Argent’s grinning tightly, but it’s not an expression of humor. “I wondered if you’d catch that,” he says quietly.
“I could have that drek inside me, too.”
“You could.” he stresses. “But you weren’t in the area of the spell effect at the second meet—if that’s actually what went down.”
True, but not as reassuring as it might be. If my whole chain of logic is right, I’ve got a biological time bomb in my lungs or in my guts, and whoever put it there can set it off with the casting of a single spell. Only with a major effort do I stuff those fears deep down into the mental swamp. They’ll bubble up again, sure—and probably at the worst possible time—but at least they’re out of the way for the moment. What I tell myself is that, okay, maybe I’ve got the bug in my system. But activating it means the bad guys— whoever they are—have to target me with the trigger spell. Which requires them knowing where the frag I am and that I’ve been infected with the virus in the first place. Chances of that? Pretty fragging slim, or at least that’s the way I choose to look at it. Who knows? Maybe I avoided infection in the first place.
The chromed runner's still watching me, so I slap a frosty expression on my face. “Yeah, well, doesn’t make much fragging difference, does it?” I say. His lip quirks ever so slightly, and I know he scans the truth, but isn’t calling me on it. At least he’s got the decency to leave a man to his own fragging paranoia.
We cruise on through the gathering dark for a few minutes more, then again it’s Argent who breaks the heavy silence. “Who?” he asks.
He doesn’t have to elaborate. “Timothy Telestrian and his faction,” I say flatly.
“You don’t know that,” he points out.
“The Telestrian angle's there,” I stress. “Lynne Telestrian and Lightbringer establish that. And if it’s not Timothy, we’ve got frag all else to go on. I say we stick with what we’ve got until something else comes up to prove otherwise.”
Argent nods slowly. He doesn’t argue because he knows I’m right. If one lead is all you’ve got, you follow it up even if it doesn't seem one hundred percent germane, hoping it’ll
break something else loose. The only other alternative is to
sit around waiting for something to fall into your lap, and that’s a bulldrek waste of time.
“Timothy’s prez of BioLogic, isn’t he?” I muse. Argent nods confirmation. “BioLogic sounds like it might be into genetic drek, doesn’t it?"
"A gengineering firm? Could be. I’ll have Peg dig into it.”
“Go after any gengineering activity under the TIC umbrella,” I say. “The link might not be that obvious.”
He nods again. “I’ll get her on it.” He’s silent for a moment, then, “It might take some time. Maybe you’d best stay low profile in the meantime.”
I find myself thinking about the smears under Paco’s eyes and the sound of his breathing, and my skin crawls. “I think I’m down for that,” I say quietly.
Paco died that night at about 0230. Doc Dicer phoned me with the news, through the same kind of blind relay I’d used to contact Argent in the first place. (The runner had resisted the idea of giving the doc the number, despite their apparent friendship, but I held my ground, and eventually he caved.) She didn’t say, “He went peacefully,” or any of that feel-good drek doctors usually feed to the families. She didn’t have to tell me anything, I know how he went—inhale, exhale, click . . . and then nothing.
The news slotted me up so much I couldn’t get back to sleep until the thunderclouds were starting to lighten in the east. Another friend gone. And of course it didn’t help to know the same fragging bug might be lurking in my own system. When I did get back to sleep, the dreams weren’t pleasant. I was back in the parking lot that was Hell, but this time everyone around me was breathing like Paco, and I could feel the start of the bubbling mucus in my own lungs. Just fragging peachy.
When I finally got up to face the day at about 1030, I decided to take Argent’s advice to heart and keep my head way down low. Like, as low as it’s possible to get, leaving the room only to visit the drekker. Apparently Argent had clued Jean Trudel in. so I found meals—greasy bar food, no surprise there—delivered to me upstairs. Breakfast—and lunch and dinner—in bed, if I wanted it. All three meals Bavarian-style soy-smokies sitting in buns the texture of styrofoam packing material. Yum.
While I wasn’t cramming grease down my yam, I took some time to check out the capabilities of the room’s telecom. Extensive, in a word—more extensive than my ability to take full advantage of them. For a couple of hours I wrestled with a nasty case of ESO—Equipment Smarter than Operator—until I stumbled across the interactive online help, and got my hand electronically held as I scoped out what the machine could do for me.
