Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (26 page)

I probably had given him too much of the roofie. Then again, he already had one of Ares’ 10K sticks, so what the hey? He could afford to cover the cost of the Schraeder. Long as he didn’t pass out on me.

Someone way back in the 20
^th
Century had invented packaging that you could not open without power tools. It was good to see that they’d improved things since then. I nearly tore off a fingernail getting the damn package open.

The rear of the sec had half a dozen interfaces, none of them compatible with my old, old headware. I poked the sec under the slightly-crossed eyes of the counter guy. “What you got that interfaces to a MD-45?”

He weaved a little but finally a hand rose up and he pointed at a rotating kiosk farther back in the store.

But first.

I rubbed my thumb on the pad I’d glued onto my belt, getting a good dose of ruffie on it. Wouldn’t hurt to make the elf relax a bit. Better if he relaxed a lot.

I put my thumb on the biometric pad of the sec and waited for the beep, then handed the unit to the elf.

Secs are pretty standard stuff. Nobody wants to have to relearn a new sec, so they all work alike. Feed the biometric reader, then set up your security.

The elf planted its thumb on the pad and waited for the beep.

I took the unit back. Now I had to stall a bit. It would take a few minutes for the drug to work its way into his system.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to pretend that I was having trouble finding the right adapter. I knew there had to be one but damned if I could find it the first time through or the second. I must have turned that kiosk four of five times.

Naturally, the bloody thing was hiding behind a different adapter that someone had hung on the rack in the wrong place. And this one was also wrapped in Impenetrable Plastic.

I always carry my own cable and snapped it to the adapter and felt around behind my ear for the skin pad I had had grafted over the plug to my datalock—quite expensively, if I may say so. Then it was just plug and play.

Like I said, I had been a courier back in the day. Lots of fine storage in my skull, most of it secure in a datalock. All of it obsolete.

Good enough for me, though.

I was just about as obsolete. Tried my damnedest to keep my hands from shaking.

The clock I had started in my head when I got out of the Spirit was starting to get into the yellow zone. I had to push things along.

It still took nearly a minute to download the file. I understand it’s significantly faster these days but I’ve got too many enemies from the old days to risk anyone working on my skull anymore.

The file automatically deleted itself from my skullware when the download completed. Standard courier model. I don’t have any sort of access to that memory, either.

I tapped up the first page of the file in the secretary and locked it. Then I stuck in a password to freeze the display. Only the elf and I could access the secretary now, but the elf would need my password to change the display.

Before I had a chance to hand over the sec, the elf’s face brightened. “Hey, you’re Jacob McCandless. I heard of you. Weren’t you with Echo Mirage? I heard you were dead.”

No, I wasn’t with EM. I was twelve back when they were changing the world, but something I’ve noticed over the years is that for people these days, anything that happened before they were born apparently had all happened at the same time. That damn elf probably thought we rode dinosaurs like the Flintstones.

Plus, my original name wasn’t McCandless, but for the last thirty years I had used it. I stopped the clock I had running in my head. The piece-of-crap ECM in this place had not prevented this elf from getting a facial recognition search started and no doubt that search raised flags all over the place when the search hit on that name.

The elf knew my name and had accessed the Matrix to get it. I had to run, if I was going to get out of this intact, but I could not afford to panic this elf.

Or any of the confederates he no doubt had scattered around outside.

I laughed. “You must be a John Wayne fan.”

“Who?”

Yeah. One thing about elves, if it isn’t that artsy-fartsy airy-faery stuff, they thought it was too much like crap to be worthy of their attention. When I was a kid, I watched all of John Wayne’s movies. On a 2D TV set, no less.

“OK,” I said, “I showed you mine. Now you show me yours.”

I’d told him when I’d talked to him that one time, I had to see the kid, in person, alive and well, and I’d be able to tell if it was some sort of simsense chameleon program. So the boy had to be somewhere close.

I just hoped he was on this side of the street.

