Crossroads

Ambushed.. ..

The door exploded outward like it was hit by a bullet train. I heard yells of surprise and pain as the thugs waiting in the hall were struck by jagged fragments of flying synthwood.

There were two other attackers awaiting me as I stepped out into the hall. I turned towards the ork and thrust my hands forward as though holding an invisible ball. Pale magelight flickered between them and the ork took a step forward, raising his gun. Then his eyes glazed and blood began to run out of his nose and ears as he toppled forward like a poleaxed cow.

I started turning towards the woman, but she was too fast. She brought her gun to bear and I started a protection spell, knowing I wouldn’t be nearly quick enough. My attacker knew it too and gave me a nasty, feral grin that showed her sharpened canine implants just before tightening her finger on the trigger

SHADOWRUN : 36

CROSSROADS

Stephen Kenson

To Christopher, for everything.

Acknowledgement

There are many people who helped in the creation of this book whom I would like to thank. Thanks go to everyone from the Sprawls amateur press association, where Talon saw his first adventures; to Sean Johnson, for the use of Boom; to Jak Koke, for his loan of Jane and Ryan Mercury; to Lou Prosperi, for his advice and comments; to Donna Ippolito, for her editorial work under pressure; to my family and friends and to everyone at FASA Corporation who help to bring the Sixth World to life and keep it moving. Thanks, everyone, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Prologue
October 2060

The sprawl is a beast that never sleeps. Even in the dark hours of the early morning the lights of the city change the course of nature to bring day where it is needed for people to continue about their business, heedless of the course of the sun, sheltered in their tall towers of glass and steel. Deep in the heart of the city, the subways rush like caged creatures mindlessly running the course of a maze over and over again without purpose, always moving, but never resting or reaching their destination.

Anton Garnoff considered these things as he watched the dark walls of the tunnel rushing past through the dim reflections on the subway window. The night was a special time, when the sunlit world passed away and another took its place, a world of dark shadows and bright neon that could only exist through the genius of humanity. There was nothing like the unique world created by nighttime in the city, save perhaps nightfall in the jungle, which was the closest thing to the sprawling riot of city life that existed in nature. But Anton Garnoff was not interested in nature, and his errand on this particular night was in no way natural.

He kept careful track of the subway stops, ticking them off in his mind in a kind of mantra as the train passed through each one and brought him closer to his destination. There were only a few other passengers in the subway car with him, each of them sitting behind a personal wall of silence, careful not to allow a misplaced look or unusual sound to open their walls and draw attention to themselves. Like prey frozen in the undergrowth waiting for a predator to move on. Garnoff wondered idly if he should kill any of them.

An old ork woman sighed quietly and licked her lips as she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Her dark skin was heavily seamed with lines and wrinkles that made her face look like a raisin beneath a rumpled mass of dark hair. The tusks protruding over her upper lip were yellowed and chipped, and she worried slightly at her lip with them as she sat, quietly mumbling to herself. She wore a tiny gold cross on a chain around her neck. Garnoff wondered if she really thought it would protect her against the creatures he knew were lurking in the shadows of the city.

Several seats further down a young man, human, sat listlessly looking out the window. But his eyes were focused on nothing anyone else in the car could see. A thin cable ran from the chrome jack behind his left ear to a small box cradled in his lap. The boy was lost in a fantasy world of someone else’s making, reliving the scripted emotions of another person through a playback in his neural pathways. Living a life he’d already decided he could never have, that no one, in fact, could have, since it existed nowhere but in the mind of the person who had written and engineered it. Garnoff wondered how long the boy had been riding the train and how it was he knew when he reached his destination. He concluded that such a person really had no destination and didn't really care, one way or another.

The few other people on the train were in similar sorry states, each wrapped in their own meaningless little worlds. No, Garnoff thought, these pitiful souls would not do. They were too
dry,
too drained of life. The city had already drawn the most pleasing juices from them, leaving only husks to walk about the streets and ride on the trains in the dead of night.
He
needed far better than this sorry lot. He needed energy: emotion pure and strong and undiluted by the minutiae of daily life in the sprawl. He needed it desperately.

The train hummed to a stop, the doors hissed open, and Garnoff’s new victim stepped into the car. He spotted her at once, a young woman, in her mid-to late-twenties, dressed in a smart black coat, collar turned up against the slight autumn chill in the air. Her hair was a lustrous brown, cut short and styled fashionably. She wore black leather gloves, and gold gleamed from her ears. Dark stockings and suede boots clad a pair of shapely legs. She quickly found a seat in the car and took a small datapad from her coat pocket. As the doors hissed shut and the train began to move, she settled back to read.

She is the one,
Garnoff thought. She seemed ideal, provided she met all the other criteria. Settling back in his seat, anonymous behind his dark glasses, Garnoff allowed his gaze to roam over the young woman, taking her all in. He opened his awareness to the astral plane and observed the colorful play of light in her aura. It was bright and strong, without any blemish to indicate illness or artificial implants. Not like the poor, tired things taking up the other seats. This aura was clean, energetic, perfect for his work. Yes, she would do nicely. With a slight smile, Garnoff allowed his vision of her aura to fade from his sight and stood up.

Moving across the shifting floor of the subway car like a sailor crossing the deck of a swaying ship, he approached the young woman casually. She didn’t even look up from her reading until Garnoff settled into the seat next to her. She glanced over at him for a moment, barely a flicker, then again, a bit longer this time, then returned to her reading.

Garnoff paused a moment to savor the experience, then gathered his will and focused on the woman before him.

“Excuse me.” he said in a low voice, barely audible above the screech and grind of the subway’s progress through the tunnels. The young woman looked up at him, an expression of quizzical concern on her face, and Garnoff struck. The force of his will surged across the short gap between them and she was his. The struggle was over before it even began, and the quizzical look was quickly replaced by one of shock, then fear, then a blank and vacant stare. The mage’s spell took hold and Garnoff almost laughed out loud at the ease of it all. His power truly was growing. Just as he was told it would.

With a corner of his awareness, he directed the young woman to return to her reading and she did so. She was completely under his control. The effort of the spell hardly drained him at all. In fact, it left him feeling almost giddy from the warm rush of power at his command. He could hardly wait to feel it again.

When the subway hissed to a halt at the proper stop, Garnoff was pleased to make his leave. The sad scene of these pitiful people disappointed him. He could not imagine how they could choose to live like such sheep when they knew deep within themselves that they were doomed for doing so. He could see it in their eyes, the dull acceptance of animals being led to slaughter. They had surrendered themselves to the inevitable. It was sad that so few people in the world were capable of being anything more than victims, and most of them weren’t even worthwhile as that. As he stood, he touched the woman gently on the arm.

“Time to go, my dear.”

She looked up at him with a blank expression, but her body moved to obey him. She rose and allowed herself to be led from the train. To anyone watching, the two were simply a handsome couple out for a late evening. Not that anyone on the train had the slightest interest in anyone else’s business. That wasn’t a healthy occupation.

The platform of the subway station was all but abandoned. Only a few people stood in protective groups awaiting the next train. Somewhere out of sight a man was loudly muttering and cursing to himself, and the people gathered at the edge of the platform looked nervously in his direction from time to time.

Garnoff suspected they had little to fear. The man doing the cursing was likely where the boy on the train would be before too long, once he’d been compelled to run ever more outlandish and daring fantasies through his abused neural pathways to satisfy the void created in him by his empty world. Eventually he wouldn’t be able to handle the sensory input his fantasies demanded and would be quite rudely thrust back into the real world he thought he’d left behind forever, a useless burnout. Pitiful.