Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (25 page)

“I would take action?”

“That you would betray the Chairman,” he corrected.

“He is the one who betrayed
us
,” Kanaga hissed through gritted teeth, “betrayed our traditions!”

“Oh?” Kage observed. “Like the tradition of using others as puppets? How did you get him to do it, Sato?”

“It wasn’t hard,” the kobun replied with a slight shrug. “You made it easy, in fact.”

“I ...” Kage breathed, then sighed. “The sims.”

Sato smiled without humor or warmth. “Yes. A subliminal program, a viral subfeed.”

“That woman...”

“A puppet,” he replied. “Like Tomashi... like you.”

Kage recalled the woman’s intense stare, the endless depths of her dark eyes, the signs she was
bunraku.

“Why didn’t it affect me?”

“The program needed to be compressed into a tightly contained data pulse to be transmitted by the carrier’s corneal emitters. It only extracts and runs in the simsense playback, and even then only during direct experience of the wet record. You would have had to replay the sim, which, of course, there was no reason for you to do. If you had, it would have served just as well. Its effect is quite limited, but profound. Fortunately, it didn’t need to last long. Once I found out about Tomashi’s new ‘hobby,’ it seemed like a prime opportunity.”

“You know what you have to do,”
she had said, pressing the gun into his hand. She hadn’t been talking to him. He thought of Tomashi, reliving that moment as the invasive program unfolded and ran through his brain.

Kage pulled the knife away from Kanaga’s throat slightly. His hand was shaking and he focused to steady it, and keep it from slashing across the steady pulse of the artery there.

“So,” the
kobun
said with remarkable calm. “You have your answers. What now? The man you protected is dead. The man who employed you is dead, and the rest of his men know their place and will shoot you on sight. It’s only a matter of time before they realize you’re here, if they haven’t already. You’ll never leave here alive. Do you kill me now and go out in a blaze of glory?”

He stopped when Kage drew his pistol and leveled it at him, stepping around to the side of the desk, keeping his eyes—and his gun—fixed on Kanaga.

“I should kill you,” he said. “In fact, honor demands it, does it not? But you were right about Tomashi’s habit being an opportunity. I’ve had some time to think things over while waiting for you. For the first time in my life, I’m free of obligations, free of debts, and tired of being used. That’s why the sim of
this
conversation is being transmitted and stored someplace safe.” The new Chairman’s eyes widened only slightly, but it was enough for a moment of understanding to pass between him and the former bodyguard. “If anything happens to me... I won’t be the only one to go out in a blaze of glory. Sometimes it’s better to just fade away.”

He stepped back from the desk towards the doors of the study, and they slid open. Kage’s eyes—and the unwavering gun barrel—remained locked on the man behind the desk until he was through them and they closed in front of him.

Sato immediately opened a new comm window on the desktop.

“Yojimbo has just left my... the Chairman’s office,” he told the man on the line.

“What are your orders, sir?”

“Let him go. He’s nothing, and no one, now.” The other man hesitated, confusion clearly written on his face, but only for a moment. He was trained to follow orders, not to question them.

“Hai!”
he replied, nodding sharply. Sato closed the window and sat back in the chair, his own, rather than the one Shigeda died in. He would need to get a newer one, befitting his new station, he mused. He glanced out the darkened windows; the rain had stopped, although droplets of moisture still ran down the outside of the glass.

Fade away, then,
he thought to the now nameless, masterless man headed out into that empty night.
Fade away, into the shadows.

Big Jake

By Dan C. Duval

Dan C. Duval has published more than 20 short stories, including one in the DAW anthology
Cosmic Cocktails
and another in the upcoming DAW anthology
Swordplay
. A grizzled veteran of the high-tech community, Dan is happy to be leaving the supercomputers to the younger people while he enjoys life on the Oregon Coast with his cats (who complain he does not pet them enough) and his horses (who complain that he rides them too often.)

The Spirit drifted over to the curb and eased to a stop. Paulie was an excellent rigger and one of the few I would trust to remote me anywhere, especially after more than twenty years hiding out. You get used to not trusting anyone when you have been under the radar that long.

