SHADOWRUN: Spells and Chrome (shadowrun) Read online

  But they're not good, Deke reminded himself. Good kidnappers wouldn't have grabbed the daughter of the local oyabun. He thought-clicked a reply to Lincoln and went back to studying the building he thought they were hiding in. It had been a restaurant, once upon a time. Now it was a ganger hideout.

  In the Barrens.

  Deke blinked the overlay away and sighed. He'd sworn to never come back here. And if he didn't need the nuyen the bunnie had promised so bad, he never would have. But a samurai has expenses. And so here he was, a half-klick from the shack his mother had birthed him in, sitting the near-misting rain and trying not to think about his childhood. And one job away from getting off this bloody rock for good. There was good money to be made in Europe for a man who was good with his hands.

  "Deke," Lincoln whispered.

  "Shut up," Deke snarled.

  "The lackey is back."

  Bollocks. Deke twisted around and watched the yakuza mage low-crawl forward. He was wearing a black skinsuit, no armor, and he carried no weapons. He was the weapon, of course. And ink. Lots and lots of ink. Deke had seen him without his shirt back at the meet. He was covered in tats. A good little yak. The bloody hell am I doing working for yaks in London?

  "It is time," the mage whispered.

  "It's not," Deke whispered back.

  "They will soon detect us," he said.

  "If you keep talking and moving around, you're right." Deke ground his teeth and turned back to the ganger shack. AR showed him old dots, tags from the restaurant days that were still powered. The detectors, for example, were still up. So if they approached from the drive-thru side there'd probably be a chime announcing the arrival of the next consumer-drone sucker to purchase his ration of trans-fat and obesity. The gangers had probably left that there-it was cheap security for them. A gang that could swipe the bunny's daughter had some sophistication. Not smarts, of course. But sophistication. And maybe… Deke ducked his chin to whisper to the mage behind him.

  "Any like you in there?"

  "Like me?"

  "Spooks? Magickers? Seers-through-walls?"

  "Let me see." There was a still moment, where Deke had the uncomfortable feeling someone was walking on his soul, and then the yak mage spoke. "One of them has some small talent, but he isn't trained. There are nine, by the way."

  "Where?" The yak shook his head. "Armed?"

  "I could not tell."

  Deke sucked air through his teeth. "Guards?"

  "I could not tell."

  "You're not helping, you know."

  "Nor am I hindering," the yak said. "The oyabun sent me to make sure his interests are looked after, and that his daughter survives this ordeal." Deke heard something in the man's-well, the ork's-voice. He looked back, but the sun had set too far for him to see the man's face without calling up his cybereye's thermal settings. "You are being paid. I am to watch, and assist as necessary."

  Deke snorted. "I'm so grateful." The mage made no reply.

  "Deke," Lincoln whispered. "It's now or never."

  "Yeah," Deke whispered. "All right. On my signal."

  "Rog-o," Lincoln said.

  Deke rolled his head around on his shoulders, stretching the sinews of his neck. His fingers ran across his torso and thighs-subgun, pistols, a half-dozen balanced knives wrapped around one thigh. He blinked the combat overlays up, visual light only. No starlight, no thermal. It was a restaurant-there would be stoves, and lights. He sent a quick diagnostic check through his commlink. All implants ready, firewalls up. His kit-both physical and mesh-was secure.

  "All right," he whispered, and then slithered forward.

  The hide he'd selected was above the restaurant, and his path forward was downhill and mostly wet-good English weather-and the gullies would hide him for most of the descent. The slings kept his subgun tight against the small of his back, no whispers, no rattles. Dad would've been proud. Fast and silent, the old SAS vet had said. Deke was both. He low-crawled into a culvert and risked a look.

  A half-klick from where he crouched, his mother had borne him just before things had gone in the pot. His dad had been called up and snapped up into the unpleasantness before he'd even really gotten to know him, and then his Ma had started doing what was necessary to feed them and give them a roof-roofs, really, since the tricks never let us stay long-and Deke had gotten the start of his education in the realities of the Sixth World.

  The drekking Barrens.

