Lone Wolf

GANG OF WAR

My H&K’s ready, and the wire’s humming, ready to pop anything that threatens me. I carefully push open the lounge door and scan the room. Drek everywhere—chip carriers, empty flash-pak food containers, beer cans, the usual—piled on the two low tables and the handful of chairs. On the couch is a figure—and it’s so bundled up in coats, stained blankets, and the lounge’s curtains that I can’t even tell what sex it is. And it’s snoring, but it sounds more like someone trying to breathe through scuba gear clogged with porridge, I feel smothered just hearing it.

I move across the room using the H&K’s flash-suppressor, I push the fold of curtain back from the figure’s head so I can see the face. It’s Paco, and he looks like drek. His skin’s not so much white as a faint tinge of blue, and his lips are cracked and peeling, showing fissures here and there so deep they’re down to pink meat. There’s thick, yellow-white mucus trailing from his nose. I know why his breathing’s got that underwater sound to it—his lungs must be full of the drek.

His puffy eyes blink, then slowly open. They’re so bloodshot I can barely see any white at all. They roll blindly for a moment then settle on my face.

“Help me,” he says, and his voice is a tortured, horrible, bubbling thing. “I got the bug, ’mano. I think I’m gonna die.”

SHADOWRUN : 12

LONE WOLF

Nigel D. Findley

To Fred,

my favorite (as yet) unpublished novelist

Live with wolves, howl like a wolf.

—Russian proverb

Book One

1

Another fragging raid. And, typically, at the worst possible time.

We’re in one of the warehouses owned by the Cutters— the small one way the hell and gone out east of Lake Meridian—loading crates of Czech assault rifles into the back of a GMC Bulldog truck for transshipment to points south. I’m not supposed to know the rifles’ final destination, but I make it my business to know what I’m not supposed to. Call it fragging survival. So, anyway, this shipment’s earmarked for some hotheads down in Sioux Nation who apparently have some minor bitch with the local government that they think only high-velocity ammunition will solve. Just the kind of drek that’s business as usual for the Cutters. And, as far as I can figure, it always has been, even from their early days as just a local gang in Los Angeles back eighty years or so. The Cutters don’t do high-volume in the arms biz (you want to outfit an army, you go see the Mafia, the yaks, or some friendly government), but they do pride themselves on quality. Take the crated assault rifles that are doing such a number on my lower back: top quality vz 88Vs that fell off the back of a truck in Brno, or some fragging place, and somehow found their way to 144th Avenue Southeast. Of course, the Cutters are into hundreds of other kinds of biz as well—from drugs and chips to kidnapping and extortion to (I drek you not) freelance security work for the occasional corp. And that, of course, is why I am where I am.

Which, at the moment, happens to be grunting and wrestling with eighty-plus kilos of ordnance in a wooden crate apparently tailor-made to send stiletto-sized slivers right through the palms and fingers of my work gloves. The slag holding up the other end of my crate—Fraser, a malnourished ork with ratty dreadlocks—doesn’t seem to mind, but mainly because he’s under the wire. His midbrain is constantly hooked to a signal from a simsense deck, but it’s one set for the lowest possible intensity. Not enough to cut him off entirely from reality, but definitely enough to color his every perception of the real world. Hell, for all I know, the same slivers that are driving me crazy could be making
his
hands feel like he’s got a good hold on Honey Brighton’s luscious yams.

There are four other guys humping crates with us: Piers and Lucas, Paco and En. (I don’t envy Paco, having to keep up with En, who pops methamphetamines for breakfast.) All but Fraser are humans, which means we’re struggling with the limitations of human muscle (except for En, who either doesn’t know or care). Why didn’t the big bosses send along a couple of trolls to help out? The huge trog everyone calls Box could have tucked a crate under each arm and then fragging
run
to the truck.

The six of us in the grunt squad aren’t the only ones sent to the warehouse, of course. We’ve got three spotters out, plus Katrina, our driver. She leaning against the Bulldog’s front end, staring off at nothingness and looking much too scrawny to carry the rack that fills out her kevlar T-shirt. A real space-case, that Katrina.

