Matt Forbeck has worked full-time on games and fiction since 1989. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, and board games, and written short fiction, comic books, novels, nonfiction, magazine articles, and computer game scripts and stories for companies including Atari, ArenaNet, DK Publishing, High Voltage Software, Turbine, Ubisoft, Del Rey, Wizards of the Coast, Games Workshop, WizKids, Mattel, IDW, Image Comics and Playmates Toys. His first original novels, Amortals and Vegas Knights, hit shelves in the summer of 2010. For more information, visit Forbeck.com.
"Deal me in," the dwarf said as he limped along the sumptuous Sioux carpet that sprawled across the wide, polished parquet of rare Yucatan woods. He snickered as he watched the gazes of the men drift inward toward their commlinks, silently demanding that their high-paid security forces earn their exorbitant wages by showing up to take out the trash.
He gimped his way closer to the table, enjoying the growing look of fear on the faces of each the four suits sitting there as they realized that help would not soon be coming. He grunted along on his good leg, favoring his battered knee, and he reached into the fraying pocket of his torn and tattered jacket, fished out a packet of paper, and pitched it into the middle of the table.
The men recoiled as if he'd tossed them a grenade. Then one of them leaned forward and peered at the bound-up papers through tight, beady eyes set deep into his hatchet-shaped face framed by a haircut that cost more than the dwarf made in a week.
"Real money," the dwarf said. "The stuff we used to use before electronic transfer. Before trusting the corp banks was mandatory."
"Is it real?" a white-haired man at the table said. The dwarf heard the telltale click-wheeze of the man's cybernetic lungs. The man stared at the money as if it might sprout legs and fangs and attack.
The dwarf laughed. "Probably not, but then what is?"
He hopped up onto the only empty chair at the table and stood on it. His eyes still barely came to the level of the men staring at him. He flicked his chin at the man stroking his pianist's fingers along a large tray of thick, colored chips.
"That's a hundred thousand nuyen." The dwarf waved a thick hand at the decaying paper. "Count it if you like."
The man's pencil-thin moustache peeled back in a sneer. "That won't be necessary."
The dwarf smirked at that. He reached out for the chips, but the hatchet-faced man slapped a hand on the felt between the banker and the cash.
"This is a private game," the man said.
The dwarf stuck out his bottom lip at that and gazed out the high windows overlooking the sparkling Chicago skyline-or what was left of it. The space where the Sears Tower had once stood still gaped like a missing tooth.
"So it is," the dwarf said. "And it's being held in a private club." He smiled at that. "And yet here I stand."
The white-haired man coughed, then spoke. "Subhuman species are not permitted in the club."
"The club? Is that what you're calling it these days? Short for the Policlub, eh?" He looked at his own stunted height, then gave the men a knowing wink. "Pardon the pun."
"Humanis is a charitable organization devoted to protecting the rights of a humanity besieged on all sides," the banker said, a hint of amusement in his voice.
"Or so your commercials claim," the dwarf said as he doffed his grimy baseball cap. Nanite-inked tattoos snaked and danced beneath the skin of his bald scalp, forming hypnotic shapes like a living screensaver trapped inside his skull.
He leaned forward and put two hammer-like fists on the table. His braided beard, streaked through with gray, grazed the green felt.
"Let's not mince words. We're worldly souls. You're bigots. Wealthy ones too. You get nasty people to do terrible things to people like me, and you pay them well for it because it keeps your hands clean."
A small gun appeared in hand of the fourth man at the table, the one who'd been silent until now. He looked young and strong, although the dwarf was sure he'd been surgically sculpted that way. He could smell the bioengineered pheromones wafting off the man, designed to tell everyone within range who the big dog at the table must be.
Despite all that, he held the gun like a little boy.
"I'm not afraid of you," the man with the gun said through rows of perfectly straight teeth.
The dwarf laughed. "Go ahead, boy. Pull that trigger. Give it your best shot."
The man hesitated. A bead of sweat ran from his temple.
The dwarf leaned farther over the table, nearly crawling on to it. He pointed right at the center of his forehead.
"Go ahead and shoot, son." The dwarf's voice dripped with contempt. "I can take it. Or when you went in for all that cosmetic surgery did they remove your balls because you were clearly never going to need them?"