  More and more dots popped up on his AR. Deke shut his mesh down to internals, closing off the queries from parking bots and restaurant menus. The remote aiming reticle from his gun flicked off his overlay, but Deke knew how to shoot without his implants aiming for him. He could bring the mesh back up quickly enough, but anything that wasn't wired direct would broadcast, and he needed to be unseen.

  The misting rain thickened into a good English drizzle, not heavy enough to block his sight or raise a noise, just enough to start swallowing the small sounds of odd noises and his movement. Deke let the grin show-good English weather-and just for a moment forgot where he was and why.

  Yaks. In the Barrens.

  "I'm going," he subvocalized. The processor smashed those two words to a zip-squeal and burst it out to be picked up by Lincoln's mesh. That was his signal-that meant that anything Lincoln saw through his scope that wasn't an early-middle-aged former SAS commando carrying a little yak princess out the door was a target for the big rifle he was snuggled up with. Deke gathered himself into a crouch, brought his subgun around, and triggered his mesh.

  Then he sprinted.

  His AR came active again and filled with dots, RFIDs sensing him and firing off announcements and queries. He made the ten meters between himself and the access door he was aiming at in about five seconds, which was about fourteen and a half seconds longer than it took the first of the over-the-counter security bots to see that his mesh wasn't one of the gangers and trigger what passed for an alarm.

  That's right, kids, he thought. Run outside, where my friend Lincoln can see you.

  It was forty seconds before the door opened, and a boy with iridescent facial tattoos ran out, cradling an old Ares repeater. Deke grabbed him from behind, swung him around and into the side of the building, then dropped him. The muzzle of his submachine gun was already pointing down-a single round was all it took, and all of that in the span of two seconds and a half-yelp of noise from the ganger. Deke ignored the tapping of the boy's foot against his as the body's nerves reacted to the loss of its brain. He was listening, his cyberear attuned for echo and canceling the masking rain noise.

  A boom echoed through the night, so close it almost covered the mallet-striking-soft-meat sound of the large-caliber bullet hitting its target from around the building. Deke didn't bother looking in that direction. Lincoln's ghillie was more than enough cover to conceal him from the likes of these pukes.

  Seven. Deke heard footsteps coming, but they stopped before they appeared out the door. He frowned, looked down. The dead boy had dropped his Ares where someone in the hallway could see it. Damn it, he thought. Then he slid away from the doorway.

  Bullets punched through the light metal of the door as one of the gangers inside lit through a whole magazine. Deke grimaced as hot bits of metal flecked against his face, but none got in his eyes. He squatted, subgun ready. His cyberear had already adjusted for the noise of the gunfire. Footsteps.

  One set of footsteps. The clatter of a magazine hitting the floor. No answering click of a new one being seated.

  Deke stood up, slipped his gun around behind him on its sling, and clenched his fist. Precise pressure from his ring finger against a specific part of his palm triggered a mechanism in his fist. A ten-centimeter blade slid from between his ring and middle fingers of his right hand, mono-edge sharp. Deke stepped around the door and took two long steps.

  The ganger was maybe eighteen, fit but with the added paunch around the midsection that a young man gets when the near-constant exercise of youth is replaced
with the sedentary complacence of one's early twenties. He was fumbling with a magazine for the bullpup-style subgun he was carrying. He saw Deke, and his eyes went as big as saucers. His mouth opened, ork's tusks prominent.

  "Shite-" Deke heard, but that was all the man had time for. Deke swung an uppercut at the kid, hard enough that when it landed it lifted the ork ganger off the floor. He didn't fall, though, because his jaw was caught on the edge of the blade protruding from Deke's fist, the blade that quickly sliced through the jawbone holding it in place. The kid collapsed, blood and bits of bone and gray matter leaking out of the gaping hole in his chin.

  "Bloody hell," Deke whispered. "Another kid."

  Six.

  A message window popped up on Deke's AR. ALARM TO CITY-DON'T KNOW WHO. Deke blinked the message closed and pulled one of the matte black automatics from his thigh holster. A remote alarm? All the way out here? For gangers? He looked down.

  The dead kid's arms were tattooed.

