Shadowrun

by Russell Zimmerman

Boss! The spirit’s frantic voice in my head. Behind!

  I spun to see another dark figure coming around the other side of the house. Frag it, did they ever give up? This one looked like a dwarf; I thought of gruff, blue-haired Tonio, who’d died trying to help some punk-kid friend of his teammate, and my rage flared again.

  I gathered mana to me, fighting to keep the invisibility spell up at the same time. I was sweating like a pig, my skull pounding in rhythm with my heartbeat: I wasn’t used to throwing around mojo like this. In fact, I’d never used magic to hurt anybody in my life before tonight. It was kind of like martial arts: once I got some training, knowing I could had always been enough to boost my confidence so I didn’t need to get into fights.

  This time, though, I didn’t use my stunning spell. It hadn’t taken down the other one—at my power level, maybe I just didn’t have enough juice to take out this level of opposition. If I was going to make it out of this, I’d have to use my brain, not my power.

  “Eat this, motherfragger,” I whispered, pointing my hand at the guy just as he spotted me (how had he spotted me? I was invisible!) and brought his gun around.

  I wasn’t close enough to see his expression when his feet lifted off the ground and he sailed upward, but I imagined it must be pretty amusing. He yelled something I couldn’t make out and tried to get a bead on me as he continued rising, but I used his confusion to scramble behind cover again.

  I didn’t take any chances: I sent him up as far as I could while still keeping him in sight, and then pulled the rug out. He plummeted, shrieking bright red (I was learning tonight that shrieks of terror were almost always some shade of red, no matter what color the voice was normally) and crashed with a dull brown thud. He didn’t move.

  I wondered if I’d killed him. At this point, I didn’t care. “Bug?

  Still there?”

  “We’re moving,” Strings said. “Taking fire. Where are you?”

  I ducked low and looked around. I couldn’t see anybody else nearby: either they were invisible too, or they were still out front. “How many more?”

  “At least two,” Bug said.

  “We got more comin’ in,” Strings broke in. “Drones picking up two more vans from the south and west.”

  Oh, frag. Things just kept getting better.

  I knew I needed to get my ass back out front if I had any chance of making it out of here alive. My spirit didn’t have any more services left, but at least it was still following its last order to look out for threats. Ahead, I could still hear gunfire, and wondered if the drones had managed to take anybody else down. With Chunder and Junkyard out of action, we were woefully low on offensive capability. Basically we had Strings’s drones, and we had me.

  At least Strings knew what she was doing.

  I decided to risk a quick message to Bug so she’d know where I was. >Coming out. East. Invisible.

  “On our way,” she replied. “Hurry.”

  I picked up the pace. I hadn’t been scared before, but I was now. If Bug and Strings left without me, I was meat and I knew it.

  My only chance was to get to the van. Even then, with two more coming in fast, odds weren’t looking good for the home team.

  A cry of pain—or whatever spirits feel that passes for pain— over my mind-link, and then the little air spirit’s presence was gone. Somebody’d taken it out. That meant they had magic. Oh, this was not good…

  I’d almost reached the front of the house and was starting to scan the area for the van when something hit my legs and they stopped working right. I completed an unceremonious faceplant onto the scrubby ground before I realized somebody had snared me with some kind of bola that had wrapped around my ankles and dropped me like a sack of rocks. I only had a second to consider that, twisting around to try to spot whoever had hit me, when a figure that hadn’t been there an instant ago loomed up in my vision.

  He was big: a large human or an ork, but I couldn’t tell for sure because he was clad head to toe in some kind of matte-black security armor. His helmet was black too, even the visor, and he held an assault rifle in his right hand.

  “Bug! I’m caught!” I hissed into the link as the man reached his beefy left hand down and grabbed me by the front of my jacket. I fought to formulate a spell, but I had no experience with this kind of combat casting, and he was shaking me so hard my teeth were rattling.

  “Frag it, kid!” His voice behind the helmet was an electronic growl, dark muddy orange shot through with streaks of purple. I’d never heard a voice that color before. “Just tell us where the hell you stashed it, and nobody else has to die!”

  I gaped at him. At this point, I’m not proud to say, I’d have handed over anything I owned just to get these guys off our backs. Yeah, they’d killed Uncle Mason. Yeah, they’d killed Dax and Mimi. Maybe they were even going to kill me. But I’d be damned if I was going to get whoever remained of my team—of Mimi and Dax’s chummers—killed to hold on to some thing, no matter how valuable somebody might think it was.

  The problem was, I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about. “Got what stashed?” I yelled, infusing all of my anger and frustration into my voice. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  In the periphery of my awareness I thought I heard an explosion. Oh, no.

  Oh, frag, no.

  The guy in the black armor shook me again. “Don’t frag with me, you stupid kid!” the featureless helmet screamed in my face. I could barely make out other figures approaching from behind him. “You damn well better—”

  He didn’t get a chance to tell me what I damn well better do, because suddenly the air was full of sound. Something hit the guy from behind and pitched him forward, driving us both back into the house. Of course I hit first, and then he hit me. He was no lightweight—I gasped as the impact forced my breath out of me. My mind spun: Maybe Bug and Strings had—

  Was that a helicopter?

