Shadowrun: Streets of Blood Part 1

SHADOWRUN.

STREETS OF BLOOD.

CARL SARGENT &.

MARC GASCOIGNE.

RAZORS IN THE FOG.

London, 2054. Shadows dance in every fog-bound lane and alley of the historic city-shadows that hide a s.a.d.i.s.tic murderer, somehow summoned from Victoria's reign to kill once more.

An uncertain alliance of shadowrunners is thrown together by violent death and corporate intrigue. Geraint, n.o.ble lord from the Princ.i.p.ality of Wales, Adept, politician, bon vivant. Serrin, renegade Elf mage from Seattle, in search of vengeance or forgetfulness. Francesca, high-cla.s.s decker for hire, haunted by blood-drenched nightmares. Rani, Punjabi Ork, street samurai, a true shadow-dweller from the lowest level of British society.

All are drawn into a web of death and deceit; a conspiracy which reaches to the highest powers of the land; an intrigue built upon murder and manipulation.

When death stalks the dark streets of London, no one will be safe from the razor's kiss.

The door swung open even as his hand rapped on it.

The living room was quiet, a black lacquered lamp lay on the carpet, the shade tumbled askew. Geraint's nerves began to jangle. People who live in places like this didn't leave their doors open.

Francesca looked puzzled, dumb, as if trying to focus on the scene. "Where's Annie?" she mumbled.

"Don't know. This seems a bit odd, but I'm sure there's nothing to . . ." His voice trailed away as he stepped farther in and saw the hint of a stain in front of the door to his left. He couldn't be sure, it might be no more than spilled wine, but his guts were beginning to churn and he was afraid.

"Fran, why don't you just sit, uh, down there and I'll call down to security?" He steered her to a plush chair facing away from the far door, and reached for the telecom on the table beside it. That way he could open the bedroom door and peek in un.o.btrusively while making the call.

Geraint would never have believed a body had so much blood in it.

1.

The first gleam of blood-red light arced across the cabin just as the ma.s.sive tires of the suborbital Ghost shuttle screamed on first contact with Runway 11 of the world's busiest airport. The mage's mind was elsewhere, and the rough impact jolted him back into the real world of Heathrow's dazzling lights and concourses.

The call had come just when Serrin thought he'd almost gotten used to Seattle, even begun to feel slightly at home there, his suitcases slouched against the wall of a cheap hotel for more than the usual week or two. He'd been wary of the offer made by the suit with the impossibly even tone of voice, but the nuyen glowing on his credstick was no lie and money enough to bring him to London as requested.

Perhaps the corporation that wanted to hire him couldn't find a registered British mage to do the job for them. That was plausible enough, considering the way the Lord Protector's offices had nearly every British mage tied up good and safe in red tape. Every pract.i.tioner of magic had to pay a hefty fee and submit a DNA sample to be registered by the Lord Protector's office. A foreigner trying to register could wait weeks, or even months, just for the processing of his or her application. Serrin had bypa.s.sed the usual difficulties and delays-and possible refusal of his application-because the powerful Renraku Corporation had owed him a few favors. Thanks to them Serrin's carefully coded DNA sample was properly filed in one of the huge bas.e.m.e.nt complexes of the Temple District. Gently, without admitting it, they had pointed him in the direction of the right people, which was the least they could do to make up for his leg turned to mincemeat while doing some work for them.

"We'd like you to sign this disclaimer of responsibility, however," the jittery accountant had muttered, all the while avoiding his gaze. "It'll, ah, tie up any loose ends. Just protocol." Maybe a leg turned to mincemeat was just protocol after all.

The magnetic seatbelt unclipped and Serrin got slowly to his feet, reaching up to open the overhead compartment. He pulled out his pigskin bag, then instinctively clutched it to his chest as if protecting some intimate part of himself. He edged forward along the aisle behind a snot-nosed child, who whined in protest as a blotchyfaced woman dragged him along toward Customs. For a split-second, the elf had a feeling of pure absurdity, a sensation of unreality, of being almost out of his own body. He grabbed at the papers inside his shabby jacket as if for support. With a shake of his head, he focused on the pa.s.sport, the visa, the medical doc.u.ments, the permits, and the licenses. d.a.m.n the British love of bureaucracy! Getting through Customs and Immigration in London was like having to read a long letter very slowly to a very deaf, half-senile great-aunt who, even in her rare moments of lucidity, willfully feigned a lack of comprehension.

