2xs

by Nigel Findley

  "I'll certainly do what I can," he assured me. He was silent in thought for a moment, then said, "Tell me again what happened in your flat."

  I reviewed the attack once more. As I described the fireball again, my numerous burns began to sting despite the painkillers I'd swallowed and the first-aid cream the elf had given us to apply to our scorched skin. When I was finished, he nodded. "Again, Jocasta has to be right," he said. "It was most certainly spell defense that saved your life."

  "Could I have done it without being aware of it?" Jocasta asked.

  The elf shook his head. "I've assensed your aura," he told her, "and though you do have the potential, you haven't yet progressed far enough along the way of the shaman to control your power sufficiently."

  Without warning, he raised his voice and called, "Amanda."

  The willowy blonde was suddenly standing at his elbow. I saw Jocasta jump at the suddenness of the spirit's arrival, but she quickly controlled her reaction. Amanda bestowed a warm smile on me, then turned to Rodney. "Yes?"

  "Amanda," he began, but the spirit already knew what he wanted to say.

  "Yes, I saved them," she said simply.

  "Why?" the elf and I asked simultaneously. Amanda shrugged. "Shouldn't I have?" she asked innocently.

  "I'd just like to know why," Rodney went on.

  The spirit shrugged again. "I like him, that's all. It seemed a shame to let him get cooked."

  Rodney glanced over at me, his expression somewhat pensive. I wished I knew what he was thinking.

  "Have you been following him around?" he asked.

  Amanda looked abashed, almost like a kid caught stealing cookies. "Sometimes," she replied, "when I'm not around here."

  "Do you mind?" Rodney asked me. "If it disturbs you, I'll ask her to stop."

  I found myself wondering if Amanda would cease even if he did ask her. "Free spirit" seemed to have more connotations than I'd thought at first. "She saved our lives," I said. "If she wants to do it again, we're not going to argue."

  "So be it." Rodney rubbed his hands together briskly: down to biz. "I assume you need, um, a safe place to stay, correct? Presumably other than a hotel."

  I nodded agreement. "I seem to be all out of apartments," I said drily.

  * * *

  As dosses go, it was certainly a few steps up from Purity. Like fifty, maybe. Rodney had given us the mag-key to a small two-bedroom place on Capitol Hill just a few blocks away from his own doss. Small by Capitol Hill standards, perhaps, but the whole of my Barrens doss would have fit into the smaller of the two bedrooms. It had a real kitchen, not just a microwave and sink, and the en suite bathroom had a bath as well as a shower. The place even had a reasonable view.

  "It belongs to two chummers of mine who are currently working overseas," Rodney had told us.

  "Please, um, do your best to make sure it's in one piece for them when they get back." Then he became more serious. "You contracted me for astral security," he reminded me, "but I haven't installed it yet. Would you prefer I set it up here?"

  I thought about that for a moment, then said, "Just give us the bare minimum until I figure out our next move."

  He'd nodded at that. "Whatever you say, but I strongly suggest that you, um, just stay in and keep your heads down until you know what that move is going to be."

  Good advice. As soon as we arrived, Jocasta and I had tossed for the main bedroom. I lost. So while Jocasta was test-driving the bathtub, I was making what arrangements I could with the telecom.

  That was the sole disadvantage to this place, I quickly learned. The telecom wasn't anywhere near the same league as the units in my own dosses. Which was surprising for a place belonging to shadowrunners, as Rodney had hinted. (Or maybe not so surprising. If they were "overseas" on a major job, they might well have taken all their good gear with them, and left a brain-dead telecom just to take messages until they were back.)

  Anyway, I had to make do. I quickly called up my system in Auburn, which I was surprised to find still online, and downloaded Buddy's fake-out-the-LTG utility. The new telecom used different hardware from either of my units, and its capabilities were much more limited, but I managed to scam together at least a rudimentary correspondence between the two machines. I couldn't make outgoing calls from this apartment with the same guarantee of secrecy, but at least any calls incoming to my Auburn system would be transferred to this telecom without anyone knowing about the switch. Be thankful for small favors.

