by John Helfers
“You were anticipating a need you were not supposed to know about. It is not beyond reason to suspect Horizon might not want an outside agency calling attention to a project still in the planning stages,” I styled my summation on a popular trideo barrister, narrowly resisting the urge to parody. “It also takes very little imagination to assume Horizon would want to maintain exclusive control of all access between this future enclave and Fun City—already their enclave in all but name.
“Given these assumptions are valid, I think they were showing uncharacteristic restraint. Assassinating you would have solved the matter more quickly, cheaply, and thoroughly.”
I counted three before Julius closed his mouth.
“Rachel,” he said and presented his profile.
She would have turned us right, leaving the sanctum, back toward the garage exit. Instead I turned left, heading for the room where she had briefed me on the job fourteen hours ago.
Rachel hesitated, then followed.
I could not help but notice yesterday’s approving pheromones were missing. It also seemed that Dog, whom she’d pretty much ignored previously, now occupied much of her attention.
I was not surprised when Franz and Hector appeared some distance ahead, vectored for rendezvous.
I preceded the trio into the meeting room and made a point of sweeping around to the far side of the oval table without hesitation. Let them think they had the safety of covering the exit. I remained standing and Dog jumped onto a chair next to me so he could see over the table.
For their parts, Hector stood watching me, Rachel divided her attention between me and Dog, and Franz had eyes only for Dog.
“Two out of three conspirators talk to street shamans.”
“What?” Franz glanced at me to ask.
“You three are lucky Julius ignores lackeys,” I answered. “Bad acting can be a fatal flaw.”
“What makes you think—”
Rachel stopped, her eyes big on the Tiffani needler in my hand.
I kept my eyes on Rachel, peripherally aware of Hector’s reach for whatever he carried. The big man stopped mid-motion when the tiny weapon left my hand to clatter on the table.
“Your sister, on the other hand, could make a fortune in the trideos.”
“Sister?” Franz asked in a puzzled tone that almost redeemed my respect for his acting abilities.
“You’re mistake was trying to spook me into a reaction in the garage,” I told him. “A seldom smart way to assess an opponent. Once Dog had a whiff of your mageblade, I was able to smell your work everywhere.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Okay,” Rachel cut of my cuttingly clever retort. “What is it you think you’ve got?”
“Three smart people who work for a self-absorbed, dangerously ambitious idiot and trying to banish Dog will get you killed, Franz.”
The mage lowered his hands.
“Make that two point five smart people,” I said. “Julius had concocted a scheme anyone with half a brain could see would piss off Horizon—if only because it revealed someone was selling their plans to idiots.
“My bet is he knew but did not care that he was going to level the hometown of half his faceless minions.”
“What?”
“Hector, a refugee camp and its environs do not do that well without a steady infusion of outside resources. It’s an economic model as old as haves and have-nots,” I spread my hands, including my audience. “Loyal sons and daughters with jobs in the promised land sending home all they can.”
“If your speculations were true,” Rachel said. “If. All we’d have to do to stop him is tell Horizon.”
“At which point vanVijrk Revitalizations would disappear in puff of greasy smoke and all of you—and likely your families—would become either dead or broke or both. You had to convince Julius he was waking a monster without waking the real monster. However Julius, Humanis to the bone, looked at your carefully crafted evidence and saw his own monster—and made wiping out the refugee community an even higher priority. You couldn’t tell him he was jumping at the wrong shadow without showing your hand, so you had to find an outsider to connect the dots.”
“And out of all L.A. we picked you?”
“If those college kids pretending to be street punks hadn’t been from Pasadena, I might have considered that a long shot,” I agreed. “As it is, I think someone took Jesalie Pilar’s hundred-level culture of street magic course at City College. I’ve met enough freshmen over the years to know she makes a minimal attempt to conceal my public professional persona while dwelling exhaustively on my affinity for scents. Inadequately informed, you convinced Julius I was a big deal and staged a little drama to convince me Julius was up against the big boys and the orks were innocent victims.
