Donahue groaned. Hart straightened and stepped away from him, so that when he emptied his stomach, she was well clear. He started to roll over, but she whispered a spell. In his weakened state, he had little resistance and succumbed to the enforced sleep she pressed upon his mind. She tapped the hall’s illusions, extending them, to cover the sprawled body. Stretching an existing illusion was something that she couldn’t do anywhere, but the mana-rich environment of the palace allowed certain liberties to be taken. The masking was an imperfect job, but it might delay discovery of the sleeping Donahue for a few minutes.
She checked the passageway and found it still deserted. Sam had chosen his ambush site well. Sam and the priest certainly hadn't passed her, so they had to be somewhere ahead. She took a moment to set her ally spirit Aleph on overwatch, warning it to watch specifically for Sam. Then, she hurried down the corridor, trusting her mundane senses to warn her of non-magical problems.
She could do no more than pick archways at random, because there was no way to tell what path the fugitives had chosen. As she crossed a threshold and heard the distant whine of a helicopter engine, she guessed their destination and suspected she was too late.
She ran.
She hit the clearing as the landing gear of the Ares Wyvern lifted from the pad. She could see Sam at the controls in the cockpit. He saw her, too, and smiled savagely.
Hart ducked back through the archway and pressed against the wall of the service passage. No alarms clamored. No one shouted to her. Sam had hijacked the helicopter successfully and she seemed to be the only one who knew. It was important that she not be seen here.
She didn’t have much time before the Lady learned what had happened. Hart herself could tell Deigh, but she didn’t know if the Lady would have her killed before or after they shot down the helicopter. When aroused, the Seelie Court could be every bit as ruthless as their less seemly cousins of the Unseelie Court. A violated parole and a stolen aircraft would certainly anger the Shidhe.
Hart had taken responsibility for Sam and the priest. Their escape was her failure, her responsibility; by the Shidhe’s law, her life was forfeit. Only Sam’s death at Hart’s hands might release her from that harsh judgment.
It took Hart three minutes to run through the halls to her quarters. Worry nagged at her the entire way, almost disrupting the concentration she needed to maintain her invisibility spell. She knew some of the palace’s guardian creatures had marked her passage. The damned, chittering leshy seemed to see her too, but none of the elves she passed were aware. That was good.
There were no guards at her quarters. The alarm had yet to be given. She wasted no time packing, only grabbed the working bag she had kept ready out of old habit. Before leaving the room, she used the computer to log a "do not disturb" order and a delayed order for a meal delivery with the palace household staff. It was a weak ruse, but it might buy a few minutes.
On her way to the outer precincts, she only paused once at a storeroom. The room was supposed to be secure, but she had penetrated better systems. She was in and out at the cost of only a few precious minutes, her bag stuffed with Sam’s gear. There were ways to use the items as tracking links.
Just before she hit the outer, public section of the palace, she dropped her invisibility spell. There would be mages on watch at the boundary, and her concealment spell would only mark her as someone to be detained. To her relief, she found at the gate that her privileged status hadn’t been revoked. The guards listened dutifully to her story about a trip to the southwest, and even offered her good wishes as she left the building.
She passed through the park surrounding the palace and entered the rail station without incident. Her good fortune held; a train was in the station. She slipped a certified credstick into the turnstile slot and dumped enough nuyen for a month’s open pass. The gate opened and she made it to the platform in time to board just as the doors were closing.
By the time the train pulled into the main station in Dublin and she left the car to mingle with the city crowds, she had worked out the bones of her plan. Her first step was to contact her decker Jenny and arrange transport to England. As soon as she secured a little backup, she would intercept Samuel Verner. She was very sure she knew where he was headed.
* * *
Dodger had never felt so tired. He stared at the dataplug in his limp hand for a full minute before letting it drop to the idle cyberdeck. He was hungry and his muscles ached from hunching over the cyberdeck. His meat was failing under the strain. Running the Matrix steadily ground a decker down. Trying to do the work of a whole team of deckers changed the grinding wheel of exhaustion from carborundum to diamond grit. He was worn down.
