shadowrun 40 The Burning Time (2 page)

"You must be Mr. Johnson," the man said, just loud enough to be heard over the blaring music. He gave a faint smile to say that he didn’t believe that Johnson was Dan’s real name. "Have a seat."

Dan slid gingerly into the booth, suddenly torn between getting what he’d come for and the urge to get the hell out of there. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off his contact.

"Did you bring the money?" the man asked abruptly, and Dan nodded.

"Let’s see it."

Dan fished a slim plastic rod from his pocket and held it up. The man reached for it, but Dan snatched his hand away, surprised at his own boldness.

"First I want to see. . .the merchandise," he said, thinking about how Ethan Hunt handled himself in the
Shadows of Seattle
sim. He continued to stare the man down, no matter how much he wanted to look away. His contact reached into his jacket and pulled out a black plastic case, which he set on the table. Dan could see a flat optical chip through the transparent lid. He bent closer to read some tiny print.

"That’s it," the man said, "the Cal-hot edition of
Shadowbreakers VII
. Complete and uncut."

Dan read the title etched onto the chip and looked up in awe. "You mean with Winona Flying-Horse and, and. . .everything? The sauna scenes and. . ."

"Everything," the chip dealer said with a slow, wolfish smile.

Dan almost laughed out loud at the thought. He had to have it. He started to reach for the case, but the man grabbed his wrist. He picked up the chip-case with his free hand.

"Uh-uh, not until I get the money," he said. " Oh, and the price has gone up."

"Wh-what?" Dan protested. They’d already negotiated the price.

The man shrugged. "Supply and demand. This baby is a hot property." He shook the chip-case for emphasis. "Especially since those explicit pics of Winnie ‘mysteriously’ hit the Matrix. You want a taste of the real thing—better than the real thing—then you gotta pay. You got a problem with that, take it up with the complaint department."

He nodded toward the top of the stairs. Dan glanced over and saw the same ork he’d bumped into earlier. He was leaning casually against the wall, his dusky skin almost blending into the shadows. His bald head was scarred, and two small tusks protruded over his upper lip. He slowly cracked his knuckles, a reminder that he could snap Dan in two like a twig.

Dan turned back to the dealer. "How much?" he asked.

"Five hundred nuyen."

"But you said three hundred-fifty," Dan burst out.

"You want the goods, it’s five hundred. Of course, if all you want is regular simsense, you can rent this one at Sim-Sation for twenty nuyen. They’re all kid-safe and everything."

The man sat back with a mocking smile. Like Dan was going to waste his time with that drek. He’d run those kinds of sims. They were like trideo compared to the simsense that came out of California Free State. The Cal sims didn’t leave anything out; you got to feel it all. It was like living out your greatest fantasies in the safety of your own head. He’d heard that the producers and programmers even tweaked the chip’s signals to "enhance" the experience and make them seem even realer than real life. Once Dan had gotten a taste of them, he couldn’t get enough. Unfortunately, so-called "California-hot" chips were illegal in the United Canadian American States. They couldn’t be imported or sold, which was why he was here trying to score.

"It’s not BTL, right?" he asked.

"No way, chummer. This is quality merchandise. We’re not talking about brain-burners here. This is just entertainment. The best."

BTL chips—short for "better than life"—went even further than Cal-hots. Dan knew about them, of course, but he was honestly afraid of them. BTLs messed with a chip’s sim-signals to give users an experience simply not possible in real life. You didn’t even have to put up with some flimsy storyline—the BTLs offered pure sensation.

Dan had heard that jacking a BTL was pure bliss, direct stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers. The experience was so intense that most BTL junkies didn’t last very long. They stopped caring about anything except chipping until it got so bad they wouldn’t jack out even to eat or use the crapper. Of course, the vendors didn’t want to lose their customers too quickly, so the chips were tweaked to burn out after a time, keeping the buyers coming back for more.

Sooner or later, though, the chipheads would figure out how to override the cut-out on the chip. They would jack in and never come back. They’d starve to death, lying in their own filth, until somebody found them and called the police. That was if the organ-leggers and ghouls didn’t get there first and turn the bodies into spare parts for the illegal organ-banks or, worse yet, a quick meal.