Standing at the head of a stairway leading to British tarmac, Serrin shivered. It was one-fifteen in the morning, early November, the temperature hovering around zero Celsius and a dismal filmy drizzle of rain coating his skin with grime from the London skies. So much for the year 2054 and the city's miracle weather-control dome!

He descended the steps slowly and a little painfully, his usual fine tremor become a veritable tremble. Coughing into a balled fist, he made his way gratefully to the warmth of the pa.s.senger coach waiting to deliver him unto British officialdom. I hate London, he thought, but at least you can get a decent malt whiskey here. Comforting himself with that prospect, he ducked his cropped gray head into the coach doorway and found himself sitting next to a pile of duty-free items and another sniveling child. The tall, gangling elf gave the boy a sinister look that made the youngster shrink back in alarm. Good, thought Serrin wearily, that should keep him quiet for a while.

At the moment Serrin was closing his eyes for a bit of rest, somewhere in London's East End, blood was dripping down onto the floorboards of a nondescript apartment in the neighborhood known as Whitechapel. The knife had done its work and now was the time for greater precision.

In Chelsea, yet another part of the city, a n.o.bleman was turning his gaze from the flickering computer screen to the elegantly fluted bottle resting in a monogrammed silver ice bucket. Geraint drew the bottle toward him, wrapped a linen cloth around the cork, and pulled it out so carefully that the hiss of escaping gas was barely audible. She hadn't heard; she would be deeply asleep by now. Dom Ruisse '38 would have been wasted on the girl-one of Geraint's rare lapses of taste.

He clipped the rubber seal over the bottle and depressed the silver hooks to keep the chilled champagne fresh. The wine tasted good, and he contemplated the pleasure of it as he idly swirled the bubbles in his gla.s.s. Then his gaze traveled, almost involuntarily, past the row of financial yearbooks and references by his work station to the mahogany box etched with images of dragons. He hesitated for only the briefest instant, then flipped the gold catch and drew out the black silk bundle containing his deck of cards. He cleared a s.p.a.ce on the cool white surface of the table, pushed his gla.s.s to one side, then expertly shuffled the unwieldy deck several times. He sat for several long moments, mentally aligning himself with the Tarot. Feeling the rapport established, he lit a cigarette and left it to spiral blue smoke from the marbled ashtray.

With a sudden motion he reached out to cut the deck with a single, decisive sweep, then flicked over the top card.

The Magician.

Geraint was startled, not expecting this after so many years. The signal from a card of the Major Arcana was quite unequivocal: Serrin!

The Magician is here, he thought. The deck was telling him, and he felt it in his gut. He pursed his lips with his fingers, forgetting everything else around him, intent only on the extraordinary image of the snake-crowned juggler smiling at him. More than a century ago, the artist had given the Magician card the distinctly pointed ears of an elf; what had she and the designer of the Thoth Tarot known of the coming Sixth Age of the world? Had they foreseen the birth of elves and the other new races of metahumanity?

But these thoughts were taking him off-track. Show me why he comes here, Geraint silently asked the deck. With long, slender fingers he drew another card, which he placed face-up, across the first. He saw the unmistakable image as it turned, and shuddered in spite of himself.

The Nine of Swords. Cruelty. Blood dripped from the fractured blades in the image. The Welshman felt fear, fear for Serrin, fear for what was to come. Then, a third card slid from the deck, without his even touching it, as though his fear had called it forth to obscure the horror of the Nine.

A stone's throw away, Francesca Young rebuffed an inept pa.s.s by her escort as she drew her tanned legs into the waiting limo. She wrinkled her nose just discemibly at the sight of a troll in the chauffeur's seat, but he was polite and Forbes Security had obviously spent money on elocution lessons for their operatives. Mercifully, he restricted himself to a "Very good, m'lady" as he eased the powerful machine along Kensington High Street; Francesca was too out of sorts to put up with a driver who thought clients wanted meaningless chatter about London's weather at two in the morning. As she stared out the window, the first sight that greeted her eyes was that of two young fools in tuxedos squaring off in the road while a pair of debs shrieked with delight from the windows of their limo. She felt tired and jaded, fed up with men who ordered salmon after hearing her mention she'd grown up on the Pacific seaboard of North America, then expected s.e.xual favors for the price of a fairly routine meal.

