by Mel Odom
“Sure,” the troll rumbled. In his arms, Emma pushed her bottle from her mouth and made happy cooing noises.
“Set it up,” Wheeler told Archangel, “and we’ll make the pickup.”
Skater felt guilty as he watched Elvis holding his daughter, knowing there was a body in one of the next rooms that could, beyond a doubt, get them all geeked. He couldn’t help thinking Deja was probably right in saying he had no business with Emma. The way he lived, running the shadows, was no way to bring up a child. But he had to worry about other matters at the moment. “What good is this diagnostics equipment going to do?”
“When you’re dealing with cyberware,” Archangel said, “you’re working with four separate systems.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Bodyware. Headware. Matrixware. Sense-ware. All of these subsystems are routed through their own interface modules. By accessing the subsystem interface modules through the cyberware diagnostics interface, I may learn more about what Caber was involved with. And who. There’s also the probability that since Fuchi’s private yabos were muscling the snatch-and-run on Caber’s body, whatever they were searching for wasn’t found at the accident scene.”
“Which leaves the corpse,” Duran said.
“Caber was equipped with a C2 deck. Before I start slotting around with the memory modules and enhancements, I want a better scan of what’s actually in the matrixware subsystems. If the body has something hidden in it as software, I don’t want to frag it up before we get a chance to extricate it.”
“A C2 deck is top-of-the-line tech,” Skater said. “He could have been a runner.”
Trey leaned forward. “I’m afraid I don’t know what a C2 deck is. My education into the technological side of life is admittedly somewhat limited.”
“It’s a cranial cyberdeck,” Archangel replied. “Placed entirely inside a joker’s head.”
Trey leaned back in his chair, going white around his lips. He loosened his cape collar with a hooked finger. “Not for me, I’m afraid.” As a mage, he knew what that kind of invasive treatment would do to his ability to wield magic.
“If you were a decker, you’d see the wiz of it,” Archangel said. “Hands-free operation. When you get up to run, you don’t have to lug a deck around with you or worry about getting it boned slamming into something. I’ve heard that some corps even tie the C2 decks into a decker’s vital signs as a sec precaution. If a decker’s heart stops, the last thing the C2 does is juice up a trigger that activates a trace and report program as well as a trace and burn program. The trace and report does exactly that, homing into a corp’s security systems and giving a location to a rescue squad so they can pick up the dataslave. While that’s going on, the trace and burn melts down the C2 deck’s MPCP.” She glanced over at Trey. “The master persona control program. It’s the nerve system for the C2 deck.”
“So when you open Caber’s C2 deck and the memory/storage—” Skater said.
“—there may be nothing inside,” Archangel finished. “But I won’t know until I can run diagnostics on his cyberware. If the memory is intact, I’ll still have to sleaze my way into the data.”
17
Skater looked around at his team, all of them seated at the table now. “At this point we’ve got a little time. Luppas and Fuchi may be looking for us, but if they’d made us, we’d know it by now. All of them have street contacts who’d have passed the word on through drop sites.”
A round of nods agreed with him.
“We’ve got a few angles to pursue on this busted play. The first angle is Caber’s ID—if that’s his real name. Archangel’s already run him through the Matrix. No one knows him there. The only records that do exist are on Coleman January, who is a fabrication. But it’s possible Caber has been living under the ID for a few years. His DocWagon premiums were paid up.
Someone corporate knew he was living under the Coleman January name or they’d have been canceled.”
“You say corporate,” Archangel said, “because of the cyberware.”
“I’m talking about the security DocWagon had on his files regarding employment. And also the fact that having a DocWagon platinum account means you’ve got to have a pretty high standard of living. DocWagon must have alerted someone connected with Fuchi about the crash-and-dash, otherwise Luppas wouldn’t have known about it.” Skater felt he was in the zone now, all worries about Deja temporarily shelved. “The January ID may list him as a free-lance efficiency expert, but what kind of annual salary are we talking about here?”
“Not enough, chummer,” Cullen Trey commented, idly twisting his glass in his hands. “Hiding out means seeing people off the books. Everyone from medicos to income tax surgeons. We’re all aware of that. And those people working the shadows have a habit of charging much more and expecting to slot the old credstick up front—no payment plans.”
Skater nodded. “Caber had to have been getting nuyen from a source not named on his income tax statements. There may be leads there and also in the work he was supposed to have done free-lance. Self-employment—those contracts have to be accounted for.”
“White collar drek,” Duran groused.
“There’s enough red tape in their cross-filed and redundant datastreams to bring down nearly anyone you’d want to,” Archangel said. “Provided you have the patience and talent to take their subsystems apart.”
“It’s one of the tools we have to work with to finesse this scam,” Skater said.
“Rather chase a target through the shadows,” the ork stated. “When things start heating up, I want the action.”
“You’re going to get it,” Skater promised. “Next on our agenda is Kylar Luppas. The joker’s got his sights on crashing our hoops. We’re going to do some crashing of our own.” Duran showed a big-toothed grin under lowered eyebrows shadowing gimlet-black eyes.