The gun barked in the man's hand, nearly leaping from his fingers. The bullet zipped high over the dwarf's head and crashed into chandelier overhead. Flying shards of crystal rained down and sliced into the dwarf's exposed skin.
The dwarf pushed himself back to stand on his chair. He reached up and picked out the bits of crystal still embedded in his skull.
The white-haired man with the plastic lungs gasped. "Lucky Wurfel," he said. "You're supposed to be dead."
A rivulet of blood trickled down the side of the dwarf's head. He snorted at that. "No such luck."
"Lucky?" The man with the gun had lost his expensive cool. His hands shook so hard that he dropped the weapon on the table. It went off again.
This time, the bullet tore through Lucky's jacket and creased his ribs. He grunted in pain and grabbed at his side. When he pulled his hand away, crimson coated his palm.
"Oh, my God!" the gun-dropper said. "I'm-I'm…"
"Sorry?" Lucky said as he straightened back up.
The man scowled at the dwarf. He glanced at the gun again, and his fingers twitched.
Lucky nodded. "I didn't think so." He pointed at the man with the chips again. "Deal me in."
"So we can play against a dwarf named Lucky? I don't think so."
"You got something against free money?"
"I don't want you taking mine."
The white-haired man interrupted. "The nickname's meant to be ironic, like calling a fat man 'Slim.' This son of a bitch has the worst possible luck."
"Huh." The hatchet-faced man gave Lucky a look like he was sizing him up for a body bag. "Seems that would have killed a 'normal' man by now."
Lucky grunted at the man's racism. "Dying's easy. Living with pricks like you around, that's the real challenge."
The hatchet-faced man shifted in his seat but refused to meet Lucky's eyes. The dwarf stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the banker. "So," he said, "do you want my money or not?"
"Why do you want to play?" the gunman said. "I mean, you're going to lose, right? What's the point?"
"Because I want to tell you a story," the dwarf said. "And interrupting a game of cards is rude. "
The white-haired man nodded at the banker. The man reached out and scooped up the packet of bills. Without counting the money, he pulled 100,000 nuyen worth of chips from the tray in front of him and pushed them across the table toward the dwarf.
Lucky swept the chips into a pile in front of him. Then he looked each of the men-every one of whom hated him and anyone like him, he knew-and grinned.
"All right," he said. "Let's play."
The hatchet-faced man dealt. Lucky spotted him slipping cards from the bottom of the deck as he went, but he didn't bother to say anything. He knew he was going to lose, after all. He expected it. The game meant nothing.
"So," the white-haired man said. "What's your story?"
"Yeah," the too-handsome man with the gun still sitting in front of him said. "You're about to pay us a lot of money to listen, so out with it."
Lucky gathered in his cards and looked at them. They read 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. All of them were clubs, with the exception of the 7, which was a spade. He put the cards down in front of him and tossed a 1,000 nuyen chip into the center of the table.
"I wasn't always the unluckiest dwarf you'll ever meet. Well, I mean most people. I suspect idiots like you don't run into a whole lot of dwarves in your corporate boardrooms.
"I was one of the first dwarves ever born. When I came out of my momma, imagine what a surprise that must have been. At first they must have just thought I was a little small. Maybe just a bit behind the growth curve. By the time I got to school, though, they must have had their suspicions. I know when I finally went off to middle school, for sure, they had more than guesses that I was a, well-"
"Freak." The man with the gun sneered at Lucky.
The dwarf shrugged it off. "Maybe. Hell, probably. They even talked with some doctors about how to surgically lengthen my not-so-long bones.
"After they talked with enough specialists, though, they realized that they didn't have some kind of genetic anomaly on their hands, but a child in the vanguard of a new resurgence of an ancient race."
Lucky held up his hands to stave off the scoffing.
"Save it. You think I'm a freak of nature, and I think you're a murderous bunch of assholes. Maybe we're both right, but that's not the point of the story. So, if you'll let me go on?"
The others looked to the white-haired man, who nodded his assent.
"Back in those days, there weren't a whole lot of things a dwarf could do. I didn't fancy joining the circus, thank you, so I had to forge a new destiny for myself. When I was eighteen, the computers all crashed, and my identity was lost. I took that as a sign and never registered with the rebooted systems. Instead, I slipped into the shadows, and I've never come out since.
"The year I turned twenty-eight, I was a hardcore shadowrunner. That was back in '39, back when it all went bad. I lost a lot of friends in the riots on the Night of Rage."