Her mind returned to her work. All afternoon she'd been buzzing over her cyberdeck, a Fuchi 6, installing the smartframe that would operate as a semi-independent intelligence to execute programs that would protect her while she traveled about in the cybers.p.a.ce of the Matrix. With the new Korean sleaze program, she'd be able to slip past intrusion countermeasures that until now she'd been too wary to confront. She forgot all about her annoying date and stretched out in the back seat. Men were far less sensuous than a hot program.

She was almost asleep when the limo delivered her to her doorstep; six minutes more and her head hit the pillow in her bedroom. In vain did the tortoisesh.e.l.l cat grumble for his food. Daddy's little rich girl slept, but that didn't mean the cat would have long to wait. Not much time pa.s.sed before Francesca was awake again, screaming in terror. It was the same nightmare and it always woke her at the same place, just as the last scalpel had been cleaned and was being put back in the case.

The Empress. Sitting demurely in her bower, holding flowers, and dressed in blue-green, the serene figure gazes out contentedly over the bounty of the earth. Her curves are sensuous and strong, and she is crowned by the sky above her throne.

Geraint almost slumped with relief. Francesca. Well, we certainly know each other, we three. The hint of a feeling slipped past his control, a momentary sadness, the recollection of a precious opportunity now lost, but the impression faded quickly.

His eyes were drawn against his will to a detail in the bottom left-hand corner of the card: seated below the throne of the woman, beyond her sight, was a pelican feeding her young. It was said that the bird nourished her offspring with her own blood, and, in truth, these fledglings were pecking at their mother's breast. Geraint saw blood, blood in his mind's eye and not on the card, and his body almost convulsed. The triangle of tufted hair at the nape of his neck rose and a cold chill ran down his spine. The champagne lay flat in the gla.s.s now, having become merely poor, thin wine. Show me help, he begged the cards, show me what I can reach to. Is there anyone there?

Rani was breathing a little heavily as she gave the five-rap signal on the reinforced door. Her brother Imran drew back the bolts, saw her face in what remained of the streetlights, and hurriedly pulled the chains from their pins. He drew her into his arms and half-dragged her inside, fumbling the bolts and heavy steel chains back into place to seal out the harsh night. He brushed back the hair from her forehead, examining her face carefully. Rea.s.sured that she was unharmed, he still wanted to know what had happened.

"It was nothing. Just a pair of dweebs in an alley in Sh.o.r.editch, up by Den's chippie, the one who sells that c.r.a.p cod, you know?" She was talking too fast, unsettled. "One came up behind me and I swivel-kicked him. I don't think he'll be having any kids in future. The other one didn't back off right away, though. b.a.s.t.a.r.d had a meathook with a honed edge. I think he wanted to get some practice barbering." She laughed a little too loudly and tears welled in her large brown eyes. "Doesn't matter. Happens all the time. "

Imran hugged her tight again and shushed her, stroking the back of her head. Then he ushered her into the living room with its barred windows, peeling gilt wallpaper, and frayed carpets. She could see Sanjay with his thermometer and gla.s.s retorts in the kitchen beyond, the acrid smell of acetone and isopropyl biting through the air. She looked despondently at Imran, then flicked her eyes back toward kitchen, her face almost despairing.

"It's for a bunch of rakkies in from Ess.e.x who think they're going to have fun slumming in the Smoke," her brother sighed, trying to prevent a scene. "Who cares about white human trash? Sanjay won't put any rat poison in it. Promise." His lopsided grin asked for comprehension, but her head was in her hands now, her broad shoulders heaving a little as she fought back the sobs. Her brother knew better than to touch or approach her, giving Rani time to master these powerful emotions with her own strength. This wasn't the moment for the usual reproaches about her being away from home; for once, the words died on his lips.

She inhaled deeply and brushed away the traces of tears from her face. "Maybe they wanted to kill me because I'm not white. Maybe they wanted to kill me because I'm an ork. I only did what I did because they came at me with blades and hammers. But I killed someone not twenty minutes ago, and I don't feel good about that. And when I get home I find my brothers cooking up drugs to feed the habits of a bunch of trancers." She sighed deeply and sank back into the chair, resigned and weary. "Sod it. I'm seventeen years old, and just now I think I've had enough of the world. Or at least the East End of b.l.o.o.d.y London."

