Shadowrun: Fire & Frost

by Kai O'Connal

  Leung’s death was an icicle in his chest. His inner self warred with the need to discover why and how the hacker died and the desire—no—the obsession of seeing the tower for himself. He wanted to touch it.

  To see it with his eyes.

  Kyrie stood beside him, but a little apart. She’d grown quiet after the doc pronounced Leung dead, her face a blank mask. The physical adept had been less animated at Slycer’s death on the run before this one. But then, the two of them hadn’t known Slycer very well, or shared much time with him.

  Tango had apologized several times, as if she wasn’t sure what else to say, and Niko’s expression gave his own sadness away. Elijah wasn’t fooled—these two weren’t sad for themselves as much as they were afraid. No one knew why that device had been there. No one knew where it came from. What if it were related to the tower? What if the tower presented more deadly mysteries?

  Elijah already knew these questions because he’d asked them himself. They rattled around in his head as the cage descended and for a time, the shaft grew darker. He could make out tiny robotic lights moving with them, taking up positions along the shaft wall to illuminate it as they descended.

  When they reached the bottom, his jaw hung open as the cage door opened and he nearly ran toward it.

  Sticking up from the hollowed out ice was a conical-shaped monolith. Bits of ice still clung to its surface, which gleamed when the light hit it. Elijah could make out specks of gold and azure in the light as he walked around it and Kyrie tracked him with their hand light.

  “What the hell is it made of?”

  Elijah shook his head. “I’m not sure. Niko, was Gauntlet able to analyze it?”

  “No.” The shorter troll moved in the opposite direction as they all circled the twenty-foot tall pike. “But Danvers’ techs agree that the tower itself goes much deeper and becomes much wider. If he’d cleared more of it, he would have run out of ice for the floor.”

  “What’s it for?” Tango asked as she approached it, and then, with just a hint of hesitation, touched it with her gloved hand.

  Elijah actually flinched. He expected a light, or maybe a glyph—but nothing came of it. He started removing his glove to touch the surface with his bare hand.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Niko warned. “The temperature down here is fifty degrees below what it is on the surface. Just removing your glove could be far more dangerous than touching the tower.”

  The mage nodded, and touched it with his gloved hand. The surface was smooth, with ice crystals that seemed to form right before his eyes. “Is there any way to warm it up down here?”

  “No—adding heat could sacrifice the integrity of the shaft.” Niko said. “If you melt the ice at the bottom—”

  “The top collapses on top of it,” Elijah finished. “I see. So, what are the plans for getting inside?”

  When the troll shrugged, Kyrie spoke up. “I guess we start drilling into it?”

  “We have the tools,” Tango said as she turned and headed for the cage. “But we’re not going to be able to stay down here too long. My fingers and toes are already getting numb. We’ll have to work in teams.”

  Kyrie and Niko joined her in the cage, but Elijah hesitated. He’d noticed the discomfort of the cold, but his curiosity …

  “Elijah, either you get in this cage, or I put you in it.” Kyrie started toward him.

  But he came to her instead. Once the cage was secured, Niko signaled Gauntlet, and the crane lifted them to the top.

  Elijah watched the spiral become a dot in the darkness until it faded away. The further away from it he got, the more Leung’s death re-emerged. When they were back on the surface, he started toward the shelter and the tent behind it.

  He intended to get some answers. Even if he had to take that damn box apart himself.

  An hour later, Elijah sat at the back table, his hands moving in the air in front of him. He was still furious at discovering that the device that had killed Leung was missing. Then Danvers didn’t clear him to work a drill. Then his volunteering to use magic to keep the workers warm was summarily quashed by Lucas. The Aztechnology man didn’t want to waste any mage’s powers on that when they didn’t know what they might find in the tower once it was open.

  So, with nothing else to do, he’d set himself in the corner to use VR and go over what Leung had gathered.

  The door opened, and Kyrie stepped into the shelter while removing her gloves and goggles. She looked pale and stressed, but that was to be expected—the mystery device, as well as Leung’s suspicious death, had her on edge.

  Had them all on edge.

  “Done already?” he asked, trying to keep his tone light, despite recent events.

  Kyrie headed to a table set up for hot beverages and poured a soykaf. “Half an hour’s all I can take working in that hole.” She sipped the bitter, black brew and grimaced. “I swear, trolls really are crazy. Those two nuts Pineapple and Niko are having a contest to see which one can stay down there the longest. So far, Pineapple’s winning.”

  “Of course he is—he’s almost as stubborn as you are.” Elijah grinned briefly, and was pleased to see a small smile from her in return. “How’s it going overall?”

  “Slow but steady,” Kyrie replied. “In another four, maybe six hours, we’ll have a nice opening in the tower.”

  She walked over to the table and sat down across from him. “How’re you doing? You don’t exactly sound like you’ve calmed down yet.”

  “No, I haven’t.” He waved his hands again, as if moving papers around. “I will give Leung credit on his organization. He was good at it. The problem is I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of some of it.”

  She leaned forward, hands curled around her steaming cup. “Anything useful?”

