Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (18 page)

“I can see the shape of it, but I don’t understand the mechanics,” he frowned. “This is not … usual.”

I considered explaining, but didn’t see the point. Jesalie hadn’t figured it out in a month of living with me; there was no way I was giving away the trick of my trade to some one-off customers who’d never see me again.

Franz had been right when he pegged me as unremarkable. I like to think I’m unique, but if you were to graph the talents and abilities of all the psychic investigators in LA, I’d be about dead center on the bell curve. What made me was my partner.

Dog, by which I mean the free spirit possessing Dog the Basenji, gives me direct access to astral data—way beyond my ability to assense. But he gives it to me in doggish: very little sight, lots of smells. Where top-dollar wizards see an astral fingerprint, I get an astral scent. You can research it—believe me, I have—and find enough evidence to make a case for the way Dog conveys information being dictated by the limitations of the creature he’s inhabiting.

Personally, I think he does it because it amuses the hell out of him.

Like Franz said, everything is quid pro quo. So what does Dog get from me? Hard to say. He explained it once, I think, but I’m not sure I followed. Call it context. Interpretation. Maybe it’s because he’s a dog; maybe it’s because he’s a spirit, but everything we people do seems random. Dog finds humans fascinating; he just needs me to understand the natural world.

“So,” Rachel said into the stretching silence. “What do you plan on doing with this information?”

“I’m kinda torn between telling Julius and getting killed or telling Horizon and getting killed,” I shrugged. “One of the things that makes me unremarkable is the fact that I honor a confidence when there’s no compelling reason not to.”

Hector and Franz glared with varying intensities, but Rachel’s smile was wry.

For a moment I considered asking about the Pembrokes. Maybe they were her grandparents. Or maybe there was a network of families helping kids make it out of the ghetto into the promised land. But it was none of my business. Nothing here was.

I circled the table, Dog preceding at a thoroughly terrier-esque trot. The three made way.

“If Monica wants to go into the business, tell her to call,” I said in the doorway. “I can connect her with some resources. She’s got my card.”

“Business?” her sister asked.

“Investigator,” I said in dripping ain’t-it-obvious. “She can play a role, keep her wits while loaded on painkillers in the middle of a confusion spell, and—to come that close with a needler at forty meters and
not
hit me? She’s a hell of a shot.”

Rachel smiled unexpectedly.

“She says you moved so fast she almost hit you.”

“Story of my life.”

Where the Shadows are Darkest

By Steven Mohan, Jr.

Steven Mohan, Jr. lives in Pueblo, Colorado with his wife, three children, and surprisingly no cats. His short fiction has appeared in
Interzone
,
Polyphony
,
On Spec
and
Paradox
as well as several DAW original anthologies. He has written nearly half a million words of
BattleTech
fiction and has been tapped to write the first novel of Catalyst Game Lab’s line of
MechWarrior
novels
, A Bonfire of Worlds
. His short fiction has won honorable mention in
The Year’s Best Science Fiction
and
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
and he is a former nominee for the Pushcart Prize. This is his first
Shadowrun
story.

Abiola Fashola was on his way to meet with the Yoruba street gang that ran his neighborhood when he saw the old man. A cold shiver of dread rippled through the troll’s massive body.

The funny part was he didn’t know why. Abiola had never seen the old man before.

He didn’t
look
dangerous. The old man was human, but then most Yorubas were human. He wore olive drab work pants and a bright yellow shirt. He was big around the belly, suggesting he got quite enough to eat, though how he managed to do that in the Shomolu quarter of Lagos was a mystery. His skin was dark, his hair the color of iron. His chin was clothed by a wispy, gray beard.

So he didn’t look dangerous and he wasn’t doing anything unusual. The old man stood in the busy street haggling with a fishmonger whose cart was loaded with the rich variety of fish that could be caught in Lagos Lagoon: three-eyed fish and no-eyed fish, fish with parasites and fish with stumps where fins should be, fish that
looked
fine, but were loaded with heavy metals or bacteria or magical maladies.