Feeling too hopeless to talk, Rani climbed the stairs to her room. She kicked off her heavy combat boots, pulled off her woolen socks, and looked at the upturned palms of her hands with their flexible immunoneutral pads below the skin. Not many of her kind could afford such a fusion of biology and tech. The twenty-first century had made it possible, but it couldn't make it cheap. Imran had paid a lot to protect her.

That's one advantage of being an Indian, she reminded herself; a smartgun link is harder to see on me than on a whiteskin. Makes me a lot harder to kill than most of my cousins. The ones still alive know that. The others found out too late. She pulled the padded jacket over her head and shoulders, making a mental note to repair the tear along the right shoulder in the morning. The edge of the meat hook had made a very precise cut, but a few minutes with the monofilament staplegun and the jacket would be as good as new. She tugged off her baggy ribbed pants and clambered into bed, and within minutes was asleep. Rani was too exhausted to be disturbed by the frequent sounds of shouts and gunfire that came up from the streets through her cracked window to her. Besides, she was used to it.

Strength.

The calm gaze of the woman holding the lion's mouth open stared back at Geraint from the card. He didn't know who she was, but he felt a mixture of calm and excitement after the horror and fear of the earlier images, a sense of rea.s.surance and uncertainty at the same time. Well, powerful lady, I hope we meet sooner rather than later. After the soft-bodied creatures of the last few weeks, you should be interesting.

Geraint grinned, put the pack in its silk and in its box, and then poured a fresh gla.s.s of champagne. News was coming through fast from Tokyo and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong; something was popping in the pharmaceuticals markets, or so it looked. He reached for the plug and snapped it into the datajack behind his left ear, bringing the electronic chatter of the cyberdeck closer to his consciousness.

Geraint was in the Matrix now, and he felt predatory. At the same moment, his persona icon showed the place where his attention was directed in the Matrix. The icon had no objective reality among the optical chips, data-lines, and computer architecture they called the Matrix, but another operator in the same part of the system would perceive Geraint's "persona" as a Celtic knight grasping a longsword, which represented a powerful attack program in cybers.p.a.ce. Beside him, his sensor utilities took the image of a pack of Irish wolfhounds, eager and snuffling as they loped along beside him.

Let's go check on the nightlife in Teesprawl, he thought with a smile. Something tells me Zeta-ImpChem might have some interesting data on this. Come on, boys. Time to make money.

It's the middle of the twenty-first century, but the November fog is not so different from what it was in fin de siecle nineteenth-century London. The soup may not be quite as thick, but it boasts a more powerful c.o.c.ktail of pathogens and chemical pollutants. The famous fog also still provides cover for those who want to slip unseen into the shadows, especially closer to the River Thames, where most of the street lights have been shot out.

At three-ten in the morning, the thermometer is still hovering around zero. Blood is beginning to seep through the floorboards of a room in Whitechapel and soon it will begin to show on the ceiling of the chamber below. That won't worry the girl asleep downstairs; she's a trancer. The drugs won't wash out of her system until a police doctor arrives after the constables smash down her door later on. A young constable, the one who is first on the scene upstairs, will be vomiting uncontrollably in the street outside. The police photographer will be very, very glad he never takes more than coffee for breakfast.

So it begins.

2.

Serrin woke with a start.

Seven-thirty. The familiar and unchanging BBC voice, anonymous for generations, was reading off the mundane litany of disaster that comprised world news. The only good thing, the elf thought groggily, was that the BBC was less parochial than the American broadcasts he was used to. You actually did get world news and not just what happened in your city, tribe, or state in the previous twenty-four hours.

He yawned and stretched his whole body until his hamstring gave him a twinge, reminding him not to push it too far. That thought had distracted him from the first part of what the BBC voice was saying about some five murders in London last night, somewhat above the average. The part he caught was about a particularly messy murder of a prost.i.tute in the East End, hardened policeman turning white or green or similar implausible shades, blah blah, blah. Serrin reached for the remote and ran his fingers over the b.u.t.tons to switch to trideo. The picture shimmered into focus instantly-not bad for an average hotel box-only to show some airhead prancing around a weather display that suggested Britain was doomed both to rain and garbage breakfast entertainment for some months to come. He eased his long legs over the edge of the bed and creaked to his feet.

