Shadowrun, p.12
Shadowrun, page 12
He eased his hand away from the grip, instead.
“A duel, then.” He spat blood, but sounded smug, looked smug, was smug. From his blue-white hair to his elven-soft hint of scruff, his sleek riding suit to his clean, soft, hands, everything about him leaked smugness all over her beloved, filthy garage. Somehow. Even after getting slapped silly. Fragging elves.
“As the challenged party, I choose…” He smiled as he paused, savoring the hush of the gathered Quick Slivers, savoring the taste of his victory over her.
A race? He’d surf on the speed of some spirit, not really riding at all, not really racing, just cruising in the right direction in first gear, blurring through the night at impossible velocities.
A fight? They started them at ten paces—Mongoose’d thought it would be funny, until the first time she saw what combat spells did to the first Sliver to ever challenge Royal, tearing the sap apart while he tried to close the gap—and she’d never get within striking distance.
A joust? He could combine them, then. Cheat to beat her at riding and fighting, just like he’d always wa—
“A joust,” he said, smiling like the devil, then nodding. “I choose a joust.”
Mongoose slapped him again—frag it, why not?—before she turned and strode off. The gang parted for her, murmuring, questioning.
By the time both riders had their bikes centered out front—wheels on the dotted yellow line, pointed right at each other—he had his spirits up, just like he’d made sure the rules allowed. A pair of ghostly eels circled him, flickering blue-white like his hair, his eyes, the mageblade that made him dangerous. She just flat-footed it on either side of her bike, waiting. She had her armor, her good sword, her trusty Kaburaya. There was nothing else she could bring.
Mongoose heard Tempest—third-up in the gang; Royal’s apprentice, but a righteous go-ganger, she honestly had no idea which way the kid would go with this—from far away, and just revved her bike in response. She focused on her pulse, pounding in her ears. She focused on Royal, opposite her. She didn’t scan the crowd, didn’t watch the street, didn’t glance up at the rooftops. In a joust, focus and momentum were everything.
Tempest spoke a word, and Royal started at her.
Mongoose’s Yamaha screamed, engine just letting the world know it was alive. It redlined as she accelerated, throttling as fast as she could shift gears. She was perfect. It was the best hot-start of her life, and she’d done plenty. Everything was smooth as silk and fast as lightning, she and her bike in perfect tandem, straight-line speed. Not an engine on the streets could beat her.
But Royal, being Royal, cheated. One eel flashed with blue-white fire, crackled with sorcery, and called up an imaginary wave, an invisible cresting surge of power for him to ride. His weaker bike didn’t matter, his clumsiness at the controls didn’t matter, physics didn’t matter, Mongoose didn’t matter.
For just an eyeblink, it worked. Then the spirit was gone, snuffed out, banished, and its power gone with it.
Royal’s bike wavered, wobbled as he over-corrected from the sudden loss of speed, then crashed. He gaped, eyes wide in terror, as headlight bore down on him.
Mongoose sliced past him, razor-close and razor-sharp, her sword flicking out to slap him with the flat of it. Blood flew, elf-perfect bones broke, and he almost died.
She threw her Kaburaya into another skidding, sidelong stop, tires squealing. As she swung a leg up and over and strode back toward him, he whimpered in pain and shock, worked at disentangling himself from two hundred kilos of plastic, carbon fiber, and rubber.
Mongoose threw her helmet at him when she got close enough she knew it’d hit; she wanted his attention. He cowered from it, batted it away on his upraised arms, but it was enough to startle him to motion. Lethal motion. His eyes cleared, then blazed with power. One hand drifted to the hilt of his mageblade again, and he suckled at its teat, then threw a bolt of blue-white acid at her.
Mongoose forced herself not to flinch. To trust.
The spell roared at her like a rushing tide, then fizzled, then went out; the stream sputtered and stopped, like the tap water when they’d tried to wet some rags for Luisa’s baby. There was a soft green glow around her.
Royal’s eyes went wide with terror again, and his remaining eel-spirit writhed at her in a vicious charge.
