Shadowrun, p.2
Shadowrun, page 2
On I ran toward Castle Wolfsbane. In the stories, it belonged to Brendan Rake, the Dolorous Knight of the Moon. Because of a curse, he went through life as a wolf-man, and had wondrous adventures fighting various villains like the Grim King and Lady Malice—with the villains always caught in a trap of their own manufacture. He did heroic deeds and righted wrongs with his youthful companion, with whom he spent a lot of time eating honey-cakes and training for knighthood—when not out killing things. The stories weren’t really much more sophisticated than retreaded Beauty and the Beast clones, but their target audience didn’t want much more. A tragic but gallant and always true knight who clearly loved them, but could never proclaim that love because of his terrible curse.
The Weaver played at being Sir Brendan incredibly well. Always polite and thankful. Always a bit shy and a touch morose. When deckers broke into his fantasy world, he’d vanquish them in short order. And the adventures he led his companions on were all spectacles of heroism, with a part for them to play. Just a tiny part, but one that turned the tide, and made Sir Brendan ever so grateful.
Then he’d wish, he’d start to confide, but would hold back. When pressed, he said that he could not thank his companion enough. He’d admit to it all being a game, but then would say, “At least, that is how it started…and now…well…” He’d say that he wanted to do something, but dared not. It would violate a trust. He couldn’t, even though he hoped his friend would like this memento of their friendship Sir Brendan had found. The Weaver couldn’t send it to him, unless, perhaps.… Maybe his friend had a trusted confederate, or a place to which it could be safely shipped. He could send it, and his friend could track the package’s progress—but it would have to be their secret.
And with the offer of a gift, and that promise, the Weaver inserted himself between parents and child.
The Weaver always kept his promise. He sent the gift. For me, the favor had been an exquisite, hand-painted medieval knight toy soldier from St. Petersburg—the European one. He’d chosen well. Not only did the soldier fit the Wysteria setting, but the knight’s crest was a fanciful thing that included clues about our past adventures.
It wasn’t the gift that really mattered, however, but the software used to track it. Once the victim linked in to monitor the package’s progress, a variety of viruses punched through protections inside the homes. They melted through ice and into proprietary systems. Sometimes they got through remote access portals and into corporate mainframes where the parents worked.
Valerie said that the only difference between that code and cancer was that cancer could be cured.
I ran through the end of the tunnel and there Sir Brendan stood. Tall, wearing black mail with a breastplate emblazoned with the wolf’s-head crest, he leaned on the hilt of his greatsword. Red eyes stared at me.
I waved.
He shook his head.
I tripped.
I fell forward, then tumbled into a depression which hadn’t been there a millisecond ago. Vines grew up through matted grasses. They curled themselves around my limbs, constricting like snakes and holding me fast. I struggled against them, but felt weaker than even the child I was supposed to be.
The Dolorous Knight suddenly loomed at my feet. “You have been clever, Mr. Kies, but not quite clever enough.”
Trapped inside the body of a little boy, I glared at him. “It wasn’t the code that give me away.”
“No, no, not really. Very well assembled for the child you were supposed to be.” The Weaver stroked the fur at the back of his head. “In fact, your infantile level of experience in the Matrix proved surprisingly convincing as a determinant of age. Your vocabulary and level of comprehension suggested you were poorly educated, and your delight in Ingold’s wretched stories hinted at emotional retardation. I employed a series of Turing tests of my own devising which determined you were, in fact, human. A dull human, but human none the less.”
I shrugged as much as I could. “I’m going to take that the way I heard it, not the way you meant it.”
“And thus you prove my point.” He leaned forward, supporting himself on the sword’s cross hilt. “Of course, were this one of these insipid Wysteria stories, this would be the point where I tell you my plans for the future. Then you would escape my clutches and, somehow, defeat me.”
“I’m betting you don’t really see yourself as the villain here.”