  I'd just finished defrauding the telephone company and was checking out the liquor cabinet-remarkably well-stocked-when the newly gimmicked telecom beeped. Beeped twice, to indicate that the call was originally directed to my Auburn number. I hesitated. I was feeling edgy-understandable, I think, after somebody tries to cook you. The strong possibility also existed that the caller might be the same person who had hired the killers, checking to see if I was in any condition to answer the phone.

  So I didn't answer it, not personally. I hit the key to trigger my sound-only, synthesized-voice outgoing message. "This is one-two-oh-six, eight-seven, six-six-oh-three. Please leave a message."

  A hard-lined male face filled the screen. Mid-forties, with iron-gray hair and a jaw like a shovel. Dark eyes, small and piggy, and his voice sounded like twenty klicks of bad road. "Pick up the phone, Montgomery," he grated. "I know you just linked into this number."

  I felt cold-Quincy had assured me it would be impossible to detect the switch I'd made-and then angry, which was probably just reaction to the fear. I hit a key, picking up the line but making sure my video pickup was disengaged. "And who the frag are you?" I snarled back. "Captain Scott Keith, Drug Enforcement Division."

  I was glad my video was off: I'm sure my face went white and my eyes bugged out. Scott Keith and DED-pronounced "dead," of course-I knew of, fortunately, only be reputation. DED was a semiautonomous division of Lone Star, composed mainly of ex-members of the old UCAS Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA. Over the last decades, the DEA, and later the DED, had changed their focus from strictly drugs to drugs and illicit chips, but nobody had bothered to change the name. Scott Keith had clawed and backstabbed his way to near the top of the DED hierarchy, earning a reputation worthy of a robber baron crossed with a corp hit man. Under his guidance, DED had racked up a phenomenal record against BTL distributors and dealers, but at the cost of even more flagrant infringement of civilians' civil rights than the Lone Star norm-and that was saying something.

  So I'm quite willing to admit it. It frightened the drek out of me that Scott Keith was glaring out of the telecom and that he knew I'd just pulled some kind of trick with it. Not that I had any quarrel with DED, of course. I'm not a chip dealer or user, and so they have no official interest in me. But if Keith could dig me up, even to this degree, what about the other departments of the Star, the ones that would just love to see my hide nailed to the barn? On that topic, even if Keith had sources of information to which the rest of the Star wasn't privy, there was nothing to stop him from passing on what he knew to others in the organization.

  Things were suddenly a whole lot more dangerous for me. Just what I needed.

  Of course, I couldn't let on to Keith that I was shaking in my boots. "So what do you want?" I growled.

  I didn't expect what came next. "Lone Star's got trouble," Scott Keith said. "That means I got trouble."

  He grinned nastily. "And that means you got trouble, Montgomery. Unless we can come to some kind of arrangement."

  All my subconscious signals were screaming "Setup!" but I couldn't afford the risk of breaking the line.

  "What kind of arrangement?" I asked.

  "Like, you help me, I help you."

  "Forget it, Keith," I told him flatly. I wasn't reaching for the Disconnect key, but I hoped the tone of my voice would make him think I was. I wanted to see how serious he was about this "arrangement."

  "Hold it," he snapped. "Don't disconnect. You don't hear me out, you're dumber than I thought."
/>   "Talk away," I said after a moment.

  "I got word you're digging for drek on Yamatetsu."

  That shot my eyebrows up into my hairline, but I managed to keep my voice level. "Maybe."

  "So are we. Don't ask me why, cause I fragging-A won't tell you."

  "I couldn't give two frags why you're looking," I lied to him harshly. I could guess why Keith was interested in Yamatetsu, I realized after a moment's thought. Somebody in DED, maybe Keith himself, had made the connection between SPISES booster tech and 2XS. "Keep talking," I told him.

  "We got shut down," he almost shouted. For the first time his anger wasn't directed at me, and I rather enjoyed watching the way he ground his teeth. "I got told to drop the investigation."

  "Oh?" I said, amused. "And who pulled the plug?"

  "Veep, Enforcement," he answered. "Corbeau, the slot."