  Oh, shit. These weren't gangers. They were yaks.

  Rival yaks.

  Deke drew in a deep breath and flashed a warning to Lincoln. His instincts screamed at him for standing in one place this long. He crept around the body and down the hall, pistol presented. He'd only used a single round from his subgun, and there were still twenty-nine more in the magazine, but he didn't want to be spraying bullets around in a room where his paycheck-I mean, the little yak princess-might be held.

  Deke moved toward the front of the building. He'd been in restaurants like this one before-there'd be a little maze of rooms in the back, then the kitchen, then the main dining room out front. He kept the pistol leveled and moved steadily. His boot soles made no noise, not even being wet. Nothing jingled.

  "I see you, runner," a voice said. Deke jerked the pistol around toward the source of the sound, but it was a speaker in the ceiling. "That's right. I'm watching you."

  "Nice to know," Deke said, resuming his advance. He came to a junction, turned toward the front.

  "I wouldn't go that way, runner," the voice said.

  Deke went that way.

  When he'd been ten his father had gone out to deal with looters or something-his mother was never good with stories-and never came back. All he had of him were memories of the brief times they were together when his father had been on leave. Times when the man had been drinking and spilling his soul to his eight-year-old boy, confessing his sins and passing on a veteran's wisdom in his catharsis.

  "Never do what the blokes want, lad," he'd said one night, eight or nine deep in his pints. "They say go left, you go right. Nine times out of ten, they was just misleadin' you anyway. An' if they weren't, well…you'll know where to find them."

  An alert pinged on his AR as Deke passed a junction in the corridor, barely a few meters away from the large swinging door that had to lead into the kitchen. He's just entered a mesh zone, an overlap. Most of the area around here was dead zone-no Matrix-but a node had just popped up. Deke frowned.

  A buzzing in his ears erupted. Jamming. That meant they knew about Lincoln. Deke gritted his teeth and reached around to a small pouch on the small of his back. He pulled out a small canister, twisted the top, and nudged the door open far enough to shove it through. As he expected, a hail of gunfire tore through the door the instant it moved.

  The flash-bang exploded. The light was blocked by the door, but the sound carried through like a punch, and even though he'd prepared for it, it still dazed him for a second. And a second was all the bloke needed.

  ALERT. Red letters flashed across his vision. "Bloody hell," Deke mumbled. His overlays started twitching. The hacker was messing with his mesh-with his own bloody network-and although he'd not fully penetrated the OS, he was trying. And he might succeed. Deke was a samurai, not a hacker. He had hackers on retainer that updated his mesh. But he wasn't one himself.

  "Shit." He shut down all of his unwired network. Targeting crosshairs dropped off his overlays. Reports stopped pinging from the arrows and dots scattered around the restaurant. Deke squeezed the grip of his pistol, cursed the seconds he'd lost dealing with the hack, and charged through the door.

  A troll lay on its side just to the side of the door, its thick hide smoking. Bloody fool must've grabbed the grenade, Deke thought. He drew back a foot and kicked, but the impact did little more than jostle the giant. He grunted and spun, taking in the rest of the room.

  And the three guns pointed right at him, held by the last five gangers.

  "I told you I could see you, runner," an elf said. His eyes were glassy with overlays-he'd been the one speaking in the corridor. That made him the hacker.

  "And here I am," Deke said.

  "You're here for the child," the elf said.

  Deke looked around. He didn't see any children. "I am. Her father wants her back."

  "Thinks 'e own the place, does he?" a human said from one side. Deke glanced at him. He was almost forty, dirty, with the look of a man who'd done his lazy best to get through life on bravado and cowardice. Deke looked at the gun in his hand, flashed an enhancement through his cybereye, and then ignored him. His pistol's safety was still on.

  "He doesn't care, Cyril," the elf said. "He's just a runner, not a yak."

  "Then let's shoot 'im an' be done," Cyril said.

  "Let's not," the elf said.

  "Wise choice," Deke said.

  The elf laughed. "You're hardly in a position to negotiate," he said. "Your sniper outside can't help you, and we've got you covered. I can sense your augments, runner. I know you're wired-a relic, really, these days-and although I shut down your mesh, you're still dangerous." He brandished the Ares in his hand. "You might get me, but not all of us."

