Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (9 page)

The coyote hit it hard on the left flank. The sphinx twisted back, but its hind right leg gave along a line I'd scored with several shots, crashing the beast down on the docks. I directed a stream of fire at its spine, burrowing in just at the base of its neck, while the coyote ' distracted it with lunges and feints. Once my fire severed its spine, the creature lay still for a moment, then evaporated into a mist.

I ran over to Raven as the coyote likewise disintegrated. Raven had slumped to his knees on the crate and held himself up from total collapse on his hands. His chest heaved and the black curtain of his hair hid his face from me. Sweat glistened on his arms and shoulders and I saw droplets stain the wooden crate.

I reached over and squeezed his left shoulder in congratulations. "We got him, Doc. We got his monster."

Raven shook his head and looked down at me. "He's not defeated yet." He pointed back at the yacht, purple highlights being etched onto his face by the glow still surrounding Hasan. "He's getting an energy boost from the ship. It's an ally spirit of incredible power and it's using him as a conduit. Whatever summoned it must have been unbelievable."

The same voice I'd heard Hasan use before now burst into my brain without the sham of having the man's lips move. "It is true, Richard Raven. What summoned me was beyond your mortal ken to understand. You have interfered with the mission given me by my master, and now you must pay! But first, you will see this one of your friends die because I relish the pain it will cause you!"

I felt magical force begin to gather around me, then tighten like a chain wrapped around my chest. It crushed in from all sides and I wanted to scream, but I could get no air from my lungs. I wanted to beg Raven to destroy the ship, but I realized that was impossible. How do you kill a thirty-meter-long ally spirit?

The burning agony drove me to my knees. The Old One howled in pain and fought to win my release, but even it was helpless against the power that held and crushed me. Sparks began to float before my eyes, then great shimmering balls of light sizzled across my field of vision.

I knew the end had come.

I felt certain the explosion I heard was my heart bursting, and the sudden cessation of pain only meant I'd died. I could smell death in the air and I recall having been disappointed that it did not smell differently when it came for me. I waited for the blackness to steal my sight, but it did not. In fact, the light grew brighter and I laughed that death was not so dark and grim after all.

Then I realized I'd heard myself laugh.

That meant I wasn't dead.

I scrambled to my feet just in time to have a second, larger explosion blast me back into the boathouse wall. Whereas the first explosion had only torn a small hole at the base of the ship's superstructure, the
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greater blast punched fire out through all the portholes below the main deck and pulsed a flaming corona out over the deck itself. Then the whole superstructure lurched to port and dropped down a deck level.

The ship listed to port and started to take on great floods of water. High on the superstructure the purple glow imploded. A column of fire whirled up into the air and Hasan combusted instantaneously. I saw his skeleton outlined in black against the golden fire, then it too vanished.

The ship screamed, then sank from sight in a steaming caldron of bubbles.

By the time Raven helped me to my feet and we then picked our way through flaming debris to the edge of the wharf, Stealth had managed to awkwardly haul himself up out of the water. His left arm hung limply from his shoulder and showed where most of the working parts had been crushed when the sphinx had batted him out of the air. Water poured from the arm compartments where he carried plastic explosives, and his talons gouged their way into the decking to steady him.

Raven and I exchanged smiles while Stealth turned and nodded grimly at the burning ally spirit.

"Underwater I could see no props or jet nozzles—the ship had no natural way to move. I figured that made it very special, therefore I resolved to destroy it. Then a grunge corpse strapped to a flamethrower drifted down from the surface, so I improvised a bomb. Not much can stand up to napalm and Semtek."

His mention of the flamethrower brought my earlier encounter with it back to mind in full sizzling detail. I shifted my shoulders around to ease the soreness in my back. "By the way, that was pretty tricky shooting you did when that grunge popped up with the torch gun."

Stealth nodded solemnly. "He was half hidden so I couldn't go for a head shot. A body shot would have ruptured the tank, and that would have roasted you alive." He shuddered and glanced at his tattered left arm. "Burning to death isn't something I'd wish on anyone."

