Shadowrun: Crimson

by Kevin R. Czarnecki

  “Maybe it just never settled down here.”

  “It’d try to seek out something as astrally active as a hive. But you could keep it out with simple airflow. Don’t you feel that?”

  Slim pulled off his mask and felt the wind on his face. “Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. And that smell…”

  I knew it all too well. Familiar, organic, reminiscent of yeast. It would get stronger the closer we got to the hive.

  “This is the right way.” I said. “Let’s get moving. Slim, keep track of our path. Odds are we’ll need to get out of here in a hurry. I don’t want to get lost because of a wrong turn.”

  “Already on it.”

  Another few minutes went by before I felt a sick, twisting feeling at my center, making my head spin for a moment. The collective groan I heard over the intercom let me know I wasn’t alone in my assessment.

  “What the drek is that?” Slim asked.

  “Mana warp,” I said. “In a place as Awakened as Chicago, and in the middle of a massive bug hive, that nuke twisted the astral something awful. Seems like it recovered a bit, since we made it this far in. It used to be much worse.”

  “Ugh,” Pretty moaned. I could sympathize. It could only get worse for them. Unlike me, ghouls don’t have a choice about switching off their perception to the astral. Dual nature in a mana warp is a slow torture. I turned to Needles, a silent question.

  He met my gaze, refusing to let the discomfort get to him. “We move on. We’re not done ’til we’re done.”

  Deeper and deeper we went, far deeper than the blast crater and into the oldest parts of the city, the smell growing stronger. Slim and Pretty were moaning quietly from the stress of the warp. Needles bore it stoically, though his movements were stiffer now. Were it not for the equal disadvantage the spirits would suffer, I’d have said we ought to go ba—

  Suddenly, the twisting sensation stopped. The others straightened up as they passed me, looking in wonder at the sudden change. I took a step back, and the twisting returned.

  “What is it?” Needles asked.

  “I’ll be damned,” I whispered in wonder. “What?”

  “The warp…it ends here. Further into the hive, the warp has been…completely healed.”

  “What?” Needles look more confused.

  “Don’t you get it? The warp is enough to stop casual astral scouting. It’ll stop astral bacteria like Strain III from getting in. It’ll dissuade ghouls and mages from coming close. But it’s just a shell. Don’t you see? They’ve cloaked their entire hive and kept it safe! Like the eye of a hurricane.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “I’ve never heard of it.” I stepped out of the warp and saw with astral eyes. Sure enough, I could actually see the twisting, rippling distortions in the mana field, and behind me… deeper within the hive...

  …FEEDGROWREPRODUCEMUTATE…

  I pulled out before it could overwhelm me.

  “What is it?”

  “Something I’ve never seen before, Needles. I don’t know if anyone ever has.”

  “I don’t like this,” Slim said, his voice quivering.

  “What’s to like?” Pretty asked bitterly.

  We headed deeper in, until our boots started squishing on something. I activated a small light on my shotgun, and in the faint glow my elven vision could see the details of organic mush all over the floor. The smell was almost overwhelming, a blast of hot, fetid rot in my nose, but I kept my mask off. In the thermal spectrum, everything was dimly red, humid and awful, far beneath the dry winter night above. Skittering sounds came toward us, and I thumbed the safety off. I dared not assense for them, not in the belly of the beast…

  The first came crawling along the wall, climbing hand over hand with frighteningly fast, jerking motions. In the dim light I could make out chitinous growths all over its body, and I took a moment to reach within and draw the strength of my stolen spirit into my reflexes. My shotgun came up in a flash and I shot, pumping the foregrip as fast as my mind could comprehend doing it, time slowing as the precision grew. The slug smacked it in the shoulder, bringing it to the ground with a wet thump and a distorted scream. I advanced on the lashing form and shot again, and again, until it stopped moving. It gave one last, hissing gasp before dying.

  “Shit.”

  Needles moved forward, covering the hallway as I knelt over the corpse. “Red, what the fuck are you doing?”