“My guess is your sister’s expression was an added bonus—you probably had some suitably innocent waif originally cast for the role of guide through whatever expository journey you’d concocted,” I shrugged. “I spoiled things by going off script and your shaman friend had to improvise.”
Rachel shook her head.
“I have no sister,” she said, and I lost my mental bet with myself that she’d deny the whole thing.
“Olfactories.”
“An olfactory scanner can’t identify individuals,” Hector seemed glad the conversation had hit on an area of his expertise. “There’s no way to establish family relationships by smell.”
“For a chemsniffer it’s impossible,” I agreed. “For a dog’s nose it’s inevitable.”
Hector made an inquiring noise.
“He’s a mystic adept, talented in all the usual detection, inquiry, and discernment skills. Nothing obviously remarkable about him,” Franz explained, bearing down just a bit on the obviously. “His key investigative tool seems to be an animal attunement of an intensity that strains credulity.”
Hector looked unenlightened.
“He’s got an open channel, for want of a better word, to the dog,” Franz explained. “He experiences through the dog’s senses. He sees and hears and smells everything the animal does.”
“Not so much see,” I corrected. “There’s a reason you’ve never heard the phrase Basenji-eyed.” I stopped short of explaining my limitations in the optical sphere.
“Franz here cast that darkness spell through a quartz security window in a steel door he’d welded shut to ensure Dog here didn’t get a whiff of him. Effective, but like the potent sanitizer Monica used to get rid of the gunshot residue after shooting at me, it called too much attention to itself.
“Speaking of smell, the touch I really liked was loading needler ammo with cordite gunpowder. I suspect that was your handiwork, Hector. You don’t need a dog’s nose to smell that stench, and everyone knows it’s used only by one of the big corps’ favorite head-busters and that they only use it in cannons too big for little Monica to handle.
“Franz didn’t realize that was wasted effort,” I spared that worthy a smile. “I already had his astral scent from his mageblade.”
“That’s the second time you’ve spouted that nonsense,” Franz snapped.
“But that nonsense isn’t what’s really got you pissed,” I countered.
Franz made an angry gesture at Dog. “You have neither the skills or the power to craft this vessel or bind a spirit into it.”
“Not even close,” I agreed. “That is no vessel, that is my dog; a real dog really named Dog, now possessed by a free spirit with no name he’s willing to tell me but answers to Dog.”
The three took a long hard stare at Dog. He grinned back a canine grin, all sharp teeth and mocking eyes. He clearly had no intention of showing them what he’d shown the shaman in the alley.
“You’ve said you feed Dog, and that you need to rest after doing so. And from that confrontation with—” he stopped himself mid-word. “In the alley, we know Dog loans you his energy for spellcasting; so there’s a quid pro quo in play.
“I can see the shape of it, but I don’t unde
rstand the mechanics,” he frowned. “This is not … usual.”
I considered explaining, but didn’t see the point. Jesalie hadn’t figured it out in a month of living with me; there was no way I was giving away the trick of my trade to some one-off customers who’d never see me again.
Franz had been right when he pegged me as unremarkable. I like to think I’m unique, but if you were to graph the talents and abilities of all the psychic investigators in LA, I’d be about dead center on the bell curve. What made me was my partner.
Dog, by which I mean the free spirit possessing Dog the Basenji, gives me direct access to astral data—way beyond my ability to assense. But he gives it to me in doggish: very little sight, lots of smells. Where top-dollar wizards see an astral fingerprint, I get an astral scent. You can research it—believe me, I have—and find enough evidence to make a case for the way Dog conveys information being dictated by the limitations of the creature he’s inhabiting.
Personally, I think he does it because it amuses the hell out of him.