Lucky stopped for a moment and gazed up at the spot where the Sears Tower had once stood. Although it had been gone for so long, it still felt like someone had cut off one of his limbs. When he got this close to it, it almost seemed like he could still feel it out there, teeming with thousands of lives.
He didn't bother drawing any cards. He just kept the ones he'd been dealt. Still, he called every bet and every raise.
"My parents worked downtown, right near the Sears Tower. They died the day it went down. I was somewhere off in Manhattan, still trying to help clean up, to make a difference after the riots."
The banker threw down the winning hand and raked in the chips. The deal passed to the white-haired man, and the cards came sliding across the felt again. Lucky didn't even bother to look at his cards this time. He kept playing mechanically while he talked.
"As you might imagine, all that made me pretty mad. I was a real revolutionary for a while there. I cut off all contact with humans.
"As far as I was concerned, you guys were the enemy. A dead-end branch on the evolutionary path to the top of the food chain. If I'd have had my way, I'd have pushed all the resurgent races into havens on the West Coast and then nuked the rest of the continent until it was a sheet of glowing, green glass."
Lucky paused for a moment to relish the looks on the faces of the men staring at him. They were used to being the haters, not the hated, and the swap in positions discomforted them.
"Instead, after a lot of soul searching and no little amount of beer, I decided to switch tactics. Instead of doing runs for anyone with enough credits to spare, I swore I would only take on contracts for missions that would help the resurgents and do something to keep disasters like the Sears Tower from ever happening again.
"I specialized in curses."
The breath in the white-haired man's plastic lungs caught. Lucky was sure he was the only one who noticed, as it came at the end of another hand. The gunman won this time, and after raking in his winnings he started to deal as well.
"Magic came back along with the metahumans, as I'm sure pisses every one of you off to this day. You probably think the only kind of magic is eeeevil magic, but you're as wrong about that as you are about everything else.
"Magic is a tool. It doesn't tell you how to use it. You just pick it up and do what comes naturally.
"If you have a chainsaw, for instance, you might start knocking down trees. Paul Bunyan might hate the chainsaw, but every other lumberjack around loves it.
"If you decide to use it for something more, ah, antisocial, though-like knocking off heads instead-then you're the evil one. The murderous urges come from inside you. The chainsaw is innocent."
The gunman shook his head. "But that's not true. Magic doesn't work that way. You just mentioned curses."
"Yes," the banker chipped in. "Aren't you supposed to be cursed?"
Lucky tapped his temple with a thick index finger. "Exactly," he said. "Magic can be bad, just like people can be bad. Curses are bad, but they're not the worst."
The dwarf called the bet and raised it again. He waited for play to continue, but the hatchet-faced man held up his hand for it to stop.
"What is it then?"
"What?"
"The worst sort of magic. Does it have anything to do with something that causes perfectly normal women to give birth to genetic freaks?"
"Do you know to keep an asshole in suspense?"
The man shook his head.
"I'll tell you later. Now see that raise or fold."
The man tossed in his chips, and Lucky began speaking again.
"I got sent on one of my last missions back in '45. I wound up at a secret base up in northern Michigan, near Sioux St. Marie. The scientists there had located a cursed artifact of some sort or another and were trying to weaponize it."
The gunman scoffed. "Are you telling me that some of those damned elves were trying to figure out a way to throw the evil eye at a whole city at once?'
Lucky waited for the man to stop chuckling at himself. Then he started in.
"Ever read The Lord of the Rings?" he asked.
The gunman shrugged and shook his head. The hatchet-faced man and the banker followed suit. Only the white-haired man seemed prepared to admit he'd ever even heard of the books.
"I've seen the movies," he said. "The trideo remakes, not the originals."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," the gunman said. "The ones with the dwarves in them." He glanced at Lucky as the others nodded in recognition at last. "I'll bet those are your favorites."
"In The Lord of the Rings, there's this dark lord named Sauron-"
"As in 'the Sons of Sauron.'" The white-haired man glared at Lucky. "Who did you say you worked with again?"
"I didn't," said Lucky. "But I try to avoid those pro-metahuman wackos whenever I can. Their agenda is almost as stupid as the crap you Humanis idiots spout."
