by Carl Sargent
“As I said, we won’t know anything until tomorrow and perhaps not for another twenty-four hours after that while we wait for the results of the diagnostic tests. If you wish to remain here in the hospital overnight, we have facilities. The insurance covers it.”
“I can’t,” she blurted out and saw his shocked reaction. “I mean, Michael was going to meet someone—um, family relations. I will have to tell them. And there are friends.”
“Of course,” Kohler said, his voice expressing as much disapproval as his expression. “We have the number of your hotel. We’ll call if there’s any change.” He gave her directions to the exit.
Passing under a clock in the lobby, Kristen looked up to see that it read 19:40. All she could do now was hope desperately that Serrin would call back to the hotel in the next two hours.
* * *
“No details on Mr. Sutherland are publicly available,” the robotic voice informed him from the telecom. “Information is never released except to immediate kin.”
“Spirits, I’m his best friend. I only want to know if he’s alive or dead, dammit,” Serrin yelled, then forced himself to calm down. “His, er, wife was intending to visit him. Can I speak to her?”
“I cannot confirm or deny that any of Mr. Sutherland’s relatives have or have not been in attendance on him at this time,” the voice droned back. “Thank you for your inquiry.” With that, the connection broke.
“I can’t fraggin’ believe it!” the elf shouted. “I mean, is there some special archipelago somewhere in the world where they breed people like that?”
“Kristen will be back at the hotel,” Tom said calmly. “Call her there.”
“No more calls.” The shaman, who’d given her name as Mathilde by now, was adamant. She took the portaphone away from the elf before he could key in the hotel number.
“But, look, Michael was cutting a deal for weapons and armor. We’ve got to find out what he got,” Serrin pleaded. “We may have to meet someone. A date he made and can’t keep.”
“Then you’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got,” Mathilde said emphatically. “And you’ve got a lot more convincing to do. So far, from what you’ve told me, you’re in Cape Town because you’ve been scammed by a woman reporter in New York and then someone tried to kidnap you in Heidelberg. Now you run into some street girl thinks you’re Darkvine or something just ’cause she’s seen your face in the paper. Sounds like a crazy, bored fool running round the world chasing the shadow of his own butt to me.”
Another hour, with the complete story, didn’t change anything. The orks simply passed from skepticism to the borderlands of plain hostility. Serrin realized that he and Tom just didn’t have any evidence. No hard facts. No proof.
“The bottom line,” he said, “is that it’s ...” He paused for a few moments doing some mental arithmetic. Allow Michael a hundred for his deals. If it was more, Serrin could lay his hands on enough to make up the difference. “It’s a hundred thousand on the deal. A hundred thousand for you guys. That assumes a minimum of, say, fifteen samurai. And you, Mathilde. We got to have someone there to check it out and confirm it.”
“A hundred thousand deutschmarks?” She was incredulous.
“A hundred thousand nuyen,” he shot back. “Two hundred thousand deutschmarks.”
“This guy can’t be for real. That’s the kind of money only a heavy-hitter would get for scragging half the Berlin Council. If anyone cared enough,” Gunther said. “I’d kill for that much. Frag, I’d blow my own fraggin’ head off for a hundred thousand.”
“That’s a flat payment. It buys us people willing to go all the way on this one. You know and I know that we could buy drek-hot mercenaries with that much. But they aren’t what we need. We’ve got to stop this guy,” Serrin pleaded.
“Oh, and you can keep everything and anything Michael might have bought. If his deal can’t be cut—and that’ll be your fault—we could go higher than a hundred grand. But then we’d want more bodies.”
Mathilde was thinking hard. Serrin and Tom saw that the samurai looked to her for leadership. She was smaller, less tough, than any of them, but they seemed to follow her lead. Apart from Gunther, the others had barely even opened their mouths.
Tom got up to stretch his legs. The little chair was giving him a hard time.
“Mathilde, can I have a word with you? Privately, I mean,” he said gently. He thought he heard the sound of a safety catch being released.
