Ripping away the protective layers, Laura brought out a credstick showing a thousand nuyen, an old Colt revolver and ammo box—better than nothing, she supposed—a medkit, and her first real deck, a Fuchi 2 with the spare fiber-op cables still attached.
First off, she checked the action of the Colt, then loaded the revolving internal steel cylinder by manually sliding in six individual .38 cartridges. Fragging thing wasn’t even autoloading or caseless, no smartlink, laser sights, nothing. Just a hunk of dead metal. But the oily bullets were explosive hollowpoints capable of blowing a norm’s head off or seriously getting the attention of a troll. It would do for today until she was able to boost, or if abso-fragging-lutely necessary, buy, something better.
Armed, she slid the table in front of the door and checked to make sure the windows were locked. Nobody hiding in the closets or in the empty fridge. Satisfied that she was alone for the mo, Laura connected the Fuchi and ran a quick diagnostic check. The obsolete deck hummed happily as it took entire seconds to perform this simple task, but gave a go status reading of all operational parameters achieved.
Everything took forever with this dinosaur, and the first thing she did was check her mail. Lots of notes posted there by friends and chummers who owed her on the down and dirty of the queered run last night. Most of it she knew from what she’d already picked up on the street. Blackjack was dead, shot, crushed, and burned. Ghost! Not even the yakuza kill you three times. Apparently a wetjob by their own Johnson, who’d attempted to disguise it as a counterstrike by another corp. Lone Star bought it ’cause they didn’t care, but the street was wise. Zapped by your own Johnson, every runner’s worst nightmare. The single flaw in the otherwise perfect wipeout was that Laura Redbird was still alive, and even though she didn’t know what the Johnson looked like, she did know that the slitch worked for the Gunderson Corporation. And while faces and even voices could change, Laura highly doubted anybody would take precautions to protect herself from a decker known to be dead.
Gonna find you,
omae,
Laura vowed to the universe. And I’ll geek you on the spot right in front of your guards. BlackJack was much more than my bedpartner and fellow runner. Lovers may come and go, but we were friends. Something clean that even the sprawl couldn’t steal. But you did, Johnson. And my life isn’t going to start again until yours has ended, slot. End of trans.
The ancient keyboard had only some basic programs in it. She couldn’t do anything fancy, but she could do one very important thing. Stored in this deck’s memory was an RTG number that would grant her legal access to the main datalines of the Miami grid.
Who knew what number this was? Maybe an old lady who happened to mention it once or a local business that had used it in an ad or even the number of some poor slob who’d told her to call him in the morning. Wherever it came from didn’t matter because the line opened .. .
. . . and she stood in one of the main datastreams leading into Miami. The data flowed around her like the rushing rapids of a river. After all that happened last night, now she was home. She belonged in the Matrix.
She’d once programmed her persona into this old deck, and so she appeared in the consensual reality of the Matrix as a gleaming silver falcon. The icon a decker used was of his or her own choosing, and Laura used the modified totem of her Choctaw tribe.
She knew she needed to get off such a public line; in the
Matrix too much data could be as big a pain as too little.
She’d never be able to navigate the data streams the way she wanted using this old deck, so she was going to have to hop out of this line and head for the private nodes. A few standard log-ons and log-offs and she was heading into the heart of Miami by an untraceable route.
So far, this was mostly kosher. Bypassing the public links, she headed straight for the private business lines, hopping from connection to connection as she had a hundred times before when playing her favorite game. Soon Laura was alone as she penetrated deeper and deeper into potentially deadly corporate territory.
In the angled distance, she spied the decahedrons of the Miami city gov, the irregular lumpy bubbles of the Gunderson Corporation’s data banks, and beside them, a collection of squat stumps covered with nasty-looking barbed thorns of no known function. It looked like the Gunderson deckers had been working overtime on either some new defensive IC or system alert. Either way, she’d note it. It might be of great interest next time she stopped off at the Virtual Cabana, a node where she and some of Miami’s randier shadow deckers liked to hang out.