  And then the whole house and the yard in front of me were bathed in light so bright it burned my eyes. I sagged back against the house and squinted up, trying to make sense out of what was going on. The black-armored guy had dropped me and backed off, and somebody in the chopper was firing on him. I watched him turn tail and retreat so fast I could barely follow his movement, weaving back and forth toward the back yard. I tried to throw a spell at him, but he was gone before I could gather my thoughts.

  And then the yard was full of people, and they were all shooting at each other. Mostly the new group was shooting at the old group, because as near as I could tell, the old group was trying their best to get their asses out of there as fast as they could. Which wasn’t very fast: the new group was mowing them down like a pro Urban Brawl team taking out a herd of street kids.

  “Bug? Strings? You there?” Even as I called their names into the ’link, I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer. I didn’t have a good view of the front part of the house, but the orange nimbus- glow and the smell of burning rubber and oil (and worse) told me what I needed—and desperately didn’t want—to know.

  I had to get out of here. Nobody was paying attention to me right now. If I was careful, I might be able slip out before they—

  A woman in armor appeared around the corner of the house, looking right at me. “Come on,” she called. “We’ll get you out of here!”

  I might be new at this, but I wasn’t an idiot. I raised my hands, head throbbing, and pulled the mana to me again.

  She whipped out a small gun. It fired with the tiniest of little baby-blue thwips, something stung the side of my neck, and that was it.

  Five

  When I woke up, I wasn’t dead.

  That was seriously the first thought that popped into my head when I opened my eyes: I’m not dead. Why am I not dead?

  “About time,” said a voice, gruff but not unkind.

  I blinked. I was lying on something soft, in a dim and mostly featureless room. Seated next to me was somebody I’d never seen before: an ork woman in an olive-
drab tank top, her whole upper body assembled from big slabs of muscle. I jumped, trying to jerk to a sitting position. My head felt woozy.

  “Easy,” she said, putting aside the newsfax she’d been reading. Her voice, oddly, was bright pink. “Easy, kid. You’re okay now. You’re safe.”

  I stared at her. I was right: I’d never seen her before. Where the hell was I?

  “Why aren’t I dead?” I demanded. My voice slurred a little, and I finally caught on: they’d drugged me. My hand flew to my neck where the sting had hit me.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “Things were a little chaotic. We had to get you out fast. Couldn’t have you fighting us.”

  “Who are you?” I scrubbed my forehead like I was trying to hold my brains in. This night just kept making less and less sense as it went on. “What do you want? Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”

  She handed me a bottle of water. “Here. Drink this. And if you feel up to it, come with me. There’s some people you need to meet.”

  “I’m not going fraggin’ anywhere!” I yelled, slapping the bottle out of her hand. “Not until somebody tells me what the hell’s going on!” I felt my control, which had held up remarkably well over the course of everything that had happened to me tonight, at last starting to slip its moorings. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to do anything. Everybody I cared about—everybody who’d trusted me—was dead now. At this point I didn’t give one frag what happened to me. I was thoroughly out of frags to give.

  The ork woman nodded, and there was sympathy in her small brown eyes. “Yeah, I get it,” she said. “You had a pretty rotten night, from what I heard.”

  “Are they dead?” The question came out of me without any mental filters to hold it back. I had to know. “Bug and Strings, and the others—are they—?” A last glimmer of hope struggled to stay alive inside me, that maybe they’d managed to get out, or that somehow they’d just been injured, instead of—

  Her expression was all I needed to see.

  I sank back down to the bed, rolling over away from her. This was it. I couldn’t take any more. “Just go away,” I told her. “Or kill me, if you’re going to. I don’t care any more.”

  There was a long pause, silent except for her breathing and mine. I heard her chair creak as she got up, and her footfalls as she left the room. The door shut with a gentle click. I didn’t even bother to roll over and try to see if there was a way I could escape. That was how much I didn’t care.

  I wasn’t sure how much time passed before the door opened again. I didn’t turn back toward it. “I told you to go away.”

  “We can’t do that, Cody.” It was a different voice this time: male, soft, deep blue shot with purple. It had a British accent.

  I still didn’t roll over. “Get out, whoever you are. All of you.”

  “Don’t you want to know what all of this is about?” the man asked.

  I froze, curious in spite of myself, and hating myself for it. At least if they were going to kill me, I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what was so important that all these people were willing to commit this many murders over it.

  I rolled over.

  The man sat in the same chair the ork woman had been in. He was human, maybe late thirties, with dark hair and a suit that probably cost more than my monthly salary back at ManaSure.

  “Look,” I said, letting out a loud sigh. “I don’t know who you are or what you want. I don’t care. My friends are dead. My uncle’s dead. Maybe you’re connected with the people who killed them. Maybe you’re not. But either way, I can’t help you.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” he said. He stood. “Come out front when you’re ready. There are things you need to hear, and then you can decide what you want to do.”

  And he left, just like that, closing the door behind him again.

  For a couple minutes, I thought about just staying where I was, but part of my mind wouldn’t let me do that. Some part of me had to know, even if it was just for the short time before they killed me.