I turned to Raven. "You should have seen it. He nailed me in the back and knocked me forward into the woman I was trying to save. That blasted us out of the way of the flamethrower." I looked back at Stealth. "It's a good thing you remembered I was wearing kevlar." The look of surprise on his face took a second or two to die. I felt a chill pass between us, but it drained away as Kid Stealth punched me lightly in the shoulder and gave me a genuine smile. "Yeah, I'm glad I remembered, too . .."

Digital Grace

I

Given that I didn't know where I was when I woke up, I figured still having my clothes on was a plus. I mean I can remember similar incidents when I thought otherwise, but I hadn't been tied up in those situations. I also didn't have a kid sitting on the end of the bed pointing a pistol with a bowling-ball bore at me.

"Kyrie, he's awake." The little albino showed me his teeth in a feral grin and held the heavy revolver with pale, unwavering hands. "Do anything, Kies, and the last thing going through your mind will be a bullet."

Great,I thought,
I'm being held by some psycho punk who's been downloading intimidation lessons
from Kid Stealth.
"No problem, ace."

I took a moment or two to assess my situation. Because of the thick blue and red Amerind blanket
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drawn up to my neck, I couldn't see my hands, but it felt like the kid had used hawser to bind my wrists together. The cable had been knotted tight, but my hands weren't tied behind my back. Whatever spark of hope that little gift inspired died in the railroad tunnel at the end of the gun barrel staring at me.

The old, metal-frame bed had been painted enough times for me to see a rainbow of colors where chips cut through to bare metal. Off to my left, just on the far side of the doorway, I saw a table and two chairs. My leather jacket hung over the back of one of the chairs and my shoulder holster, complete with pistol, lay on the table itself. The room, from the cobwebs in the corners to the cracks in the plaster, had seen better days, but it was still habitable. The bedding looked fairly clean, but the scent told me it had been a week or two since it had been washed.

Using my elbows and heels, I slowly pushed myself back and up into a sitting position. I clamped down on the blanket with my chin, pulling it up with me. Bending my knees and digging my heels in, I popped the blanket up into a little tent and watched the albino over the artificial horizon stretched between my knees.

"So, tell me, do you have a 'Preferred Guest Rate' or am I being soaked for full fare during my impromptu stay?"

The albino's pink eyes watched me without blinking. His white hair had been shaved into a mohawk and stiffened with glue into a bristle of porcupine quills. Aside from the reddish cast to his eyes, the only color on him came from the dirt beneath his fingernails and the little creases at the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. His jaw showed white wisps of beard-to-come. His Maria Mercurial t-shirt and synthetic pants matched the dingy gray walls in hue.

Before he could answer, or pull the trigger, a second person entered the room. She was a pretty little elf, if a tad on the lean side. She had fire in her dark eyes, though she seemed to take care to hide it when she looked at the albino. She wore her black hair very short in a boyish cut. That, and her slender figure made it easily possible for her to pass as a young man—a wise thing to do if, as was my guess, we were in the Barrens and this was where they lived. She wore mostly synthleather—standard for the sprawl—though hers was of browns and tans that would have seemed more appropriate out in the Tir.

"How are you feeling?" Kyrie leaned on the foot of the bed as she asked the question. "Are you hurt?"

I shook my head casually. "Tongue feels thick. I could use some water."

She turned to leave, but the gunboy snarled at her. "Overruled. You'll get water when I say you get water."

"Albion, he's not an enemy." "He's not a guest either, Kyrie. He's a hostage." Albion locked his serpent-stare on me again. "You're Wolfgang Kies, right?"

My eyes narrowed. "Cut to the chase."

"My game, my rules, my speed."

"Okay, if that's the way it is. Yes, I'm Wolfgang Kies." I pulled my head up and back, pressing it against the wall behind me. "Next?"

"You work for Dr. Richard Raven, right?"

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That question, combined with calling me a hostage earlier, started alarm bells going off in my head. I knew that Etienne La Plante, a big Seattle crime boss, had a standing reward for the delivery of Raven's head in a sack. I didn't think these kids were setting a trap for Raven with me as bait, but anything was possible in the sprawl. As desperation finds plenty of prey in the Barrens, that might be exactly what was happening.