The Yoruban quarter was pushed right up against the poisonous lagoon, which the people of Lagos used as dump, toilet, bath, and larder all in one.

The cart’s contents turned Abiola’s stomach. He had eaten better when he’d been a merc—too bad he couldn’t stomach the killing.

He was tempted to dismiss his feeling as nerves, but he knew better. The shiver meant his dreaming mind had seen some danger his waking mind had missed.

The first time it happened to him his merc unit had been working some Igbo raiders that were coming out of the jungle to harass the oil workers that fed the Lagos pipeline. It seemed like cake duty, drawing a fat corp paycheck from Global Sandstorm (washed through the Edo Kingdom, of course) to hunt down some irregulars.

Only the irregulars didn’t turn out to be so irregular. Later Abiola learned they were mercs drawing their own fat corp paycheck from United Oil (washed through the Igbo Kingdom, of course.)

Anyway, it had been a pretty summer day and they were working their way through some small family farm that had met some unfortunate and violent end.

They were on the north side of the farm, moving through fields that weren’t growing anything but knee-high grass. The jungle rose up before them like an emerald wall, so close that Abiola could hear the cries of monkeys, the chatter of birds, the buzz and click of insects.

They moved across the farm using standard infantry tactics. First squad would sprint forward, while second stood back ready to provide covering fire. First would stop, establishing cover, and then the two squads would trade, second exposed, first concealed.

First had taken cover behind a truck turned over on its side, men laying prone behind the truck’s engine block or its bed, AK-97s pointed at the jungle.

Second readied itself to rush forward toward the burnt-out hulk of a tractor forty meters from their position.

Abiola shivered.

It wasn’t that he was a coward. He didn’t fear combat. He was used to being bigger and more powerful than the men he fought. And he was a devout Christian, so he didn’t believe this life would be his last. He did not want to die, but neither was he paralyzed by the thought that death might be waiting for him around every corner. Abiola Fashola was
not
a coward.

But suddenly he couldn’t move.

So when second squad moved out, they went without him.

Giving Abiola a ringside seat when an Igbo ambush cut down every last man before they could reach the tractor’s limited cover.

He would never know for sure what had caused him to freeze. Maybe his dreaming mind had looked out into the jungle and recognized the signs of danger: a glint of sunlight on steel, a fern stalk snapped and broken, the sudden peculiar silence of birds.

Whatever it was, from that moment on Abiola believed in it. So he took his fear of the old man seriously.

Abiola turned and hurried down the street, telling himself that things in Lagos were not always what they seemed. The old man could be scouting for the flesh-trade or he could be a corporate hitman, a merc recruiter, a drug runner.

Abiola did not wish to find out.

He ducked down a side street, took another turn, and ended up on Ikorodu Road.

In the late afternoon, Ikorodu was a snarl of traffic, an impossibly long line of cars and trucks so old they still ran on gas. Mixed in with the cars were darting motorcycle taxis called
okadas
, construction yellow
danfo
busses so crowded that people hung out their open doors, and the occasional caravan of trucks on their way to Victoria Island in the company of tanks and APCs.

None of them going anywhere.

A brown cloud of smog hung over the go-slow. Horns honked and men cursed. Boys no older than six worked their way between the stalled cars, hawking gum, newspapers, steamed bean cakes, sweating bottles of Gulder beer, anything that might sell to the trapped commuters.

In the chaos, no one noticed a hulking troll moving down the sidewalk.

Abiola Fashola was big even for a troll, two meters sixty-one and pushing three hundred twenty kilos, only the last ten of which were from too much Star beer. His skin was dark chocolate and a pair of ornate horns the color of bronze began at his forehead and curled around like a ram’s. He wore camouflage pants from his merc days over heavy work boots. A black t-shirt revealed muscular arms that could pop a human skull like a balloon. A meter-long machete hung from his belt by a lanyard.

He also wore a simple gold cross hidden beneath his long, black beard. Abiola had great love for the baby Jesus, but he tried not to let it show.

In Lagos, universal love and brotherhood was the kind of thing that could get you killed.