As much as she wanted to hit Gunderson directly to try and find out who’d set them up, she reluctantly turned away from the thorn structures and continued on, flying low through a forest of transparent flowering trees and jumbled cubes all color-coded for different public uses and departments.
Now soaring high in the electron skies, Laura froze motionless in mid-air above the endless horizon of the Matrix. This area of the consenting hallucination of the world computer grid belonged to the Caribbean League Gov and vaguely resembled something by an ancient painter named Salvador Dali, a fave among deckers who’d created the initial sculptured programs.
The ground was translucent red glass filled with billions of stars—databytes—that swirled and flowed like trapped galaxies of fireflies. Rising into the sky were polyhedron skyscrapers of shining green, so large they almost blotted the horizon. They were filled with myriad tiny triangular sections that constantly opened and closed as if a million tiny mouths were accepting or disgorging visitors—databytes—and venting white steam of unknown function. The writhing sky was a vista of quicksilver, endlessly flowing into itself and reforming nano by nano, a mad mirrored plane against which she hoped her own chrome icon was not discernible.
Down on the ground, a dozen or so corporate icons of different styles and types were scrambling about near a small, insignificant geyser of gushing light that formed a fountain from an irregular crater in the dataflow. The main international RTG. From here links to nearly every country could be tapped, although this point was mainly a link to Africa, South America, Amazonia, Aztlan, and the Antarctic Colonies. It was also what the Caribbean League used for “official government business.” Which meant there was nothing of value here. The League had a one island one-vote policy for political decisions, but the rest of the time they seemed to be at each other’s throats. All the various members also had their own individual nodes and their own private links to each other. Pirates had deckers too.
Laura loved this node. It was a decker’s playground ... Satellite uplinks were a blink away, and she could be anywhere in the world in nanoseconds. And the security was nearly always beatable. She loved that the best.
She was about to leave when something caught her eye. Out of the datastream another icon appeared, then another and another, five or six in all. Keeping her distance, she watched as the icons first took on the appearance of the data-processors at the fountain—metahumans in typical Miami neon-colored jumpsuits and sunglasses. But as they headed away from the fountain on one of the telecom lines, the icons changed into black sharks.
The sharks moved along the public telecom grid at an incredibly fast rate, and it almost seemed to Laura that the date flowing along those lines actually moved out of their way. They stopped at a public telecom unit. Or that’s what it must have been before somebody fragged it up. The icons set up a new mode next to it and then changed again to public telecom decker icons. The com unit must have been only recently damaged because the node was still active, but Laura couldn’t figure this one out. Public telecom nodes usually just lay there dormant until a decker used one and got fried or they closed the node. This type of activity was unique. She wondered what it meant, but she had more important things to do right now.
Laura Redbird would cruise the Matrix day and night, night and day, haunting the grid and info nets and virtual hangouts until somebody put out the word that they were hiring for a dangerous run. Any run, she didn’t care, as long as it was local and the bigger the better. Eventually, she’d land a job with the Gunderson Corporation, or better yet, a run
against
the corp. Laura would use that link as the thin edge of a wedge to get closer to the killer Johnson. It would take time, but there was really no other way. Eventually, the murderer would try to find another team of shadowrunners to hose over and Laura Redbird was going to be first in line on-line.
Drek! Name. She’d have to use another name. The Johnson didn’t know what her meat body looked like any more than she did the Johnson’s, but the biff might know her name. She flapped her chrome wings in annoyance. It would be easy enough to change her physical appearance—some bleach for her hair and contact lenses, and she could probably pass for a deeply tanned European instead of the light-skinned Amerind that she was. Null perspiration. What she didn’t want to change was her icon; all her program chips and utilities were set to recognize it. Take days to correct the software. Then again, did she need too? There were lots of bird icons on the grid, so how about changing her name to Talon or Raptor or Falcon? No, something more common, innocuous. Go slow, stay low. Let the target come to you. Hmm, what about Silver? Yeah, perfect, nice and bland. That would do fine.
Here
I
am,
sent Silver silently to the whole world.
Please hire me, Mr
.
Johnson, so I can kill you!
