Shadowrun, p.3
Shadowrun, page 3
Home sweet fuckin’ home.
Thanks to the Deepweed, I could literally see that last one. Couldn’t stop astrally perceivin’ if I wanted to.
We hustled down the block to the Stuffer Shack on the corner and shoved through the glass doors. The manager, a halfer called Jorge, knew not to fuck with us when we rolled through. Everybody else tripped over themselves—and several snack displays—gettin’ out of our way.
Benefits of bein’ Bot’Kham, chummer. But we wouldn’t be feared and respected like we are today if not for the blood and sweat Grampa left on the streets back in the ’50s. Just another reason we had to get him back.
Grazz and Kass grabbed whatever munchies they wanted on the way, which Jorge could obviously do fuck all about. What was he gonna do, hit the PANICBUTTON and summon the quaalz? Might as well trigger his own cortex bomb. Poor little halfer. Sheila musta thought the half-scared, half-resigned look on his face was pretty funny, ’cause she barked laughter. I might have laughed myself, if we weren’t on a mission.
There were two crumbling wooden doors at the back of the ’Shack. The one on the left read Employees Only, was locked, and contained the kind of shitter that probably had a background count from the atrocities committed there. The one on the right had a Do Not Enter sign—physical and AR (I have goggles, I’m not some kind of Cascade farmgirl). It was also covered in gang tags and graffiti, again on the wood and on the AR veneer pinned to the sign. All of it was from our set: I saw markings from different Bot’Kham crews, Creeps and Skraacha tags, even our own crew’s tag—the Cupid Killers, a baroque little cherub with huge angel wings and a tricked-out assault rifle—covered the door.
Adam booted it down and yanked open the rusty metal trapdoor in the crumbling tile floor of the 2m x 2m closet—the walls were empty except for a peeling Crimetime poster. One by one, we climbed the ladder down the cramped, mildew-stinkin’ ventilation tunnel into the Ork Underground.
The scene at Gunther’s was bad, even though the action was almost an hour old by the time we got there. It was a high-end barbecue joint turned into a fuckin’ warzone. The smell of cordite lingered in the air, and red synthleather booths and synthwood tables were chewed up by high-velocity gunfire.
For some reason the whole place smelled like—and was covered in—puke, plus another smell beneath it I couldn’t recognize.
It was a testament to just how many shits the ’plex government gave about the Underground—even after Prop 23 passed—that there wasn’t no Knight Errant or DocWagon on the scene. Still, even without a meatwagon around to bag bodies, I didn’t see any corpses. But the blood trails smeared on the black-and-white-tiled floor hinted that some unlucky chummers who got geeked might already have been dragged off by their families.
Wounded, there were plenty of. Even some breeders, halfers, and keebs who’d managed to catch a bullet. Most of ’em were bein’ seen to, and the ones that weren’t looked like they already had been. I didn’t see any dead zakahn—bad guys—and that made me a sad, sad tusker.
I was glad the Deepweed had mostly worn off by that point. For one thing, I’d need a clear head. And for another, there were plenty o’ bad feelings left in the wake of the violence, and I had no desire to see what color they were. Astral perception’s a fuckin’ trip, but not always a nice one.
I rushed to the back with Adam while Sheila and the others split up to ask the rubberneckers if anyone had seen anything. We pushed through the kitchen—somebody had at least seen fit to shut off all the stoves, so nothing was burnin’—where the aroma of delicious soybeef brisket was spoiled by the smell of blood and gunfire. The door to the back office was ajar, so we knocked softly and went in.
Gunther was collapsed in the big comfy chair back there, eyes half closed, a washcloth on his forehead. Bertha—wearin’ a pretty, retro-style pink dress—was leanin’ over him, fussin’.
“What happened, this egrand’rohodo get tagged holdin’ down the ereth?” Adam asked.
Gunther opened his eyes with a snort and a frown. “I wish youse kids wouldn’t talk dat Or’zet drek. You know it was just made up by norms to sell music and make us sound fraggin’ stupid.”
Adam was about to make an angry rebuttal about how it was our heritage and shit, but I cut him off with a gesture. Adam used to be my vruknart, and he’s got way more balls than sense. On the rare occasion he listens to me, I think about givin’ him another crack at it. But those occasions are fuckin’ rare.