This was stupid, in so many ways, but when Donna—probably my daughter—got in touch and told me that my grandson—probably—had been kidnapped, what choice did I have? I might be—well, over fifty years old anyway, but I still hope to live enough years that I don’t want any more regrets following me around.

And, God help me, I couldn’t resist being John Wayne just once in my life.

Through the windscreen, I saw the shop at the corner ahead, the last shop open in this part of Seattle at this time of night. Some of the apartment windows above the shops were lit, but most were dark, meaning either early risers or a lot of empty apartments. The streets almost looked clean, shining with the rain that had been falling all day and had just given up, probably for a short breather before starting again.

As soon as I stepped out of the little three-wheeler, the clock would start. If the kidnappers were late or if the deal didn’t go down quick enough, we would all have more problems than we were ready to deal with. 4
^th
and Pine was not the most happening part of downtown, but all of my contacts combined still gave me no hope of being able to spoof all of the cams, sniffers, ears, and other possible stuff that could be scattered all over the place here.

My best hope was that popping up unexpected, in a city far from my normal haunts in my runner days, would give me enough time to get the swap made and get my grandson out of here, before Humanis goons overran the drop point.

Frankly, I was tempted to blow it all off when the call came from Donna, but then she knew she was taking a chance of blowing my cover by calling in the first place, and the need was desperate enough that she used the one-off code I’d given her, so it had to be serious and I knew, at least, that it was her and not anyone I really had to worry about. Made a trap at least a little less likely.

About the time I dropped off the face of the Earth, she was just starting at Ares, a development manager in some lab or another, doing something that she couldn’t talk about, but she probably was my daughter, so I had to leave a contact point with someone in case some of my old friends needed me. In the bosom of Ares, she was about as safe as she could be from anyone trying to pry the contact info out of her. Besides, only my really good friends knew she was probably my daughter: my name didn’t appear anywhere on any of her records, so if I hadn’t told someone myself, they wouldn’t know. I trusted my closest friends to keep the secret and, since I am still alive, they must have.

I took a deep breath and popped the hatch. As I stepped out, I started a clock in my head. Packets were doubtless already flying and it was only a matter of time before one of those packets hooked up with a spider out in the Matrix somewhere and a whole world of crap would descend from the sky.

OK, I chose the place. Donna gave me the contact info for the exchange. Fortunately, the people who took the kid were smart enough to realize Donna had no hope of getting around Ares security, so they were willing to allow a go-between and the fact that the go-between was an old man with the beginnings of a serious belly seemed to go well with them.

Of course, the picture I let them see wasn’t really me. Facial recognition software would have tied my face to my name and that would have been the game.

I patted my jacket and tapped the various pockets in my cargo pants.

And they said cargo pants would never come back in style. OK, so they were right, but all those pockets were still useful for carrying stuff. I just hoped it was enough.

I stepped on the sidewalk as the Spirit pulled back into the street and disappeared into the night. Paulie would lose it out there somewhere for a while, long enough that I would hopefully be able to crawl back into a hole somewhere before anyone could use it to track me down.

I shuffled down the sidewalk as fast as I could. Less time on the street, the less packets maybe, but any one packet could be enough.

The door of the shop swung easily and I slipped inside.

Lou’s Gear-Up was just that: if you had the money, Lou had the gear. Looked like the Radio Shack when I was a kid. Aisles of stuff, from pods to comms to scanners to spy gear to just about every sort of electronic toy you could imagine. Bright, overhead fluorescents and an above-average security system. Bars over the windows.

I was here a good fifteen minutes earlier than I had told the kidnappers. I had some business to take care of first.

The guy behind the glassed-in counter was nondescript, a nobody. Early middle age, starting to bald, rounding in the belly even faster than I was, his practiced, eager-bland expression offset by a shrewd pair of eyes that looked me over carefully and dismissed me as mostly harmless.

I pulled out a credstick and stuck it under the guy’s nose.