She looked at him and waved a dismissive hand to the samurai. “Sure. But no tricks. You hear any bad noises, boys, smoke him.”
She led the troll into the front room of the rundown building. The ceiling had a gaping hole in it, and water trickled down from upstairs, dropping onto the floor from a light fixture with a carbonized bulb fused into it. Crouched slightly against the far wall in the fading light from outside, she waited for him to speak his piece. Mathilde really did look feline in the shadows.
“I know the story sounds crazy, but now you can get into my mind. I'd be surprised if you didn’t see a mark on me,” he said to her. She crouched a little further; he knew she'd registered whatever Shakala had laid on him.
"I'll try to relive it. Try to daydream it. Try to let you enter into it,” he said. She nodded and waited. The troll sat on the wet floor and closed his eyes.
Anger started to rise in him as he pictured the way the Cheetah shaman had taunted him. He tried to vision it clearly, and then the memory of the cuts and wounds came back for real. He half-panicked as the anger rose, wondering whether his own imaginings were going to send him beserk. He forced his will down on the emotion, stifling it, but then it just took him over.
He was lying face down again, the cheetah ready to sever the vertebrae of his neck. But he let himself go totally empty, everything flooding out of him, leaving only calm and serenity. He saw himself talking to Shakala afterward, as if floating above and looking down at himself in conversation.
Then something new took over. He was standing at the site of the ruined, burned-out, defoliated research plant. The zombies shuffled up to him, arms outstretched, faces blank and agonized in the same paradoxial instant. As they approached, a wave of emotion rolled over him from the smoking buildings like a slow-motion tidal wave. Rooted to the spot, he couldn’t turn and run.
Emanating from some kind of cold presence he couldn’t identify came contempt, cold hatred, a bleak nihilism so engulfing that for a dreadful instant he thought he was going to die. What made it so awful was the absolute impersonality of it. It didn’t give a speck of dust for him. It didn’t even notice him. It just rolled on its way, bleaching and razing the life and soul out of anything in its path.
He vomited then, shaking in a cold sweat. He hugged himself, wrapping his arms desperately around his own chest, then forcing himself back against the wall to reassure himself that he was really in this room, that he could feel the dampness of the floor, that blood still flowed in his body, that he was still alive. Across the room,
Mathilde’s face was a mask. She didn’t move for a full minute while he continued to hug himself in an effort to control the violent shaking.
“You found something bad,” she said, voice almost a whisper. “I’m not saying I believe the story. But I know you’re for real. I think we can make a deal.”
She got to her feet and came over to Tom, who wasn’t able to get up. She opened the door and called in some of her orks.
“I think we got work tonight,” she told them as they helped Tom to his feet, supporting him until he could stand on his own.
“Can I make that call now?” Serrin pleaded.
“Yes,” Mathlilde agreed. “But keep it short.”
* * *
Maybe he believed her and maybe he didn’t. But talking by telecom let her actually show him the money.
“Okay, lady, maybe we can cut it. I heard about the shooting on the trid. Seventy-five was what we agreed,” the man said. “He paid me thirty down, forty
-five to come. I got the full inventory. Now, you want some basics to go with it. We’re talking another deal here.”
“Sure,” she said. She’d planned this out, with nearly two hours to do it. All told, in money and credit there was a hundred and forty in Michael’s room. Subtract the forty-five, allow an extra seventy for Serrin to pay the samurai, and that left only twenty-five thousand to spare. She’d spent a moment wondrously contemplating such a huge amount. A week ago, she’d never seen even a fraction of that in her whole life. Now she had to act like she handled such sums every day. But at least she knew the actual figure Michael had agreed to and that the dealer was lying about the price. He was squeezing an extra ten grand out of her, but she was keeping the knowledge as an ace up her sleeve.
“Run me through the full details of the inventory again,” she said.
“My dear lady, is this some kind of trap? If it is—”
“Come on. you got your deposit, didn’t you?”