Mongoose slashed, ducked away, slashed again. She only half-felt it when her sword impacted—Why weren’t they helping? No, no, no, I can’t do this!—and had to roll sidelong to avoid a hissing rush from the thing.
How can I kill this thing? I don’t know how to kill this thing! In the corner of her eye, she saw Royal getting to his feet, saw him drawing his sword, saw him limping toward her. The spirit harried her, she had to turn to fight it. He and the wreckage of his bike were somewhere behind her, its blue-white mouth opened wide, it rushed at her behind electric, blue-white, eyes, just like Royal’s—
No. No more.
She screamed out loud as she hacked at the spirit one last time, and it withered and faded before her calm fury, her force of will, her certainty itself.
The world spun in a blur, and Mongoose was the axis on which it did so. Royal tried to stab her in the back, but instead she felt his blade skitter against her armor.
She ran him through in one smooth motion, monosword angled inward and upward right through his ribs, Royal’s too-pretty face looking completely flabbergasted for maybe the first time ever. The elf slumped over the sword, going limp, dropping his precious sword.
His mageblade never hit the ground. It was enveloped in a soft green glow instead of clattering, then gently floated upward.
Royal hit the ground, though, when Mongoose kicked him off her sword like a piece of meat.
The Quick Slivers—those that hadn’t already—were already drawing weapons, staring at her.
“Wait!”
She shouted. They listened.
“I know. I know! I know about the rules! I wrote them. We wrote them, him an’ me. But I didn’t cheat, just now. Not any more than he cheated back then.”
The rooftop behind her blurred, rippled, and a half-dozen figures slithered into visibility. There was Rikki, Tikki, and Tavi. Stavros in his armor. Two strangers to the gang: a killer with slick hair and a sharp suit, and another killer, this one in fanciful wizard’s robes. All of them—bless ’em, even the triplets, without fear—stepped off the rooftop and were slowly carried streetside in a soft green glow.
The Slivers took a half-step back, as one, the whole gang recoiling, looking from Mongoose to Tempest to the belly-stabbed Royal, not sure who to listen to, what was true any more.
“Royal cheated us all when he made those rules,” she told the truth.
“And he cheated us all every day since, using those spirits to maintain mind spells,” she lied.
One of the killers at her back, the Merlyn in rune-encrusted robes, now holding Royal’s mageblade in his free hand, gestured. About one Sliver in three—Not too many, she’d said, Just the ones that always followed him the most—began glowing a soft, sickly green. The other Slivers murmured, stepped away from them, looked around worriedly.
“It wasn’t your fault.” She spoke softly now, paying no attention to the other killer, the one in the sharp suit standing over the moaning, gut-stabbed Royal. He was screwing a silencer onto a big Browning autopistol. She couldn’t stop him if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to.
Mongoose kept the Slivers’ attention on her as best she could. “Royal tricked us all. He cheated us all. He lied!”
More truth.
“The last straw was that he told Knight Errant where to hit us the other night.” Another lie. “You all remember how quickly he left. Why do you think that was?”
Off to one side of her, Stavros shifted and grunted, a wall of menace and authority made flesh, a reminder of failure and fear. The triplets kept quiet. Good.
Off to her other side, a silencer muffled a pair of shots. Royal stopped whimpering.
“These people represent the Finnigans.” She gave it a second to sink in. “And now, so do we. Royal cheated them too. They don’t take that lightly. They value trust.”
They’d lectured her on it plenty, and on the price of failure. She had to make this work. She needed the Slivers to buy it, for their own good. Mongoose exchanged a nod with the suit-clad killer who’d had a long talk with her. Don Joseph Gianelli. He’d wanted to be here in person, to handle this business with Royal, to get bloody payback for Venus, to establish this new, dynamic power base for his family.
