Find your own truth s-3

by Robert N. Charrette

  Find your own truth

  ( Shadowrun - 3 )

  Robert N Charrette

  Find your own truth

  Robert N. Charrette

  PART I

  There Is No Surety

  Mudder McAlister's blood stained the sandstone of Ayer's Rock a deeper crimson. Bright stars and smears of gore marked the spots where he had struck out-croppings as he fell, and a growing pool haloed his head. Among his twisted limbs, one arm hung as though it had an extra joint. If McAlister were still alive, he would surely be dead before anyone could reach him.

  Samuel Verner turned his eyes away from the grim sight, lifting his gaze toward the cloud-dotted sky as he offered a prayer for the guide's soul. With a twinge of guilt, Sam knew that his sorrow was less for the end of a life than for the injury to his own quest. He had known Mudder McAlister for only a week and hadn't particularly liked him, finding the man ill-mannered, foul-mouthed, and abrasive. Nor was Sam amused, as was Jason, by Mudder's rages when Gray Otter physically rebuffed his clumsy advances toward her. Sam wouldn't miss McAlister's company, but he had been the only runner in Perth who claimed to know where to find what Sam sought. And Cog, that faceless fixer who seemed to have connections everywhere, had given him a high competency rating.

  During their trek deep into the interior of Australia, McAlister had proven his skill and knowledge time and again, flawlessly navigating the pair of all-terrain Mules across the trackless, shifting wastelands of the Outback. Fifty years ago they wouldn't have had such problems, but Australia had changed since the Awakening.

  In the days before magic had returned to the earth, the country had been well served with roads. Aircraft had flown high above the deserts and grasslands to connect the coastal population centers with the interior's scattered bastions of civilization. But with the Awakening, the land had come to chaotic and often malevolent life, swallowing roads and brewing vast, swirling storms of such violence that air travel was often too risky. The Dreamtime had returned as a Nightmaretime, and mankind had retreated before the unleashed fury of the wild magic. Only a few resource-exploitation centers belonging to megacorporations remained in the interior, and even their lifelines were tenuous.

  Sam was sure that without McAlister the team wouldn't have survived the trip to Ayer's Rock. The guide had saved them from blundering into any of the treacherous landforms and had known which of the local paranimals they had seen were dangerous. He had even shown them how to spot an approaching mana storm and how to take cover from the manifestations of the uncontrolled magic. Now he was dead, and the Americans certainly had not had tune to learn everything Mudder McAlister knew about the Outback. They were all experienced shadowrunners, though. Besides, they still had Harrier Hawkins, the other Australian who had come with them. Though not as experienced as Mudder, Hawkins had run the Outback before. Sam thought there was a reasonable chance they could all get back.

  He stared down at what was left of the guide's rap-peling line, which lay looped chaotically near its piton anchor. When the line's sheath and multi-stranded core had parted, the sudden release of tension had flung the loose end back. He bent to examine the end and found it frayed, as though cut. Neither Jason nor Gray

  Otter for all of McAlister's harassment would have had reason to kill the guide. They knew as well as Sam that he was the only one who knew the way. As for Harrier, he'd had some history with McAlister and so might have had a reason, but he hadn't been near the line.

  Holding the end, Sam shook out the rope and estimated the remaining length. It looked just long enough to reach the edge of the ledge where the team stood. He stepped to the edge and crouched. The rock was jagged where the line had gone over the edge, easily sharp enough to slice through the line as it sawed back and forth' under the weight of the descending McAlister. Before dropping over the edge, Mudder had said he wouldn't need an edge roller because the rock was smooth. Would an experienced climber like McAlister have made the mistake of laying his line over such a dangerous point? The jagged edge couldn't have been there before McAlister went over the rim.

  Jason stood at the precipice, looking down at the broken body of the guide. The Indian's cyberware gleamed in the sunlight and "made the blocky silhouette of his enhanced body look even less human than usual. He turned to Sam, the mirror lenses of his optic implants glittering beneath his dark brows. "He's broke but good."