He looked mollified; her heart had begun to race the moment it looked like he might call off the deal. She gulped down her relief.
She was amazed that she could remember so much from the small talk of the few samurai she’d met in Cape Town. Not that she’d ever have expected to put it to use like this.
“We’ll need pistols and ammo, obviously. And full armor jackets.” she said, waiting for his response, trying to sound as convincing as possible.
“I got Ares Viper Silver, madam,” he grinned. “The very best. Only a thousand per a full clip.”
“Discount for bulk.”
“How much muscle are we talking about?” he shot back.
“Say fifteen,” she said. Serrin and Michael had said they’d try for at least a dozen samurai. Just as well to add a few extra. Fifteen thousand she couldn’t afford. She had to haggle him down.
“Thirteen.”
“Twelve. Throw in four spare clips for each one and we'll call it thirteen.”
“Four each? You're crazy, lady, that would be fifteen hundred alone.”
“Thirteen five, max.”
“Fourteen, lady. Maybe call it thirteen five if you want to be real nice to me when we meet? Depends how good you are,” he leered. Kristen thought this slag didn’t sound anything like the smooth operator Michael had described. The bastard thinks he can talk to me like that ’cause I’m black, or maybe ’cause I’m young, she thought. Or maybe he’s just another woman-hater.
It’s like being back home, she thought, repelled by the man’s expression. She said she’d give him fourteen if he performed an anatomically impossible act she described in loving detail. He laughed.
“Lady, I like you. You got a good attitude. Let’s say thirteen five for fifteen Ares Vipers with four spare clips apiece. Now, for the armor jackets . .
After the haggling was done, they fixed a meeting time of ten-fifteen. The problem was that Kristen was overdrawn, with a total bill of thirty grand. She couldn't get him down any lower.
“There’s one last thing,” she said. “You lied about the deal. It was sixty-five; thirty up front and thirty-five to come. You shouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating someone just because of appearances.”
The gulp was audible. She loved every instant of his pause for breath.
“Okay, lady. Apologies. Let’s say I refund nine of the ten I bulled you about and keep one for the sake of my reputation. Now, where do we want this stuff delivered to?”
Frag it, she thought. I can hardly have a band of samurai wheeling in crates of grenades and ammo into the hotel lobby. What do I do? Only one idea came to her.
“The Meld In. That’s where. Let’s make it for ten-thirty. That gives me a little time to finalize all the details.”
“You better be there, dear lady. That’s sixty-six grand you owe me.”
Kristen punched the Disconnect key and fumbled for one of Serrin’s cigarettes from a new pack. I’ve got to get down to that place and find someone, she thought. Otherwise, I'll be alone, sitting on over a hundred thousand nuyen worth of heat.
Anyone with an eye to the main chance is going to slit my throat and take the whole slotting heap. Serrin, where are you?
She was out the door and into the elevator by the time the telecom began to beep. She never heard it.
28
“No answer,” Serrin lamented. “We probably just hosed the deal. Great.” His anger wasn’t mitigated by Mathilde’s sudden change of heart.
“We’ll just have to go with what we’ve got,” she told him. “Our samurai know how to take care of themselves.”
“Yeah,” Serrin moaned. He was just about to make an uncomplimentary comment when he realized a lot of eyes were on him, just daring him to say the wrong thing. He declined.
“What now?” asked Tom. He was still pale, still a little shaky, trying to figure out what had just steamrollered him.
“We meet some friends underground. Below Meld In,” Mathilde replied. “Some of ’em have a stakeout there. Waiting to see if any of the Kreutzritters come back snooping. And it’s just around the corner. We can call up anyone extra we need. Gunther, check it out.”
They waited and a few minutes later the ork was back, saying everything was quiet on the outside, safe.
“That’s it, people. Let’s go.”
The orks got to their feet in some semblance of military precision. They filed out through the back door, with Serrin and Tom shepherded into the middle.