"Message for you, Mr. Shamandar." the telecom crackled with a cheerfulness utterly unsuited to such an hour of a British morning.

"Thanks, go ahead," Serrin wheezed, spluttering back his thick, early-morning cough.

"Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones cordially invite you to a business breakfast in the Chippendale Suite at nine o'clock. They politely request that you be prompt. Thank you for taking this message." The voice squeaked into silence.

Serrin headed for the bathroom opposite the bed, and wrenched the tub's bra.s.s hot-water tap into life. One of the few things he appreciated about Brits was the ambivalent quality of hotel baths: lots of towels, excellent, subtly perfumed soaps, and appalling plumbing and cold bathrooms. The chill guaranteed that you'd want to stay in the hot water of the bath purely to survive. The plumbing, however, guaranteed that every bathtime was something of an adventure; would you get enough hot water to fill the respectably large tubs before it ran lukewarm?

Francesca had told him that it was solely the principle of the thing that made Brits refuse to use decent chiptech in their hot-water systems. Baths, they seemed to think, shouldn't be enjoyed too much. It offended their puritanical asceticism. At the time he'd a.s.sumed that it had more to do with plain, old-fashioned British inefficiency. Strange that thoughts of Francesca should cross his mind now. It had been five years since they had last met.

With a tug at his heart that he hadn't felt for a long time, the elf remembered holding a terrified young woman outside a restaurant full of corpses in San Francisco. Closing his eyes, he sank into the welcoming warmth of the water as a wave of memory brought back the sweet smell of her fresh-washed hair against his face. Serrin rarely thought about women, nor did he linger on the topic now. He leaned back against the deep tub, turning his thoughts to business and to the fact that the accommodations the suits had chosen for him did not reveal much about them. The Crescent Hotel was neither real cla.s.s nor the fake kind for Americans and j.a.panese with more money than true discernment; it was simply a reasonably good place to stay. He guessed that the pair would not give much away in the breakfast meeting, either, that there might be some cat-and-mouse about this job. I'll worry about that later, he thought. Right now, it's time to soak these bones and get out some of the jet lag.

"Thank you for being so prompt, Mr. Shamandar." The pudgy hand gripped his with routine corporate strength; not weak, not strong, just an in-between rea.s.surance.

The Chippendale Suite could have seated twenty in ample comfort, so whoever was behind Messrs. Smith and Jones wasn't worried about their expense credsticks. The serving table groaned under the weight of a very traditional British breakfast: bacon, kidneys, smoked herring in b.u.t.ter, scrambled eggs in a great silver bowl, poached eggs in salvers, acres of toast that would be as cold as the chill gray morning, yellow b.u.t.ter in white dishes, thick and distressingly dark marmalade, preserves, urns of tea the color of boot polish, and silver pots of Colombian coffee, enough to feed an army of the urchins roaming the streets of the South London Squeeze zone. They'd have died young from gamma-cholesterol furring up their arteries, but then those urchins had a very low life-expectancy anyway.

Serrin turned his mind back to the matter at hand and heaped a Wedgwood plate with bacon and eggs, hoping that the steam rising from the yellowed eggs would live up to the promise of some residual heat in them. The suits settled for coffee, toast, and what the jar label claimed to be Scottish raspberry jam. The mage vaguely recalled some blight having wiped out Scottish fruit-farming several years ago, but maybe the druids of the Wild Lands in the Grampians had restored the land of late.

The leaner suit, Jones, saturnine and with an almost polished skin, interrupted Serrin's meandering thoughts. "We require a skilled operative to conduct some low-risk surveillance, sir."

The opening gambit was not unexpected: nice and vague. Serrin nodded without speaking. Let them come to the point.

"Our client has an interest in a certain key area of research," Jones went on. "And such research is being conducted in facilities in a city not far from London. Naturally, our client observes the proprieties, while aiming to conduct multimodality surveillance."

Serrin winced mentally, hoping it hadn't shown on his face. Where did these people learn to speak like this? He nodded once again, gratified to find that the eggs had retained just enough heat to warm the toast.

"It would not be frank to fail to apprise you that our client has initiated observations in the cybersphere."