With a bandanna now wrapped around his head to hide the gang tattoo, Thumbs appeared from around the wreckage of an old radio-controlled truck—now a home for twelve, with dogs and kids included—staying low and following the dwarf. Money was honey, and if the halfer had needed muscle once, he might need it again. And the job could easily go to the next guy who happened to be on hand. Which was going to be him.
Piracy had been taking its toll on both shipping and tourism in Miami of late. The fraggers were ruthless and slippery, all the harder to catch because there were so many different groups of various sizes. Sure, Atlantic Security was on the case, but it didn’t seem to be making much of a dent. That was hurting the local economy bad, the trickle-down effect slowing everybody’s biz to a crawl. While Shorty there smelled like money and trouble. Thumbs’ two favorite things, outside of beer and sex. Which were practically the same thing: money-trouble, beer-sex, one always got you the other. Or so it seemed.
Bending his knees to keep as low as possible, Thumbs watched as the dwarf scooted into a used clothing store. He knew the place. It was run by an old ork who’d lost both legs in a bad run and never quite managed to get enough nuyen to buy new ones. Lucky Pete was anything but. But he owed Thumbs favors, lots of ’em, and now no punksters would ever bother the cripple again after Thumbs had had some grisly fun with them. Mighty hard to ride a Scorpion or a Harley when ya can’t get a good grip on the handlebars anymore.
Moving for the pink alley that led to the back door of the blue store, Thumbs froze as the dwarf came out again wearing sandals, a laser-white pair of shorts, a holiday shirt, sunglasses, and a beard almost as big as him. So big in fact that it nearly hid the Nikon & Howell portacam slung around his neck. Thumbs checked for the telltale map and there it was, sticking out of the halfer’s back pocket like the dorsal fin of a shark. The official flag for I’M A FRAGGING TOURIST.
Smart move. During the day, nobody sane would ever bother him. So he was safe from molestation, unless he ran into someone who knew and didn’t like him. If the locals found out he was a fake, they’d become a mob and violently tear the dwarf apart with their bare hands, then set his bloody bones on fire as a warning to any other braindeads who dared to violate the unwritten law of Overtown.
Thumbs gave a half-smile as he crossed the street to stay behind the Johnson. Little guy must be desperate to try that, and he obviously had more nuyen, a lot more, to get Lucky to cough up a disguise that fast for an alien. Just for a tick, Thumbs debated sliding into the store to get the scan from the ork. But his quarry was moving with a purpose now that he was disguised and Thumbs knew he’d lose him if he dallied.
“Take a cab, nullhead,” he mentally ordered the other. Be a lot easier to track the halfer sitting down. But the dwarf scuttled along, humming pictures of everything and everybody. Which made more than a few of the local denizens scurry for cover. Last thing a SINless gleeb wanted was some alien recording the fact that he lived but did not have a System Identification Number. That could get a person killed down here.
On a littered corner, a girl troll from the Slammers raised an arm to hail him. Thumbs quickly gave her a curt hand slice and frowned, never pausing for a beat. The fem’s face went neutral and she leaned back against the crumbling brick facade of the old movie theatre, now a joyboy brothel, and began cleaning her nails with a Japanese-style long knife.
Smart. Talia was shaping up real good. And not just ’cause she was reaching her teens. Big troll like him had lots of beds to warm, but drek-few chummers who knew when to keep their fragging mouths shut, [f the hammer fell on this and things got dirty, Thumbs’d bring her in as cannon fodder and see if she really had the stuff. He wondered if she had a gun. If not, he could supply her. For a price, of course. Nothing was free.
Why would anybody shoot a telecom?
Moving through the thickening traffic of the wageslaves heading home, the answer hit him. To stop a possible trace. No phone link would mean no ID. Even an ace decker couldn’t reconstruct what was no longer there. Then he remembered how fast the sirens had sounded. Lone Star would never race into Overtown simply for a blown phone. The police had bigger problems than that just staying alive in this town. But no, they’d been on their way. Ergo, some red-hot decker had already done a trace. If only he could check to make sure.