  “Actually, there’s some things here on our friends that didn’t show up in their dossiers.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did you know that Gauntlet is a former Amazonian?”

  Kyrie blinked. “Really?”

  “Yes. And Leung noticed, as did I, that he’s spending a lot of time with Cao.”

  Now she frowned. “Elijah … you don’t mistrust Cao?”

  “She’s from Brazil. And I know both she and Pineapple weren’t happy that we had to deal with Humanis.”

  “I thought you and Leung had already agreed that Pineapple wasn’t a risk.”

  “I still believe that. But I didn’t know that Cao’s visited Amazonia several times. She was born in Brazil, but never formally lived there. So there might be hidden loyalties to Hualpa.”

  Kyrie sipped her soykaf and winced again. “That’s ridiculous. Cao’s not like that.”

  “Maybe not, but either way, I want you to keep an eye on Gauntlet and Cao. Especially Gauntlet. He seems like the natural choice, and I plan to speak with Tango about this as well. Just watch him. I think he could influence Cao easily.”

  Kyrie nodded. “Okay … but I’m more worried about where that device went.”

  Elijah refocused on her. “Danvers, Tango, Niko, the techs—they all insist they didn’t take it. But it’s missing. And I’m going to find it—one way or another.”

  Kyrie leaned back at the very controlled, but very powerful venom in his voice just as the shelter door burst open.

  They both turned to see Gauntlet step in. “Professor! We’re in!”

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Elijah was at the cage, ready to go down, in practically a heartbeat. Below, Pineapple and Niko were waiting; Niko was going to head back up to get warm, while Pineapple kept an eye on Elijah to make sure he didn’t get too wrapped up in the tower. Anxiety pulled at Elijah’s stomach, turned it over several times before he reached the bottom. Pineapple told him to relax as he opened the cage door and stepped out of his way.

  The teams had done a great job of cutting a tall, rectangular hole in the side of the structure. Elijah paused outside of it—unsure of whether to proceed or wait.<
br />
  Pineapple texted.

  Elijah nodded, and waited for the cage to start its ascent. He was so focused on what he was about to see, whatever it was, that he didn’t notice the troll hulking behind him. Out of habit, he pulled enough energy to ready a stunball and refocused on the astral as he took a deep breath and stepped through.

  If he looked at the small space of what felt like the loft of a large building, the interior was unremarkable. It wasn’t made of the same shiny substance as the surface. It was dull and full of dirt and ice. Given the fact that he was now over eighty percent enclosed and away from the sides of the ice shaft, Elijah used a bit of magic to warm the inside. The heat immediately started melting the ice coating the beams and rafters overhead.

  His boots echoed on the solid surface as he moved to the center of the space and looked at it astrally.

  Things changed, and his eyes widened as a grin pulled at the corners of his mouth.

  The dull walls held a luminance all their own, pulsing with a pattern of color. Blue, green, white, yellow, orange, red, and the sequence started again. The hues were subtle, and it took a bit of concentration to see them. Within the patterns, if he moved close enough to reach out and touch them, he thought he saw faces as they moved through the pulsing lights. When he reached for them, they disappeared, and the light moved away from his touch. When he took off his gloves, the wall felt … warm. But was it from his magic, or was it the tower itself?

  Further examination revealed some kind of square set in the floor. He moved a few of the lights closer to see it was a door, but it didn’t have a handle. He knelt down and pressed on it, pulled, jumped on it, but it didn’t move. A closer examination showed it was frozen shut. He fired up another burst of magic and ran his heated hand along the seam, melting the ice away. When he completed the circuit, the door popped up enough for him to get his finger under the lip and pull it open.

  He expected to peer into a dark cavern. Instead an eerie, fluid light, much like what he’d seen before, illuminated his way. A quick switch to his mundane senses showed him that whatever was lighting the room below wasn’t just on the astral.

  With a sense of urgency, some unknown fear that someone was going to come and take this marvel away from him, Elijah dropped down to the next floor without even thinking of how high the ceiling would be or if he might sustain a serious injury. There was no need, because he didn’t drop as much as eased down to the next floor.

  Pineapple said something as he dropped down. Elijah made some vague answer that he hoped was adequate and continued on.

  He landed with little or no impact—as if he’d just jumped off the floor into the air—in a round room. Unlike what he referred to as the attic, this room filled the entire circumference of the tower. The floor looked to be made of the same stuff as the attic, but the walls moved and swirled. Their patterns reminded him of clouds filmed over a period of time and then sped up. But the sequence never repeated, and the clouds always changed.

  As he stared, fascinated with this display, something behind him grew brighter, casting a shadow of his silhouette against the wall.

  When he turned, he staggered back and pressed against the same wall he’d been ogling because now, what had once been an empty room held a large, glowing ball in the center of it. It floated in the center, between the ceiling and the floor.