“We ride for the Finnigans and Giannelis now, and Royal’s sins—our sins—will be forgiven. We’ll move product for them, we’ll be security for convoys, we’ll be muscle. We’ll hit other gangs. We’ll ride old school, challenges. We’re the best in the city at it!” She didn’t know, honestly, deep down in her bones, if that was her lying or not. “In exchange, they’ll get us parts, guns, business. And they’ll keep the Knights off our ass. We’ll be their riders, they’ll be our patrons.”
She stabbed her sword down into the concrete and let it stand there in the street, a glittering shard of steel jutting up from the pavement. Stavros pointed at her blade with his baton, glinting in the moonlight, and swung his club in a slow arc, making a line down the middle of the street. The Quick Slivers got the message. Rikki, Tikki, and Tavi were already on her side. When Tempest, Sliptrip, and Torque stepped past the sword and over to her too, she knew the rest would follow.
The king was dead.
Long live the queen.
ÁDHAMH Ó BRAONÁIN
(9 of Batons, 10 of Batons)
DYLAN BIRTOLO
I reached out into the darkness, trying to find something to hear me, but I felt nothing. I don’t mean silence. I’ve heard silence before. This was deeper than silence. It was like the entire spirit world had deliberately turned their backs and created a vacuum around me, something that sucked away any call I made as I floundered around. I was abandoned.
And then fire and streaks of pain through my arms brought me back to my reality.
A rough hand grabbed my wrist, easily wrapping around the entire thing so that his fingers curled over each other as he dragged me across the pavement behind an armored truck. I didn’t even feel where my skin rubbed raw against the street, I could only focus on the ringing in my ears that drowned out everything.
He was shouting at me. This human I had only just met earlier this evening. What is his name? My brain struggled to recall as he continued yelling. I shook my head and he glanced away, his lips curled into a snarl as he turned around the corner of the vehicle and fired his gun. When he turned back, I heard sounds starting to penetrate through the ringing. Scent came back as well, the air heavy with smoke and hot metal.
“—Where’s the damn spirit? We need cover!”
“I can’t…”
I couldn’t even finish the sentence. You’d think I was used to it by now. This isn’t the first time I haven’t been able to have my voice heard. But it never gets easier. The sense of emptiness—of being cut off—cuts just as deeply as the first time it happened.
Cutter—I remembered his name in a flash—turned away from me and yanked a grenade off his belt. He pulled the pin and hurled it with his cybernetic arm, launching it as far as if it had been propelled from a launcher. I couldn’t see the explosion, but even at this distance I felt the shockwave and heard the screams. He continued firing his gun while shouting into his commlink.
I wasn’t going to just sit here and wait. The spirits may not be listening, but I would not be useless. With a snarl, I pushed myself up off the street and pulled out my pistol. I ran to the other corner of the van and stepped out, firing until the magazine was empty. One security officer rolled to the side after taking a bullet in the shoulder, but I didn’t stay to admire my handiwork. I’ve learned that lesson. I ducked back behind cover to reload.
I was about to turn and fire again when I heard the screech of rubber sliding across pavement. A car raced up to us and did a 180 before the doors on either side popped open. Cutter threw another grenade before rushing into the driver’s side. I jumped into the passenger seat just before the car lurched forward, doors still open. As I straightened up in the seat, I noticed Cutter was busy with his weapons, not driving the vehicle. They must’ve had a rigger they hadn’t told me about when I signed up. Of course, I was a last minute addition, so I wasn’t surprised they’d left some details out.
Once I was situated properly and had done the seatbelt, I tucked my gun back into its holster. A very loud click sounded next to my head and I jumped, looking through my peripheral vision and not daring to turn. I felt the heat emanating off Cutter’s gun barrel. It singed my hair and filled the interior of the car with a nauseating odor.
“What the fuck was that? What happened?”
I tried to stay absolutely still, but my jaw clenched. I wondered if he noticed. After a couple of seconds, he lowered the gun. It was still pointed in my direction, but he held it in front of his body. I twisted in my seat so I could look him in the eyes when I spoke. It was hard enough to admit my weakness; I wasn’t going to shy away from this bottom rung runner captain. Not that I was any better, but I didn’t need to listen to that voice right now.
