Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (3 page)

"Sorry if you aren't used to this, Wolf." The shrug of her shoulders told me she wasn't sorry at all and that my surprised reaction made her day. "Warping the Matrix to my conception of it gives me a home-field advantage." Within the solar yellow of the glove on her right hand, she twitched a ball around and got the grip she wanted on it. From a dugout over on the third-base side of the field a smallish man walked up toward the plate. Behind and above him a Scoreboard flashed to life and spewed out all sorts of information in hexidecimal.

I pointed up at the display. "Can you translate?"

She looked at me as if I'd disappointed her, then nodded. Suddenly the Scoreboard flickered and the handy notation of baseball replaced the curious array of numbers and letters. Coming up to bat was Ronnie Killstar's personal file. The count was zero balls and two strikes, and the Scoreboard reported his batting average as .128. He batted right-handed.

Val licked her lips as a catcher and umpire materialized behind the plate. "Can of corn." A green ball appeared in her left hand and she spun it around until she grasped it between her thumb, index, and middle fingers. Rearing back, her azure outline blurred and she delivered the pitch. It arced in at the plate, then dropped a full fifteen centimeters below Ronnie's futile swing.

"Yer out!" screamed the umpire.

All sorts of data poured out onto the Scoreboard. It was a bit more nasty than one might expect to find on the average baseball card, but it still bespoke nothing more than a mediocre career. A quick comparison of his successful stolen bases versus times caught out in the attempt confirmed that he was an unsuccessful smalltime thief before La Plante took him on as a leg-breaker.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

As the record of his most recent telecom calls started to flash up on the Scoreboard, I looked over at Val. "You can cut this any time you want. He's useless and now he's dead." I glanced over at the number of the last call he'd made. "Hope it was to his mother."

Val wrinkled her nose. "I was unaware anyone had taught Petri dishes to answer the phone." She caught the ball the catcher threw back at her. "That was just a warm-up. I shouldn't have used a forkball on him—that was overkill." Certain things started to click into place for me. Cracking systems required a vast array of ice-breaking programs. Most deckers used commercially developed software and, consequently, could only break into the most simple of bases.

True artists like Val modify and write their own wares. I once talked with a decker who went by the handle of Merlin who'd named all of his ice-breakers after spells. "It helps me remember what's what.

When some system's trying to flatline you, you want to be able to react quickly with a codebomb that will do the job." Val, with her passion for baseball, had designed and named her ice-breakers for pitches.

"Let's get on to the main show, okay?"

"Roger."

Val concentrated and slammed a fist into her glove a couple of times. I noticed some subtle changes in the stadium as the Fujiwara system came into range for us to access it. "Okay, we're ready to begin.

Kind of like robbing Peter to pay Paul, isn't it?"

I nodded. Fujiwara Corporation was a legal shell that laundered money for a yakuza group based further down the coast in Tokyo West. Whereas La Plante was a broker who facilitated the movement of things from one party to another, Fujiwara actually brought contraband materials into Seattle from all over the world. On a scale of one all the way up to Hitler's SS, both groups ranked fairly high, but Fujiwara exercised a bit more restraint in how they dealt with rivals.

That meant they preferred a single yak hitter to a mad bomber. La Plante did too until Kid Stealth had the temerity to defect to Raven. Neither group played nicely with their enemies, and this little Matrix run was about to deposit us on Fujiwara's bad side.

The butterflies started in my stomach as a behemoth stepped from the dugout. He looked like something from a cartoon. He had tiny legs and a narrow waist that blossomed up into immensely powerful arms and shoulders. The bat he carried looked like it had been cold-hammered into shape from the hull of an aircraft carrier, but he wielded it like it weighed no more than a spoon.

The field changed abruptly when he stepped into the batter's box to hit right-handed. Runners appeared on second and third and the count stood even at 0 and 0. The batter's name appeared on the Scoreboard as Babe Fujiwara and his batting average stood at a whopping .565.

I swallowed hard. "Why do I get the feeling this man is the All-Star team all rolled into one?"