  “There’s something wrong with this bug.”

  “He’s right,” Pretty said, looking down at it.

  The chitin growths were more pronounced than usual. It had once been a human, that much was apparent. Probably a male, skinny and Caucasian. The eyes bulged unhealthily, and long veins of discolored blood looked more like lesions all over its body.

  “It looks diseased,” I said.

  “Even for a bug.” Slim chimed in.

  “But more than that… Termites don’t build their hives underground…but, except for these mandibles, it really looks like a Termite.”

  “Hey!” Needles hissed back to us over the comm. “We can dissect it later, but now is not the time, people!”

  We got up and had our guns ready. But the bug stuck in my mind. It was different. Far different from any other I’d ever seen. And that worried me.

  It was too quiet, with only ragged, nervous breathing and the squish of our boots in the muck as we went deeper. It was far, far too easy. I could feel us drawing closer to the center of the hive, even without astrally perceiving. Drones and warriors should have been attacking en masse to prevent us from getting any closer, but the place was silent as a grave, with only the steady air current from ahead, like the exhalation of a great beast.

  Finally, a pulsating, soft red glow from around a bend told me we were close. The rasping sound of many creatures breathing echoed around the corner, along with a sickeningly loud heartbeat. Beneath it I could hear dozens more, each in time with the primary, throbbing in horrible rhythm.

  I took point, stepping around the corner to gaze into a nightmare.

  The chamber might have borne scars from the old Cermak blast, were it not thoroughly coated in the hive materiel. Termites love to build hives. It was massive, a cylindrical room that went up and down from where we were. From the pipes leading in, I could only assume it was a huge septic tank or sewage reservoir for the city. Tiered protrusions of organic matter extended out toward the center, each holding fleshy orbs with faintly writhing human shapes within.

  Eggs. Dozens of them, each containing some poor, doomed soul. Termite flesh-forms crawled along the walls, tending the eggs and spitting out more matter, building more tiers.

  The ring around our level was suddenly host to dozens of warriors, chittering menacingly and clacking their claws. I raised my shotgun as the others brought their guns up—

  “Stop!”

  The voice echoed up to us, and the flesh-forms backed off. The only human who might command the bugs would be…

  I looked over the edge into the pit. A massive, bloated termite queen craned its bulging, distorted head up at us. Two men stood to either side of it, one more pale than any ghoul I had ever seen, and thinner to boot, the other covered in armor and adornments formed from bits of bug chitin and termite building materiel. I didn’t dare assense them, or even speak. I knew we were in way over our heads.

  “Welcome.” The insect shaman opened his arms, as though to embrace us. “Welcome to Heaven.”

  The other man chuckled at this, wringing his hands as his gaze roamed over us.

  The Termite shaman spoke again. “Please, come down here. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Strong hands grabbed my gun, wrenching my arms behind me. I heard the others struggling, and struggled to see them. The termites had come right out of the woodwork, grabbing Pretty around the waist and snatching her gun away. Two seized Slim’s wrists and squeezed until he dropped his pistols, exclaiming, “Ow ow ow!”

  Needles was backed into a corner, A
lphas aimed at the three advancing beasts. I looked to him and shook my head. He struggled for a moment, finally relaxing his grip and dropping the rifles. The termites grabbed him, firm but oddly careful. I knew I could escape quickly by turning to mist. I could even make a break for it, head for the surface… but what of them? No, best to keep that ace up my sleeve for now.

  They lifted us off our feet, carrying us straight down the wall. Floor after floor I saw corridors leading off into the sewers, the access tunnels that had served the city for decades even before the Breakout. They led everywhere, some probably past the containment zones. The sheer number of eggs indicated they had been here for some time. Maybe this was the reason LS was so ready to go to war. Maybe bugboy had staged a massive kidnapping.