"Yeah, I work for Raven."

Immediately Kyrie's expression brightened. Albion remained stone-faced, but tipped the pistol up toward the ceiling. Some of my anxiety drained off as the pistol ceased its violation of my personal space, but I knew lots more was going on than I could read.

Two more kids entered the room, and the second I laid eyes on the smallest of them, how I got involved in this mess came flooding back with a clarity that caused me to blush. I'd just come out of Kell's over between First and Second, down by the Market. I'd been drinking a bit, but not much because I was more interested in watching the Seadogs1in their fight for the pennant than I was in getting drunk. Jimmy Mackelroy salted

1The Seattle franchise for major league baseball is officially still called the Mariners, but pretty much everyone who isn't under contract to them calls them the Seadogs. About ten, fifteen years ago they had a really bad streak—stats just weren't clicking the way they should, so everyone started calling the team the Dogs. Then this guy—an ork related somehow to Plutarch Graogrim, another of Doc's chummers—gets this idea about turning out Seattle Seadogs merchandise, including caps and shirts, and all with a great pirate-hound logo. Everybody started getting into the game away with a three-run homer in the ninth, so I left and headed out toward Stewart to get my Fenris.

I should have known better, but in the alley between Kell's and the Gravity Bar I heard someone crying.

I pulled my Beretta Viper 142and thumbed the safety off, then glanced around the corner of the alley.

Aside from two rats perched on the rim of a dumpster and the usual accumulation of trash, I saw nothing out of the ordinary except a tiny humanoid form.

Its head came up and revealed the most cherubic little face I'd ever laid eyes on. Because of the multiple layers of clothing swathing the child I couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl. It took one bold step toward me with its left foot, men hesitated and let its right leg drag shyly in behind the left. With the length of cuff overhanging its right hand, the child swiped at the tears on its grimy face, then smiled at me.

"Ah you Wolfgang Kies?" it asked in an innocent, mush-mouth voice.

I slipped my Viper back into the shoulder holster I wore under my leather jacket. "Yes." I stepped into the alley and approached the child.

"And do you wook for Docto Waven?" it followed up in a voice rising with expectation.

I dropped to one knee and held out my left hand. "Yes. Are you lost?"

It smiled as agelessly as a Buddha. "No." It held its hands out to me. As it did so, a mist sprayed out from its left sleeve, while the little figure clapped its right sleeve over its own nose and mouth.

The neurotoxin stung my eyes, but before I could even think of running, I'd pulled enough in through my open mouth to drop me on my tail. I coughed weakly,

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whole charade, with a local radio station even doing play-by-play of fantasy dog-day games. The Mariners tried to sue, but when fans stopped coming to games in protest, the suit was dropped and the Seadog name has been a thorn in their sides ever since, even though the team has gotten good.

21 hasten to note that even some newer, wizzer gun wouldn't have kept me out of this situation.

then lay back. As consciousness drained from me, I remember praying one thing over and over: "Please, God, if I have to die, don't let Stealth find out how I got it."

That same little boy now disengaged his hand from that of the fourth member of the youth assembly and approached the head of the bed. "Ah you okay?"

The hurt and fear in his small voice prompted an instant smile of reassurance on my part. "I'm fine."

The albino looked over at the other girl in the room. "Sine, get Cooper away from him. You're supposed to be watching out front."

The blond flipped her long hair back from one shoulder with a contemptuous toss of her head. "Load up Reality 1.0, chummer. These are the Barrens. There's nothing out there and no one will find us here. No one but that damned preacherman." Still, despite her defiance, she held her hand out to the little boy, and Cooper took it. His other hand came up to his face and his thumb disappeared within his mouth.

"Okay, chummers, what's the scan?" I put a nasty7face on and centered my attention on Kyrie. "You tagged me good and you've got me here. You want something, that's obvious, or I'd have woken up dead. Slot and run. I've got places to go and people to see."