The search for Sam and Hart had been a total bust. The Matrix offered no hints of any operation, and his checks on druid holdings gave no indication that they had anything to do with the sudden disappearance of his fellow runners. Willie had come up with zilch as well. Even Herzog’s street contacts had nothing, no matter what price was offered. No avenue Dodger had explored had yielded any information on the platinum-haired lady elf or the brown-bearded American shaman. Neither should have been able to hide for so long in the London sprawl.
Dodger was frustrated. Hart he could take or leave; something about her flashed a warning mode. But Sam . . . Dodger had gotten him into this mess and now his friend had vanished without a trace. His feelings of guilt were uncomfortable as much for their rarity as for their strength. Those feelings were exaggerated every time he thought about how much time he w7as spending on the other problem.
The hunt on that issue had turned up only negative clues, but the puzzle drew him like a siren. Driven to look, and repelled at the same time, he haunted the Matrix searching for anything that might tell him more about the Artificial Intelligence that had called itself Morgan le Fay.
Dodger had visited with some of the best deckers in the Matrix, but they knew nothing. The rumor mill at Syberspace was empty. Or rather, it had been when he checked into the virtual club. It wouldn’t be now. He knew that he would have started a whirlwind of speculation with his guarded questions. The habitues of the decker club were not stupid—nobody stupid could deck through the ice that armored that exclusive little Matrix hideout. His fellow Matrix runners would guess what he had hinted at and begin looking for themselves. Soon someone would know.
Or would they? Was the AI too good for mortal deckers? Could it hide in the Matrix in ways beyond any decker ability to detect?
He wished he knew.
All he knew was that Renraku still had not announced the Artificial Intelligence’s existence to the world. That meant that something in their program had fouled up. If they were sole owners of a functioning AI, they should be media-blitzing. The technological coup was worth too much.
Unless they were using it for shadowrunning. Could the rewards of applying it subversively be greater than the killing to be made on the open market? The AI had been present in the Hidden Circle’s architecture. Dodger’s investigations had revealed no significant connection between Renraku and the Circle. There were the usual minor connections between some of the druids’ corporations and the megacorp, but no more than could be expected in the interconnecting world of modern business. Renraku had contracts with the British government, but Dodger had been unable to detect any unusual activity or connections there, either. Normally, he would have assumed that everything was just too well hidden. But with the AI involved, he couldn’t be sure. The Hidden Circle’s antics just weren’t Renraku’s style.
So what was the AI doing in the Circle’s architecture?
His first thought had been that Renraku might be moving against the Circle, too. Such criminals might attract the attention of a civic-minded megacorp. The publicity for squashing murders and terrorists was always worth a few points on the stock exchange. But the AI hadn’t done anything to the Circle’s system, and Renraku operations were quiet. The fragging local Red Samurai contingent had just been withdrawn for tempo
rary assignment on the continent. Dodger’s every runner sense screamed that Renraku wasn’t involved.
So who was running the AI?
It wasn’t the renegade druids. If they had that kind of Matrix power, Dodger would be a vegetable by now. The AI was just too much Matrix muscle.
For all its power, the AI was a riddle. It had found him in the Circle’s architecture. How? It had even brought him a present. Why? Could it have been following him? Again, how and why? What in all the electron heavens and hells was going on?
Dodger had begun to think the only one with the answers was the AI itself. If he met it, he could ask. That was a concept that burned while it froze. When he was jacked in and experiencing the AI in the Matrix, he had no desire to stay in its presence. No rational desire, anyway. But an irrational attraction was there. He could no longer deny it. There weren’t supposed to be emotions in the Matrix. The electron world had no pheromones to clog a man’s brain and force animal reactions on a rational mind. When he stood under the electron skies, in the presence of the mirror woman with the ebony clothes, something called to him in a way he had never experienced before. At least not in the Matrix. He felt very afraid when he realized that the pull was too much like what he felt in Teresa’s presence.