Dan shuddered at the thought, but told himself this wasn’t BTL. He wasn’t a junkie. It was just some harmless fun, a way to relieve the stress of work. It wasn’t his fault the UCAS had declared California simchips illegal. He wasn’t hurting anyone.

"All right," he said, tearing his eyes away from the chip-case for a moment. "I guess I. . ." He stopped in mid-sentence when he noticed that the man wasn’t looking at him any more. He was staring down onto the dance floor with an expression like horrified fascination. He glanced at Dan, back at the dance floor, then back at Dan.

"Stay here," he said, standing up and slipping the case into his jacket. He strode toward the stairs as Dan watched in amazement. The man brushed past the big ork, who called out after him as he raced down the stairs. The music was too loud for Dan to what the ork said. He looked down at the dance floor, wondering what the man had seen that made him jump up so suddenly. To Dan, it was just a mass of mostly human people, with a sprinkling of elves, orks, and trolls.

Then he had a terrible thought. The police! What if the man had spotted an undercover cop or something downstairs. Or maybe he’d decided to sell the chip to someone who wouldn’t object to the price. When Dan glanced at the stairs, the ork was still there. He looked torn, like he wasn’t sure whether to go after the other guy or walk over to Dan.

Dan didn’t plan to wait around to find out which. He jumped up and headed for the stairs on the other side of the tier, weaving around the people who blocked his path.

He bumped into a dark-haired woman in a synthleather jumpsuit that clung to her curves like Vita Revak’s in the classic
Rambo XX
sim. The open neck showed off an expanse of creamy flesh and a sprinkling of freckles. She had long dark hair, a lovely face, and a dazzling smile.

"Hey, honey, what’s your hurry?" she asked. Dan looked over his shoulder and saw the ork coming closer as he pushed through the crowd.

"Can I get you a drink or something?" she asked.

Any other night, that would have been a fantasy come true, but tonight Dan’s only thought was getting away. He stammered an apology and bolted past her down the stairs. When he reached the floor, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd, ignoring the angry protests and shoves. The only thing that mattered was getting out the front door.

Hammer stood at the top of the stairs and watched Dan Otabi get away.

"Frag," he said under his breath as Trouble came up to him. She was upset that their mark had gotten away.

"What the hell happened?" Trouble asked.

"I dunno," Boom said. "Talon saw something."

She scanned the dance floor, looking for Talon, then spotted him on the other side of the room. "Over there," she said, already starting down the stairs to find out what was going on.

The man who’d been talking to Dan Otabi had vanished. In his place was someone who was younger, cleaner, and better-looking. He was standing on the edge of the dance floor, staring out into the mass of people, his eyes slightly unfocused. Most of the club-goers probably thought he was drunk or stoned out, neither of which was a rarity in the Avalon. His chummers knew better, of course. Talon was a mage, with perceptions beyond those of mundanes.

When they reached his side, Trouble saw that he was crying, the tears running unheeded down his cheeks as his eyes searched the room.

She had worked the shadows long enough to know you didn’t interfere with a mage doing his thing, but the look on his face had her worried. She grabbed Talon’s shoulder and shook him.

"Talon! What is it? Did you see something?"

He turned his tear-streaked face toward her. "It was Jase," he said over the din. "I saw him. Out there on the dance floor."

His words sent a shiver through her body, but Trouble shook it off. "Jase is dead," she said, as gently as possible amid the uproar. "He’s been dead for fifteen years."

Talon nodded. "I know, but I saw him, Trouble. He was here. I’m sure of it."

CHAPTER THREE

"Let me get this straight," Boom said. "Are you telling me we fragged up a meet that took weeks to set up and maybe lost our only real window on the target site because you thought you saw somebody who looked like Jason Vale in the club tonight?"

"I don’t
think
I saw him, Boom," Talon said. "I did see him. He was right there, across the dance floor, as plain to me as you are right now."

Trouble smiled to herself. Boom was a troll, a mass of muscle nearly three meters tall. With his lumpy, greenish skin, ram-like horns, protruding tusks, and the garish Hawai’ian shirts he favored, he stood out in a crowd a lot more than any human ever could.

