Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (17 page)

“Pasadena,” I said, keeping it simple.

“What’s that? A Humanis dumping ground for freaks?”

Second ork was clearly the humorist of the group.

“It’s a blended community,” I said to Monica. “No ghettos. And between the college and the university there’s a lot of opportunities.”

I didn’t come right out and say she could do a lot better in Pasadena than in the L.A. refugee camps, but no one in the alley misunderstood what I meant.

“She belongs with us.”

The woman’s voice was low, but it seemed to resonate off the plascrete beneath my feet. The alley walls didn’t so much echo as repeat her words.

I was not surprised to discover the middle of the boulevard was no longer shrouded in darkness.

The speaker was ancient by ork standards and wrapped in several layers of symboled robes. Her hair was gold. I mean the metal, not blonde. Most folks would have thought it was a wig, but the filaments grew from her scalp. Fine as optical fiber, they were braided into intricate patterns—an echo of the web that connected her to the astral and to the city.

Her eyes were white with cataracts but she had no trouble keeping them locked on me as she strode forward. The black staff in her hand rang softly against the plascrete; metal, no doubt crafted from whatever she considered the bones of the world around her.

Middle ork shifted, making way for the street shaman without looking at her.

“This is our child, a daughter of this city.” The resonance wasn’t illusionary. I felt the vibration through my soles. “She belongs with us.”

I felt Monica tense beneath my arm.

Another step, halfway between us and Monica’s would-be rescuers, the shaman stopped as though she’d hit a wall. Her eyebrows—silver wire, I noticed—climbed toward her hairline. She looked down at Dog, sitting with his tongue lolling from his grinning mouth, and then back up at me. It took no great leap of logic to deduce what had happened; Dog had raised the astral curtain enough to let her know what she was up against.

The shaman gathered herself, and for a moment I thought she was going to try to overcome. I braced myself as well as I could while maintaining my reason, and tried to anticipate what attack would make sense to an urban.

Instead, she relaxed visibly. “Respect.”

“Respect,” I agreed and dropped the confusion spell. If she was giving respect, the three tough guys weren’t going to give trouble.

For their parts, the bully boys blinked and muttered, looking disoriented as their minds suddenly cleared. The erstwhile comic gave me a bug-eyed stare, apparently the only one to realize why they’d been too bewildered to attack.

Monica stood straight as her own uncertainty evaporated. She didn’t pull free of my arm, but she was no longer leaning against me for support.

My own cranium took a deep, cleansing breath. Don’t try this at home, kids.

“This child is as connected to this city,” the shaman said, speaking clear and straight, with none of the drama and declaration of her earlier pronouncements. “She belongs here.”

“That’s her choice to make.”

“She has made it.”

I wasn’t surprised when Monica stepped forward, breaking her contact with me.

“Wait a sec, kid.”

She turned back to face me. She looked excited, anticipatory, maybe a little nervous. Pretty much confirming what I already knew. You can’t get complex expressions like that under compulsion.

I took her too-young hand in mine, pressing one of my old-fashioned business cards into her palm.

“If you need us, send ‘Bastion Chien’ to Pasadena.”

Monica smiled, her eyes clear despite the pain meds.

“You’re a good man,” she said.

She turned away again. The shaman half-turned her head, indicating the street behind her. Monica walked past the old woman, close enough to touch but not touching, and joined the older ork male still standing in the middle of the boulevard.

The shaman’s white eyes were on me. I thought of six clever things to say in as many heartbeats and kicked myself for each of them. Instead I kept my eyes locked on to her gaze and bowed, leaning forward about thirty degrees at the waist.

She acknowledged the respect with a deep nod to me and then a bow of her own to Dog. Without a word, she turned and made her way across the street to the shadow beneath the stoop. Monica and the ork fell in step behind the shaman as she passed.

The three toughs were still milling and bemused, looking after the shaman and back to me a few times. Two of them knew something they didn’t understand had happened—the third wasn’t talking. I cocked an eyebrow; he flinched. No doubt when he felt they were safely out of range, he’d tell his chummers how close they’d come to death by magic. Eventually the three decided they couldn’t see me and headed off into the night on whatever mission I’d interrupted.