  The slender woman at Jason's side nodded in agreement. She wore gray leathers decorated with short fringe and panels of exquisite beadwork. The leathers were real, unlike her Amerindian features and skin color. Those were the result of cosmetic surgery and melanin chemoadjustment. Once, when very, very wasted, she had shown Sam the minute scars, claiming they were the marks of a ritual Sun Dance. Sam knew the signs for what they were, having once prepped information for a brief on radical cosmetic surgeries back when he'd been a researcher for the corp. But even on that night she had owned up to no name other than

  Gray Otter. He was sure she hadn't been born to the streets, but she had embraced them and learned to live on them. As swift as her namesake and with a bite that could be as sharp, she usually saved her speech for important matters. When she spoke without being spoken to, Sam knew she was concerned. "Bad karma."

  "Crimey," Harrier exploded, dancing about as though ready to take flight. "You blokes can't give up. Old Mudder wouldn'ta wanted that. He said you were real tough chummers. You can't quit now. Not when we's so close."

  "Nobody said anything about quitting," Sam said soothingly.

  "Seems like a good idea to me," Jason said. "Can't get where you're going around here without a guide." "But Mudder said we was here, that we'd made it," Harrier whined.

  "He made it all right. Maybe you'd like to join him." Jason took a step toward Harrier and the little man danced back, dodging to put Sam between him and the samurai. Jason laughed. Sam faced him. "We're going down." "Go ahead. I didn't come here to hump up and down rocks looking for something we won't be able to find." "You're here because I'm paying you. And because I'm paying you, you'll shut up and come along."

  Jason bristled at that. He cocked his wrists inward, and twin fourteen-centimeter blades slid from ecto-myelin sheaths embedded in his forearms. Sam's eyes were welded to the tips of the blades. Stomach churning, he watched the tips vibrate with the tension in the samurai's arms. Jason was arrogant and full of his own competence as a fighter, but Sam hoped the Indian would realize that it might take magic to handle some of the threats the Outback could throw at them before they could get back to the coast. And Sam was the only magician for a hundred kilometers. The samurai boiled with anger at Sam's tone, but Jason never threw away something that he might need. Sam was betting on that.

  The blades slid back into their sheaths. Relieved, Sam turned back to Harrier and ordered him to rig another rappeling line to replace the remnant of McAlister's line. While the Australian worked at that, Sam shrugged off his pack and set it at the rim of the ledge. He took out a few things he thought might be useful, then closed it up and braced it in position with stones. As an edge roller it was pure improvisation, but it would have to serve for the real one that lay below with McAlister. When Harrier was ready, Sam tossed the line down and made very sure it passed across his pack. Hitching the line into his harness, Sam turned his back to the void. He stepped backward, balancing at the edge for a moment before slipping slack into the line and leaning backward over the drop. Satisfied that the line would fall on the buffer of his pack, he took the first few steps downward. Only after the line settled into place did he push off gently and allow himself two meters of drop. He landed smoothly. The second controlled drops went equally well. It wasn't till the fifth that rock crumbled u
nder his feet upon landing and he twisted his ankle. Though he had to favor that foot for pushoffs and landings, the rest of the descent went without incident. When he reached the bottom of the drop, he was relieved to find that his ankle could bear his weight.

  Jason was the next down, dropping in five-meter controlled falls. Gray Otter was less ostentatious, but her more cautious approach was not enough to ward off bad luck. Halfway down she had a bad landing, and slammed shoulder-first into the cliff face. She slipped a dozen meters down the line before she could brake to a stop. When she reached his level Sam saw that her leathers were abraded and torn, but the ballistic lining remained intact. Though she made no com 8

  Robert N. Charrette plaint, she favored her right arm. Jason did nothing but nod brusquely to the stiff smile she offered him. Sam had seen enough of Indian stoicism to know better than to offer help. Harrier joined them by executing a rapid series of small drops that seemed more like a scramble than rappeling.

  The ledge they had reached was even narrower than the one they'd left behind, and McAlister's body lying there made standing room even more cramped. The guide's blood seemed to have soaked into the rocks, the stains becoming almost indistinguishable from the reddish sandstone.