  "True," Deke said. "But…"

  "But what?"

  Deke smiled. "Now, yak."

  Someone walked on his soul. Power wafted through the mana, wrapping itself around the weapons of the gangers like ethereal fists and ripping them from unyielding hands. Deke brandished his pistols as all the gangers' guns slammed themselves against the wall behind him and clattered to the floor. A moment later the yak ork sorcerer walked through the hallway door behind Deke. His eyes and his tattoos were alight with unholy fire. He'd been watching through the small vision slit. Or at least, that had been the plan.

  "You should not have taken the child," he said.

  "Couldn't come yourself?" the elf spat. "Had to get gaijin help?"

  "When a need arises, one secures an expert," the mage said. "Where is the child?"

  The elf snarled a half-heard curse. Deke swallowed.

  "Where. Is. The. Child?"

  "Sod off, yak," Cyril said.

  The mage looked at him. His lips moved with silent words, and suddenly Cyril was screaming, was writhing, and then was on fire. Deke stepped back, pistol leveled, but the yak was only interested in Cyril. After a moment the body collapsed and stopped screaming, but didn't stop to burn. The scent filled the small space.

  The yak turned back to the elf. "The child?"

  "We sold her."

  "You sold her."

  "To Tamanous." The elf looked at Cyril's corpse and then back at the yak. Deke had to give him credit. If he was scared-and by all the dragons in the Sixth World Deke was scared-he didn't show it. "Got a good price, too, a young thing like that. Had just the right blood type."

  "Why would you do that?" the mage asked. "You knew we would come after you. You knew who she was, who her father was." He frowned, which made his tusks more prominent. "Why would you do something so foolish?"

  "Because this is England," the elf said. He spoke the best Queen's English. "And you're just an import. And it's time you remembered it."

  Deke looked at the mage. The ork raised an eyebrow, but didn't speak. Deke swallowed, and rebooted his mesh. It came back up clean, but there was a waiting message from an unknown sender. He looked at the elf. The elf looked at him. "What's the plan?" Deke asked.

  "We renegotiate," the ork said. "Let's go?"


  Deke turned toward him. "What about them?"

  There was a strange, wet noise behind him. He turned, saw the bodies lying on the floor, faces frozen in distended caricatures of horrible pain. Blood leaked from their eyes.

  "What about them?" the ork asked, and walked through the door.

  Outside, Lincoln came down to meet them. He had the hood of his now-soaked ghillie suit thrown back and his rifle cradled in his arms. He looked at Deke, elf's ears upturned and a smile on his face. "Payday, mate?"

  "Not yet." Deke slipped the safety on his pistol and slid it into his holster. "You said renegotiate," he said to the mage.

  "I must contact the oyabun," the mage said. "Please do not leave." He sat down where he stood, into a puddle, black skinsuit splashing muddy water. His face went blank.

  "What happened?" Lincoln asked. Deke filled him in. Lincoln looked at the mage, his hand unconsciously stroking the receiver of his rifle. "Bloody hell, mate."

  "Yeah." Deke looked at the ork on the ground. He didn't seem to be there. He called the message up on his screen. It was text only, but he recognized the elf's hand on it. The way it spoke was the same.

  ›I don't blame you, runner. Nuyen is nuyen. But beware the yakuza. We've stained their honor, and they'll want that hidden. You know. Be wary. As the man said, you are an expert. But you're not yakuza.

  Deke read it twice, then deleted it. The ork had not stirred. He was communing, or something. Deke caught Lincoln's eye, then set up a link through the mesh. Text only. He glanced down.

  ›Can the yak get on our mesh?

  Lincoln glanced down, then shook his head.

  ›He killed everyone in there.

  ›YOU TOLD ME THAT.

  ›Yeah, but he did it without blinking. He didn't ask which harvester they sold the girl to. He just gakked them. Deke looked back at the building. There was a bit of smoke rolling out of the open door. Perhaps Cyril had spread.

  ›One of the gangers left me a message.