“Ten K nuyen. Crank your ECM as high as it’ll go.” I didn’t care. Wasn’t my nuyen. Donna wasn’t stupid: her first call had been to Ares Internal Security. I’d asked for a half-dozen 10K credsticks and the AIS chick I worked with didn’t even blink as she handed them over.

Naturally, he immediately became suspicious.

“Relax, dude,” I said, “A guy is going to show up here, we’re going to talk a little, then we leave. I just don’t want anyone listening in, ‘K?”

The little wheels in his head cranked for several seconds before he reached under the counter, came up with a packet of cheap hearing aid batteries and slid them across the counter. The guy was pretty good at this, but not good enough to keep me from seeing him snatch the 10K ‘stick from my hand, palm it, and drop a different stick into the cash drawer. Good enough for the security cameras in the store, though.

He rang it up and handed me a paper receipt that showed a purchase of a whole five nuyens. The paper was brown around the edges. Must have been in the machine for a long time. No one used credsticks anymore.

Just old fossils, like me.

The guy smiled and stepped down to the end of the counter, where he tapped on the keyboard of a pretty hefty old deck. Then he nodded at me.

I didn’t put a lot of DMSO on that credstick, so the rohypnol would seep into his bloodstream slowly. If I timed this right, the guy wouldn’t remember much of anything but, more importantly, wouldn’t be inclined to get involved in anything that was about to happen.

With luck, that also wouldn’t be much, but why risk any more complications than I already had?

“Where are the personal secretaries?” I asked.

The guy had a sort of dreamy look on his face when he drifted back to my end of the counter and tapped the glass over a half-dozen handhelds on the top shelf.

“Which ones are secure?”

His hand wavered a bit as he pointed out the three at the end. I may have given him a bit more than I’d wanted. I just hoped he wouldn’t pass out before the deal was done.

Now, there was a chance that just upping the security on the place was enough to trigger warning flags someplace. A chance, but who knew what sort of skull gear the kidnappers would be walking in with?

Five minutes early, an elf walked into the shop.

Nasty-looking elf. No apparent gear but what did he have in his head? He was alone and, if this was the guy, he was supposed to be alone, at least while we were in the shop. Can’t say the purple hair and subcutaneous LEDs were exactly inconspicuous, but he was an elf.

I’d been underground for years. What did I know about fashion?

“You the man?” the elf asked me.

“If you got the kid,” I said, “I am.”

“Yeah, I got the kid. You got the stuff?”

What this was all about was something that Ares had cooked up in one of their labs, just simple corporate espionage. I give them the files, they give me my grandson. As long as they didn’t tweak to the kid being my grandson, things would be just fine and very businesslike.

‘Course, I’d get a bonus from Ares if I managed to get the boy back without handing over the files. And another bonus if I found out who this bunch of faeries were working for. Priority was the kid, though. Donna had apparently become pretty important to Ares and their primary interest was to keep her happy, more than anything else.

I stepped to one side and pointed out the three secure secretaries. “Pick one.”

The elf looked at me like I was crazy. “Nobody uses that obsolete crap anymore.”

“I do,” I said, tapping the socket behind my ear. “Couple generations old. You want the data, it goes into the sec. When I get the kid, you get the sec released.” I shrugged. “No other way to get it out of my head.”

The elf peered at the three units. “Secure, eh? Double biometrics lock and the whole bit?”

I shrugged. “Sure. It all still works. That’s why they still make them.”

The nice thing about these little secure secretaries is that someone could dissect them but not before they overwrote the data ten or twelve times. The data would be secure enough for the next hour or two, long enough for me to collect the kid and get away, even if everything else went to hell.

Pointing at the Schraeder, the elf straightened up.

I stuck out my lower jaw and nodded. “Good choice. You know your gear.”

Schraeder was a very minor player in the corporate world, but that meant they had to try harder. Rugged, reliable, and hard to spoof the security features. I waved the guy behind the counter over and indicated the Schraeder. He reached in and handed it over without even asking for payment.