Frag this paranoid drek, my mind’s not built for it! Give me a gang to infiltrate—or, better yet, a troop of fragging Ork Scouts or some drek—and I’ll be a happy little narc. Leave the deep, paranoid, multilayered, cerebral crap to neurotics who are so twisted they meet themselves coming round corners, that’s what I say.
And hey, isn’t, that a thought?
I pick up the pocket secretary again and carefully save the text file. Then I start scanning through the little unit’s help system. There’s a trick a chummer taught me about a year or so back that might really help out here. If the secretary has the feature-set I need, of course. I wish I’d paid the extra thousand nuyen and gotten the fragging manual . . .
* * *
This pay phone’s seen better days. Every exposed surface is covered with graffiti, most in English or Cityspeak, but some in that brain-fragged pseudolanguage the elves call Sperethiel—some of it actually funny (“Help your local police: beat yourself up”). The heavy metal enclosure of the phone itself is dented across the front, the impressions unmistakably made by the impact of light bullets. (I guess the calming, aggression-reducing display on the screen while a call’s being placed didn’t work for somebody.) All the circuitry seems to work, though—except for the video pickup, which I broke myself.
It takes forever to make the connection. Not surprising, really. The pay phone is calling the cel unit built into my Yamaha pocket secretary, which is sitting on the bug-infested bed in my room at The Promise. The secretary is holding that call and using a parallel channel to place another call—that’s multiple call capability, the feature I spent so fragging long looking for in the help files—to a number I programmed into it before I left the flophouse. When the recipient of that second call picks up the phone, the secretary patches the two lines together. Simple (yeah, right).
And the recipient does pick up. “Yes?”
There’s a sequence of clicks, buzzes, and electronic echoes. For a moment I’m worried that I’ve asked too much of the pocket secretary, and that it’s busy slagging itself down and setting fire to my bed. But then the line clears. Audio only, which means my call might have been forwarded to a cellular on the other end. “Yes?” the precise voice says again on the other end of the line.
“It’s me, Nicholas,” I say, and just like the last time I wait for him to clue me in.
“Richard,” Finnigan replies, and I hear the honest pleasure in his voice. I relax—he wouldn’t have used my name, or sounded so glad to hear from me, if he was in any kind of trouble. “Far be it from me to discourage an acquaintance from calling for a chat, but are you really sure this is wise?”
I have to grin. When I first met the old fart, I figured this overdone way of speaking was a put-on for my benefit. Didn’t take me long to realize that’s how he always talks, and probably how he thinks, too. “Wise enough.”
“Phones can be traced,” he says doubtfully.
“They can find the one that’s calling you, I don’t care,” I state. If the drek hits the pot, IrreleCorp, the Cutters, or the Star can have the pocket secretary, and they’re welcome to any fleas or other infestation they pick up at The Promise.
I can almost hear Finnigan shrug. “As you say,” he accedes, but the doubt’s still there in his voice. He sighs. “So, now. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“Lightbringer Services Corp for one,” I tell him.
“Oh?” Now curiosity overrides the doubt, and I know I’ve got him hooked. “From your tone I assume you already know that Lightbringer does actually exist, that it’s not a false front?”
“You got that,” I agree, “it’s real. And it’s in bed with Telestrian Industries Corporation.”
"Indeed?” he asks mildly. “Well, I must admit I find little of note in that. A great number of companies are, as you put it, 'in bed with’ Telestrian. By far the most widespread and aggressive conglomerate in Tir Tairngire, with ambitions that extend far beyond the boundaries of elven territory."
"You know about TIC, then?”
“A little,” Finnigan admits. “Perhaps not enough to satisfy your curiosity, however, because I take it that is where your inquiries are leading.” He paused, and I know what he’s going to ask.
So I cut him off. “I can’t tell you why I figure the tie-in with TIC’s important, Nicholas. You’ll understand why.”
Finnigan pauses, then, “I see,” he says slowly, “yes, I really think I do see. It’s not simply the fact that Lightbringer is joint-venturing with TIC—I rather imagine Lightbringer has a similar arrangement with many other organizations. It must be something else that piqued your curiosity. What, I wonder?”