“Sorry to disappoint, no, I do not.” That sentence actually hung in the air in purple flames that quickly collapsed into greasy black smoke. “You should realize by now that your paralysis is physical. Despite your node-anonymizing software, I traced you back to this…place. The breeze you felt before the castle appeared, that was me insufflating you with Ket-7. I’ve given you enough that you will feel light-headed soon. Then you will suffocate in due course.”
“Ket-7? Old school.”
“A traditionalist, yes. And the drug is so easy to get for recreational purposes, it becomes untraceable.”
The Dolorous Knight crouched, then lunged forward and straddled my chest. He wasn’t there, his weight wasn’t pressing down on me, but my restricted breathing made it seem as if that was so. In the darkness at the center of my being, the Old One began to pant. “However, I am not cruel. I have with me a syringe of adrenaline sufficient to serve as an antidote. If you are cooperative.”
I already had to work at drawing a breath. “Define cooperative.”
“I’ll ask questions politely. You will answer truthfully and succinctly.” The knight bared his teeth. “Remember, I can overdose you more easily than I can save you.”
“Cooperative is my middle name.”
“Very well.” The big bad wolf rose and began to circle me. “Now, to begin…”
“I have no breath to waste here. You want to know how we found you.”
“Proceed.”
“We’ve found seventeen victims, with disappearances going back five years. All selected for age, affluence, weak family structure. No one outside your victim profile and no botched jobs.” I paused to catch my breath. “Doc Raven figures you’ve done this before, somewhere else, perfecting your method, then you came here. No one is looking for you, so you didn’t leave because things got hot.”
The wolf stared down. “And?”
“We spotted the victims after breaking your DNA encryption on the Jane Does. I think there are more out there.”
“Could be.” The wolf flashed fang; whether out of pride or irritation, I wasn’t sure. He opened his hands. “Interesting methodology, but less than illuminating about how you realized I existed.”
“None of the parents narced you out. They’re terrified of you, and don’t know anything anyway.” My muscles began to tingle. “But you want to know what we know about you, right?”
The wolf bared more fang. “The longer you drag this out, the smaller the chance I will save you.”
I would have smiled if I could have, because I was pretty sure that saving-ship had already sailed. “Well, once you get past the murdering, narcissistic, sociopathic thing who gets off on murdering little boys, and toss in that you have mad decking skills and feel you’re the smartest man in the Matrix, not a whole heck of a lot.”
I expected anger, but he surprised me. The Weaver slowly folded his arms over his chest. “How did you arrive at gender determination?”
“You say ‘I’ too much. Your notes, our conversations. A big muddy footprint that tells a lot.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed. “I take it Doctor Raven drew that conclusion for you?”
“More of a committee decision.” I coughed as the virtual vines tightened around my chest. “If it wasn’t the code disguising me that did it, what gave me away?”
“A fair question.” He spread his arms. “Our adventures here were exciting and scary. While you said all the right things, your heart rate and respiration betrayed you. Your code correctly masked the actual numbers, but the eight-nanosecond delay after a shock-incident clued me into the mask’s presence. After that, things unraveled. This is, in fact, the third time I’ve seen you—in the flesh, that is—during one of our adventures.”
I wished I could have nodded. “You run code as a prelude to our adventures to keep me occupied while you can physically shift location without being jacked in.”
“Exactly. Less time in the Matrix, less data to trace.” The wolf chuckled. “I find myself amused that you never realized I’d seen through your deception.”
“You figured it out on our sixth little playdate, right?”
The wolf cocked its head.
“The first five times, that delay had been four nanoseconds.”
“Not possible.”
“Check your data.”
The Dolorous Knight’s eyes blazed red for a heartbeat—one lasting nine nanoseconds, for anyone keeping score. “It was four…But, if you knew…”
I reached down inside. “Now, Old One, if you don’t mind.”
The Old One howled with delight. “Overdose him on reality, Longtooth.”
He doesn’t really exist, of course. He’s just a figment of my imagination through which I access magic. He puts a brake on my using it, too. While I wanted speed and enough strength to tear a man in half, I got what I really needed.