  Along the cliff face to the left was a darkness that had been hidden from above by an overhang. The cavern entrance was invisible from below as well, screened by the steep angle of the nearly sheer cliff. But it was here, just as McAlister had described it.

  It would have been more direct to assault the cliffs from the plain, but McAlister had pointed out that such an attempt would require serious mountaineering equipment. He had strongly advised against driving as many pitons as the climb would require. "The rock," he had said, "wouldn't like it." So they had climbed along a circuitous path to the ledge, from which they had just dropped down onto the site. At the time Sam had thought McAlister's attitude superstitious, but now that the rock had sent the guide to his death he was not so sure.

  A desert oak clung to a precarious foothold in a cleft on the far side of the entrance. The harsh location had stunted the tree, making it a natural bonsai. In his time as an employee of Renraku Corporation, Sam had known gardeners who would have sacrificed their retirement to have achieved such miniature perfection.

  A flicker of motion at the edge of the tree's shadow caught his attention. At first he saw nothing on the sunlit rock; then he perceived a lizard clinging to the surface. Its back was decorated with stripes and lines of dots, but the patterns blurred as the lizard streaked away.. A shot cracked suddenly, and the lizard vanished in?: a gout of blood and tatters of flesh. Sam started back, feeling the heat of the bullet's passage near his cheek..!" "What in hell do you think you're doing? You almost hit me!"

  "Zero out, Twist." Jason gave him a sardonic grin. "The 'ware's top of the line. Didn't even clip a hair of your fuzzy Anglo beard."

  Sam knew Jason's smartgun link. The technology would keep the Indian from discharging his weapon while it was pointed at anyone the Indian recognized as a friendly. Killing the lizard was Jason's way of demonstrating that he would consider Sam a friend 'Ij. only as long as it was to his advantage, and that he f was capable of dealing with Sam anytime he wished. Jason was a dangerous man, a quality that made him j valuable to this run. The Indian was, in fact, the second-most-deadly samurai Sam knew. He would have preferred to have the first-most-deadly by his side, but that samurai wouldn't leave Seattle. Sam had known from the start that this run would be too dangerous with less than the best he could afford. He didn't like or trust Jason, but he had hired him anyway. Jason had offered a discount for his services to dem- f onstrate his disdain both for the danger involved and for that other samurai, and so was affordable muscle.

  Affordable, deadly, and a future problem.

  "You didn't need to shoot it," Sam said.

  Jason gave him a look that was supposed to be innocent. "It mighta been poisonous. Coulda bit you."

  "Damn fool street-runner," Harrier snapped. "Don't you know nothing? Rock monitors eat bugs. Ain't gonna bite nobody!"

  "Shut up, little man." Keeping his eyes on Sam, Jason swung his arm around so that his gun pointed at Harrier. They all knew the samurai's smartgun link would let him aim the weapon without looking in the direction the muzzle pointed. Gray Otter leaned back against the rock face and out of the line of fire. With nothing between him and the weapon, Harrier began to retreat along the ledge.

  "Don't let him shoot me, Mr. Twist. You're a shaman. Hex him or something."

  Pointedly, Sam turned his back on Jason to demonstrate his disapproval of the Indian's bullying. "He won't shoot you, Harrier. I hear tell that you can't get anywhere around here without a guide, and you're the closest thing we've got to one."

  The sound of a weapon being bolstered told Sam that Jason was done with his posturing for now. He hoped there would be no more problems until they got back to the Mules. The Indian usually went relatively docile for several hours, after having lost a play in the domination game. With all the dangers of travel, he would be quiet enough on the trip back to the coast. Once there, the odds would shift again. Sam expected that Jason would want an accounting for Sam's having embarrassed him in front of Gray Otter.

  For now, though, they stood before the cavern McAlister had described. If everything the guide had hinted were true, they were facing more immediate problems. Even without shifting to his astral perception, Sam felt the stirring he had come to associate with the presence of powerful magic. He sat down cross-legged and shifted perceptions. The cavern mouth remained a dark hole in the cliff, his astral senses offering no clues to what lay beyond. Ayer's Rock itself buzzed with charged mana. He had no desire to assay the darkness within the cavern in astral form.