“Don’t push it, Nicholas,” I warn him quietly.
“Hmm. ‘ “Curiouser and curiouser!” said Alice.’ You really must tell me the complete story some time.” He pauses. “I take it you have a specific request to make of me, Richard. Is that not so?”
My turn to pause. “I need someone to dig deep into TIC,” I tell him at last. “Deep, Nicholas. Turn over all the fragging rocks and stir the drek.”
Finnigan goes, “Hmm,” again. Then, “You obviously have some level of intelligence on the corporation,” he muses. “To discover the connection with Lightbringer, for example.”
I shrug, even though I know he can’t see me. “A chummer sent some demons and smartframes out for me.”
“Preliminary research, then,” he says slowly. “Autonomous data search constructs”—he rarely calls things what the rest of us do—"are of limited use for anything more extreme.” He thinks for a moment, then continues, “The um,
colleague
who created the constructs is no longer available?”
The pain and the rage twist in my gut. “No,” I say, and my voice is cold and emotionless—almost inhuman—in my own ears.
There’s a long silence at the other end. Finally, Finnigan says, “Yes, well . . .” Another pause, nowhere near as long. “I believe I can help you in that regard,” he says slowly.
“You?” That surprises me. “You write fiction.”
He chuckles dryly, and I realize I’ve said something that would slot off just about anyone else. Finnigan’s not just anyone, thank Ghu. “Yes, I write fiction. But in order to twist reality, you have to
understand
reality. You have to know the laws in order to break them.” He thinks for a moment, and I can almost see him tugging at his upper lip the way he does when he’s puzzling something through. “Yes,” he says at last—firmly, as though he’s not going to take any drek from anyone on his decision. “I have the access and the skill—and, so it seems, the motivation—to handle this for you. It’s been a long time since I did any deep research in the corporate realm, and high time I took up the challenge again.” Another pause. “It might take a while, you know. I assume I won’t be able to call you.”
I smile grimly at that one, and don’t even bother answering. Instead, “How long?” I ask him.
“It depends,” he says with another chuckle. “I’ll get on it right away, but depending on how deeply things are buried it might take considerable time. A couple of days, probably, perhaps more.”
An uncomfortable thought strikes me. “You’re not planning to deck into TIC itself, are you?”
It’s a full-throated laugh that comes from the phone’s speaker this time. “Not even if my life depended on it. Or yours, for that matter. The sole result of even trying would be to call down whatever security assets TIC has in Seattle on my own precious cranium. No, third-party data sources only, I assure you. The effort involved and the expertise required might be high, but the danger is low. By the by, have you ever heard of Shadowland?”
I shake my head. “No. What is it, a club?”
“You might say that,” Finnigan muses. “Not a nightclub, but the more traditional notion of ‘club’, with a very, um, rarefied membership.”
“A poli?”
“Not as such. Shadowland is the name some people give to an extensive electronic bulletin board service.”
“Like UOL?” I ask. “Never heard of it.”
“I'd be greatly surprised if you had,” he says dryly, then corrects himself, “or maybe not, at that.” He pauses to order his thoughts, then goes on, “As I say, Shadowland is a BBS, with no fixed geographical location. The server hubs and nodes that make up the network ‘float,’ like illegal crap games. Rarely are they in the same place for more than a week at a time. So, too, the access lines—the LTG numbers and communication protocols—are highly variable.”
“Why so much security? Who’s after them?”
“The megacorporations,” Finnigan shoots back at once. “Governments. Law enforcement agencies. Effectively, everyone.”
And suddenly I know what he’s talking about. “Shadowrunners,” I say sourly.
Finnigan chuckles again, and I realize my reaction’s given him another clue in the fragging puzzle-game he’s playing— guess who/what Larson is. “Useful assets, at times,” he points out.