“Sometimes the spirits don’t answer. They’re not dogs, or guns where you can just pull the trigger any time you want. They’re alive. They do what they want.” He would believe the lie. He didn’t know any better. There was no way he could possibly know the anguish of having a connection that defined your existence severed completely.
“Never met a shaman who couldn’t call up a spirit. Seems like you got ways to make ’em show.”
“I didn’t know you were a shaman, too. What’d you need to hire me for, then?” I swallowed and licked my lips before speaking again. “I provided backup.”
Cutter snorted and rolled his eyes, making no attempt to hide his opinion about what my level of backup was worth. At least he put his gun away, stashing it under his jacket.
I turned away from him and stared out the window, watching the buildings flash by in a blur of lights. I still felt the coldness, the sense of darkness that came from deep within me and made me shiver whenever I took a deep breath. I knew I’d have that feeling for the next couple of hours. At least our debriefing would be at a bar, so I could get some warmth to try and chase away the chill.
We rode in silence until we reached the Bell in Hand Tavern. The car stopped on the street in front of the entrance, the doors once again opening of their own accord. After we climbed out, the car drove down the street toward the main parking lot. Cutter brushed past me on the way to the entrance, and I followed in his shadow. The bouncer nodded at us both, stepping aside, much to the chagrin of the line of people waiting against the wall.
Like many businesses in Boston, the Bell in Hand had embraced its building’s heritage. Walking in, you could feel the age emanating off the brick walls. It was rumored to be one of the city’s oldest standing bars, but I’d never bothered to check. I knew they had good synthahol for cheap prices, and a few quiet places you could sit and have a drink by yourself even when it was packed. It helped that I was considered a bit of a regular, at least when I had the nuyen to spare.
Cutter headed to one of those quiet spaces—a table in the back corner—and I followed. The rest of the team sat there, the team that I had known for less than a full day. I recognized the ork, but had no idea who the elf was. My guess was he was our mysterious rigger. To be honest, it didn’t really matter. He was just another in a string of random faces I would soon forget.
“Right. Job done, time to debrief and get paid. Perdita, here’s your cut. I think we’re both glad to put this business behind us.”
I took the certified credstick and checked the amount. It was half of my fee. “Are you trying to shaft me? This isn’t what we agreed to.”
Cutter put both hands on the table, and I could see him clenching them around the edge. His cyberarm cracked the wood. Judging by the sneers on the faces of the other two, Cutter had already shared his displeasure with my performance. He spoke low and soft, so I had to strain to hear him, but the emotion in his words was powerful enough to make me take a half step backward.
“We also agreed that you’d be a shaman. Last I checked, shamans were good for one thing: summoning spirits. No spirits? No paycheck. Be glad you’re getting anything at all.”
I considered debating the issue, but it was three against one, with two of them significantly larger than me. I decided against it. Besides, they were right. That was my job, and I had failed. I may dress it up and say I provided support in my own way, but no one knew better than I just how empty that statement was. Instead, I took my token payment and turned around, heading to the bar.
The first stool was empty, so I slipped onto it, cradling my head in my hands and staring at the wood grain inches from my nose. Some chummer came up and offered to buy me a drink, but I didn’t even look up. He got bored with a very loud sniff and went on to look for more responsive prey. A short time later I heard a glass smack down onto the bar and smelled the powerful, almost-turpentine-like aroma of my drink of choice—neat gin. Kyle didn’t even need to ask. I lifted up my head enough to flash him a compressed smile, but he was already turning away to serve another customer. I had to remind myself: he wasn’t a friend, I was his job security. He was friendly enough, but in the three years I’d known him, I’ve never seen him out from behind this bar.
Still the drink was good, and I knew it would help. I tilted my head back and downed the whole thing in one swallow, not letting it rest on my tongue for too long. Otherwise the taste might make me reconsider my decision. I took more time with the second, and the third I slowed down enough to savor it.