  Very interesting. Mariane Corbeau, Lone Star's Vice President, Enforcement, for Seattle, had the reputation of being one of those totally incorruptible types. Of course, some people use an air of incorruptibility as a bargaining chip to jack their price way up. Apparently this was true in Corbeau's case, it certainly seemed that Yamatetsu, maybe in the person of Jacques Barnard, had purchased a veep.

  Or did that make any sense? I wondered, remembering the tricky political infighting at Yamatetsu. "Go on," I told Keith, more to give myself time to think than anything.

  "I think she sold out," he snorted, echoing my own thoughts. "Ever since she got back onto full duty, she's been acting strange."

  Again, that caught my attention. And as it did, I was struck by a particularly nasty thought. "Echo that," I snapped. "You said, 'back on full duty.' She was away?"

  "Fragging car crash, she almost died." From his expression, I gathered he was less than overjoyed at her survival. Was Scott Keith angling for a veep corner office?

  Of course that wasn't relevant right now. "When was this?" I asked.

  "Couple months back," he answered. Then his eyes narrowed. "Why do you care about that?"

  "Idle curiosity," I lied. "Go on, you were going to offer me a deal."

  "Yeah, a deal." His smile was highly unpleasant. "I can't dig into Yamatetsu. So you dig. You dig up some dirt, especially something that smears Corbeau, and maybe I'll get the rest of the force off your back."

  He chuckled nastily. "Like, maybe I'll tell them you died. Or maybe I'll show them the evidence showing you weren't the one geeked the Yzerman bimbo."

  "And if I say frag you?"

  He shrugged and tried to make his face look ingenuous-a downright impossibility. "I know a lot about you the other departments don't, Montgomery," he answered predictably. "Like the doss you got in the Barrens and that fancy corp-broad you're running around with-the dead girl's sister, yet. It's simply my duty to pass what I know on to my colleagues, right?"

  It was reassuring to know Keith wasn't as close on my ass as he thought, otherwise he'd have known my Barrens crash-pad had been turned into a pizza oven. But I couldn't deny he knew enough about my actions to give the rest of the Star a major assist in tracking me down. "So you want me to just dig into Yamatetsu?" I asked him.

  "No," he shot back, "I want you to dig real deep. Find the fragging bodies, Montgomery." He paused, and I saw him smile widely as a new idea occurred to him. "Let's make this like a game," he said, "and what's a game without a time limit, huh? If you don't dig up some drek in-what do you say, Montgomery?-three days? Yeah, that sounds good. If you don't dig up some real heavy drek in three days, I'm going to have to do my duty, I can't deny it any longer. Doesn't that sound like a good game? So," he went on, "are you going to play my little game?"

  Fragging sadistic slot, I thought. But I kept my voice as casual as I could. "Why not? I've got nothing better to do. Give me a number where I can reach you."

  He grinned, showing his soykaf-stained teeth. A local LTG number appeared on the bottom of the screen, and I saved it to chip. "You get anything, you tell it to the nice machine," Keith instructed. "See you, Montgomery." He raised his watch to the video pickup so its face filled my screen. "Clock's running."

  I slammed the Disconnect key almost hard enough to break the keyboard. Fragging slot. Scott Keith was everything bad about the Lone Star organization all rolled up into one loathsome body. I knew what he was hoping. He was hoping I'd charge right into the jaws of Yamatetsu in a mad attempt to get the Star off my butt. Or, to use a different metaphor, he was hoping I'd walk into the killing ground, while he stood safely back and watched who geeked me. Then he'd follow up on that lead, because an investigation into my murder was no longer a direct run against Yamatetsu.

  Of course, his bets were covered both ways. If I managed to survive and actually came up with something useful, he'd use it to back-stab Mariane Corbeau and ease his way into her spot. And then what would he do? Clear my name of Lolly's death and tell the rest of Enforcement to forget about Dirk Montgomery? Not a fragging chance: he'd use everything he knew and anything more he learned to hunt me down, just to cover up the fact that his ouster of Corbeau was premeditated. Just fragging wonderful.

  Never trust a man with two first names.

  Chapter 22.