As he walked down the street his vision swarmed with augmented reality objects, ghostly icons floating over reality, powered by the mesh network that blanketed the road.

Most of it was garbage, spam pop-ups offering to increase the size of certain parts of his anatomy. (Like he needed any part of himself to be
bigger
.)

He powered down his comlink and looked around. No sign of the mysterious old man. Maybe it’d all been in his imagination, after all.

Abiola weaved through the crazy, crowded streets of Lagos, following Ikorodu Road another couple blocks before ducking east again.

After losing the mysterious old man, Abiola almost felt good. Until he heard a cruel voice behind him say: “If it isn’t Mr. Troll,” and he remembered the errand that had brought him here in the first place.

•
•
•

They ended up in a little bar, Abiola nursing a Star beer the street gang bought him. Abiola loved Star, but this one tasted a little off. Bottled beer went for five naira, but he couldn’t help thinking this one had cost more.

Abiola raised the bottle in a gesture of respect and said, “Thank you for the beer, Babafemi Kosoko.”

Yeah. This one had cost quite a bit more.

The bar was small, a ramshackle collection of salvaged wood over a dirt floor. It was filled with the six or seven area boys Babafemi had brought with him, all of them armed with automatic weapons and wicked looking knives.

Babafemi and Abiola sat alone at a battered table. Babafemi was young and handsome. He wore jeans, real western blue jeans, and a pale green t-shirt that proclaimed: “
I don’t have an attitude problem, you’re just an asshole.
” The boy couldn’t be older than twenty.

His given name meant, “Beloved by his father.”

Babafemi flashed a lopsided grin, bright against his dark face. “We’ve been watching you, Abiola Fashola. Trolls are rare among the Yoruba people. Especially ones who used to be mercs.”

“That part of my life is over,” said Abiola carefully.

“Yes, but you still have the skills, no? You don’t have to be a merc, but you still have the
skills
.”

Abiola took a pull of his beer.

Babafemi was not human, not really. Oh, he was biologically human, Abiola was sure of that, but the part of human beings that made them feel for others of their kind, that held them back from terrible violence, that caused them to reach out a helping hand when none was required,
that
part of Babafemi was utterly missing.

Abiola hated killing, he was sick to
death
of killing, but he would have killed Babafemi for a quarter-naira and he would have taken the job without a second’s consideration. He would’ve taken no joy in it, but he would have done it anyway for the same reason one puts down a rabid dog: because the world would be a better place without Babafemi in it.

Except instead of killing Babafemi, Abiola was going to end up working for him.

“The 38 Dragons have forgotten their place,” said Babafemi. “They’ve been giving us trouble.”

“Isn’t their place down south where Shomolu bumps up against Surulere’s northeast corner?” asked Abiola. “Maybe they’re giving you trouble because they’ve got their backs to a killing field. If you talked with them, maybe you could work something out.”

A thin, cold smile knifed across Babafemi’s young face. “Oh, we’re going to work something out. It won’t involve talking, though.” The boy leaned forward. “And the Ammits would like your help.”

An ammit was a giant crocodile. The awakened species terrorized the swamps and creeks of Lagos. It was a powerful and dangerous creature, but Abiola understood that calling yourself an ammit didn’t
make
you an ammit.

These boys, these terrible boys played at being soldiers, played at being
monsters.
They called themselves tigers or crocodiles or dragons or lions, but in the end all they did was kill each other.

And whoever else happened to be in the way.

“I don’t know,” said Abiola softly.

“Eighty-five naira,” said Babafemi, “and plenty more where that’s from. Every time you join us for one of our little parties.”

Abiola stared off into the distance. Eighty-five naira and a bottle of beer. How had he come to sell his soul for so little?

Babafemi leaned back in his chair, and slapped one of the young men crowding the bar on the arm. “Or you could always become a fisherman.”

Everyone laughed at Babafemi’s grand joke.

And that’s really what it was about. Choices. He could go work for one of the corps, who were less decent even than the mercs they hired. Or he could eek out a meager living, just another poor
maghas
paying tribute to Babafemi or some other petty thug while the poverty of Shomolu drained the life out of him.