“He didn’t get shot,” Bertha said. “This old fool just about half-cacked himself trying to heal everybody that got hurt.”
“Useta tough out dat much drain, easy,” Gunther said. “Gettin’ fraggin’ old.”
“Dramar,” I began respectfully. My Or’zet isn’t perfect—I was tryin’ to denote respect for a non-familial elder, but I think it literally means “stepdad”—but he wouldn’t know the difference. “We have to get Kham back. It is djoto.”
Djoto: the way of life for us SINless here in the Sixth World. The code of honor that rules the streets. A trid doc told me that sixty years ago, djoto was called bangin’. The tharon talkin’ heads from the corps say djoto’s killin’ us: ork-on-ork crime, keepin’ us in the ghetto. But what the fuck would they know ’bout it?
“I’ll tell youse what I can,” Gunther said. “I owe dat old slot more den a ting or two. But I didn’t see much.”
“You need to rest,” Bertha chided in exasperation.
I put my hand lightly over her own on the armrest of Gunther’s chair; she sniffed in distaste at the monofilament-spiked nails on my index fingers.
“Bertha, please, anythin’ he can tell us’ll help.”
She sighed, and Gunther told us what he knew.
Which, as he said, didn’t turn out to be much. The attackers were strangers, breeders, and looked Asian (like about half of Seattle’s population). Maybe a half-dozen of ’em, maybe twice that. They all wore black lined coats and rebreathers, but no ski masks. They’d opened up with SMGs and gas grenades (the gas made everybody who breathed it in puke their guts out, which was the source of that stink).
Gunther had a hearth spirit bound to protect the space—Ol’ Croc, he called it—but the attackers had two elementals with ’em. They musta tussled with Ol’ Croc on the astral, because he was torn apart before he could do anything useful. He figured they must have had a mage with them, too, because a couple fireballs went off as they stormed the place, turnin’ large sections of the restaurant floor into scorched craters.
There was no footage of the attack because they shot out the cameras almost first thing. That meant no facial recognition.
Well, shit. That wasn’t much to go on.
“Devil, I got somethin’,” Sheila said as she brought a little girl to me. I recognized her—it was Nessy, one of my little cousins, around nine years old. She’s one of my uncle’s kids, and my uncle’s dad, like my mom’s dad, was Kham.
I knelt down, bringin’ my eyes level with her hazel ones, brushing my orange-pink hair—dyed like cotton candy that’s on fire—out of my eyes. “Hey, babygirl. You okay? Your family okay?”
She nodded. I could see she was all dressed up for a fancy dinner with her family, and that, while shaken up and a little mussed, she was unhurt.
“Where’s your dad?”
“He’s out lookin’ for grampa,” she replied.
I should have figured. Uncle Rabo was Kham’s son, after all. I’d coordinate efforts with him later. “And your mom?”
“Took the babies home.” Nessy had five younger cerri, all around four years old.
“Tell Devil what you told me,” Sheila prompted her.
“Was it one of the assholes that shot up the place? One of them have a face that was memorable, a scar maybe?”
Nessy shook her head. “They were all just…breeders. But one had a tattoo on his hand. Like a dragon.”
I exchanged a glance with Sheila.
“Could you draw it for us?”
Nessy’s kinda an artistic prodigy. She’s already started taggin’ ’round the hood, though her parents don’t like it. She gave us a pretty accurate napkin drawing of a stylized Eastern Dragon. Unfortunately, that still didn’t narrow it down too much. We knew the streets, but we didn’t know the colors and tags of every single gang in the sprawl. Could be Triads, or Yakuza, or Kumon’go, or who knows what else. It’d be convenient if we had access to the KE gang database, but we got the next best thing.
Spaceboy looked pissed when he opened the plexiglass lid of his Puyallup coffin, which I’d been kickin’ for the last minute or so, standin’ in the pink neon glow of the Poppy’s Good Sleeps sign overhead.
“This better be biz if you’re interrupting my private time,” he said. “And the biz better be arctic.”
Across the coffin, I glimpsed the flawless AR body of a huge-breasted, pink-haired anime elf goddess wink out of existence. “Private time,” right. I saw Adam wrinkle his hairy green nose in disgust as he came to the same conclusion.
