Shadowrun, p.26
Shadowrun, page 26
The heat shimmers off the rocks and melts even our protein bars.
Fuck this mission. We should have stayed home. Should have listened to Spruce. He never liked the sound of it. But no one listens to Spruce. He worries too much. Except this time…he might have been right.
We lie on the floor together, her body even thinner now. Her blood runs from my sword, sucked dry by the sand sifting across the floor. No resource goes unclaimed in the Mojave. Stillborn magic spits and sparks from her fingers, a static storm of wasted potential. So many things we could have done with her power. So much waste. The desert doesn’t like waste.
Gods help me, I thought I’d hit rock bottom when I was first branded as a criminal. Lost my job, my girl—god, when you’re supposedly screwing the boss’s woman, and even your own girl believes you did it, maybe I made some poor life choices—and my girl had all the money, so there I was, homeless and alone and so very, very out of place. I figured it couldn’t get worse. Should have known.
A spark crackles from her fingertips to mine, and fire engulfs me.
We almost fall into our target’s hideout. It’s a steep climb up this hill, and we’re too tired by the time we reach the top to notice the heavy scent of damp earth. The ground drops suddenly into a steep slope, then down into a little valley.
Of course, this is when we see the broad floodplain to the south, which would have saved us humping all these hills.
A tiny cabin huddles in the center of the valley, shaded by a few straggled cottonwoods. The ground is moist, a small patch of green grass betrays the presence of a spring. There is nothing else here. No garden, no corral, no animals. No curl of smoke from the chimney.
We have won this far, at least.
Her breath hisses into my mouth with a taste of burned copper and pinyon pitch. Desert magic. It crackles through my teeth and trembles in my bones. Her hands are wrapped around my blade, the edge caught on her fragile bones.
It would have been easier if she’d fought me. She’s just so surprised. All her power, her fury, her magic, it falls away and she’s just a scared kid, eaten hollow by a gift no one taught her to use.
I sink forward, my blade passing through her body and hands with horrifying ease. I can’t stop myself, our breath has become entwined and she pulls me down with her.
We set up a perimeter around the place. Snipers—magic and mundane—in the nests, the bruisers guarding the road. The Sword ghosting close to the door, her fingers itching for blood.
“The door is warded,” Spruce says. “Touching it will kill us all,” he says. Whatever is inside doesn’t want to be disturbed. We prepared for this.
Our comms are having trouble, too. We can talk to each other, but our communication with the outside world disappeared as soon as we came within sight of the cabin.
We’re less prepared for that.
I can feel her hate infusing the shield around her. My sword turns hot in my hands, her fire warring with Spruce’s ice. My body is their battleground now. She pushes Spruce back, her power overwhelming him. I can feel her consuming him within me.
She forgets about the sword, so busy exterminating the threat she deigns to acknowledge. I am a battlefield, not an aggressor. The sword is a conduit, a part of her now.
The shield surrounding her weakens for an instant, and I nearly fall. Time slows, a saying I’d always considered idiotic hyperbole. Her eyes widen, latched on the blade. Her hands fly up, wrapping around the metal. Stupid girl. Stupid me. I never should have come to this spirit-infested desert.
The Voice, her pudgy body plastered with sweat-soaked khakis, sets herself up behind a rock, out of range of the cabin. She’s our first line of attack. Get the target into custody. Protected. Neutralized. We don’t know what’s in there, but we know it’s to be considered hostile, at least for now. Our orders were clear on the fragility of the package…and its sharp edges.
So for now, we need her to be friendly, so we don’t end up cut to shreds along with any attackers.
The snipers, their eyesight boosted with bioware, their heat signatures fuzzed by chameleon armor, settle into their nests. They scan earth and sky, adjusting for the heat-distortion and the wind picking up from the south. The Voice begins her siren song, weaving a net of safety and trust, a helping hand extended to the target. The bruisers play cards and sweat.
And so we wait. Wait for her to come to us. Wait for an attack. Wait for something to happen.
All I need is a moment. She’s too strong for our mages. If I can get to her, subdue her, we can deal with the attackers easily enough. I can hear what has to be Spruce screaming in rage and pain. “We need a focal point! Something to channel through!”
I carve through the spirits protecting her, my enhanced blade severing their semi-corporeal bodies and dismissing them. She has amazingly good control of the things, but she can’t seem to summon them quickly, and with the incoming attacks, she can’t focus enough to call more while maintaining her defense. She is incredibly powerful, but she is not a match for all of us.
I set the tip of my sword against her shield and open myself to the mages, feel their power pour through me in a flood of ice-cold water, and her rage-filled eyes turn to me.
The hostiles don’t waste any time, certainly not as much we’d hoped. We hear the choppers first, though maybe the weirdness glitching our comms kept them back too. We never hear more than the steady thump of rotors in the distance. Not long after, the low growl of tanks and troop transports as they come up over the floodplain. A big convoy, heavily loaded.
Sun glinting off gun turrets, the insignia of the Sioux Nation plastered everywhere. Magic shields sparking around the trucks and outriders. The heavy tramp of booted feet. They’re not even trying to stay hidden. Out for blood and power.