  I swung my legs off the bed, making a quick detour to take a leak before heading out. I stared at my image in the small mirror, realizing I hadn’t gotten a good look at myself all night. My eyes were huge and sunken in my pale, thin face, my mousy-brown hair hanging in lank strings over my forehead. I looked like some kind of war survivor.

  Come to think of it, I guess maybe that’s what I was.

  When I showed up in the front room of what looked like a featureless rental house, the ork woman was there, along with a lean, leather-jacketed human man with a dirty-blond ponytail. The British man came back in from the kitchen, where he’d been conversing with someone on a commlink. All three of them looked at me, waiting.

  “Well?” I demanded, throwing myself down into the nearest chair. “Start talking. What the hell’s going on, why is somebody killing all my friends, and what are they looking for? I know it’s got something to do with my uncle, and some dragon. Maybe more than one. And they think I’ve got this thing, whatever it is. So what is it? And while I’m at it, who the hell are you?” I glared at them in challenge, one right after the other. As bad as I felt right now, it felt good to get that all out.

  The British man answered. He didn’t look at all ruffled by my outburst. He paced around the room as he talked. “You’re quite likely correct. The people who killed your uncle and your friends want you because they think you have something they want. The question we need to answer is: do you?”

  “Don’t you people listen?” I yelled. Whatever patience I might have had at some point—and I’d never been high on the scale even at the best of times—had gone right out the window a couple of hours ago. I spoke in slow, distinct words, like I was talking to a toddler: “I. Don’t. Have. Anything.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s true,” he said. “Since you don’t know what it is, you might have it and not even know you have it. Or, as I suspect, you might know where it is, or at least have seen it. That’s what we’re needing to determine.” He paused and seemed to catch on that I was building up another head of steam, because he continued: “They—or rather, the people they’re working for— are looking for a dragon embryo. And so are the people we’re working for. The difference is, our employer doesn’t want to kill anyone who’s ever been associated with it. He’s—somewhat more forgiving of past transgressions than his counterpart.”

  I gaped at him. I wasn’t sure I’d even heard him right. “A—dragon embryo? You mean like a baby dragon? Some kind of egg?”

  “Not an egg,” he said. “A preserved embryo. Probably around a third of a meter long.” He pulled out his commlink, called up an image, and held it up. It showed a page from a scientific textbook, depicting a small, grayish creature that did look quite a bit like the beginnings of a baby dragon. It also looked very dead. “It would likely be stored in some kind of solution. It’s very old.”

  I studied it for a moment, then looked up at him. “That’s what everybody’s after? My uncle doesn’t have any—”

  I stopped, a sudden chill crawling up my spine as a long-ago memory from my childhood came back to me.

  “What?” the ork woman asked, leaning forward.

  I let my breath out. “I thought it was a fake…” I said, talking more to myself than to any of them. “A model, or something. That’s why I didn’t think of it, even after Bug—”

  I hadn’t seen the thing for years, but I could picture it clear as day in my mind’s eye now: back when I’d first gotten my magic and spent most of my free time helping Uncle Mason in his shop, it had been there in the back room, sitting on the shelf in a jar, next to a couple of other, similar specimens. I think one of them had been some kind of Awakened chicken, and one was a monkey-looking thing. When Bug had mentioned “dragon parts,” it hadn’t even occurred to me that Uncle Mason might have had a whole dragon sitting in his storeroom.

  “You know of it?” the British man asked, excitement layering a flash of red o
ver his blue-purple tones.

  I glared at him. “Okay, just a fraggin’ minute,” I protested. “You’re gonna tell me the rest of this. I’m done being some kind of pawn in everybody’s little game. You want what I know, you tell me what I want to know. That’s the deal.”

  He made a small shrug. “Fair enough, then. But be quick. If you know where it is, we need to move soon. They won’t stop looking.”

  “So there’s some dragon out there who’s pissed off because talismongers are selling their parts, right?” I asked, leaning forward in my chair. “That’s what Bug found when she did some digging online.”

  He nodded. “Yes. There’s discord among the dragons these days, as well as between the dragons and what they call the ‘young races’—that is to say, us. Some of the more militant among them have decided that anyone who’s been trafficking in dragon reagents needs to be punished with extreme prejudice. And then there are others who want the reagents back merely so they can give them a proper draconic sendoff.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “That, I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “A dragon, though.”

  “It’s probably safer if we don’t tell you that.”

  An answer without being an answer. I mulled that over. “And these other guys are working for one of the dragons that wants to kill everybody who’s ever had anything to do with a dragon reagent. Even if it was years ago. Even if they didn’t mean to, like my friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s to say they won’t kill me if I tell you where this thing is and you take it away?” I demanded, anger seeping into my voice. “You take it and go off wherever you’re from and give it to this other dragon, and I’m stuck here in Seattle. My friends are dead. My uncle’s dead. I got nobody any more. They’ll pick me off like gangers on a devil rat.”

  He considered. “We could—arrange a relocation, I think.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want a relocation. That would just move the problem to a different city. At least here I know my way around.”