uncle?”

  Dax reached into a little fridge behind him and tossed me a beer the size of a small fire extinguisher, then got one for himself. He was looking spooked too: he hadn’t seen Uncle Mason in a lot of years, but he’d always appreciated the fact that my uncle didn’t treat him like Barrens scum. “Anybody see you when you left?”

  “I don’t think so.” I sagged in the oversized chair. “Frag, Dax, Uncle Mason’s dead. They cut him up like some kind of science experiment!” I couldn’t help it: I tried not to lose it, but the images kept coming. I couldn’t shake that vision of my uncle’s guts all over that table. I felt like I was going to puke again.

  Dax’s big hand came down on my shoulder. “Hold it together, bro,” he said, his deep earth-brown voice full of sympathy. “You can’t freak out yet. We gotta figure out if anybody saw you.”

  I nodded, miserable. “I need to get some stuff from my place. You think it’s safe?”

  “Hang on. Lemme go do something. You stay here.”

  I waited in the office, closing my eyes and letting the muted colors from the band pummel me. Dax came back a few minutes later with a skinny ork girl who looked too young to be in the club. She wore a CrimeTime T-shirt and had a deck slung over one shoulder.

  “This is Bug,” Dax told me. “I had her do a little checking, and I got some sorta good news.”

  “Yeah?” Good news, even of the “sorta” variety, was better than anything that had happened so far today.

  “Whoever was at the front door,” Bug said, “it wasn’t the Knights. I hacked a couple street cameras around the shop, and there ain’t nobody there.”

  I stared at her. Maybe things weren’t quite as fragged as I thought. “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Cops’d be all over that place if they found a body inside. I even checked the recordings—saw you go in around 1900, and then some other guy showed up at the front door a little later. He waited a couple minutes, then left. That’s it. Nobody there now.”

  “So maybe nobody knows I—” I started, then had a brainflash. “Hey,” I said, “Did you maybe see who—”

  “Way ahead of you, chummer.” Bug shook her head. “Somebody wiped the feed before that. I only got about a half-hour before you showed up. Pro work, too,” she added. “Whoever cacked your uncle, they made damn sure nobody’d see ’em doin’ it.”

  Dax gave me a ride over to my place on his old Scorpion. “You’re gonna have to make it quick!” he yelled over his shoulder, his voice carrying over the throbbing gray thudthudthud of the engine. “I gotta get back before the late show starts.”

  I didn’t answer, just hung on to his synthleather jacket and tried not to bounce around too much on the wide seat. The Harley had been ancient when he’d gotten it, back before I headed off to U-Dub, and apparently Dax thought having suspension was an admission that your ass couldn’t handle the ride.

  I hoped he and Bug were right about nobody seeing me. Trying to keep my mind off my protesting backside, I thought some more about what had gone down, and realized I had no reason to think anybody was after me just because they’d killed Uncle Mason. As much as my stomach felt like it was full of plascrete and my heart ached at the loss of the last blood relative I had left in the world, the whole thing had probably just been a business deal gone bad.

  I wasn’t born yesterday: even though he didn’t talk about it, I knew Uncle Mason had his thumbs stuck in some pretty sketchy pies. Some of the stuff he sold wasn’t technically legal, and I’d seen more than one shadowy figure show up at the shop’s back door while I was studiously polishing rat skulls and pretending not to notice. If that was the case, then this whole business was probably over. Not a happy thought, but at least a somewhat comforting one.

  I let my mind wander for a minute, fantasizing about tracking down whoever had done it and getting even with them, like I used to do when I was a little kid. Back then, I used to daydream all the time about being some kind of combat monster in a flashy longcoat and mirrorshades, slipping in and out of evil corp installations like a ghost and helping out the deserving people in my neighborhood. It was a nice dream, but it didn’t survive contact with the real world for very long. Right now I was painfully aware of the hard truth: I wasn’t some shadowrunner or trid action hero. I was just a poor slot who’d gotten fired from his first real job because he couldn’t focus on what he was doing long enough not to frag up one simple ritual. Sure, I knew a few spells (including some I wasn’t really supposed to know, courtesy of Magicknet and an old friend of Dax’s back in the day) and I was actually halfway passable at slinging the mojo when I could keep my mind on track, but Bug had said these guys were pros. Dreams were one thing, but delusions got you killed.

  My doss was in an old building just south of Renton. Not the swankiest end of town, but I couldn’t afford much on my entry-level mojodrone salary, and at least it wasn’t the Barrens.