Which, in this case, was adrenaline flooding through my system. Ket-7 might have been shutting me down, but the Old One pumped liters of go-juice into me. I sucked in breath and roared it back out.
Might have sounded more like a howl, actually.
I ripped the ’trodes off with my right hand, letting gritty reality slam into me. My left hand flicked out, punching the decker sitting next to me hard in the chest. He flew back, toppling others and smacking the back of his head on a rent-a-deck console.
I pounced on him, dropping my full weight on his ribcage. Might have heard a snap. Or two.
The Weaver looked about as much like the Dolorous Knight as the Weed looked like a safe place to eat. Slender build, acne scars, thinning hair. I figured he had the mange. A wire ran from a socket behind his ear into the console he’d been sitting at. I yanked it hard, not caring which end came free, or what bits came with it.
He shivered beneath me. “You wanted me to know…”
“Disappointing that you took so long to figure it out.” I jerked my head toward the console he’d jacked into. “But you were so happy you caught me playing pretend that you got sloppy. You missed that what looks like a beat-up console on the outside is pretty special on the inside.”
Catching him hadn’t been the problem—Kid Stealth could have dropped him on the previous run. Because Raven figured he had groomed multiple victims at a time, we had to find out who they were and where he might be keeping them. The moment the Weaver double-checked the reaction time data, he opened a doorway into his home systems. Through the console, Valerie drilled into his systems and ripped out all the information we needed.
The Weaver blinked, multiple times. “But…how did you know to start looking for me? No one cared for those children. None of those parents would have dared betray me.”
“Len, the kid you dropped last summer, he loved the Wysteria books. Good little artist, too. You probably encouraged that, huh?”
The little man smiled smugly. “His pride made him vulnerable. I told him I loved the images he shared.”
“Your encouragement inspired him to draw Sir Brendan. He sent the picture off to Wysteria’s creator via the publisher. They eventually forwarded it, and by the time the author sent a thank you note, Len didn’t exist any more. She reached out to Raven. Valerie discovered you used Wysteria book ISBNs as your encryption keys. That led to the DNA decrypts, and that brought you here.” I let the Old One’s growl rumble from my throat. “Just like the villains in the books, you set the trap that caught you.”
“No, not possible.”
“Keep telling yourself that, chummer.” I stood and hauled him to his feet by his shirt. Tom Electric, another of Raven’s aides, hustled him toward the door. “You’re the reason you’ll never see the light of day again.”
After Knight Errant had hauled the Weaver off, and the Weed returned to its battered normalcy, Doc Raven slipped silently through the bar’s darker shadows and rested a hand on my shoulder. “You going to be okay?”
“Adrenaline overdose’ll have me jittery for about a month.” I held a glass of whiskey up in my left hand. Ripples danced over the surface. “I’ll probably have moved out of here by then.”
“Sooner, I hope. A lot sooner.” Raven looked around the bar and shivered. “Valerie’s still working on cracking all of the Weaver’s files, but she’s found a list of the victims he was planning to groom. Knight Errant is notifying their parents.”
“What about previous victims?”
He nodded. “Looks like there were twenty-three here, another half-dozen down in Portland. He worked Chicago and Atlanta for a while, too. It seems he perfected his craft in Milwaukee and kept moving until he felt safe, here in Seattle.”
“And here it stops.”
“It does. His reign of terror and your self-torture.” Red and blue highlights swirled like an aurora through his dark eyes. “Lynn’s outside. She would like to see you. To say thank you.”
I shook my head. “Why? She hates me, with good reason. Last time she laid eyes on me, I all but got her killed.”
“She doesn’t hate you, Wolf.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Doc. You’ve read her books.” I focused on the amber glow at the whiskey’s heart. “Brendan Rake, the Dolorous Knight of the Moon. Appears to be a Wolf. He’s cursed. Bystanders are always in danger—mortal danger—in all those stories.”