Of course, it isn’t nothingness she’s staring at. A fiberoptic line as thin as one of her greasy hairs runs from her datajack to the truck’s comm panel, where some repeaters are pulling in signals from the warehouse’s surveillance cameras. When Ranger and the others assigned us out here to pick up the ordnance, they gave us the spotters plus our own eyes, and that was it. But once I got aboard and realized what the Bulldog’s onboard electronics were capable of, I felt smug as hell as I set Katrina to watching out for our sorry asses. Great idea.

Too bad it didn’t work worth a frag.

One moment everything’s chill, then the next there’s gunfire from outside, and Katrina’s down like she’s been pole-axed.

Panic stations. I drop my end of the crate—not worrying about Fraser on the other end—and sprint toward Katrina. Nothing personal there, but knowing what took her down might make a big difference in the minutes to come.

She’s flat out, maybe dead, but still in one piece. No holes, no missing meat, no blood Either somebody sent something nasty through the circuits to her datajack or else there’s a mage kicking around. If it’s a mage, we’re hosed big-time because we don’t have any magic of our own to fight back with. If it’s something technological, it’s probably a “tingler” sending enough of an overvoltage through the surveillance systems to overload Katrina’s filters—and maybe Katrina too.

And then everyone’s running around like a fragging elven fire drill. Fraser’s hopping around on one foot screaming a blue streak while everyone else is hauling out their weapons and looking for cover.

As for me, I just hunker down next to Katrina and scope things out. If you don’t know where the threat’s coming from, running like a spooked rat is as likely to take you straight into the guns of the bad guys as it is to save your hoop. Besides, I want to see if I can figure out who’s hitting us.

There are plenty of candidates. Neither the Mafia nor the yaks would bother to harass the Cutters, but we’re always butting heads against some of the Seoulpa rings. The Cutters are tougher than the other local gangs—except for the Ancients, maybe—which scares off some, but makes others occasionally want to take their shots at the biggest kid on the block. So it could be any of a dozen interested parties.

More gunfire from around the back of the warehouse, and the other boys of the grunt squad are suddenly finding new cover. I don’t bother: the Bulldog will cover me from a number of angles, and if push comes to frag, I can always hide under it, or inside it.

Another burst of fire, this time from yet another angle and accompanied by a scream. Somebody’s down, and from the direction of the sound, I’d guess it’s one of our spotters. Cursing almost as fiercely as Fraser, I pull out my SMG. The feather-touch of the wire in my brain tells me the skillwires are pulling data from the skillsoft plugged into the socket at the back of my neck. My palm tingles, and some normally unused part of my brain lights up as the gun’s circuitry synchs up with the tech in my head. Instead of merely holding a gun, I now feel like the weapon’s a living part of me. Like, at last my arm is whole again, or some such drek. Data floods into my mind as the smartgun and my skillsoft do their digital handshaking. Heckler & Koch 227-S, recoil-suppression active, silencer at nominal one hundred percent effectiveness—as if it matters—twenty-eight rounds in the clip, one in the pipe.

And that’s the problem. I’ve got one spare clip and that’s it. Same with Fraser and the rest of the boys: maybe a hundred and fifty rounds between us. Hell, we’re not supposed to get into a scrap; that’s what the muscleboys outside are for. If anything, we’re overarmed to handle the one or two leakers we thought we might run into. Well, that’s all changed now, for fragging sure. Another frantic burst of firing, another howl—this one wailing on for a while before cutting off sharply. Sounds like the hardboys are taking a pasting. I look around at my “command,” which is what these sorry scroffs have suddenly become. They’re all hunkered down with ordnance out, the red dots of sighting lasers tracking everywhere, even over each other. It's just getting better and better.

But, hold the phone, you say. What about all those dandy Czech assault rifles? Well, maybe it’s true that we’ve got three or four ARs each, but bullets we ain’t got. The ammo that was supposed to be the other half of the Sioux shipment is stored somewhere else. (Don’t ask me why; some perverted extension of “range safety,” I guess.) So unless we feel like using the rifles as clubs, all those crates full of ARs don’t mean squat.