Despite appearances, he was actually a big part of the "brains" behind their outfit. Everyone acknowledged Talon’s natural leadership abilities, but Boom was the best when it came to planning. He also had the connections and knew all the right people for getting them work in the shadows.
Anything that threatened the team’s reputation, or his, was a concern.

"I told Otabi to stay where he was," Talon said, somewhat lamely. "I didn’t think he would bolt like a jack rabbit."

"You didn’t think, period," Boom said. "Taking off in the middle of a meet like that—what did you expect him to do?"

"It doesn’t really matter," Trouble said, giving Boom’s massive arm a reassuring pat. "What’s done is done. What matters is what are we going to do about it?"

Boom glanced down at Trouble, and his anger seemed to deflate. He gave a heavy sigh and scratched behind one horn with a blunt finger. He turned back to Talon. "Sorry I blew up at you, chummer. I guess the stress of this run is getting to me."

"To all of us," Talon said, smiling wanly. His eyes held the same haunted look Trouble had noticed earlier, but he got down to business in spite of it. "I think we can still salvage something from this mess. It’s just going to take a little more work."

"Well, the cred’s good," Hammer said from his seat near the door of Boom’s office. The big ork casually cradled a submachine gun across his lap, ready for anything.

A knock at the door froze the conversation in its tracks. Boom glanced at the monitors built into the surface of his broad desk. He looked up and nodded slightly at Hammer, who went to open the door to Valkyrie, the team’s remaining member.

She was dressed as usual: a T-shirt, worn jeans tucked into a pair of heavy leather boots, and a battered leather jacket layered with ballistic armor. Her dark hair was clipped "short and simple," as she put it, revealing the chrome of the datajack behind her left ear. She carried a slim, flat control deck under one arm and a flat-profile pistol in a holster at her waist. Val sauntered in and flopped down on the couch against one wall.

"What’s the word?" Boom asked.

"I tracked our boy by remote," she said. "He took the T, so I lost him when he went underground, but I staked out his apartment. He showed up there a few minutes ago. He couldn’t have gotten home that fast if he’d made any stops along the way.

"So he didn’t talk to anyone else or try to make another score," Talon said.

Val shook her head. "Not unless he met somebody on the train. ‘Sides, we’ve checked this guy out. He doesn’t have any street connections. He’s a lily- white, sheltered corp-baby. We’re the only connections he’s got."

"Which is something we can turn to our advantage," Boom rumbled. "We just need to turn up the heat a little, so he’ll have to come back for the bait. And I think I know how we can do that."

Boom looked at Talon, who seemed lost in thought. "Tal, what’s this about Jase? What did you see?"

"I don’t know." Talon gave a baffled shake of his head. "I’m not sure any more. Maybe it was just a trick of the light or the smoke or something. But I could have sworn . . . " He trailed off and threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. It hurt Trouble to see Talon, always so sure of himself, look so lost and confused.

"Are you sure you’re up to handling this?" Boom said. "’Cause if not. . ."

"No, no, I’m fine," Talon said. "I’ll deal. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do and get down to it, okay?"

Boom nodded curtly. "Okay, here’s what I’m thinking." He laid out the plan, and they discussed it, working through potential problems. When everyone had their assignments, the team broke up to get some rest. It was already quite late.

The club was closing for the night as they emerged from Boom’s office. The Avalon belonged to Boom, and it was a good front for his shadow business. The last of the club-goers were trickling out the door onto the streets of Boston, and the clean-up crews had already begun repairing the mess their festivities had left behind.

Talon was down the stairs and almost out the door as Trouble hurried to catch up. He had that lost look again, walking with his head down and one hand jammed into the pocket of his jacket. His motorcycle helmet dangled by its chin-strap from his other hand.

"Hey," she said, "Want to grab a cup of soykaf before calling it a night? I mean, if you want to talk. . ."

Talon gave her a sorrowful smile that made Trouble’s heart ache. He shook his head. "No, thanks. I think I need to be alone for awhile."

"Okay, chummer," she said gently. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, but thanks anyway," Talon said. "Talk to you tomorrow." He tucked his helmet into the crook of his arm and walked off toward the alley.