Time was running out and I couldn’t afford to run back and forth across the street too many times.

Now
the elf decides it’s time to talk.

“The kid anything to you?”

I felt like I was in the movie.

“Nope. I get paid to bring the kid home in one piece. If something happens to him, I don’t get paid and I become cranky.”

“I’m scared. You’re a real badass.”

Didn’t have a clue, which was just as well. He might have been more careful if he had. Fortunately, I had spent a lot of nuyen making sure that sort of data had been purged from all of the pertinent files about me. At least, the files I could find.

“Yeah. Big time.” I nodded toward the door. “The kid.”

The elf shrugged and led the way.

Out the door, turned right, and into a door right next to the shop. Two steps up from the sidewalk, through the door, and onto a landing with a set of stairs that went up into the darkness.

Someone had knocked out all the lights.

Damned elves can see in the dark, but not old, fat men.

Well, not normal old, fat men. I had the best artificial eyes you could buy—twenty years ago. Not to mention ears, nose, and taste buds. All with full recording capability. Better than any other receipt a courier could provide.

Inside my head, I turned up the gain on the image intensifier and the darkness turned into green shadows rather than utter darkness. I nudged up the IR gain, too, though the only significant heat source was the elf.

I still put in a couple of theatrical stumbles on the steps, just to make it look like I was blind up here.

The door at the top of the stairs could have used some paint. The stairs turned the other way behind us, going farther up. I stepped through the door after the elf. No lights in this hallway, either, though a couple of doors had light showing underneath them, enough that I could nudge the intensifier image down a bit. Might need some reserve battery power later, so no reason to waste it.

On the other end of the hallway, I could just make out another door. Calling up a floor plan of the building from the Matrix, I saw that both sets of stairs went all the way to the roof and into the basement, so it wouldn’t matter which I used when Escape and Evasion time came.

At the farthest door from the front of the building, the elf stopped and tapped, tapped, paused, then tapped one more time. It was one of the doors with light coming out from underneath. Could be a good thing. Maybe they weren’t keeping the kid blindfolded and gagged.

As the door swung open, I saw that it was just gagged.

And tied to a chair.

With three other elves in the room.

You know, the stereotype of elves are all slender and brittle-looking. These three bruisers did not follow the stereotype. If they had been a little taller, a person might have been able to mistake them for orks.

They had to go.

Except for the chair, the rest of the apartment was empty. One light shone down from the ceiling fixture right in front of the hallway door. There were sockets in the ceiling in other parts of the big room and one in the ceiling of the kitchen that I could see, but rather than broken bulbs, it looked like the last tenant had taken them. Taken the plastic covers of all the electrical outlets, too. Some people.

“Let the kid go,” I said. “Let me take a look at him.”

The head elf looked at me for a moment, then nodded to the muscle. One of them touched the binders on the kid and they snapped open.

The kid immediately hopped out of the chair and started for the door.

Didn’t get far.

One of the bruisers caught him by the back of the shirt and lifted him off the floor, legs still kicking, tossing him back toward the chair.

Got to give this to the kid, he was persistent. Three times he got caught before he gave it up. Granted, he was a kid, but given how easy he got caught each time, I’d have given up sooner. But finally, the kid stood there in front of the chair, panting, trying to pull the gag free.

“The gag,” I said. I knew the kid could claw at that thing for years and never work it free.

The right touch and the gag popped free, too.

“He looks OK to me,” the elf said, sneering.

Looked OK to me, too, but no reason not to make sure.

“How are you, kid? They treat you OK?”

In the John Wayne movie, the kid is dressed like a sissy but he says to John Wayne, “Sir? Are you my grandfather?” Now, I didn’t really want the kid to mention that I might be related to him, but I doubted the kid had a clue—the only time I had ever seen the kid, he was barely a year old. But that “sir” part had always sounded good to me, maybe with a touch of defiance, refusing to knuckle under.

“Bite me, dickweed,” the kid said.

Well, another lost John Wayne moment. At least the voiceprint matched.