The package is still unresponsive. We have to hold the line. Good thing we prepared.
The earth explodes in a gout of fire, incinerating the first two trucks. Then another, tripwires activated by feet who don’t even think to see if someone’s been here first. Thought they were supposed to be the ones who knew everything first. Looks like our boss has better intel.
Our traps are working well, but we weren’t planning for a war. The convoy immediately deploys into battle formation. The snarl of machine guns erupts immediately, spraying the surroundings with suppressive fire to keep the snipers pinned.
But we didn’t just trap the road. Phantom beasts spring from the rocks, their containment wards shattered by hurried feet scrambling for cover. Soldiers go down screaming, but it barely checks the flow. We are outmatched, and in danger of being overrun.
This is a horrible time to be unsure of my next action. Ever since I fell, since the Staves took me in, I’ve always known what I’d do, my next move, my ultimate goal. When you join the Staves, you forgo whatever vengeance you are rightfully owed. You’ve seen what can happen when people lose sight of humanity, and you make the choice to never be that.
But I’ve never really been a Stave. I never let go of the desire to find the man who bought his freedom at my expense, to make him feel a fraction of the loss I feel every second. My family, my friends, my life. They weren’t much, but they were something. They were enough. He took them from me to protect himself from the allegations of fraud, to keep living his lifestyle.
I’ve never really bought into the ‘protect those who have no one else to protect them’ thing my teammates believe in, but here I am, and the last vision of the Voice is pouring through my brain.
The Voice is pouring everything she has into subduing the target. Strain marks her face, sweat beads on her upper lip. It is the first time she has appeared uncomfortable. As she fights, the echoes of her discomfort spread across our communication web.
The Voice’s skill is in neutralizing fear and anger, in luring her target to side with her. This is beyond her, even with the target half-asleep, confused for some reason. The only advantage she has is that something else is holding the target down, keeping her passive. Another explosion shakes the earth, and the sleepy irritation blossoms white-hot, scorching the Voice’s mind in an instant.
But in that instant, she sees what the target really is, and what she will do. Her warning screams across the comms, deafening us even in the middle of battle. We are too busy fighting for our lives to pay attention, and we’re barely holding our own here. We can’t fight another enemy, we have no choice but to keep fighting the war we can see.
Even confused, magic crackles around her. I can hear the screams outside, her spirits and power slamming through the earth and frying nervous systems with a thought. Rage is the only response to the primal fear she triggers in me, and I raise my sword with a cry, diving for her.
The girl’s thin lips tremble, a manic smile flirting over them, swallowed by a snarl of rage. Mood after mood plays through her, too fast for the eye to track. She is humming with power, channeling it from an unseen source.
The Voice gives up, sinking into exhaustion. Her mind is overwhelmed by the target’s, by a swirling, chaotic firestorm. This is the thing we’re supposed to protect, this wild creature? She is the desert, uncaring of life, cruel in her casual disregard. She isn’t an ally, she’s a weapon, and someone wants to use her.
Indecision swamps us. The Voice is down, useless, her wisdom lost. We are without a leader, without a mission, without a plan. For a moment, doubt cripples us.
A sudden, alien taste of burning pine and wet copper, then the Voice blinks out of our shared web, disappearing. Dead or unconscious, who knows? It feels bad. Very bad.
I pull my gun and send several scattered shots toward the rocks. Nothing aimed, nothing hit, but it buys me a precious moment to dive behind the target, putting her between me and the fire. Hey, the shots are clearly having no effect on her, and my shoulder tells me that they came loaded to kill. Maybe they did have better intel than us.
With the Voice down, and that last strange flare, the focus of the mission switches from “protect the target” to “survive.” The Sword is unresponsive, the target’s power disrupting any communication, but Spruce saw her dive into the cabin, and broadcasts it to the rest of us. The army is pinning us down, but our goal is clear: there’s nothing we can do now but survive.
I see her fury growing along with her awareness.
—Who are you how dare you attack me attack my home attack them how dare you how dare you you will all burn, burn like the ones who brought me here burn like all the others who come after you burn in the fire of the Great Dragon how dare you!—
Her nonsense shriek fills my head, the words garbled and running together, but the message is clear, and I am between her and the attackers.
I try to speak, to reason, to bring her attention away from the battle. My voice is snatched away, words muted by a growing roar. The package is powering up, her hair lifting from her shoulders by the light breeze beginning to swirl around her.
“We’re here to protect you! Please, let us in!”
No comprehension. I open my mouth to try again when a stray round comes through the doorway and hits the ward, shattering bones. The force drives an opening in a circle. Her eyes go to it immediately, and the air in the cabin suddenly because heavy and hot enough to burn my lungs.
Shit! I dive out of the doorway, a Sioux round clipping the top of my shoulder as I dive. Blood in the sand, she’s drawing from the earth, oh fuck can she control me now…I’m pinned by Sioux snipers and whatever that thing is.
Bast, I’m fucked.