Leaving Dog to watch the street, I strolled over to the dustbin Monica had hidden behind.

Five minutes later I was on the street, headed back toward Fun City. The sidewalk, empty throughout the little passion play, was again busy with the foot traffic of late night. People scurrying with heads down, hoping not to be noticed; others strutting their stuff, ready to do business.

I bought a skewer of scorched and seasoned meat from a vendor with a trash can grill. Catching a troll hooker’s eye, I flashed her a grin and a wink, earning a raucous laugh in return.

Julius was not going to like my report one bit—but I was no longer interested in what he thought.

•
•
•

“Horizon?” Julius looked pale.

“You were right in that there are orks involved,” I said. “But they are being used as cats’ paws.”

I described the darkness spell, again, in detail.

“A spell of that size and density requires both native ability and a thorough grounding in thaumaturgy—at least a university education. Something well beyond the resources of the refugee camp.

“There are ork street shamans,” I dismissed the ilk with a wave. “They
might
be responsible for the concealing spells—that’s a simple matter of dissuading people to look in a given direction. But the direct assaults were carried out by a mage or mages who can command corp-sized salaries.”

“Horizon?” Julius repeated.

“If we posit there’s another corporation that wants to stop you from linking the new Horizon enclave to Fun City, Horizon is the corp that fits the bill.”

“I was providing them with a service …”

“Unasked.”

Julius couldn’t quite muster a glare.

“You were anticipating a need you were not supposed to know about. It is not beyond reason to suspect Horizon might not want an outside agency calling attention to a project still in the planning stages,” I styled my summation on a popular trideo barrister, narrowly resisting the urge to parody. “It also takes very little imagination to assume Horizon would want to maintain exclusive control of all access between this future enclave and Fun City—already their enclave in all but name.

“Given these assumptions are valid, I think they were showing uncharacteristic restraint. Assassinating you would have solved the matter more quickly, cheaply, and thoroughly.”

I counted three before Julius closed his mouth.

“Rachel,” he said and presented his profile.

She would have turned us right, leaving the sanctum, back toward the garage exit. Instead I turned left, heading for the room where she had briefed me on the job fourteen hours ago.

Rachel hesitated, then followed.

I could not help but notice yesterday’s approving pheromones were missing. It also seemed that Dog, whom she’d pretty much ignored previously, now occupied much of her attention.

I was not surprised when Franz and Hector appeared some distance ahead, vectored for rendezvous.

I preceded the trio into the meeting room and made a point of sweeping around to the far side of the oval table without hesitation. Let them think they had the safety of covering the exit. I remained standing and Dog jumped onto a chair next to me so he could see over the table.

For their parts, Hector stood watching me, Rachel divided her attention between me and Dog, and Franz had eyes only for Dog.

“Two out of three conspirators talk to street shamans.”

“What?” Franz glanced at me to ask.

“You three are lucky Julius ignores lackeys,” I answered. “Bad acting can be a fatal flaw.”

“What makes you think—”

Rachel stopped, her eyes big on the Tiffani needler in my hand.

I kept my eyes on Rachel, peripherally aware of Hector’s reach for whatever he carried. The big man stopped mid-motion when the tiny weapon left my hand to clatter on the table.

“Your sister, on the other hand, could make a fortune in the trideos.”

“Sister?” Franz asked in a puzzled tone that almost redeemed my respect for his acting abilities.

“You’re mistake was trying to spook me into a reaction in the garage,” I told him. “A seldom smart way to assess an opponent. Once Dog had a whiff of your mageblade, I was able to smell your work everywhere.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Okay,” Rachel cut of my cuttingly clever retort. “What is it you think you’ve got?”

“Three smart people who work for a self-absorbed, dangerously ambitious idiot and trying to banish Dog will get you killed, Franz.”

The mage lowered his hands.

“Make that two point five smart people,” I said. “Julius had concocted a scheme anyone with half a brain could see would piss off Horizon—if only because it revealed someone was selling their plans to idiots.

“My bet is he knew but did not care that he was going to level the hometown of half his faceless minions.”