It was just me, Adam, and Lil’ Rabo now. We’d left Sheila, Grazz, and Kass at Gunther’s to help clean up the mess and try to get any more useful eyewitness intel.
Spaceboy was either a keeb, or one of those sad fuckin’ breeders who mod themselves to look like a keeb. A natural-born elf or an elf-poser, I honestly don’t know which is worse. Some part of me—call it gahad—saw his pale, skinny arms, his tight white Maria Mercurial T-shirt, his black girly jeans, his gunmetal blue hair and his delicately pointed ears, and longed to wring his pretty little neck. But unfortunately, Spaceboy’s also the most wiz hacker I know.
“No yerz in it for you this time, Space,” I said. “At least up-front. This is different. This is about family.”
“Except payment’s in the form of a lot of grateful-ass trogs,” Adam offered.
“Last I checked, you trogs already owe me,” Spaceboy said.
“Hey!” Lil’ Rabo snarled, grabbin’ Space by his shirt and draggin’ him halfway out of the coffin. “Didn’t nobody ever explain to you that that word’s okay for us to say, but not for you to say?”
Danglin’ by his shirt from Rabo’s gnarled fist, Spaceboy rolled his eyes. “We done here?”
“Damn it, Space,” I said, not loving the emotion in my voice. “They took Kham.”
Rabo let him go, and he fell gracelessly back into his plexiglass coffin. He rolled onto his back and looked thoughtfully up at us.
“Like, the Kham? The one that used to run with Ghost-Maker and The Dodger?”
“Yeah, chummer,” Adam said. “But we just call him grampa. He’s our egrand, used to run the whole Bot’Kham before he retired.”
“Djoto demands we get him back, and that we give whoever fucked with him the buunda,” I said. “That means geek their asses.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Spaceboy said. “But I’m in. Who took him?”
I watched Adam and Lil’ Rabo exchange annoyed looks.
“The fuck we know,” I said. “That’s why the fuck we came to you.” I handed the napkin with Nessy’s drawing of the dragon tattoo to him.
“Well then.” Spaceboy smirked. “Step into my office.”
And he passed out as he switched the gain up to full VR, turnin’ his meat body into a nerveless sack of potatoes.
Gotta give credit where it’s due. It took Spaceboy less than ten minutes to come back with the dirt: the dragon tattoo was tagged on the bodies of kobun from the Shotozumi-gumi, the most powerful Yakuza clan in Seattle. From what I’d heard, all-breeder and racist as fuck.
“I knew it was the fuckin’ Yaks!” Lil’ Rabo exploded, although I hadn’t heard him say any such thing.
Figurin’ out where the slots were took a little longer after we told him everything that had gone down at Gunther’s. Like maybe as much as an hour.
“Schlesinger’s Meats,” he told us after poppin’ back into his meat body. “An abandoned meat-packing plant in Tacoma, not far from the 11th Street Dockyards. Did you know we used to have so much meat we needed to like…pack it?”
“I thought you dandelion eaters mostly packed fudge,” Adam said. Thankfully, everyone ignored him.
“How you know dey dere?” Lil’ Rabo demanded.
“Well, it was a simple matter of doing a little facial recognition search through the traffic camera network.”
“But you didn’t have their faces,” Adam said.
“Well, the hard way would have been cracking KE’s database of Shotozumi-gumi known associates and then grabbing their mugshots. Breaking into the camera node of one of their known bunraku parlors and jacking the archived security footage was a lot easier.”
I’ll admit it, I wasn’t unimpressed.
“Alright, Space, but how do you know the Yaks chillin’ at Schlesinger’s Meats are the same ones that hit Gunther’s? You hack into their cameras and see Kham tied up in there?”
He shook his head. “No cameras at the slaughterhouse. But I got a clean shot of their faces from cameras in the Underground just before they busted into Gunther’s. I tracked them there. It’s definitely the same Yaks that snatched Kham.”
“Y’done good,” I said. “We owe you another one. Eth, let’s roll out.”
My chummers and I headed for our bikes, but Spaceboy jandered after us. “Hold up,” he said. “I want to roll with you.”
Adam and Lil’ Rabo laughed uproariously.