“How soon is your chummer going to have a jacket on Luppas?” Skater asked. Duran had assured him that some ork he knew named Vankler could come up with the goods. “Couple more hours,” Duran said.
Skater checked his chron. “That puts us up to twelve o’clock or so. I want to put the heat back on Luppas.”
“You put somebody on his backtrail,” Duran said seriously, “you’re setting them up to get geeked.”
“Not if the people on his backtrail are Lone Star and media snoops,” Skater replied. “Archangel, do you still have the vid you downloaded on the arrival of Luppas and his black ops team?”
“Yes.”
“So you give copies of it to the Star and a news trid station,” Wheeler said, clarifying it for himself. “Instant pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Only Luppas gets to be the jackass.”
“I doubt he’ll stay pinned,” Skater said. “But maybe it’ll make other pieces of this network pop loose.”
“Fuchi’s IntSec program has always been Miles Lanier’s baby,” Elvis said. “You got to ask yourself why his fingerprints aren’t all over this thing.”
“There’s street buzz that I’ve heard,” Trey said, “that suggests Lanier’s temporary absence from Villiers’s Fuchi offices is due in part to Dunkelzahn’s assassination.”
“Somebody’s suggesting Lanier and Villiers were involved with geeking the dragon?” Duran asked. “That’s one I haven’t heard.” He rubbed his face. “With all the drek I’ve listened to in the last few days since the assassination, maybe that’s the only one that’s slipped by me.”
“I’ll have to tell the regulars down at Reno’s about that,” Elvis said. “Reno Pyatt’s got an assassination pool going on who really slotted Dunkelzahn’s stick. That one’s not up there.”
“With all the parties interested in flatlining our briefest president,” Trey said, “the pool should have some fine change in the offing for the winner. Unless the leading favorite happens to come through on the pay line.”
Skater steered the conversation back to the run. “If we can link the funeral home ops to Luppas, then establish a link between Luppas and Fuchi, we’ll hold
a torch to Fuchi’s hoop.”
“They might start covering their tracks more,” Archangel said. “Real ones or ones they’re imagining.”
“Right. And if they do, maybe we can find something that floats to the top that we can use.”
“When do we contact the Johnson?” Duran asked.
“After we get the information on Luppas. Maybe it’ll give us a way to put pressure on the Johnson.”
“The Johnson may have already slotted and run,” Wheeler said. “Could have re-tagged himself with a new ID and SIN right after he found out about the raid.”
“Yeah,” Skater agreed. “And this run could have already been traced back to him, and Lone Star or Luppas are waiting for us to step into the wiz trap they’ve got waiting for us.”
The thought sobered them all.
“We’ve got our game plan,” Skater said. “Let’s stick with it and see where it goes. Things go bad, we’ll know it and make different plans.”
* * *
Emma asleep on his chest, dozing fitfully with her fist tucked up under her chin, Skater shifted on the couch. Voices drifted in from the surrounding dosses, on both sides as well as above and below, some in casual tones while others held belligerent barks and a practiced cadence.
He felt stiff from all the physical activity during the night and early morning. The lumpy couch made it worse. During his past few months with his daughter, spent recuperating from the loss of his eye and learning to care for her while the shadows cooled off a bit, he’d learned that when Emma slept anywhere on the bed with him that he subconsciously kept track of her. He didn’t move, didn’t shift, didn’t roll from one side of the bed to the other as he usually did.
Old cartilage from past injuries popped and snapped as he rolled Emma into his arms and stood. She stirred only briefly, making tiny whimpers for a moment, then let out a long breath and dropped back into slumber. Carefully, he tucked her into the portable bed that looked like an oversized picnic basket.
He knelt beside her long enough to tuck her in, pulling her blanket up. She smelled baby-powder fresh, her complexion like milk. He felt bad knowing that she’d wake up and he wouldn’t be there.
“Jack.”
Skater turned, finding Archangel standing in the doorway to the bedroom where they’d stored Caber’s body.
She wore a pair of medico gloves that reached up to her elbows. Blood stained them in places, the liquid dark and crusty. “She’s going to be just fine. I’ll be here for her when she wakes.”
“I appreciate it.” Skater rubbed at the back of his neck and tried to work the knot of tension out.
“Want to talk about it?”
“What?” He knew how inane it sounded the moment the word left his lips.
Archangel peeled off the bloody gloves and tossed them into a trash hamper that would be taken to the doss building’s incinerator later. All evidence of their presence was being quietly eradicated on a regular basis.
“The weather,” Archangel said quietly. She leaned against the door frame, fatigue breaking her normally straight posture into a warped version of itself.
Returning his attention to Emma, Skater adjusted the spare shirt he left with her when she was sleeping by herself. The bit about the shirt had been a tip from Elvis. Usually it was a fairly clean shirt he’d worn the day before, one that still carried the smell of him on it. The troll had explained that young children relied more on a sense of smell to identify their parents than sight or hearing. Those senses developed later. The shirt comforted Emma while she slept, giving her the illusion that Skater was with her.
“Give me some time.” Skater stood and returned Archangel’s forthright gaze. “I need to skull it around awhile, try to figure out how I feel about it. I appreciate the offer.”
