Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  “I’m in,” Elvis said, smiling. “Can’t let you go it alone, Jack.”

  “So am I,” Wheeler said, “but only because this seems the surest way to get Fuchi off our backs.” Beneath the dwarfs gruff exterior, though, Skater knew Wheeler was sympathetic to the difficulty of someone like Falkenhayne trying to go it alone against the megacorp. They were all professional shadowrunners, but none of them had lost their humanity in arriving there.

  “A fair damsel in distress,” Cullen Trey said, “potentially at the mercies of an uncouth varlet. A host of them, in fact. How very quaint. Yet I find myself drawn irresistibly to such a venture that calls out to the soul of chivalry.”

  Archangel nodded. “Our rep as shadowrunners is on the line, too. In this biz, you’re only as good as your last success. There are people who know we’re involved now. Vankler. Luppas. Villiers. And people who’ll talk about this run after the dust settles. If we pull out and run away with our tails between our legs, how long do you think it’ll be before we get another call from a Johnson for a run?”

  “Too slotting long,” Duran replied. “Bottom line is this chummers: shadowrunning is how we make our money. We get dumb, we get flatlined. We get too cautious, we starve. And making a successful run against Fuchi and living to talk about it, that’s blue chip stock in a resume. I’m in.”

  Skater looked around the table, feeling the adrenaline surging through his system. The run was on, and there was no other feeling quite like it. And this time they were going to be putting everything on one final roll of the dice.

  52

  With the swap utility in place and operational, shifting the safehouse’s LTG to Killer Katie’s, Skater put the call through to the LTG the Johnson had given him. His retinal clock gave the time as 17:07:16. The others sat quietly, working through a pot of soykaf someone had put on. Archangel was jacked into her deck, slumped forward in her chair. As the call went through, she was going to try to trace it in case Falkenhayne wasn’t amenable to the offer Skater was going to make.

  The telecom picked up on the other end midway through the first beep. “Yes,” a feminine voice said.

  “Liberty,” Skater said, and felt his gut clench. He wasn’t the Johnson. She’d know that straightaway. He could only hope the password would buy him some time. If it didn’t, there was nowhere else to go.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

  Skater tripped the vid control, letting her see him at her end. “It’s Jack Skater. In a roundabout way, you hired me to pick up a package for you from Shastakovich’s.”

  She hesitated.

  Skater could hear her breathing rapidly at the other end of the connection. Archangel was jacked into her deck, trying to trace the call now. Wheeler was peering over her shoulder at the floppy-screen deck attachment that showed Archangel’s progress through the Matrix, allowing her to send text messages back to anyone watching the screen.

  “Ripley,” Skate said, “I know you’re in trouble. I want to help.” He didn’t say anything more than that. Those were the words he needed her to think about and base her decision on.

  “I don’t know you,” Falkenhayne stated. “I don’t have any reason to trust you.”

  “I still have the package you wanted me to get,” Skater said. “I could have given it up to Fuchi two days ago and been out of this whole drekking mess.”

  “For all I know, you’re working for them.”

  “I can tell you that I’m not,” Skater said, “but it’s up to you to believe me.” He took a quick glance at the floppy-screen deck attachment and read the lines of text on it near the bottom border.

  >The signal's coming from Bellevue. She’s using a cut-out relay from a public telecom. I’m trying to get past it, but it's a very wiz piece of work, flirting with probably a half-dozen LTG exchanges before going back to its real origin point.

  The imagery on the floppy-screen was stark, shot through with brilliant colors. The view was Archangel’s, from her persona icon inside the Matrix. She stood in a hexagonal-shaped room, bright green lines of demarcation against an iridescent back. A computer-enhanced replica of a telecom was mounted on one wall. Hands reached into the viewpoint and popped the computerized replica of the telecom into pieces, revealing a silver and onyx box at the heart of it. Skater knew the hands belonged to the persona icon Archangel used in the Matrix.