The gunman started to say something, but Lucky cut him off. "That's not what I'm trying to get at here. This Sauron-the one in the book-he had a ring of power. The ring of power. It corrupted anyone who touched it. Drove them mad."
"Including him?"
"He lost it."
"How'd that happen?"
"Just go back to school, learn how to read, and then open the fucking book. That's not my story here."
Lucky waited for a moment for the gunman to sit back in his chair and shut up.
"All right. Imagine-now, I know that's hard for calcified brains like the ones you guys tote around in your skulls-but imagine, if you will, what would happen if you could take that cursed ring and atomize it."
"Atom-what?" The hatchet-faced man scowled.
"Grind it up into a fine dust and then mix it with an aerosol spray," the white-haired man said.
"I see someone paid attention in chemistry class," Lucky said. "Now, imagine if you did that with the One Ring. If you could grind it up and aerosolize it, think about how many people you could corrupt at once. And they'd never stand a chance of not getting infected by it."
"That's insane," the banker said. "Nothing like that's ever been done before."
"Insane," the dwarf said, "but not impossible. In any case, that's what these scientists had set out to do."
"Are you saying they had the One Ring? I thought those books were supposed to be fiction."
Lucky gestured at himself. "Do I look like fiction?" Instead of waiting for an answer, he just shook his head. "No, there's no such thing as the One Ring, but the scientists up there near the Soo Locks didn't need an artifact like that. Instead, they had something else."
"Which was?"
"Ever hear of the Edmund Fitzgerald?"
The men at the table stared at him with blank looks.
"Nobody listens to the classics anymore," Lucky said. "The Edmund Fitzgerald was the most massive ship to ever sail the Great Lakes. It went down in a storm in 1975, almost a hundred years back. Twenty-nine men died."
"So what does an ancient wreck have to do with anything?"
"The Edmund Fitzgerald didn't go down due to mechanical failure or due to the storm. It went down because it was cursed."
"Bullshit." The hatchet-faced man cleared his throat and spat on the floor. "That's too early. Before the aberrations began."
"Back in the 'good ol' days,' right?" Lucky shook his head. "You Humanis schmucks never get it, do you? Magic isn't something wrong with the world. It's the natural way of things. It waxes and wanes through the centuries like the moon in the sky.
"Just like during a new moon, though, even when you can't see magic, it's still there. It's just waiting for its time to shine again."
"That's just a bunch of Sixth World crap," the banker said. "The same foolishness street shamans and other charlatans have been spouting forever."
Lucky smiled. "Believe what you like." He gestured at himself. "I think the facts are on my side."
"So what sank the Edmund Fitzgerald? The One Ring? Or was it made of white gold this time?"
Lucky shook his head. "A sailor on the ship had been having an affair with a Chippewa woman, the daughter of the Bad River band's chief. When she dumped him for another man, he stole something from her home, an ancient spear that had been part of the band's history ever since they'd taken that name.
"'Bad River.' Makes you wonder what must have happened for a whole band to get slapped with that name."
"No," the gunman said. He had his hands flat on the table before him, framing his still-smoking gun. The fingers of his right hand twitched toward it. "I don't wonder. I don't care."
"Course not. It's not all about humanity, is it?" He looked at each of the men in turn. "It's about white, male humanity. If you ever got rid of the metahumans, you'd just turn on each other again. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays. Anyone who's different from you in any way.
"Hell, if you got rid of them, you'd start in on the people with brown eyes. Or black hair. Or crooked noses.
"It's not about preserving rights with people like you. It never is. It's about preserving power. Yours."
The men stared wordlessly at Lucky. After a moment, he continued.
"The Edmund Fitzgerald went down because the spear the sailor stole was cursed. Of course, the spear sank with the ship, and it sat at the bottom of Lake Superior for decades before someone finally figured it out and then went to find it.
"Ares Industries got its hands on the damned thing, and somebody there decided that it wasn't enough to have a cursed spear around. After all, a spear can only affect one person-or ship, or building, or whatever-at a time. The Ares eggheads set their sights higher than that.
"So they ground it up, mixed it in with some nanites, and aerosolized the whole mess."
Lucky let that sink in for a minute.
"You're fucking nuts." The hatchet-faced man folded his hand. The chips sat untouched in the middle of the table.
"Ever heard of anthrax?"
The men squirmed in their seats.