“I know. I’ve read them. Ten books. And you’re right, Brendan is you.”
“My point exactly.”
Raven squatted down. “And, in all ten books, you’re the hero.”
“That’s not how I read them.” I snorted. “In every book, Brendan is atoning for his past.”
“And in every book, Wolf, she grants him redemption.” Raven shrugged. “That’s about as far from hate as you can get.”
The Old One roused himself. “You are a hunter, Longtooth. Not a great one, but even you are good enough to read that obvious a sign.”
I hate when a figment of my imagination is smarter about me than I am.
“What if you’re wrong, Doc?”
Raven flicked a finger out, launching a cockroach halfway across the bar. “The Weed will always be here.”
I set the half-empty glass down. “Then let’s hope I never will be again.”
DJOTO
(Page of Blades)
DEVON ORATZ
Bein’ on Kamikaze is pretty strange. Even in the middle of a full-on-screamin’ firefight, things seem to slow down so you can appreciate the little details. Stop and smell the soykaf, so to speak.
Take, for instance, the look on the Yak’s face. It’s pretty funny—hard to make out, as it’s kind of upside down while his severed head tumbles toward the concrete in slow motion, heralded by a huge fan of gushin’ blood. It’s more a look of indignation than anything else. Like he’s thinkin’: you tusker gaijin whore, filth of your kind is not fit to wield a katana. Which is obviously what I just killed him with.
I guess that’s what you’d call “cultural appropriation,” motherfucker.
Rewind.
It was like any other Saturday night. I was chillin’ in the ereth’cerri with my eth. We were slammin’ down hurlg, passin’ around a spliff of Deepweed, and watchin’ pirated trid: reruns of the Neil reboot. Me, Sheila, Adam, Lil’ Rabo, Grazz, and Kass. Same as any night in the doss, maybe a little slow.
A commercial for N.E.R.P.S. came on, everybody sighed, and I pulled my ’link out from under my ass to check my messages. I had one from Bertha, down at Gunther’s.
Just readin’ that, my lips curled back in a vicious snarl. Gunther’s a nice old man—I hear he used to walk the path of Gator—and he and his old lady cook up eunabo barbecue ribs. But that was nothing compared to the last bit.
Kham’s my grampa. Ain’t nobody fucks wit’ my grampa and lives.
I jumped up off the couch, kicked the trid off the old Ares crate it was sittin’ on, grabbed the bottle of hurlg and chucked it against the opposite wall, where it exploded.
“Skraa! Listen up! We got grumoge. Some vut-eatin’ ujnort busted into Gunther’s and snatched Grampa Kham!”
Lookin’ at the group of now-serious, previously-chill orks on the couch, I saw and heard my own rage multiplied fivefold in their clenched fists, bared tusks, and angry mutters.
“Those fucks are tharon!” Adam bellowed, grabbin’ his Defiance scattergun from where it leaned against the wall.
“Easy, chummer,” Sheila said, pullin’ on her armored jacket. “We gotta find ’em before we geek ’em.”
“Should I warm up the bikes, cerri?” Lil’ Rabo asked.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I know a way down just a couple blocks away. Everybody strap up.”
We all grabbed our norgoz. Adam stashed his short-barreled T-250 under his lined coat, and I snagged my katana off its shelf, strapped it on my back, and stuffed my Roomsweeper into the thigh holster velcroed around my leg a few centimeters below where my orange booty shorts ended. We shoved outta our doss and piled down the stairs onto the street like the avalanche of pissed off trogs we were.
The nightscape of the Puyallup Barrens greeted us, as familiar as the mélange of hurlg, body-odor, and cannabis in our doss. The distant chatter of automatic gunfire, the pathetic, withered lumps of junkies collapsed in alleys and gutters, the omnipresent sirens of the quaalz—that’s pigs to you chummers who don’t savvy Or’zet—the general aura of extreme poverty and dismal metahuman misery.