Val wiped her brow on her sleeve. "That's because he is." Then she shot me a winning grin. "But that's okay, baby, because I'm Rookie of the Year."

"Play ball!" cried the umpire.

Val's fingers twitched as she toyed with the ball hidden in her mitt, then she reared back to throw. The fastball sizzled yellow and gold as it streaked toward the plate. Babe Fujiwara swung on the pitch and
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

missed, but not by much. From the look on Val's face she'd expected a larger margin of victory.

Her cerulean eyes narrowed. I saw her grip the now-green ball in the same way she'd done to deal with Ronnie. The forkball shot from her hand at medium speed, then dropped precipitously. Even so, his bat whipped around and he hit the ice-breaker solidly. Suddenly it shifted color from green to red and rocketed back onto the field.

It hit me in the left ankle and fiery pain shot up my leg. The ball popped into the air as I dropped to the ground. Val sprang off the mound, gathered the ball up, and tossed it over at Babe as he lumbered up the baseline toward first. When the ball hit him in the shoulder, he exploded into blue sparks.

Gasping against the pain, I looked up at her. "What the hell was that?"

Val's nostrils flared. "Fujiwara has put some cascading 1C on line. The fact that you hurt means it's blacker than La Plante's heart. I managed to flip a couple of bits into that program and used it to destroy the ice layer that spawned it, but I'm not sure I can do that again."

I got an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. "We're in a bit deeper than we want to be, aren't we?"

She looked over at the runners on second and third. "We got a pass on the first two layers of ice. We would have wasted time and broken them, but I thought speed was of the essence. Fujiwara gave them to us to make it difficult for us to get out of here .. ."

I raised an eyebrow as I massaged my ankle. "You mean we're trapped in the Fujiwara system."

She shrugged. "It's a matter of perspective."

"Well, try it from my perspective, one of pain."

"We're trapped." She must have seen my icon begin the fingerwork for the spell that would deaden the pain. "Don't waste the effort, Wolf. That stuff doesn't work in this environment." Her fingers convulsed and a blue mitt appeared on my left hand. "Just use this to block anything they hit at you and it should protect you."

I looked at the mitt and pounded my right hand into its pocket. "If I get something I just put the runners out?"

She nodded. "Don't tag them. It'll destroy the ice layer, but you don't want to be that close when it goes."

"What happens if they score?"

Val's smile died. "Don't ask. This is the big leagues."

"Got it."

The next layer of ice materialized as a somewhat smaller batter dubbed Mookie Fujiwara. He took position to bat left-handed and I saw that did not please Val at all. The ball in her hand took on a bright orange color. She wound up and threw. The whirling screwball arced in and broke toward Mookie, jamming him on the fists. He fouled it off.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Up on the Scoreboard his batting average went from .500 to .375 and I took heart in that. It cheered Val up as well. She prepared another program, and the ball coalesced into an opalescent sphere. Her knuckles rested on the seams, then she started her motion and threw. The program flew slowly toward the plate. It spun not at all, but floated and dipped erratically. It dove toward the ground as it neared the plate, and Mookie missed it with a clean cut. Another strike toted itself upon the board and his average fell to .175.

Val shot me a wink. "The knuckler always works on these cascaders—it reverses the value of the variables they use to get better, making them weaker. Better yet, it never shows them enough for them to create a countercode quickly."

I smiled reassuringly. "Gonna use it again?"

"Nope." She studied the Scoreboard and shook her head. "Do it again and I give it a chance to react.

Got something else for this ice."

A white ball formed in her hand. Val grinned cruelly and delivered the ball with a half-sidearm motion. It jetted in, then broke at the last second. Mookie swung and missed and the umpire called him out. He vanished and I heard a couple of voices cheering.

Turning around I saw a couple of figures in the grandstands. One looked like a glass spider and another wore the form of a black cat. "What the hell?"

Val waved at them. "Just some other deckers come to watch the fun. The Tarantula and Alley Cat are two locals I've met before."

That weird feeling ran up my spine again. "This was supposed to be a shadowrun, you know. What if Fuji learns we're here?"