  So it was back to Buddy's. Since I'd got off the phone with Scott Keith, Esquire, a nasty idea had been buzzing around in the back of my brain. Actually, several ideas, all of them more or less unpleasant. The thought process went something like this. Incorruptible Mariane Corbeau, Veep Enforcement at Lone Star, had done something dumb with her car, and ended up scragged pretty bad. Soon after she came back to full duty, she was busy forcing Keith and DED off an investigation into Yamatetsu, Obvious conclusion: she'd been bought.

  Not-so-obvious conclusion: Yamatetsu had some other kind of hold over her. Yamatetsu ... or some part, division, or subsidiary thereof. Like Crashcart Medical Services Corporation, owned by the semi-autonomous Integrated System Products Division, perhaps? Crash-cart, the outfit that had put something unpleasant into the cyber-replacement shoulder received by the late, lamented Daniel Waters.

  "Kill the Yamatetsu investigation, Corbeau, or we'll turn off the 2XS circuit in your cyber arm." It made a hideous kind of sense.

  Provided that Corbeau was picked up after her MVA by Crashcart, and provided that some kind of cyberware prosthesis was involved. Otherwise down comes the logical structure. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of info that can be dug out easily, what with medical ethics- and the fear of malpractice suits-and everything. Crash-cart and DocWagon records are even more sacrosanct, if possible, than the personal files stored in hospital medical-record departments. Definitely not available for the asking.

  Hence my visit to Buddy. She opened the apartment door at my first knock, and wordlessly led me into the living room. Everything seemed just as it was last time I'd been there, except that Buddy seemed to have even less interest in housecleaning than ever. She said nothing until she'd seated herself comfortably in lotus position. Then she looked up into my face. "What this time?"

  "Crashcart," I told her. "Client records first, then if the person I'm interested in is a client, I want to see her medical records."

  She chewed that over for a moment. "Tough. Very tough."

  "Don't you have a back door there?" Her expression softened almost imperceptibly, the closest I was going to get to a smile at this phase of her cycle. "Maybe. Still tough. Why?" I just smiled and shook my head. She looked sour again, both with me for not telling her and with herself for asking such an unprofessional question. "All right," she groused at last. "Who?"

  "Mariane Corbeau. Veep at Lone Star." Buddy didn't show the slightest reaction. One target was just the same as another. "Got her SIN?"

  "She neglected to give it to me." Buddy looked sour again, and I wondered what it would be like to have "unpredictable mentation"-a phrase I'd once heard a shrink use-like she did. From her reactions, I sometimes wondered if her questions and comments were not really under her conscious control, and were as surprising-and so
metimes disruptive-to her as they were to me. That had to be one of the most terrifying situations imaginable, I decided. How did Buddy put up with it?

  While all this was going through my mind, Buddy was reviewing my request. "Okay," she said at last.

  "Standard rate."

  I nodded, and bent to pick up the crown-of-thorns inductance headset.

  "No." Buddy's voice was sharp. I stopped, the rig halfway to my head. "No," she said more quietly.

  "Tough run. No hitchers."

  "I've got to come along, Buddy." I kept my voice low and reasonable the way I might if I was talking to an unpredictable dog. "I don't know exactly what I'm looking for or what's important. I won't know till I see it. I've got to ride along."

  "Slows down my reaction," she said. Her voice was more petulant than angry now, and I figured I could win this one.

  "It's important, Buddy," I told her, making my voice the epitome of earnest sincerity. "I've got to ride along." Then I added, "Double rate?"

  She looked troubled, and I wondered if I was pushing over the wrong thing. She was the expert, after all. If she didn't agree this time, I wouldn't push it again.

  Then Buddy suddenly nodded. "Double rate. Okay." From her expression I could see she didn't like it.

  Neither did my credstick, but I knew it would be better if I could see things first-hand.

  The inductance rig felt almost familiar as she tightened the straps. Uncomfortably familiar, I thought, as I remembered the last time I'd worn it. The craving for the false reality of the 2XS chip had faded, but images from the experience still kept coming back in dreams. I sat down-on the floor this time-and nodded to Buddy. "Ready to roll," I told her.

  She balanced her Excalibur deck across her knees, then began tapping the keys.