  As he was easing himself back to mundane perceptions, Sam noticed a faint glow to one side of the entrance. With his worldly eyes, he saw a pictograph of a lizard where the flesh-and-blood lizard had clung to the rock. The red and ocher of the paint were bright and shiny and looked almost wet. It didn't smell wet, though. When he touched one of the lines, Sam's finger came away feeling damp but showing no sign of color. While pondering that mystery, he noticed another painting a meter or so higher. Faded, but recognizable, it was another lizard. Like the first, its head pointed toward the mouth of the cave. Now that Sam knew what to look for, he saw that the entire entrance was ringed with pictographs. All were lizards, and all pointed toward the cavern's gaping mouth.

  Sam stood and started forward, but Jason stepped past him to be the first to enter the cave. Sam was more than happy to let the Indian lead the way into the unknown. Jason was the best equipped to handle a sudden physical threat, and would only get angrier if denied that honor.

  As Sam stepped across the threshold behind him, the drop in temperature was like walking into a refrigerator. After the initial shock he realized it wasn't so much the great temperature differential, but that the escape from the blazing sun made it seem so. Straining to see, he took a few steps forward. Harrier and Gray Otter entered behind him. Unlike Jason, the three of them moved cautiously, almost unwillingly. None of them had the optic augmentation of the samurai.

  It took several minutes for unenhanced eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, Sam saw that he was standing in a sort of antechamber. Gray Otter and Harrier were there, too, but Jason had probed deeper. More aboriginal pictographs adorned the chamber's walls. Hidden from the sun, these were less faded, but none had the fresh look of the one Sam had touched. Harrier identified some of them, speaking their names as though they were totems: Kangaroo, Koala, Bandicoot, Snake, and, arching overhead, Crocodile.

  Turning at the sound of a foot scraping the rock floor, he saw Jason standing in the archway of a tunnel that led deeper into the rock. Looking annoyed, the Indian turned on his heel and vanished again into the dark. Sam switched on a flashlight and motioned the others to follow.

  The tunnel was uneven, narrowing and widening irregularly as it made its serpentine
way into the earth. In the places where he had to duck low, Sam almost felt the weight of the rock above him. The walls were smooth and the tunnels almost circular. Branches too small for a man to pass through split off from the walls and ceiling. Sometimes the flashlight's beam showed that they looped back in almost immediately. Most often they were simply Stygian holes impenetrable to the probing light. The effect gave an uncanny organic feel to the place, as though they were walking through the arteries of some strange being of rock.

  Sam turned one corner to find Jason only a meter away. The Indian was advancing cautiously, gun in hand. Sam's flashlight beam faltered in the darkness ahead of Jason. Its range of illumination seemed oddly curtailed, as though it were shining into infinity.

  Suddenly Jason stopped moving, and screamed as his body arched in spasm. Lines of sparks danced along his body, tracing the wires and cables of his cyberware. His Ares Predator roared as his trigger finger tightened on the trigger. The thunder it raised in the cavern gobbled all other sound. The Indian twisted, almost as though trying to tear loose from the grip of a giant hand, and then was flung down at Sam's feet. There was the slightest hint of burnt meat in the smoke rising from the samurai.

  "Righty, mate," Harrier said as he propped his head around the corner. "That's the barrier."

  "Don't worry 'bout the Injun, Mr. Twist. Barrier don't like electronics. He'll be fine in a minute."

  Jason groaned, then cursed with a vigor that indicated he had taken no real injury.

  "See," Harrier said eagerly, "Mudder said you was the bloke who'd get us past the barrier, Mr. Twist."

  Sam handed the flashlight to Gray Otter. She took it with her right hand; her left held her Browning Ultra-Power pistol. Cautiously he walked forward. Approaching the spot where Jason had stood, Sam's head started to buzz from the strength of the magic before him. He stopped, staring into the darkness.