  Bright red and blue lines of laser light suddenly came into view, shooting along the wall, then quickiy vanishing from sight in the faraway distance.

  >Keep her talking.

  “Ripley,” Skater prompted.

  “What happened to the man I gave this LTG to?” she asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  There was a quick inhalation of breath on the other end. “Oh, god.”

  “A man named Kylar Luppas killed him,” Skater explained. “But before he died, he told me about you, said that you needed help.”

  On the floppy-screen, Archangel opened the silver and onyx box only to find another silver and onyx box inside, this one slightly smaller. She reached in for it, taking it out. When she had it firmly in her hands, most of the red and blue lines shooting from it winked out.

  >The cut-out’s a degradable utility. If she breaks the connection, it’ll destroy itself and we've lost her.

  “Ripley,” Skater said, “stay with me here. I think I can get you out of this.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed, and the strained noise sounded on the verge of hysteria. “How?”

  “Can we talk?” Skater asked. “Somewhere else?”

  “This is as close as you get to me.”

  “Okay,” Skater said. On the floppy-screen display, Archangel had opened the second silver and onyx box, revealing yet another one. The red and blue lines decreased in number, dropping to only a dozen or two. Skater felt the pressure building, wanting to make the deal.

  >Almost. Just a few more seconds. Archangel’s hands started working to open the third box.

  Skater tore his eyes from the floppy-screen display, knowing Archangel was deftly peeling back the defenses Falkenhayne had set up within the Matrix between the LTG sites. “You’re going to have to trust someone, Ripley. You’re in over your head. If Dunkelzahn was still around, you’d have had a chance to go it on your own.”

  There was a long pause. For a moment Skater was afraid he’d lost her. Then she started talking again. “I can’t believe they killed him.”

  Skater thought she was talking about Fuchi, but he couldn’t be sure. The woman sounded totally emotionally fragged from living on the edge too long. His sympathy went out to her, thinking that her present state must have been what Larisa Hartsinger went through those few months ago before she’d been killed by MacKenzie’s people. His throat constricted and he had to work hard to keep his own emotions from bleeding into his voice.

  Judging from the looks on the faces of his team around him, he knew they’d been touched by the woman’s plight as well.

  “There’s a way out for you,” Skater said.

  On the floppy-screen display, Archangel had successfully opened the third box. Inside was another, this one small enough to be cupped in her palm, still carrying through the silver and onyx motif. Only three of the glowing lines remained, two blue and one red.

  “How?” Falkenhayne asked. “Even before Dunkelzahn died, Fuchi was making a move to buy out the thinktank where I was working. They had a man in here asking questions about me. I heard about him through the thinktank grapevine. I never saw him, but I got his name.”

  “Norris Caber,” Skater said. “I know about him. What you didn’t know was that he was Coleman January.”

  Abruptly, the viewer popped on. Ripley Falkenhayne was revealed in a shot that took in head and shoulders. Her face was pinched and tight, softened some by the shadows she sat in. Skater could tell she was in a room, but couldn’t tell anything about it. H
er peroxide blonde hair was in disarray, too long to be worn in the short-cropped style it had been cut for. Metal surfaces gleamed against her face, hinting at the datajack in her temple and piercings in her ears, eyebrow, and nose.

  “Caber was Coleman?” she asked. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah,” Skater said. “When he was geeked in the crash-and-dash out on I-5, he was wearing a DocWagon wristband that identified him as Caber.”

  “I only knew him as Coleman,” she said. “I went to a fixer—a friend of a friend had arranged the introductions—and she set me up with Coleman.”

  “To sell the programming that would erase deltaware passcoding to corp execs looking to jump ship.”

  She nodded. “I gave degradable copies to Coleman. Onetime use only stuff with heavy scramble IC to nuke the files if anyone tried to read them or do any kind of analysis on them. Even then, they weren’t capable of replicating themselves, only executing the program. Coleman arranged everything else, the buyers, the times, and I got a cut. When I had enough nuyen saved back, I was going to run until I could find a place to think things out. There was too much pressure with Dunkelzahn gone and Fuchi banging at the door of the thinktank.”