Not that it would help particularly. Sure, having a slick and wizzer telecom’s all very well, but you’ve still got to know how to go about researching databases and accessing the drek you need. Like, you can have the hottest car on the road, but if you don’t know how to drive the puppy, it’s not going to win you any races. So I spent a good whack of the day getting bounced by the security around systems like Lone Star’s basic personnel files—security that any decker worthy of the name could have sliced through without missing a beat. Frag, I couldn’t even crack into the local Stock Watch service—a nominally open system that wouldn't give me the time of day because I haven’t paid a subscription fee—to see if TIC stocks were moving up or down. (I don’t savvy much about that kind of biz, but I’ve heard often enough that you can scope a frag of a lot about what a corp’s up to by catching what’s happening to its share prices.)
So eventually I was relegated to scanning the newsfax databases—those at least I could access without some kind of fragging subscription. I ran an even dozen searches, using different parameters, key words, and Boolean operators— every reasonable combination of “plague," "epidemic," "infection," "retrovirus,” and ‘’gang” I could come up with.
Coming up with one huge whack of nothing. Nothing at all, not even a denial of the report I’d heard on the NewsNet feed on my way to Ravenna. No retraction, or apology, or explanation for claims of a new VITAS epidemic. No comments from Dr. Blatherman. Nothing. It was as if the original reports had simply never occurred at all. Total media blackout. Fragging scary, chummer.
And that’s how I spent the day after Paco’s death. And the morning of the next day as well, and part of that afternoon. By the time Argent walked in the door, I was on my way toward a good dose of cabin fever.
“What the frag kept you, Argent?” I demand. The chromed runner doesn’t respond to my polite greeting, but only crosses to the armchair and slumps down in it. He’s tired, again, but fragged if I know why. It’s not as if he’s the one doing the datasearches; he’s passing them off to Peg whatever-her-name-is, the SanFran decker. Makes me wonder if he’s doing other biz on the side, and it’s that that’s scragging him out so bad. Yeah, that would be typical, wouldn’t it? Got to get some cred flow happening, or the International Federation of Shadowrunners will pull his union card as an accredited mercenary bastard.
Or maybe he just hasn’t been getting any sleep, worrying about this terror-bug drek. Frag, I probably don’t look much better. “Got anything?” I ask.
He tosses me a chip carrier. “Slot this.”
I do, slipping it into the telecom’s data port. Argent gives me the access code, which I type in. The screen immediately fills with text and organizational charts that look like circuit-path diagrams or maybe webs spun by spiders jazzed up on overdoses of electric lady. “What the frag is it?”
“That,” he says, “is the TIC umbrella—or maybe ‘empire' is a better word. Two dozen major divisions. Twice that number of wholly owned subsidiaries. Major equity positions in maybe a hundred other corps, and joint-ventures and strategic partnerships with at least as many.”
I purse my lips in a soundless whistle. “Impressive. I didn’t think there were any real Tir megacorps.”
Argent chuckles wryly. “TIC’s a decent-sized conglomerate,” he says, “but it’s nowhere near being a megacorporation. Not yet. MCT or Yamatetsu or any of the triple-A megas could buy the whole TIC network out of contingency credit.”
I don’t really want to think about that at the moment. Instead, I gesture at the complex drek spread over the screen. “Talk me though this, will you?”
“Where do you want to start?”
“The gengineering angle, remember?”
He chuckles grimly. "As I said, where do you want to start?”
Uh-oh. “Lots of gengineering activity?” I guess.
“You could say that.” His voice is dry, ironic. “Peg estimates that forty-seven percent of the empire’s entire cred flow is related to gengineering, either directly or indirectly. Less than a quarter of the business entities are into gengineering, but they tend to be the more profitable ones.”
I nod slowly, taking that in. ‘Then what about the . . . the ‘business entities’ in Timothy Telestrian’s sphere of influence?"
"Peg’s already broken that out,” the runner tells me. “Go to Bookmark One.”