I snort. Too many people—especially in Seattle, I’ve found—seem to put shadowrunners up on some kind of pedestal, viewing them as fragging “heroes of the underdog” or some such drek. Maybe Finnigan too. Who knows? Me, I think they’re scum—mercenary street drek, no more heroic than the guttermeat informers and stoolies and rats I spent too much time dealing with in Milwaukee. They’d sell out their mothers for a few nuyen, and the only reason they wouldn’t do the same for their fathers is that they generally don’t know who their fathers are.
“Take the contact data anyway, Richard,” Finnigan urges. “It might be useful.” An LTG number, an extension number, and a complex string that has to be an access protocol of some kind, appear on the phone’s data screen. Out of instinct, I commit them to memory. “They’re current, I think,”
the old writer reassures me.
“How would you know?” I ask, suddenly curious.
“Stories come from everywhere, Richard,” he chides me, “perhaps from Shadowland most of all.” He sighs. “Unfortunately, the best ones I cannot use.”
By the time I’m off the phone with Finnigan, the sun’s going down—or it would be, if you could see it through the clouds. All sunset really means at the moment is a transition from wet, dark gray to wet, darker gray. A few streetlights fire up, and the braziers and fires I remember from last night start to flicker and smoke again.
With that, I feel the force of my rage once more. By all that’s fragging holy. I’m going to find out who scragged Cat and tried to do the same to me, who ratted me out to the Cutters. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to invest a lot of time and a lot of inventiveness in making them pay. In full.
How I’m going to do it is the hard part. At the moment I’ve got no assets—unless you count Nicholas Finnigan, which I don’t, not really. A couple of leads, but nothing solid, nothing you couldn’t read a couple of different and mutually exclusive ways. My resources are limited to the few thousand nuyen on my private credsticks. Of course, I don’t dare touch the contingency fund set up by the Star— not unless I want each transaction to fly a little flag saying “Geek me!” No, wait, I forgot about buying the fragging pocket secretary. That brings my monetary resources down to .. . oh, something like one or two hundred nuyen. Frag! Not even enough to get out of the sprawl.
Which, I've got to admit, is starting to look like a
fragging good idea. Not to get away for long, though. There’s a difference between running for the hills and making a strategic retreat to regroup and plan the next battle. Seattle may be a megaplex of three-plus million, but it’s a very small town when you want to hide. It’d make my life much easier if I could pull the old fade, hang for a few weeks—in Sioux land, maybe, or further south—until the dust settles some, then make my reappearance. Armed with information and resources and maybe a big fragging gun or two. The more I think about it, the better that starts to sound.
And that brings me back to resources. I
need
some, priyatel, and that’s all there is to it. I might be able to get out of the sprawl on two hundred nuyen, possibly even make it out of the Salish-Shidhe lands into another nation without such tight ties to Seattle. But once I got there I’d have zilch in the way of resources. And you need money to get money, even in the Awakened world of 2054—maybe
particularly
in 2054. Ask the elves of Tarislar.
So that’s why I’m jandering back toward The Promise on this cold and rainy early evening. That fragging pocket secretary. Heroes on the trid—and probably in Finnigan’s books, too—never seem to worry about credit when they cut loose from their corp or government or whatever. They always seem able to buy the guns and the grenades and the ammo and the geegaws—not to mention drinks for the biffs and a room in the hottest hotel—without worrying where the next nuyen’s coming from. Me, I’ve got to skulk on back to my flop to pick up the pocket secretary so I can sell the pecker again—for half what I paid for it a couple of hours ago, you can bet your hoop on that.
It puts me at risk, or course, and it effectively counteracts that wiz little stunt I pulled with the relayed phone call. If anyone was monitoring Finnigan’s number, a trace on my call would send them hustling off to Tarislar and The Promise. And now that’s just where I’m going. No doubt things would be going very different if Finnigan were plotting this.
The one good thing about heading back for the flop is that any team out looking for me would expect to find me inside the building, because that’s where the phone is. They won’t be looking for me out on the street, inbound, which means I should be able to make them before they make me. Depending on who it is that might come a-visiting, I’ll know something I didn’t know before, maybe something important. (That’s the story I keep telling myself to counteract the
fear in my gut as I get closer and closer to The Promise.)