A thin girl appears in the doorway, seconds after the Sword dives out of it. She looks horrible, wasted and wan, weaving on her feet. But fire cloaks her, and a sudden gale buffets the tiny valley.
“What do we do?” Janey’s voice borders on panic, the big bruiser pinned by heavy fire, unable to fall back. Her position had been smart when we thought that we’d only be facing a small team, but now…no. And Janey is unstoppable in pursuit of a clear mission, but take that mission away…we need to get her out of there. The Sword, too. Too many targets. Not enough time.
It’s all in the Sword’s hands now. We’re going to have to just hold on.
We dig into our positions and double down on the army, while the mages turn their efforts toward subduing the target.
Spruce is the first to realize the danger. With the Voice down, we don’t have the triangle of power we’d relied on. Not only have we lost her strength, but the exponentially greater power we gained from her to begin with. There are simply too many soldiers.
She is still half asleep, a slight figure swaddled in ragged blankets, even in this heat. Her hair is blond and lank, hanging nearly to her waist, her limbs wasted. She looks…neglected, lost. Ragged around the edges, and somehow out of time. Her eyes are cloudy, burn scars wreath her hands and mouth.
Spirits surround her, looking equally groggy. How has she slept through the chaos outside?
A squad of soldiers charges toward the cabin behind a magic shield. A swirling wall of sand and wind gathers around them, obscuring them from sight. When it dissipates, they are on the ground, bloody, dead wrecks.
The ground erupts beneath the machine gun nest, flinging Sioux soldiers into the air. Flames roar from the new chasm, licking with a life of their own into the ammunition and vehicles. It finds the thin, dry grass and pitchy scrub and follows the path, racing in all directions to lick at clothing, vehicles, and flesh. For now, the Staves are safe; there is plenty of other fuel for the fire to devour.
We need to get control of the target. We need to neutralize her, and none of us have any ideas for how to do this without killing her. None of us can get in there.
The fire licks up the hillside, and Spruce turns his magic on the target, searching for a way to bring her down. We need an in, and frantically communicate across our web in hopes that the Sword will hear us. She’s the only one who can stop this now.
The interior of the cabin is as spare as the outside. A rickety bed, piled with ragged blankets. A pile of rotting boxes nearby. A pile of bleached bones…not a pile, a ward. Bleached bones, animal and human, containing the bed within them.
The Voice blinks and coughs up blood. Her mind is aflame with a nearly unbearable pain that seems to reach through her very core. She gathers the scattered remnants of her energy, creating a tiny bubble of sanity at the center of the maelstrom, and sends a message to the team.
We should have known something was wrong with this mission from the start, but it’s too late now.
A stray round hits something important, and the wards around the door fall with a screech like a dozen alley cats. It takes me a moment to disengage from “How do I make this fall?” to “Get through the door!” I adapt and charge, weapon hot, and feel the comm crackle to life.
TO STRIVE, TO SEEK,
TO FIND, AND NOT TO YIELD
(The Avatars, The Ride, Strength)
STEVEN S. LONG
Orkus wiped his green hands on his pants for the third time. It felt weird for them to be so sweaty in the deep winter chill.
Okay, now or never.
He crossed the street, heading for a shop called Pawnmaturgy. No self-respecting mage would patronize such a dingy place in such a dingy part of the ’plex—which meant it suited Orkus just fine, since he’d long ago given up pride in favor of survival.
It didn’t look any better on the inside. Dusty and badly lit, it contained a bewildering mix of minor talismans, arcane bric-a-brac, old books, and weird curiosities. Only one item held Orkus’s attention, but he did his best not to show it.
A week ago he’d come in to browse—well, mostly to get out of the cold—and seen it: a big, leather- and iron-bound book. It was written in Arabic or Chaldean, or some other language he couldn’t read yet, but he saw enough in the diagrams and illustrations to realize it was worth a lot more than the 100 nuyen on the price tag. But it might as well have cost a million, given his cred balance.
So he’d decided to steal it.
The only people inside were the grey-haired owner and a beefy street sam who stood guard over the shop’s “treasures.” The sam didn’t look like much—cybereyes, maybe some muscles, almost certainly a smartlink—so Orkus hoped the element of surprise would be enough to get past him.
Orkus browsed for a couple minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, then ambled over to the bookshelf. He could feel the guard watching him.
He took down a book, some old thing on the Kabbalah, and threw it at the guard’s head as hard as he could. Grabbing the grimoire, he turned to run, but stumbled as he tried to keep his grip on it—it was heavier than he remembered. He staggered into a display case, scattering curios and baubles all over the floor.
He felt the pain in his left arm at the same time he heard the shot. He dropped the grimoire, reached for it. A second shot whizzed by his head so close he felt the wind from the bullet. Definitely a smartlink.
Then he felt something even worse: a spell being cast on his left. Drek, the old guy’s a mage! Abandoning his effort to recover the grimoire, Orkus dove for the dirty floor. A bolt of sizzling power shot over his head and destroyed a shelf of cheap ritual tools.