The meat and the mind, enemies ever.
So what was going on?
He was tired and confused and hungry. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to deal with any problems if the meat collapsed on him, he rose shakily from his seat and stumbled across the squat toward the refrigerator. He hoped Willie had stocked the thing before she had relocated her base of operations.
He hadn’t thought that was a good idea. Sam or Hart wouldn’t know where they had gone, and leaving a message with a map was just as dangerous as staying put if the bad guys tracked them down. More dangerous; in a new base they’d feel safer than they were. She’d argued that splitting their reduced forces was dangerous, and been incensed that he refused to leave. But then, she’d already been smoking over the time he spent chasing his Ghost in the Machine instead of looking for Sam.
The refrigerator door didn’t rattle when he opened it. Even as bleary as he was, he knew that wasn’t a hopeful sign. The vegetable bin was empty save for a browning, wilted bunch of celery. The shelves held a few soggy pasteboard cartons sagging with the weight of their contents and a trio of bottles of Kanschlager fortified ale. The detrius of their patronage of the local food merchants he understood, but Willie’s abandonment of some of her booze was a surprise.
He picked up one of the bottles. He squinted his weary eyes at the label, but couldn’t read the fine print. How the mighty have fallen from their lofty ideals. Alcohol was another sin of the flesh that dragged the mind from the clearer realms. Still, it would taste better than what they called water around here.
A sudden clatter from the doorway showed him just how strung out he was. He dropped the bottle. It shattered at his feet, spraying shards of plastic and sticky ale over his bare feet. A glance over his shoulder wiped such petty concerns out of his foggy brain.
Two men had entered the squat. The noise had come from the one clothed in dark garments. He had slipped on the remains of Dodger’s last meal and grabbed the table where the cyberdeck and Willie’s radio lay. The rattle of equipment had betrayed their entrance.
The second intruder was already halfway across the room. At first, Dodger thought he was a Shidhe because of the cut and material of his clothes, but the wild beard that spilled from the shadows of the hood dispelled that thought. Emanating menace, the intruder closed the distance between them in four quick, long strides. Dodger tried to move out of the way, but his flesh, the poor abused meat, betrayed him. The norm caught Dodger easily as he tried to slip past to reach his gun.
Pain shot through Dodger’s spine as he was slammed into the edge of the kitchen counter. The norm forced him into the counter, grinding the edge into Dodger’s arched back. The cold muzzle of a gun forced his chin up.
"So confident that you didn’t even bother changing your base of operations? Should I shoot you now or let you try to lie your way out of it again?"
Dodger was shocked to recognize the voice. "Sam?"
Sam grinned with surprising savagery. "Surprised, aren’t you? She couldn’t hold me."
Sam wrenched Dodger upright and shoved him against the refrigerator. Dodger’s right elbow caught the edge of the door painfully. He cried out and grabbed for it with his other hand as he struggled to stay on his feet, Sam took two steps back and leveled his weapon at Dodger’s chest. The gun's muzzle seemed far too large for the pistol’s size.
"Sam, that's not a tranq gun."
"No, Dodger. It’s not. Give me a good reason not to use it on you."
"Use it? What are you talking about? What happened? We’ve been trying to find out what happened to you and Hart for a week. We were really worried. Who’s the other guy? Where’s Hart? Is she okay?" Dodger knew he was babbling, but the words just kept pouring out. Sam’s face was stony. His lack of reaction and warmth rattled Dodger almost as badly as the gun his friend was pointing at him.
"Hart’s in deep drek with her friends. Excuse me. your friends."
"My friends? What are you talking about?"
"Dump it. Dodger! I’ve had enough of your lies," Sam shouted. His hand was shaking with the violence of his emotions. "Look at you! You're pathetic. What’s the matter, chummer? Drinking away your sorrows? Or are you trying to get up enough courage to sell Willie into captivity, too? Why don’t you just have her killed? It'd be kinder than putting her into some elf zoo. See the halfer rigger and the crazy wildman from Seattle! Amusing! Entertaining! All courtesy of Dodger and Hart Enterprises. You’ve conned me for the last time."