“What?”

“Hector, a refugee camp and its environs do not do that well without a steady infusion of outside resources. It’s an economic model as old as haves and have-nots,” I spread my hands, including my audience. “Loyal sons and daughters with jobs in the promised land sending home all they can.”

“If your speculations were true,” Rachel said. “If. All we’d have to do to stop him is tell Horizon.”

“At which point vanVijrk Revitalizations would disappear in puff of greasy smoke and all of you—and likely your families—would become either dead or broke or both. You had to convince Julius he was waking a monster without waking the real monster. However Julius, Humanis to the bone, looked at your carefully crafted evidence and saw his own monster—and made wiping out the refugee community an even higher priority. You couldn’t tell him he was jumping at the wrong shadow without showing your hand, so you had to find an outsider to connect the dots.”

“And out of all L.A. we picked you?”

“If those college kids pretending to be street punks hadn’t been from Pasadena, I might have considered that a long shot,” I agreed. “As it is, I think someone took Jesalie Pilar’s hundred-level culture of street magic course at City College. I’ve met enough freshmen over the years to know she makes a minimal attempt to conceal my public professional persona while dwelling exhaustively on my affinity for scents. Inadequately informed, you convinced Julius I was a big deal and staged a little drama to convince me Julius was up against the big boys and the orks were innocent victims.

“My guess is your sister’s expression was an added bonus—you probably had some suitably innocent waif originally cast for the role of guide through whatever expository journey you’d concocted,” I shrugged. “I spoiled things by going off script and your shaman friend had to improvise.”

Rachel shook her head.

“I have no sister,” she said, and I lost my mental bet with myself that she’d deny the whole thing.

“Olfactories.”

“An olfactory scanner can’t identify individuals,” Hector seemed glad the conversation had hit on an area of his expertise. “There’s no way to establish family relationships by smell.”

“For a chemsniffer it’s impossible,” I agreed. “For a dog’s nose it’s inevitable.”

Hector made an inquiring noise.

“He’s a mystic adept, talented in all the usual detection, inquiry, and discernment skills. Nothing obviously remarkable about him,” Franz explained, bearing down just a bit on the
obviously
. “His key investigative tool seems to be an animal attunement of an intensity that strains credulity.”

Hector looked unenlightened.

“He’s got an open channel, for want of a better word, to the dog,” Franz explained. “He experiences through the dog’s senses. He sees and hears and smells everything the animal does.”

“Not so much see,” I corrected. “There’s a reason you’ve never heard the phrase Basenji-eyed.” I stopped short of explaining my limitations in the optical sphere.

“Franz here cast that darkness spell through a quartz security window in a steel door he’d welded shut to ensure Dog here didn’t get a whiff of him. Effective, but like the potent sanitizer Monica used to get rid of the gunshot residue after shooting at me, it called too much attention to itself.

“Speaking of smell, the touch I really liked was loading needler ammo with cordite gunpowder. I suspect that was your handiwork, Hector. You don’t need a dog’s nose to smell that stench, and everyone knows it’s used only by one of the big corps’ favorite head-busters and that
they
only use it in cannons too big for little Monica to handle.

“Franz didn’t realize that was wasted effort,” I spared that worthy a smile. “I already had his astral scent from his mageblade.”

“That’s the second time you’ve spouted that nonsense,” Franz snapped.

“But that nonsense isn’t what’s really got you pissed,” I countered.

Franz made an angry gesture at Dog. “You have neither the skills or the power to craft this vessel or bind a spirit into it.”

“Not even close,” I agreed. “That is no vessel, that is my dog; a real dog really named Dog, now possessed by a free spirit with no name he’s willing to tell me but answers to Dog.”

The three took a long hard stare at Dog. He grinned back a canine grin, all sharp teeth and mocking eyes. He clearly had no intention of showing them what he’d shown the shaman in the alley.

“You’ve said you feed Dog, and that you need to rest after doing so. And from that confrontation with—” he stopped himself mid-word. “In the alley, we know Dog loans you his energy for spellcasting; so there’s a quid pro quo in play.