I key in the command, and the display changes. Still a twisted spider web, but at least the spider was less ambitious. I shake my head in frustration. “Why so much focus on gengineering?” I want to know.
Argent chuckles again. “It’s the Tir, chummer. Don’t forget that. Biotech’s their big thing. If they can modify things without using techniques as . . . inelegant ... as implants”—he clicks his metal fingers together—“that’s what they’ll do. They’re gengineering everything down there. Food crops, algae, bacteria, animals, plants, even themselves.”
I think about it for a few seconds. “Okay, then how about limiting it by outfits that gengineer viruses?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t know much about gengineering, do you?” he says rhetorically. “One of the most dependable techniques uses tailored viruses to insert plasmids into target cells.”
“In fragging English,” I growl.
“Everybody uses viruses, chummer. No joy there.”
I grind my teeth. “Okay,” I say, “how about backgrounds in bioweapons?”
“Bookmark Two,” he directs, and I key in the command. The display shifts, and now we’re down to something I can almost understand. A dozen or so companies—all still interlinked, but the network’s much simpler and more straightforward. “What’s their ...” —I search for the right word—“their allegiance?” I ask.
The shadowrunner grins, and I know we’re finally starting to get somewhere. “Most of them are loyal to Lynne Telestrian, and through her to James,” he says. “But there’s one particular outfit that’s firmly in Timothy’s camp, and I scan them as real scary. Check Bookmark Three.”
I do, and read the text header that’s displayed. “Nova Vita Biotechnologies.” For the second time in as many days—or thereabouts—I find myself dredging through the Latin I learned too many years ago. “Nova Vita—‘new life’. Good name for a gengineering outfit.” I pause. “And Nova Vita’s got background in bioweapons?”
“That’s the buzz on the Shadowland BBS,” Argent confirms. “They’ve got a major facility out in a place called Christmas Valley—maybe eighty klicks southeast of Bend— that does bioweapons research for the Tir military.”
This time I whistle out loud. “Serious drek.” But then I realize this doesn’t make sense.
The runner sees my frown, and cuts in, “There’s more. Nova Vita Biotechnology’s got a subsidiary, Nova Vita Cybernetics, with a research facility right on the Columbia—Salish-Shidhe side of the river, for a wonder—at a place called Pillar Rock. An isolated facility, by the way, not connected to the Matrix.” He chuckles. “Which slotted Peg off something fierce.”
No skin off my hoop what slots off Peg: my attention’s on his earlier statement. “Oh? Why's a Tir outfit got its research on S-S Council turf?” Then I shake my head. “What’s it matter anyway? The Christmas Valley outfit’s the one that’s important. We’re after the gengineering and bioweapons connection, not the cyberware side, right?” Argent doesn’t say anything, just sits there grinning. “All right, fraghead,” I snap, “tell me what I’ve missed.”
He shrugs mildly. “Peg just found it interesting that there’ve been some personnel transfers between Nova Vita Biotech and Nova Vita Cybernetics over the last year or so.”
Oh-ho. “Gengineers, by any chance?”
“Coincidentally,” Argent confirms with a nod. “Chimeric gene splicers, a couple of hotshots at viral tailoring. Not the kind of skillsets you’d expect to be recruited by a cyberware outfit, neh? Makes you wonder if NVC hasn’t broadened its horizons a little.”
“Makes you wonder,” I echo. “And I don’t suppose NVC’s assumed any military contracts from NV Biotech?"
"Peg thought of that and checked, but actually, no.” Argent’s wearing a real poker-face now, and I know we’re getting close to the punch line. “You might want to check a list of the outfits NVC has signed contracts with in the last two years. Bookmark Four.”
I jump to the new place in the text, and quickly scan the list that appears. A long list, populated by some of the major megacorps like Mitsuhama, Yamatetsu, Fuchi, even Aztechnology. NVC is either a significant player in the cyberware field or else these corps are looking for gengineering expertise. I’m about to turn to Argent and ask him whether he or Peg knows, when a name near the bottom of the list catches my eye. Lone Star Security Services (Seattle) Incorporated.
“Interesting, huh?” Argent asks quietly.