Like Franz said, everything is quid pro quo. So what does Dog get from me? Hard to say. He explained it once, I think, but I’m not sure I followed. Call it context. Interpretation. Maybe it’s because he’s a dog; maybe it’s because he’s a spirit, but everything we people do seems random. Dog finds humans fascinating; he just needs me to understand the natural world.
“So,” Rachel said into the stretching silence. “What do you plan on doing with this information?”
“I’m kinda torn between telling Julius and getting killed or telling Horizon and getting killed,” I shrugged. “One of the things that makes me unremarkable is the fact that I honor a confidence when there’s no compelling reason not to.”
Hector and Franz glared with varying intensities, but Rachel’s smile was wry.
For a moment I considered asking about the Pembrokes. Maybe they were her grandparents. Or maybe there was a network of families helping kids make it out of the ghetto into the promised land. But it was none of my business. Nothing here was.
I circled the table, Dog preceding at a thoroughly terrier-esque trot. The three made way.
“If Monica wants to go into the business, tell her to call,” I said in the doorway. “I can connect her with some resources. She’s got my card.”
“Business?” her sister asked.
“Investigator,” I said in dripping ain’t-it-obvious. “She can play a role, keep her wits while loaded on painkillers in the middle of a confusion spell, and—to come that close with a needler at forty meters and not hit me? She’s a hell of a shot.”
Rachel smiled unexpectedly.
“She says you moved so fast she almost hit you.”
“Story of my life.”
Where the Shadows are Darkest
By Steven Mohan, Jr.
Steven Mohan, Jr. lives in Pueblo, Colorado with his wife, three children, and surprisingly no cats. His short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Polyphony, On Spec and Paradox as well as several DAW original anthologies. He has written nearly half a million words of BattleTech fiction and has been tapped to write the first novel of Catalyst Game Lab’s line of MechWarrior novels, A Bonfire of Worlds. His short fiction has won honorable mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and he is a former nominee for the Pushcart Prize. This is his first Shadowrun story.
Abiola Fashola was on his way to meet with the Yoruba street gang that ran his neighborhood when he saw the old man. A cold shiver of dread rippled through the troll’s massive body.
The funny part was he didn’t know why. Abiola had never seen the old man before.
He didn’t look dangerous. The old man was human, but then most Yorubas were human. He wore olive drab work pants and a bright yellow shirt. He was big around the belly, suggesting he got quite enough to eat, though how he managed to do that in the Shomolu quarter of Lagos was a mystery. His skin was dark, his hair the color of iron. His chin was clothed by a wispy, gray beard.
So he didn’t look dangerous and he wasn’t doing anything unusual. The old man stood in the busy street haggling with a fishmonger whose cart was loaded with the rich variety of fish that could be caught in Lagos Lagoon: three-eyed fish and no-eyed fish, fish with parasites and fish with stumps where fins should be, fish that looked fine, but were loaded with heavy metals or bacteria or magical maladies.
The Yoruban quarter was pushed right up against the poisonous lagoon, which the people of Lagos used as dump, toilet, bath, and larder all in one.
The cart’s contents turned Abiola’s stomach. He had eaten better when he’d been a merc—too bad he couldn’t stomach the killing.
He was tempted to dismiss his feeling as nerves, but he knew better. The shiver meant his dreaming mind had seen some danger his waking mind had missed.
The first time it happened to him his merc unit had been working some Igbo raiders that were coming out of the jungle to harass the oil workers that fed the Lagos pipeline. It seemed like cake duty, drawing a fat corp paycheck from Global Sandstorm (washed through the Edo Kingdom, of course) to hunt down some irregulars.
Only the irregulars didn’t turn out to be so irregular. Later Abiola learned they were mercs drawing their own fat corp paycheck from United Oil (washed through the Igbo Kingdom, of course.)
Anyway, it had been a pretty summer day and they were working their way through some small family farm that had met some unfortunate and violent end.