  Toward the bottom I could see more cisterns, ten feet deep with open tops. Inside I could make out a few ghouls curled up, shaking and scared. Feral, cannibalistic, and predatory, even the simplest-minded ghoul knew to be afraid in a place like this. Maybe seven ghouls, I couldn’t tell. Where the rest were, I didn’t want to contemplate. Other cisterns held humans and orks, some just children, all of them civilians. They looked exhausted, dressed in the hodgepodge of the citizens of the Corridor. Some were crying.

  The spirits set us down at the bottom without our guns, but didn’t seem to realize the value of what was in our packs. My boots splashed in the slimy rainbow puddles of filth pooled all around, bigger ripples to compete with the small ones from that maddening heartbeat. The queen’s eyes bored into me, and I shuddered with the unfamiliar sensation of fear. I knew her power. I knew what it was to face these creatures…or did I? Its veins throbbed under misshapen talons, distorted orbs slowly gestating in its twisted egg sacs. Facing it, my Geiger counter started making crackling sounds, like soymilk hitting Krak-L-Snaps cereal, and I started to have the barest inkling of the horror before me.

  The bug shaman approached us, moving like a rich host entertaining in his parlor, despite appearances. He strode confidently up to me, smiling genially. All the while his compatriot moved between us, one after another, examining us like specimens. He pulled Pretty’s chin this way and that, following the line of her neck. Slim snarled at him, but he paid it no mind.

  “You came,” said the bug shaman, “to kill us?”

  I locked eyes with him, barely touching his power with mine. It was akin to dipping a toe in lava. He was potent, and on his home turf, with all the power of a queen behind him.

  “No,” I whispered. “I just wanted our people back. You do what you have to do to survive.”

  “Indeed!” His smile grew wider, displaying surreally white teeth. “The Invae are alive, like all of us, and like us, they can, and will, do what is necessary to survive. To propagate their species. Not that different from us humans.”

  “Less and less different every day,” rasped the rail-thin man, who had moved on to Slim, examining his datajacks with marked distaste.

  “You understand, though, don’t you?” The shaman looked to me with something like hope. “You know more than most, being what you are.”

  “Beautiful,” the strange little man said as he got to me, lifting my lip to examine my fangs. I felt like biting his fucking hand off.

  “You’re more human than the humans. All of you are.” He swept his arms to indicate the four of us, and the ghouls in the cisterns. “You all know what it is to live. What it takes to continue living. Life feeds on life, and so on and so on. Nothing lives without doing so at the expense of another. You understand that more than anyone, feeding on your own kind.” The shaman put his hand on my shoulder. “You ought to understand what we are doing better than anyone.”

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  The shaman shook his head, his smile turning sly. “Don’t play the fool with me. You know what we’re trying to accomplish here. Just as virgin soil is without purpose until it is planted, humans exist to spawn something more wonderful, more complete.”

  “And you think insects are the right seed to plant?”

  The little man spoke up. “Why not? They are adaptive, social, industrious, and far more likely to survive in the world metahumanity is building.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  His eyes bulged even further out of their sockets from behind his greasy gray hair, and I wondered if they might pop out. “My friend, every day hundreds of tons of toxic waste are produced by the corporations, the governments. The people themselves produce this waste. It does not go away, my friend. The earth does not change it. It changes the earth. And with that change, metahumanity, and all life on this planet, is changed as well.”

  My rad counter was going crazy pointed at him. I wondered if I would glow if and when I got out of here.

  “Things seem to change just fine on their own.”

  The thin wretch before me barked a laugh, sudden and curdled with madness. “Not fast enough for the new world people build of their own free will.”

  “People don’t ask for toxic waste.”

  “Oh, but they do! They demand it! Every day it’s a choice they make, with their plastics and chemicals. By-products they willingly accept for their creature comforts.”

  “So what? You want to replace humans with bugs?”

  His eyes took a sad gleam. “My friend, I want to save them all. Don’t you understand? Evolution is a slow, inadequate process, insufficient to keep up with the changes of this brave new world. Even the insects will fall to its ravages in time… without help.”

  My eyes rolled up to meet his. “Help only you can give?”