  “But Coleman January betrayed you,” Skater said, putting together the pieces that he’d learned and deduced. It all hung together right. “That’s why you had him flat-lined.”

  Falkenhayne winced at the damning statement. “He betrayed me,” she repeated defensively. “He broke into my personal files here at DulceTech. I knew he was looking for the program, and I knew then that I couldn’t trust him. He got what he thought was the program master and ran. I hired a wetworker through the fixer who’d introduced me to Coleman and paid to have Coleman geeked in the crash-and-dash. Out of the money we made together.” She paused and laughed awkwardly. “It’s funny, you know, with Coleman helping finance the money I needed to have him killed.”

  “It’s okay,” Skater said, hoping the woman could hold it together long enough to hear him out.

  “Even with what I knew about Coleman, it took the wet-worker twenty-seven hours to find him and get the job done. I was afraid Coleman was going to find out that what he’d stolen wasn’t what he’d been looking for at all and come back after me.”

  “But the hit was arranged,” Skater said.

  She nodded, licking her lips. “I was told Coleman would be taking a trip to rendezvous with a buyer. The wetworker tailed him from his home, then geeked him on I-5.”

  “You could have had him geeked in his home.”

  “No. I couldn’t know who Coleman had told about the programming design. If he was geeked out in the public and there was enough confusion going on, whatever partners he might have had would hopefully think the programming was stolen from him and wouldn’t be looking for me for awhile. I was already in hiding.”

  “You hired the go-gangers,” Skater said, understanding her reference to confusion at the site. Frag, besides being gifted when it came to programming design, the woman had a natural talent for subterfuge.

  She suddenly broke down and started crying, wiping an arm across her face and snuffling. “It wasn’t easy to do, fraggit! But I thought maybe if the go-gangers looked like they were robbing Coleman’s vehicle, whoever was looking for us would chase them! And I never knew those slotters would hurt so many innocent people while they were doing it!” Her voice broke. “I swear to you I didn’t know! I was just trying to save myself!”

  “It’s okay,” Skater told her. “Just take a deep breath. I’m not here to judge you. I really do want to help.”

  Shoulders shaking with the effort of calming herself, Falkenhayne quieted.

  “You arranged to have us hired to recover the body.”

  “Yes. I was told you were good. Obviously since you’re talking to me now, you are. How did you know Coleman was Norris Caber?”

  “The Coleman January identity was one Fuchi had helped him establish. It probably wasn’t the only one.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said. Her brown eyes looked liquid in the dim lighting, wide and unbelieving. “After Dunkelzahn was killed, I couldn’t get through to his people to let them know I needed help; they were too involved with the assassination. He’d kept me at a safe distance, he’d told me, because his operations were constantly getting spied on.”

  “Did he know the software you were developing would erase deltaware programming?”

  “No.” She shook her head, sending her tousled locks bobbing. “I’d known for almost two months before he died, but the implications of what it could do bothered me. I didn’t even know if I was going to let him use it. All it was supposed to be was a satellite-recovery communications utility. Software that would be worth a considerable amount, but not what it ended up being.”

  A shower of sparks suddenly flared to life on the floppy-screen display, highlighting Wheeler’s face in vivid chartreuse. Archangel nearly dropped the latest box she was working on. Taking one hand from the box, she closed her hand into a fist, then opened it again a moment later to reveal a blue-white gem as large as the ball of her thumb. She tossed the gem away into a corner of the black and green room. The chartreuse sparks immediately leapt after it, freeing her to work on the box.

  >Scramble IC. The deception program utility I fed it will keep it occupied, though.