“It bothers you that she’s here,” Archangel said.
“I left her with the friends Elvis arranged last night. Maybe I should have asked if she could have stayed a little longer.”
“I wasn’t talking about Emma’s safety.” Archangel regarded him coolly with her gold-flecked bronze eyes. “I’m referring to your peace of mind and your ability to concentrate on salvaging this run.”
“Is there something you want to say about how I’m handling things?”
“No.” Her spine straightened and spots of color marked her pale cheeks. “I think you’re doing everything you can. There’s no one else I’d rather have ramrodding this run.”
“Sorry.” Skater glanced out the window. The sun shone down harder, brighter, creating specks of bright light that bounced off windows of the buildings across the street. “I’m concerned about having Emma here, in the middle of this frag-up. I’ve been waking up off and on, trying to figure out what to do about her.”
“For the run?” Archangel asked. “Or longer?”
“It gets confused. I run the shadows as a professional. There’s nothing else I’m trained to do, and I can’t go back and invent a SIN and a personal history under another name that’s going to let me take up living like a straight. And I’m her dad.”
“So you’re feeling the pull in both directions.”
“Yeah. I don’t like being connected.” As soon as he said it, Skater didn’t like the way his words sounded.
“Connected? Or tied down by having to take care of Emma?”
“Sometimes I feel tied down,” Skater admitted. “I get ready to go somewhere, it’s a pain in the hoop remembering everything. Bottles. Diaper bag. Spare clothes. Formula.” Archangel laughed, then quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. That won’t happen again. It’s just amusing to think of you forgetting something like that when you put together the runs that you do.”
Skater felt himself get angry, then the emotions dissolved when he looked at the decker. “Did you ever have kids?” Considering the unusual life-span of elves, he didn’t really know how old Archangel was. It was possible that she’d had whole families that had grown up and moved on.
She hesitated for a moment, the old defensiveness that always clung to her shining in her eyes. In their time together, she’d never revealed anything of ter personal life. “No,” she said at last.
“Ever thought about it?”
“No.” Her answer came quick and hard, final as a door closing on a slam.
Skater took the cue and dropped that subject. He looked down at his daughter. “These past few months, I’ve never felt so alive as when I’m with her. The runs used to have that effect on me. Still do in some ways, I guess.”
“The adrenaline rush.”
He nodded. “That’s part of it. Another part is finding out if I’m as clever as I think I am, as fast as I think I am.” He paused. “But Emma’s different. With her, most of the time I’m relaxed. She’s still a baby now, and is only starting to interact. I’m content most nights with her sleeping beside me, just knowing she’s there.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
“Sometimes I do.”
Archangel’s brows drew together. “Why?”
Skater drew a deep breath to distance some of the emotions warring inside himself, then let it out. “Feeling that way makes me think I’m being selfish. Let’s face it. What do I know about being a parent?”
“Emma is clean and well-fed and happy.”
“And she’s in the middle of a potential drekking firezone if this thing busts outs wrong.”
“What are you afraid of?” Archangel asked softly.
“I’m afraid of making a mistake with her, getting her hurt or not letting her live a normal life. This”—he gestured around the apartment—“isn’t a normal life.”
“You think maybe the kids of those parents in the dosses around us are living a more normal life?”
The arguing voices around them continued, interspersed with the plaintive whining and crying of small children. Something smashed against the wall of the doss behind the kitchen and broke, striking hard enough to rattle the cabinet doors.
&n
bsp; “Do you think Emma would be better off living with someone like that?” Archangel asked.
“Not everyone’s like that,” Skater said.
“Is her life with you like that?”
“Not when we’re alone.”
“Maybe that’s what you should be thinking about.”
Skater shook his head. “It’s not that fragging easy.”
“Then you’ve got to make it so that it is. Before you make any kind of decision at all.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Skater headed for the bedroom where Duran had sacked out on the floor.
The ork lay on his back, one hand behind his neck to pillow his head, and the other wrapped around the Ceska Black Scorpion machine pistol that he kept as back-up for the Franchi combat shotgun.
“Time to roll,” Skater said.
Trey had claimed the twin bed for himself and slept with a sleeping mask covering his eyes.
Duran came awake instantly. “Be right there, kid.”
“That’s fine. I got dibs on the shower.” Skater walked back to the living room and headed for the bathroom after retrieving a change of clothing from the bag that held his and Emma’s things.
Archangel had returned to the bedroom where the corpse was. Even though the door was open, Skater felt the wall between them.
18
“The office of Richard Villiers,” Kylar Luppas announced to the sec audbox sealed in stainless polysteel on the elevator cage’s wall. He checked the chron beside it. It was 11:59:19 a.m.
The maglev doors closed with muffled force, no sound, but enough vibration to let occupants know they weren’t going to open up again easily if the sec codes were violated. The cage started up smoothly, propelled by magnetic pulse. Its synthmahogany walls gleamed with fresh polish and smelled like the real wood. The Bellevue offices of Fuchi didn’t stint on decor.
“Access to further floors is prohibited without proper authorization,” a female voice said as the cage stopped only seconds later. “Please stand by to ID yourself.”