Great, Serrin thought glumly, looking around him. These orks have barely any cyberware between them. That guy, Gunther, he’s got a smartgun link by the look of it and maybe dermal plating. The rest of the bunch look like pure cannon fodder to me. Oh, frag it, if only we could have closed Michael’s deal. Assuming he ever made it .. . and Kristen. Where is she?
They’d just made it out the back of the bar when the van came very slowly around the corner. It was just another piece of traffic. They didn’t pay any attention to it at first.
Mathilde whistled and four figures came melting out of the dusk as the van got closer. They had almost reached the group when the van stopped directly in front of the bar. Gunther readied his pistol. A half-dozen more orks followed his example.
“If this is some kind of trap—” Gunther snarled.
“No!” Serrin screamed as Kristen climbed out the passenger side of the van. “Friends! Freunde, dammit! Don’t shoot or I’ll kill you!”
She heard his voice and ran full pelt toward him, almost knocking him over when she threw herself into his arms, burying herself in him, hardly believing what she’d done.
“I got it,” she yelled, almost jumping up and down with delight. “I did it. It’s all in the van, but I spent five grand too much!”
Though she looked frightened about Serrin’s reaction to that, his face broke into a smile wider than Tom’s chest.
“You’re wonderful,” he cried, and hugged her tightly. “Hey, Mathilde, Gunther, take a look inside the van. Then tell me this isn’t for real.”
The orks were already moving toward the van, urging the driver to take it around to the back, away from any prying eyes.
“Michael,” she said breathlessly. “He’s all right. He’s stable. They’re going to operate in the morning. But .. Her voice trailed away.
“But what?” Serrin had to ask her.
“Spinal damage. They wouldn’t talk to me about it.”
“Oh, no.” The elf looked away, pain in his eyes, mouth creased, fists balled. “God, no.” He turned to Tom as he held on to her, his eyes suddenly filled with determination.
“Tom, we’ve got to see this through.”
The troll nodded and gripped the Roomsweeper, which had been returned to him. “Of course,” he said. Orkish chatter came from the back yard. Someone was getting very excited indeed. Tom smiled at Serrin just before the cheer went up.
“I think our chummer must have made a good deal,” the troll said. “Let’s go see what fireworks we get to play with.”
> Gunther was examining the missile launcher and the assault cannons while the rest of the orks were contemplating the booty in the crates as the van pulled away.
“The deal is you keep everything afterward. But that buys us total commitment,” Serrin warned him.
“I’d go up against the gates of hell with this much heat,” Gunther growled. He’d just seen the grenade box and the plastic explosives.
“You may have to,” Serrin told him.
* * *
Mathanas, old friend, this may be our last night together in this world. It may be a long, long time before we meet again. There isn’t anything in my soul you do not know. If tomorrow brings the end of me, then we will know each other again. We are old souls, you and I.
Niall roused himself from his reverie. He was long out of Munich, through Ingolstadt and Regensburg, and now had come to the owl-blessed forests outside Schwandorf. The conifers stood like sentinels, the forest not carpeted with the riot of vegetation he so loved in his homeland. With midnight near, Niall had completed the shrouding of himself, all the illusions and barriers and concealments, and he knew Mathanas had been weaving his own powers into patterns, changing the aura around them. The elf wasn’t tired, even though he’d been awake for many hours. Energies beyond anything he’d ever dreamed were at his command. It felt like they could keep him awake and alert forever. He also knew the dangers of that seduction.
“We must scry the place now,” he said to his ally spirit. “We must find the defenses. The weak link, if there is one. And without being noticed.” It was the last part that would be the great strain; he could not risk Lutair sensing his approach. He had to discover everything about the magical defenses of the place without triggering any of
Lutair’s magical alarms. For that might also drive him to release the monstrosity he'd created in an instant. The strike would have to be sure and swift, but that also required hours of painstaking probing, with most of the power diverted toward concealment. It would be like playing blindfold chess against a true grandmaster. The frustration of it would call for every ounce of calm, detachment, and self-control Niall could muster.