Valerie fixed me with a stare that made me want to hit the showers. "Wolf, just because you're a 'trix virgin doesn't mean you have to show it. We've had an audience in the owner's box ever since we started. Blowing the cascading 1C likely tripped some alarms, too, but they were here long before that.

Looks like the yaks at Fujiwara have a line into La Plante's operation."

I filed that information away for future use as the final batter stepped out of the dugout. Whereas Babe had looked like a cartoon, this layer of ice manifested itself as a long, lean player with incredibly thick forearms and wrists. His flesh had a grayish, metallic tint to it, and his head metamorphosed into that of a horse. His name appeared on the Scoreboard as Iron Horse Fujiwara and his batting average registered as .957. He batted lefty and the glint in his eye was nothing short of pure evil.

Val's skin took on an ashen hue. "Dammit, I didn't think it would be this tough. I'm going to have to doctor some stuff here." A white ball appeared in her mitt, but as her fingers worked on it, bloody tendrils shot through it.

Satisfied, but not looking as confident as I would have liked, she watched the batter, then let the ball fly.

It cruised in at medium speed, then broke sharply as if it had fallen off a table. I looked for hesitation in the batter's eye, but I saw none and braced for disaster.

The Iron Horse's bat whipped around in a buzz-saw arc and smashed the ball back at the mound.

Halfway there the ball burst into flame, but the line drive didn't slow at all. Val raised her glove defensively and managed to get it into place to stop the ball from hitting her in the face. Her glove burst
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

into flame and she spun to the ground, but the ball hung there for a second, defying gravity.

I lunged at the ball. My glove boiled off and I felt as if I'd reached into a barbecue to barehand a glowing coal. "Help here, Val!"

How she did what she did I don't know, but the flame died and the ball took on a blue tint. I flipped it over to my right hand and saw the runner on third make a break for home. I drew the ball back to my right ear and threw it as hard as I could.

The blue ball shot through the base-runner like a searchlight through fog. It flew on beyond him and into the dugout. A volcano of sparks shot from there, and the baseball stadium began to crumble. In an eyeblink we were back in the city-map Matrix for Seattle, and the third floor of the Fujiwara tower exploded.

Then that imaging system failed me as well. I found myself floating in a sea of data. Waves of telecom numbers crested up over me and drove me down toward spreadsheets and cost overrun statements. Just as I felt as though I were drowning in a vast inventory system, a hand grabbed me on the shoulder and the safehouse room with Zig and Zag swam back into view.

Val watched me closely and I knew Zag would have died to have her looking at him with such concern in her eyes. "Are you okay?"

I thought about the question for a second, then nodded. "Yeah, I think so. What the hell happened?"

Her eyes narrowed. "I can't be certain, but I think whoever programmed Fujiwara's 1C built himself a back door. That blue ball was a simple virus meant to pump spurious data into the system so quickly that things freeze up and give me a chance to react with another program. You tossed it through one of the layers we bypassed and right through the back door into their system. That stopped the Iron Horse on his trip to first and I used my own little ALS virus to dust him."

"Did we get the information we needed?"

On cue the Hitachi deck's EPROM platform slid out from within the black case, offering the computer chip onto which the Fujiwara information had been burned. "Looks like it." Her smile lessened a bit as she looked at me again. "What else?"

I frowned. "Something's digging around at the back of my brain." I shrugged it off. "I guess I just want to be in an arena where I can shoot anybody who looks like the Iron Horse. It's the warrior in me."

"Pity," she said with a laugh. "You've got a future as a decker."

III

"What's he doing?" Zag asked as I started preparing to go into combat. Val frowned at him and remained quiet as I closed my eyes and reached inside. I pressed my hands together and touched the wolf's-head amulet at my throat. Using it as a focus, I let my mind touch the Wolf spirit dwelling in my heart and mind.

I saw it as a huge beast built mostly out of shadows except where lurid red highlights rippled across its fur. Lean and hungry, it still contained incredible power. When it felt my caress, enthusiastic fires burned in its eyes, but they dulled to a bloody color when it sensed my hesitation.