  At first it didn’t move, just pulsed in the same sequence of colors. It took a few more seconds before Elijah realized it was moving in the order of a rainbow. The colors of a prism were always the same. As he watched it, the ball expanded until it came close to filling the room and Elijah pressed himself against the wall. It shrunk enough to allow him room to walk around it, and as he did, he saw shapes forming on the outside of it. At first they didn’t make any sense, until he took a few more steps and noticed a shape that looked a lot like Australia—

  Elijah stopped and watched the globe begin a rotation. And as it moved, he saw the edge of the UCAS, but the outline wasn’t like was now. It was something a lot younger. He’d seen maps of the world from the 1920s, as well as the 1820s, and none of them matched the shape of the land masses he was looking at. He watched as South America appeared, and between it and the westernmost tip of Africa, he saw a small grouping of islands, land masses he’d never seen before.

  He watched again as Asia moved by, and the Italian peninsula looked odd. Australia appeared again, and it was different, too. The tips of Asia and what had been North America touched—not just as a strait, but as a solid mass. Elijah moved in the opposite direction to get a better look. The Arctic landscape looked different—bigger. So when the tilt of the world brought Antarctica into view, he saw nearly the same outline of land Piri Reis had drawn centuries ago. Land with no snow, and now ice.

  Land that had existed before his time—and long before Elijah’s.

  The mage stepped back and watched the world as it turned and pulsed. Clouds moved and swirled as time passed. He watched rain become hurricanes and saw tidal waves carry the oceans onto shores. He was seeing time—decades? centuries? millennia?—pass in the blink of an eye and he put his hand to his face. What sort of map was this? Was it the future, or the past? Would it go beyond what they knew?

  Or was it so old that now was already so far past what it knew? If he stood there long enough and watched the endless turning, would he see the Earth as he knew it today, and then see it as it would be tomorrow?

  An ARO appeared in front of him, with a symbol he hadn’t seen before. Was it from the tower? He felt a lift of excitement as he opened the link.

  It wasn’t something from the tower, but it had Leung’s signature. A package from the grave. He saved it to his commlink, feeling anything but cheerful anymore. Was it possible Leung had gotten something through, something important? His attention was now torn between the wonders of the tower, and the possibilities of what had taken his friend from him.

  Unfortunately he wasn’t going to get the chance to delve into either. His AR lit up again, but with Pineapple’s call request.

  “Pineapple! Elijah! Whoever that spy was contacting—they’re here! We’re under attack!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The first things Elijah noticed when he emerged were the spirits, because how could he not? They were legion, and they rolled toward the tents with the sound of muffled thunder and howling wind. He knew several of them, maybe dozens, had materialized, not because he could see them, but because he saw the snow they kicked up as they passed, the rocks they hurled as they ran, and the dents they pounded into the snow as they closed on the small group of tents. When he caught glimpses of their form, he saw shambling earth mounds, darting wisps of frost, and solidified shapes of mist surging forward. He watched, stunned; Pineapple, of course, charged ahead, yelling.

  As the spirits charged forward, the land around them erupted. Rocks spiked through the several-meter-thick snow cover, holes emerged and ice crumbled into them, and the entire face of the landscape became pockmarked with seemingly random destruction. Elijah could see no rhyme or reason to it, other than maybe to cause fear and panic.

  In that, it was successful.

  The camp was in total disarray, with people running in all directions, leaping onto what vehicles they could find, and trying to avoid the bullets flying from the metahumans closing in behind the spirit phalanx. These were professionals—it wouldn’t take too long for them to get their shit together and figure out how to respond—but there were few people indeed who would not be a little thrown off their stride by howling spirits descending on you in the coldest place on Earth.

  Small pieces of ice clattered off Elijah’s visor, from the outer edge of a giant chunk of ice hurtling toward the hole he had just vacated. He looked around, and then dropped flat to avoid another chunk heading straight for his head.

  Th
at was bad. He was down on the ice, an immobile target. If the spirits wanted to, they could lay the hurt on him right now. He scrambled back up, knee pads and gloves scraping the ice as he rose, looking ahead, ready to dive to one side or the other if more ice was closing on him.

  None was. The two chunks that had flown his way weren’t followed by any more. If one or more of the spirits had been trying to draw a bead on him, for some reason they had given up on the effort. Elijah made a mental note to think about that more at another time—like when he wasn’t directly in the line of a charging mass of spirits.

  His next move was clear. He sent his senses out into the air, pulling at the planes next to his reality in a way he still didn’t quite understand, but had learned to do instinctually. He sent a pulse out, a strong command, a lure that would pull a being to him whether it wanted to be there or not.

  As it turned out, it didn’t. The spirit of air that appeared before him glared with narrow eyes full of disdain—at least, Elijah thought they were eyes. It was never easy to tell with air spirits.

  Elijah didn’t bother to wait for it to say anything.

  “Carry me where I tell you to,” he said. “First, thirty meters straight up.”

  This was a risk—a hovering human might be an even more inviting target than a prone one—but Elijah didn’t like the way the ground was heaving and shaking. He hoped the elevation would give him a better view of things.

  It did. He saw the spirits closing in, the team behind them, and the people scurrying around, and the pattern became clear.

  “Pineapple, Kyrie, Cao, anyone—who’s out there?”

  Pineapple responded first. “It’s finally warming up down here! What’s going on with you, professor?”

  “Getting an aerial view. Luckily they’re keeping mostly to the ground, so it’s clear up here.”