They were on the north side of the farm, moving through fields that weren’t growing anything but knee-high grass. The jungle rose up before them like an emerald wall, so close that Abiola could hear the cries of monkeys, the chatter of birds, the buzz and click of insects.
They moved across the farm using standard infantry tactics. First squad would sprint forward, while second stood back ready to provide covering fire. First would stop, establishing cover, and then the two squads would trade, second exposed, first concealed.
First had taken cover behind a truck turned over on its side, men laying prone behind the truck’s engine block or its bed, AK-97s pointed at the jungle.
Second readied itself to rush forward toward the burnt-out hulk of a tractor forty meters from their position.
Abiola shivered.
It wasn’t that he was a coward. He didn’t fear combat. He was used to being bigger and more powerful than the men he fought. And he was a devout Christian, so he didn’t believe this life would be his last. He did not want to die, but neither was he paralyzed by the thought that death might be waiting for him around every corner. Abiola Fashola was not a coward.
But suddenly he couldn’t move.
So when second squad moved out, they went without him.
Giving Abiola a ringside seat when an Igbo ambush cut down every last man before they could reach the tractor’s limited cover.
He would never know for sure what had caused him to freeze. Maybe his dreaming mind had looked out into the jungle and recognized the signs of danger: a glint of sunlight on steel, a fern stalk snapped and broken, the sudden peculiar silence of birds.
Whatever it was, from that moment on Abiola believed in it. So he took his fear of the old man seriously.
Abiola turned and hurried down the street, telling himself that things in Lagos were not always what they seemed. The old man could be scouting for the flesh-trade or he could be a corporate hitman, a merc recruiter, a drug runner.
Abiola did not wish to find out.
He ducked down a side street, took another turn, and ended up on Ikorodu Road.
In the late afternoon, Ikorodu was a snarl of traffic, an impossibly long line of cars and trucks so old they still ran on gas. Mixed in with the cars were darting motorcycle taxis called okadas, construction yellow danfo busses so crowded that people hung out their open doors, and the occasional caravan of trucks on their way to Victoria Island in the company of tanks and APCs.
None of them going anywhere.
&
nbsp; A brown cloud of smog hung over the go-slow. Horns honked and men cursed. Boys no older than six worked their way between the stalled cars, hawking gum, newspapers, steamed bean cakes, sweating bottles of Gulder beer, anything that might sell to the trapped commuters.
In the chaos, no one noticed a hulking troll moving down the sidewalk.
Abiola Fashola was big even for a troll, two meters sixty-one and pushing three hundred twenty kilos, only the last ten of which were from too much Star beer. His skin was dark chocolate and a pair of ornate horns the color of bronze began at his forehead and curled around like a ram’s. He wore camouflage pants from his merc days over heavy work boots. A black t-shirt revealed muscular arms that could pop a human skull like a balloon. A meter-long machete hung from his belt by a lanyard.
He also wore a simple gold cross hidden beneath his long, black beard. Abiola had great love for the baby Jesus, but he tried not to let it show.
In Lagos, universal love and brotherhood was the kind of thing that could get you killed.
As he walked down the street his vision swarmed with augmented reality objects, ghostly icons floating over reality, powered by the mesh network that blanketed the road.
Most of it was garbage, spam pop-ups offering to increase the size of certain parts of his anatomy. (Like he needed any part of himself to be bigger.)
He powered down his comlink and looked around. No sign of the mysterious old man. Maybe it’d all been in his imagination, after all.
Abiola weaved through the crazy, crowded streets of Lagos, following Ikorodu Road another couple blocks before ducking east again.
After losing the mysterious old man, Abiola almost felt good. Until he heard a cruel voice behind him say: “If it isn’t Mr. Troll,” and he remembered the errand that had brought him here in the first place.
• • •
They ended up in a little bar, Abiola nursing a Star beer the street gang bought him. Abiola loved Star, but this one tasted a little off. Bottled beer went for five naira, but he couldn’t help thinking this one had cost more.