Cybersphere? Come on, chummers, cut the gibberish. I know what computerized snooping is and I'm sure you've hired a good decker. But what do you want from me?

The other man, Smith, took up the patter. As he began to speak, Serrin was intrigued by the small ruby embedded into one of the man's teeth. Not exactly standard-issue for a faceless British corporate mouthpiece.

"Our client is anxious that these observations be enhanced by magical surveillance," Smith was saying. "Our client is aware of your reputation in such matters. He has heard among the knowledgeable that you are one who can deal with watchers. If I may put it so, those spirits who exist in the etheric plane in astral s.p.a.ce. At least, this is what I gather that philosophers on such matters say."

Smith and Jones exchanged token smiles and then turned back to face Serrin. They've got their act down pat, the mage thought. They should be exchanging banter with Barry Dando on whatever the lame Brit equivalent is of the late-night talk show, not pushing this c.r.a.p. Who do they think they're kidding with watchers? Anyone into serious research will have hermetics, mages on the company payroll, who'll make d.a.m.n sure nothing so simple can crack anything that matters.

"Of course," Jones continued slickly, as Smith smoothed an errant strand of hair over his balding head, "those corporate interests that are developing research along the lines in which our client has a primary interest will be vigilant regarding the possibility of watchers being used as observers. Our client would regard such vigilance as a positive sign that those very corporations are developing research along lines in which our client is interested. In short, we want you to use watchers as a lure to test the defenses of certain corporations."

Jones sat back, then lunged forward to grab the coffee pot. There was a twitchiness about the gesture that told Serrin coffee wasn't the only Colombian export Jones had ingested that morning. It had been so long since his last visit to this country that he'd almost forgotten people here still got high on drugs rather than dreamchips. It amazed him that people were so willing to destroy their bodies and minds.

Smith took up the conversation again in an oily, ingratiating tone. "This is not a demanding task, Mr. Shamandar. However, you must be aware that the unfortunate official restrictions under which we live in Britain require that we look beyond our own sh.o.r.es for able operatives to carry out the tasks requested by clients such as ours."

Serrin was growing more annoyed by the minute. Why had they brought him all this way just to beat around the bush? Looking down, he saw that he'd dolloped marmalade onto what remained of his eggs. He decided to brazen it out. It didn't taste good.

"Our client offers one thousand nuyen per day, plus expenses." The fat man sat back, looking smug. The tiny gem glittered in his mouth, adding fake glamour to his crocodile smile.

"Fifteen hundred," Serrin said curtly. "The work may seem easy, but experts don't come cheap." Serrin thought he might be pushing his luck, but he wanted to test the responses of these unflappable suits. To his surprise, Smith agreed at once.

"Very well. You drive a hard bargain, sir. Fifteen hundred was the limit allowed by our client. You will begin work tomorrow. At five o'clock this afternoon, we will have delivered to you a list of the sites we wish you to survey. You will spend an initial period of one week conducting surveillance and then report to us, both orally and in writing, in nine days' time. We are authorized to give you this." Smith handed Serrin a roseate hard plastic rod that he'd retrieved from the recesses of his immaculate Saville Row suit. "This is good for twelve thousand nuyen, plus three thousand for travel and other incidental expenses. You will not need to provide receipts unless you exceed that sum and wish to claim the balance from our client. Your hotel bill will be covered by our client, who wishes you to stay here each night rather than in Cambridge, where your research will be conducted. That will help prevent detection of your work. You can confirm the sum the credstick authorizes in the credit a.n.a.lyzer in the hotel lobby if you wish."

The suits were rising to their feet now, Smith sweeping away some toast crumbs from the expanse of waistcoat stretched over his ample belly. Jones shook Serrin's hand with exactly the same pressure Smith had applied. "Please enjoy your day. We look forward to seeing you again." With that, the men swept out of the suite.

Serrin drained the coffee pot, adding just a little of the slightly yellowed cream from the jug, which spilled some of its contents over the starched linen tablecloth each time it was used.

This was too easy. The fixer had agreed too readily to a fifty percent increase; the credstick had already been cut on that basis. They knew him, they knew watchers were his specialty. Serrin had the feeling that somehow he was being used. But for fifteen hundred nuyen and for a job that couldn't possibly present any danger, he couldn't imagine that it was a sucker deal.

Could he?