  “Do you know what a corporation could do with what I designed?” Falkenhayne asked. “You know about extractions that routinely go on between megacorps anyway. This program is like a master key for getting through the passcode-protected deltaware a corp uses to ensure loyalty from its high-level employees. If any corp got hold of it and started using it flagrantly, we’re talking about an economic war that would trickle down from the suborbital stations all the way into the streets of every sprawl in the Awakened world.”

  “I know,” Skater said.

  “Drek, I don’t know if I would have willingly given Dunkelzahn that much power,” she said. “And I liked and trusted him. It’s just too much. Too many people would die! And all because of me!”

  “Dear lady,” Cullen Trey said, moving in close to Skater’s elbow, “you can’t simply un-design the programming you’ve created.” His voice was pitched soft and low, empathizing.

  “Who’s that?” Falkenhayne demanded. Tears tracked down her face.

  “A friend,” Skater said, broadening the view on the telecom so it would include the Trey as well. “His name is Cullen. He’s part of the team you hired.”

  Trey bowed his head in acknowledgment of the introduction. “If I may,” he told Skater.

  Nodding, Skater took a step back. On the telecom screen, Falkenhayne looked to Trey. With quiet passion, the mage outlined Skater’s deal with the UCAS. Using his way with words, Trey was able to show the subject in the best possible light. Skater figured if magic hadn’t lured Trey into its fold, he’d have had a stellar career as a used-car salesman.

  Falkenhayne wasn’t happy. “What you’re talking about is virtually a prison sentence under UCAS protection,” she said. “That’s not fair.”

  Skater silently agreed with her assessment of the situation.

  “At least,” Trey replied with quiet control, “that way you get to live.”

  “One other thing I’d like to point out,” Skater said. “You’re thinking the programming you’ve created that defeats the current passcoding on deltaware is going to remain that way. Once the megacorps find out it exists, they’ll put their best computer programmers to work figuring out new passcodes that can’t be beaten by your programming. When that happens, the programming you’ve invented now will be worthless. It might take weeks or months, Ripley, but it will happen and you’ll be free.”

  “Who’s to say the UCAS won’t do the same thing?” Falkenhayne pointed out.

  “They’re not in business like the corps are,” Skater said. He paused. “With the situation being what it is, Ripley, this is the best thing I can see happening.” He glanced quickly at the floppy-scre
en display, seeing that Archangel had cracked the last box. Only one strand of glowing red light remained attached to the telecomm replica.

  The floppy-screen viewpoint suddenly shifted, all the images blurring into long streaks of color. Skater knew Archangel had locked onto the original signal and was following it back through the LTG grid network in the Matrix.

  >I’ve got the location where she is.

  The view on the floppy-screen display halted on a tall rectangular shape that Skater assumed was a building. The viewpoint changed from side to side, addresses flickering in the upper left corner.

  Abruptly, the screen went blank. At the table, Archangel reached up and pulled the datajack from her temple. “And I’ve got the address,” she whispered so the telecom wouldn’t pick up her voice. “But, Jack, there was somebody else in there. They may have gotten through too.”

  Her words twisted Skater’s stomach, making him feel he’d swallowed an ice-cold towel that was sucking him dry despite the temperature. “What’s it going to be, Ripley?” he asked. “Every second we wait puts Fuchi one step closer.”

  Without warning, the woman broke down, her voice coming in heaving sobs. “I’m so tired. I just want to feel safe again. It’s been so long, I think I’ve forgotten how that feels.” She took a long, deep breath. “Just come get me, and damn you if you’ve been lying to me.” She gave her address and apartment number, then hit the Disconnect, blanking the vidscreen.

  Skater looked at Archangel.

  “That’s the address,” Archangel said. “But like I told you, someone else was in there poking around too. I didn’t stick long enough to find out who it was or what they were looking for.”

  “Okay,” Skater said, looking around at the others, “let’s buzz turbo and hope that whoever it was didn’t get in too, or that we’ve got enough of a lead to get there and get gone before they arrive.” He started for the door, grabbing gear as he went.