  Dax parked the Scorpion across the street and a block down. I thought he’d just wait for me, but he climbed off the bike and stumped after me, looking around like he expected to see somebody getting ready to jump us.

  I noticed he had his Ruger stuck in his belt. “You expecting trouble?”

  He shrugged. “I always expect trouble. That way I don’t get surprised.”

  Inside, the lobby was dim and empty except for a homeless guy curled up under a blan
ket in the back. My place was upscale enough that we got a better class of bum: you could usually count on finding at least one sleeping it off somewhere on your way up, but around here they didn’t piss in the corners or hassle you for smokes.

  We took the stairs up, for two reasons: I didn’t trust the building’s pair of elevators because it was a coin toss whether they were working on any given day, and they weren’t designed with three-meter trolls in mind.

  I’d made it as far as the second floor before something worked its way up to the front of my brain. I stopped and held up my hand.

  “What?” Dax whispered. He could actually make a good try at a real whisper, which was saying something for a guy with lungs the size of garbage bags.

  “Get your gun out,” I whispered back. “Cover me for a sec.”

  After all these years he didn’t ask questions, just did as I asked. I stepped down the hallway a little and sat against the wall. “Back soon. This is probably a dumb idea, but I want to check something.”

  Of all the things I could do as a spellslinger, astral projection was one of the best. Growing up where I did, there were a lot of cages. Some of them were real, like our cereal-box-sized apartment and the institutional depression of classrooms where nobody, not even the teacher, gave a frag about what they were doing. Others were more metaphorical, like the knowledge that, at least before my magic showed up, the odds were strong I’d end up dead before I was old enough to drink.

  Getting the mojo was like hitting the lottery for a Barrens kid: it held the keys to all the cages. It meant that, even as a skinny little snot who couldn’t fight worth drek, I could escape. The drab, gray-brown world of Redmond was nothing compared to the vibrant pulsing life on the astral plane. Sure, I knew it was dangerous there, but I didn’t care. When I spent most of my days dodging gangers and trying not to get eaten by devil rats, the weird, brilliant beauty of the astral was my own private oasis. My meat body might be stretched out on a musty, secondhand mattress in my microscopic closet of a bedroom, but my real body, the only one that mattered, could soar. You have no idea how liberating that was.

  Right now, though, I was doing less soaring and more sneaking. My astral form slipped free of my body and I took a moment to orient myself, looking down at Dax standing guard over me. His big body glowed brightly: I guess he hadn’t been able to scrounge up the cred yet for the ’ware he’d been wanting. His aura looked calm but wary; his hand was on his gun, but he hadn’t drawn it yet.

  Moving at the speed of thought, I zipped up the stairs toward the fourth floor. Mine was the last flat at the end of the hall, near a boarded-over window. I slowed down as I got near it.

  I knew I was probably being stupid, acting like a nervous kid. There was probably nothing wrong. Never mind that the homeless guy’s blanket downstairs had looked a little too clean for the usual class of lowlifes that lounged in my lobby; never mind that the boots sticking out from beneath it were a little too nice for a guy whose every spare nuyen went down his throat or into his chipjack. That by itself didn’t prove anything. Even bums got new shoes occasionally. Couldn’t hurt to check, though.

  My door was closed, just as I expected. Still feeling stupid—Dax was going to laugh his ass off at me for being such a chickenshit—I slipped my head through the wall for a look inside.

  I saw him just as he looked up: he was on the other side my front room, crouched down and going through a couple boxes of my stuff. Human or elf, from the look of it—his aura glowed brightly like Dax’s, and like Dax he didn’t seem concerned. Then he glanced up. His eyes met mine and he stiffened, leaping to his feet.

  I didn’t react as fast as I should have: I wasn’t used to things spotting me when I was astral, at least not things that weren’t astral themselves. He was already heading toward the door. I got the hell out.

  Barely two seconds later I slammed back into my body, jumping up before the momentary disorientation faded. “Dax!” I yelled. “We gotta get out of here. Now!”

  Once again, he didn’t ask questions. “Stay close,” he rumbled, already starting back down the hall toward the stairs.

  Someone was coming up the stairs just as we reached the top. I had only a second to register that it was the homeless man, now free of his blanket—his long coat and SMG matched his boots a lot better than the blanket had.

  “Hold it, kid!” he ordered. His voice was muddy green with streaks of black.

  I heard footsteps pounding behind me. Dax must have heard them too, because he flung himself down the stairs toward the guy. When you’re as big as Dax, a flight of stairs built for humans to take in ten steps—or maybe five if they’re in a big hurry—barely constitutes an obstacle. From the look of the guy, he didn’t expect to end up with a faceful of high-speed troll. Dax grabbed the guy’s gun arm with one massive hand and spun him by it, slamming him back into the wall. I heard something crack, and the guy let out a big bright red shriek.