Turning to the elf, I said, “Can’t believe they want this back.”

The elf just shrugged. “Password?”

This is the dangerous part of any such transaction. Outnumbered like this, they didn’t have to let the kid go, or me either, once they had the password. In fact, if the extortion worked once, it might well work again. Who knows how many golden eggs the kid could lay for them?

I had to get things moving. Out there somewhere, some Humanis operatives were herding every asset they could get hold of in my direction.

They believed I had a bunch of dirt on them that they didn’t want made public.

I did but it was well hidden because as long as I had it, I had a chance to live.

It wasn’t going to go public until I was good and dead. It was that sort of information: wasn’t going to expire any time soon.

Me, I had decided years before that I wasn’t going to be taken alive. Not if I had a choice, anyway. One of my pants pocket contained an autoinjector full of ricin. Illegal as hell but arrest was the same as capture for me, to be avoided at all costs, so wtf.

The elf got a stricken look on his face. He looked at the bruisers and their eyes narrowed before they headed for the door. In seconds, all three of the big boys were gone.

It could have been anything but I was sure something was going on outside and I was afraid I knew what it was.

“The password,” the elf demanded.

“Hogwarts,” I said. I’d loved those books when I was a kid.

Where the elf pulled that pistol from, I couldn’t say. I would have sworn there hadn’t been any place in his clothes lumpy enough to hide it, but there it was. “I told you to come alone.”

“I did. What’s going on?”

“One of my people is not responding.”

Raising my hands to the level of my shoulders, I said, “No clue. I came for the kid. You got your file, I got the kid, I just want to go get my money.”

For a few moments, I stared down the muzzle of the pistol the elf held on me, wondering if this might be it, finally, after all these years. My knees shook.

Geez, I’d been targeted by robocannon and I can’t tell you the number of times I ran down a corridor dodging bullets. I was younger then.

For sure, I thought I wasn’t going to get any older, but the elf displayed that slack-faced expression I had come to recognize. The ruffie had started to kick in.

Time for my secret weapon.

If you practice long enough, you can learn to walk quite normally with something not too large—or with too many sharp points—clamped between your butt cheeks. People doing a pat-down don’t usually cram a hand in there.

I let the little metal tube slide down my leg as I turned off my eyes and ears for a moment.

The flash-bang exploded when it hit the floor.

Immediately, I turned the gain back up on my eyes and I reached out my hand and took the pistol from his hand.

“What is it? What’s out there?” I said, as I jammed the muzzle up under the elf’s chin.

“Ghouls. Maybe two dozen.”

Crap. I hadn’t thought anyone could get ghouls to do anything, but apparently the Humanis people were not only able to get over their aversion of meta-humans enough to use them as operatives but had found some way to convince ghouls to cooperate.

Maybe it was just a matter of making sure the ghouls had plenty of meta-human flesh to chew on. Ghouls liked that.

I thought about shooting the elf but why attract attention? At least, any more than the flash-bang already had.

So I kneed him in the groin and jabbed my fingers into a nerve nexus under his right arm. Dropped him like a rock. Nice thing about the martial arts is that they never go obsolete.

Dropping the pistol into one of the pockets of my pants, I snatched the secretary out of the elf’s other hand and stuffed it into another pocket. Another chunk of change to me for preserving Ares’ data.

I reached inside my waistband and pulled out two bundles of black plastic. Harnesses. Memory plastic.

Each bundle had a fist-sized disk of metal in the middle and I held one of those disks to my chest and pulled the slider on the side downwards.

The bundle undid itself and legs reached out like a startled spider, then wrapped themselves around me, making an effective harness as the plastic folded itself into the pre-programmed shape, the “legs” gripping each other in the middle of my back.

The kid had just stood there and watched as I had disarmed the elf and done the harness thing, but when I took the first step toward him, the kid turned on his heel and ran for it. Since I was between him and the hallway door, he had no choice but to head for the darkness and gloom of the kitchen.