“You sure about that, Space?” I asked. “This ain’t some data steal. Bullets gonna fly, breeders gonna die.”
“I can hold my own in a gunfight,” he protested. Then he ran back to his coffin to open it and snag his little Colt America from under his pillow.
I had serious doubts about that.
My commlink vibrated and I snatched it up. It was Uncle Rabo (no relation to Lil’ Rabo, ’sides the name), tellin’ me he’d found out where they’d stashed Kham through his street contacts.
“Not bad, chummer,” I said with a grin. “You’re just a minute or so behind me. So, any word on the street why the Yaks are after grampa?”
“Somebody said some fraggin’ elf paid ’em ta do it,” he said. “Dat’s all I got fer now. I’m gettin’ a crew together ta spring ’im. You down?”
“Chummer, I’m not just down, you can forget about gettin’ a crew together. I got most of ’em here already.”
In the end, I had a shopping list for Uncle Rabo to pick up for the festivities, Uncle Rabo had a suggestion or two about who I should bring along, and we worked shit out. When the call was done, my ’link said it was just about 0200 hours. The streets were gray and foggy, with cold, steady drizzle comin’ down as we roared off on our bikes, taking Spaceboy with us (if the keeb gets himself geeked, I thought, it’s no chip off my tusk).
Our first stop was to pick up my homegirl Ricochet Faye. Faye’s a breeder, but she’s better than alright. I’m way tighter with her than any of us are with Spaceboy. She’s a full member of the Jerusalem Boys, a wizzer gang that’s popped up in sprawls all over the world in the last five years. She’s in with the Specters, Seattle’s local astral gang, and I heard she’s tight with the Desolation Angels too. She’s a no-bullshit, full-on shadowrunner, which is more than any of us, except arguably Spaceboy, could say.
Sure, we deal and we hustle and we put in work for our ereth’cerri, but my girl Faye flat-out just does crimes for a livin’. How fuckin’ arctic is that!
We found her downtown, outside the Alabaster Maiden. We rolled up on our bikes, parkin’ along the curb: downtown is downtown, so we all had our commlinks on active, broadcastin’ our totally legitimate SINs and social media profiles.
It’s almost 0300, so the club’s startin’ to wind down fer the night. There’s still a few posers and losers behind the velvet ropes, tryin’ to get in. Ricochet Faye’s leanin’ against the marble statue of a female mage in the center of the front courtyard—supposedly a real live magician that got petrified, if you believe that kinda shit—that gives the club its name.
As we hop off our bikes to greet her, I can see Spaceboy makin’ an effort not to drool like a cartoon coyote. Adam and Lil’ Rabo are doin’ noticeably better, since they’re useta her. See, most runners spend most of their hard-earned nuyen on bigger guns, better ’ware, and increasingly large luxury cars full of strippers. Ricochet Faye seems to have spent most of hers on gettin’ hotter. She was a babe before she’d had work done, but the work was so good—not to mention subtle, subtle enough that it didn’t interfere with her magickin’, and subtle enough I never woulda noticed if she hadn’t told me—that now she was beyond flawless.
She was vampire-pale, with the physique of a teenage anorexic elf—only with way better tits—and had platinum blonde hair tipped with neon crimson that fell to her mid-back. Her deep, dark eyeshadow and blood-red lips just made her look sexier and more dangerous. She wore a black corset, decorated on the front with a black velvet rose, and a synthleather miniskirt. Spidery and elegant tattoos crawled over her porcelain-fair, bare upper arms, collarbone, and throat, like black lace.
She’s a little skinny and a lot female for my tastes, but damn, I’d hit that.
In that tiny outfit, which left less to the imagination than mine, she was clearly not armed, but then again, she didn’t need to be. I was pretty sure the ruby she wore on her left middle finger was some kind of power focus.
“What’s wiz, chummer?” she asked as we slapped skin.
“The fuckin’ Yakuza kidnapped my grampa,” I said.
“Sounds like that new sitcom Horizon’s pimping,” she replied. I musta looked less than amused, ’cause her smirk dried up quick. “When?”.
“Maybe six, seven hours ago,” I said. “They shot up Gunther’s in the Underground and snatched ’im. My Uncle Rabo thinks they were actin’ as muscle for some elf with serious juice, but…” I trailed off with a shrug.