  “Come on!” Dax yelled at me.

  I was right behind him. My heart thudded, cold sweat running down my back. I pelted after him and got to the door just as the guy who’d been inside my place appeared. Without thinking, I pulled mana to me and flung a spell back over my shoulder. If it hit, it would knock him over, at least. I didn’t wait to see if it worked, but just followed Dax through the lobby doors.

  Outside, the street was quiet. I half-expected to see more guys lying in wait, and with every splashing step toward Dax’s Scorpion, I anticipated hearing the staccato buddabudda of SMG fire and feel hot metal ripping into me, but it didn’t happen. I risked a glance over my shoulder: no sign of anybody.

  I threw myself onto the back of the bike, which Dax had already fired up. He took off, the back tire spinning, flinging up water before it found traction on the wet road.

  “Go! Go! Go!” I yelled, grabbing big handfuls of his jacket. What the frag was going on?

  Three

  Dax took me back to Big Dreams. “You sure about this?” I asked as he edged the Scorpion past the crowd milling out front and into a hidden parking area behind the club. “Whoever these guys are, I don’t want them coming after people here.”

  He waved me off. “We gotta talk,” was all he said. He wouldn’t say more until we got inside.

  This time we didn’t go through the main club, though the music’s bright pounding colors still wound around my head to form a surreal background to my increasingly freaked-out thoughts. He led me down a back hallway, up some stairs, and into what in any other club might have been a VIP room. It had a large table, several trid units, big comfortable chairs just right for plus-sized private dances, a small bar, and a one-way window looking out over the seething crowd below. But there were no fashion-victim trolls or half-naked ork dancers in here. Even the ubiquitous AROs you’d expect to see all over the place in a room like this were absent. A small white mushroom-shaped object squatted on the middle of the table.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Safe, I hope,” Dax said. “Hang out for a minute. I gotta go find a couple people.”

  “Safe? If those fraggers have magic, it won’t take ’em long to find me.”

  Dax shook his head. “It’s warded. Be back soon. Stay put, okay?” And he was gone.

  I examined the room in a new light. Warded? I guess it made sense if this was some kind of VIP room: the last thing a rich troll cheating on his spouse wanted was some mojo-slinging PI tracking him down, or an enterprising club-goer recognizing him and deciding to play a little paparazzi blackmail.

  I sank down into a chair, letting the adrenaline from the last half-hour ebb away, along with the slight drain from casting the spell back at my building. I pummeled my tired brain, trying to figure out what was going on: somebody had been inside my doss, going through my stuff, with at least one other guy (with an SMG!) waiting for me in the lobby. What did they want?

  It was possible they were just robbing me—my little apartment wasn’t exactly in a triple-A zone, and jus
t last week the guy downstairs had his place tossed. But it didn’t add up. For one thing, if the guy downstairs had been a lookout, why didn’t he call up and tell the one in the doss to bail out when he saw me coming? He hadn’t done that—in fact, it seemed like he’d let me and Dax get past him so they could surround us.

  And why didn’t he shoot? He had a clear bead on me, even before Dax had fragged up his arm. And when we ran, they both had more than one chance to plug me. Why hadn’t they?

  Then, naturally, came the most uncomfortable thought of all: did this have something to do with Uncle Mason? I couldn’t think of any other reason why guys with guns were suddenly interested in me, unless it had something to do with work. Given that the sec-guys at ManaSure had just about been standing in my pockets while I gathered my gear before I left, I didn’t see how they could think I’d stolen anything. So it was back to my uncle.

  The door opened and I nearly jumped. Dax came in, followed by three other people. I recognized two of them: Bug, the young ork decker, and Mimi, Dax’s girlfriend. The other one was a dwarf a few years older than me, with a long gray coat and dark blue hair and beard. Dax closed and locked the door, and the dwarf came over and flipped a switch on the mushroom-shaped object in the middle of the table.

  “What the hell?” I asked, taking them all in.

  “Hear you got yourself a little problem,” Mimi said, her husky voice the color of honey. She was a troll too, not quite as tall as Dax or nearly as wide, but almost as inked. You know that expression “built like a brick drekhouse”? That was Mimi. She was still dressed in her “work clothes” of sequined bikini top, G-string, and spike heels; the open coat she’d thrown over the ensemble did nothing to dim the effect. Mimi was the kind of chica who owned any room she entered, and she knew it.