  He laughed softly. “I’m not unique, or arrogant. I just want to help metahumanity reach its full potential. We are soft beings, my friend. Weak. We’re manufacturing our own destruction faster than we can engineer a solution.”

  “So what’s your solution?”

  “Progress! Mutation is nothing but fast evolution. Radiation, acid rain, smog, these are the new weather patterns in the world to come. Only the strong will survive that, so I will make everyone strong. But insect spirit investiture is not enough. Other factors must be taken into account. Slow radiation exposure to build resistance, develop positive mutations. Chemical immersions, synthetics ingestion. Magic, as well. Viruses such as yours are an example. Strain III will be something far deadlier in the future if it survives. But perhaps HMHVV can be used to resist it.”

  “Toxic magic,” I hissed.

  “Oh, ‘toxic’ is such a vulgar term. It carries all manner of misnomers. One day, ‘toxic’ will be the same as ‘normal’. I’m not trying to destroy the world. I’m just trying to prepare the people who are destroying it for the consequences of their actions. I’m trying to give them a second chance!”

  The insect shaman stepped forward again. “We’ve seen such marvelous results with the ghoul flesh-forms. I am most eager to see what one of my children will do in the body of a vampire.”

  “What have you done with my people!?” Needles screamed.

  The insect shaman turned to look at Needles as though seeing him for the first time. The queen’s head moved in synch.

  “I’ve made them my children. I’ve accepted them into my fold, and made them my own.”

  As though on cue, the clack of long claws rattled behind the queen, and pale, twisted forms crawled out. Long black talons, ghastly pale chitin, and bizarrely long teeth with brilliant, multifaceted eyes shining like opals in the wet darkness.

  “Oh, no,” Pretty moaned.

  “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” the bug shaman beamed proudly. “Normally there are some difficulties with merging into dual-natured creatures, but, like all problems, it’s not impossible, just an obstacle to overcome. With my own abilities and the kind cooperation of the Ant queen, we managed a workaround.”

  “Ants?”

  “Oh, yes, surely you noticed? The changes wrought on the queen pass on to her progeny. I experiment on the drones and warriors, finding beneficial mutations before developing them in the queen.
Generation by generation, we build a better hive, a better breed. Before long we’ll incorporate other elements into our master race. Other bugs, free spirits, HMHVV strains, toxic magics, blood magic, perhaps even cyberware before long. The possibilities are limitless. Surely you can see that?”

  The ghoul-Ants loped over to us, long tongues running over their misshapen teeth, sniffing at us with obvious hunger.

  “Of course, there are some unfortunate side effects. The usual hunger for flesh has been amplified far beyond the norm. Perhaps they’ll make efficient hunter-killers. I’m really quite curious to see what we’ll get from you, though.”

  My eyes darted to him, and I started struggling. But just as I would have started dissolving into mist, splitting pain, wrenching and burning bright, pierced my chest. I looked down to see a wooden stake in the hands of the toxic shaman, half-buried into my heart.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time for one like you to show up. It hasn’t been easy. But I have a long view. It teaches me patience. And now, it is the time for the harvest.”

  Ah, the stake through the heart. A classic of vampire mythology. Supposedly, it should kill me. It could, with enough force. But the real kicker is that if it’s made of wood, my body has that old allergic reaction kick in. My heart stops pumping like it ought to, but I don’t die, not for some time. I’m just prevented from taking mist form…or moving at all. No regeneration, no enhanced abilities, nothing. I’m just a wounded man in shock when that kind of wood damage is present in my body.

  I went rigid for a moment, hacking and snarling and trying to shape the words for a spell, anything, even here. But I couldn’t concentrate enough to string an English phrase together, let alone Latin. Finally, my strength left me, and I slumped in the deformed grasp of my captors. Pain, and the bitter acknowledgement of failure, became my world.

  I could hear that toxic bastard talking to the others. “This is an honor. Don’t be afraid. Soon, you’ll be stronger, safer, a part of something. Devoid of this wretched individuality and loneliness. You will change, and change is the only beauty this world has left to offer.”