Dodger let go of his bruised elbow and drew himself to his full height. If this was going to be the end of the flesh, he wouldn’t cringe. He didn't know what had set off his friend, but there really wasn’t anything he could do about it. Sam was obviously confused, maybe mind-controlled, and he wasn’t listening. But talk was the only weapon Dodger had.
"You’re wrong, my friend. Whatever happened to you, I had no part in it."
"You’re a liar!"
Sam raised his pistol.
The muzzle pointed directly between Dodger’s eyes. Death was a finger twitch away. Sam’s hand began to shake.
"Drek! I can’t do this!"
Sam threw the gun across the room. His companion stretched out an arm to catch the weapon, but its trajectory took it just out of his reach. The pistol hit the wall, gouging the wallboard, and rebounded onto the mattress Dodger had been using for a bed. For the first time, Sam’s companion spoke.
"It’s just as well, Sam. I don’t think the elf is lying. His aura indicates that his confusion is real."
Sam turned away from both of them. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. Sam’s companion stood silently watching him, an expression of concern on his face. The companion turned to look at Dodger, his eyes full of curiosity.
Dodger didn’t know what to do. He was shaking himself. While he dithered, Willie’s voice burst from the radio receiver.
"Twist! Is that you, Twist? What’s going on?" There was a pause. "Frag it! Somebody answer me!"
Sam walked to the radio, avoiding eye contact with anyone.
"I’m here, Willie," he said shakily.
"Frag, but I’m glad you’re back. Where ya been?"
"Took an involuntary vacation."
"Hell of a time to go sightseeing, but you could’ve come back sooner."
"Would have if I could have, Willie." Sam took a deep breath and released it. When he spoke again, his voice was steady. "My tour guide had other ideas."
"What counts is you’re back. You ready to run again, chummer?"
"All cylinders."
Dodger thought it sounded like false bravado, but Willie obviously took it at face value.
"Good ’cause the ante’s going up and you’re the last magicker on-line."
"The last . . . what’s happened?"
"Just had a drone in for a meet with Herzog. He’s dead. Somebody raided his sanctum, but he put up the good fight. Made ’em pay. Took out four or five, my count on the body parts was a little iffy."
"The Circle?"
"Neg. Not unless they've got a lot broader of mind while you were gone. The hitters were all elves,"
Sam turned to stare at Dodger. "Say again."
"I said the guys who took out Herzog were all elves."
"Elves," Sam repeated softly. "Talk to me, Dodger.
36
Jenny’s check on the power draw for the squat confirmed that either Dodger or Willie was still operating out of the apartment. There wasn’t enough usage to supply both the elf’s cyberdeck and the rigger's board. One of them had moved out. The broad-band receiver Hart carried didn’t show any unusual broadcast activity. so she assumed it was the elf. As far as she knew, Willie didn’t use booster stations to hide her location.
Hart’s surveillance hadn't picked up any activity for over an hour. Jenny confirmed power draw, so that meant Dodger was decking and the others asleep. It was time to move.
She left her perch and made her way down through the building, exiting around the corner and out of sight from the runners’ lair. Timing her crossing to coincide with traffic, she crossed the street screened from the apartment’s window. Once on the same block, it was easy to move unseen through an adjoining tenement and up onto its roof. She leaped across the gap between the tenements and landed with satisfactory silence. Crossing the rooftops, she hesitated only a moment near the brick shack that Sam had tried to use for cover against her shots. She shook off the thoughts that threatened to upset her centering and proceeded to the cornice at a position above the flat’s biggest window, where she set her bag down. In a few minutes, her gear was rigged, and she sat down to do an astral scout of the squat three floors below her; she didn’t want any surprises.
Choose Your Enemies Carefully Page 24