"People hear the word 'anthrax,' and they break into cold sweats and then reach for their ultra-antibiotics. Remember the attack in Sacramento last year? Killed three hundred orks before it was done."
Lucky stared at the silent men. "Yeah, I expect you do.
"The funny thing about anthrax is that it's usually harmless. Cattle everywhere carry it. You can pick it up by walking through any pasture. It's more common than cow pies, and only about as annoying as stepping in one of them.
"But you refine it and then aerosolize it, and it's deadly.
"Imagine doing that with a cursed spear."
The men remained quiet. The white-haired man ran his tongue along the inside of his lips as if he had something to say, but he kept it to himself.
Lucky shrugged. "Wasn't my idea. I just got mixed up in it.
"Someone else from inside Ares got wind of the plan and hired me and my team of runners to go in and put an end to it. They'd lost the argument in the boardroom, it seems, but they weren't willing to just let it rest.
"Of course, they didn't exactly tell us everything about what we were after. Just that we had to snatch it and then confirm its destruction."
"Everything went smooth as silk at first. Our decker-that's what we called them back in the days when they still had to jack into a system-he blew through their IC defenses like they were made of toilet paper. Our mage took out most of the security with a nappy-time spell, and I took care of the rest of them with less than a single magazine."
Lucky's hand pulled an imaginary trigger as he spoke.
"Then, when we got our hands on the package, it all went to hell. Matrix feedback fried Bones's brain. Misha's spells fizzled in his fingers at the exact worst time. My guns jammed.
"I grabbed the package and high-tailed it out of there. The others were already dead. Our rigger scooped me up, and we zoomed away, watching the Soo Locks vanish in the rear-view mirror.
"We would have made it, too, if it hadn't been for the rain-and that damned moose.
"The damned thing went right through the windshield and crushed Jeremy dead. I sat there, stuck in the shotgun seat, and watched as we spun out of control and smashed into a stand of pine trees.
"The fucking airbags saved my life."
Lucky closed his eyes and took a moment to collect himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thick, stubby fingers until the screams in his head went away.
When Lucky opened his eyes again, the men were still staring at him, waiting for him to continue.
"The package shattered in the crash. All that dust. It got all over everything. Into everything.
"Everything.
"Me."
Lucky coughed at the memory, and the men around the table all jumped.
"There's a reason most people figured I died on that day. The paramedics that showed up to save my life were killed when the damn car exploded just after they pulled me out it. The kind man who stopped to give me a ride to the nearest hospital, he blew a tire on the way out of the parking lot and died in the resultant crash.
"The hospital itself suffered a gas leak shortly after I was admitted. The blast destroyed an entire wing of the place."
"How?" the white-haired man said. "You-with luck like that, you should be dead a dozen times over."
"Sure enough," said Lucky, "and that was just the start of it. It took me a while to twig to just what was going on. I'd taken a number of head injuries, after all. Eventually, though, I figured it out.
"The scientists had gotten it right. They'd turned that single cursed spear into uncountable millions of tiny little curses, and all the ones that hadn't gotten scattered all over the wreck had worked their way into me.
"I'd become-I am-a living curse. I'm kind of the anti-Midas. Everything I touch turns to shit."
The men stared at the dwarf. The banker actually edged his chair away from the table.
"It's all right," the gunman said. "He hasn't touched any of us."
Lucky reached over and picked up a card, then grinned. "True enough," he said. "But I didn't have to."
As he held the card up-the Queen of Hearts-the symbols on its face began to morph. Soon, he held the 2 of Spades.
"The nanites," the white-haired man whispered.
Lucky tossed the card down on the table and rubbed the moving tattoo on his scalp. The inkiness under his skin leaped toward his touch like iron filings to a magnet.
"They get into anything I touch for more than a few seconds. And then they do the same to anything-or anyone-handling that."
The gunman snatched up his gun again. "This-this game's over. I'm through playing around with you, stunty."
"Go ahead and fight it, kid," the dwarf said. "Give it your best shot. I've been at it for years, and I can't get it right. I'd love to see someone win."
"No," the white-haired man said to the gunman. "Don't-"
The gunman pulled the trigger. The gun exploded in his hand. He fell to the ground, clutching the raw stump of his wrist for a moment before passing out from the shock.
The banker leaped to his feet, knocking over the tray of chips as he went. He took three steps away from the table before he slipped on one of those chips and went sliding into the plate-glass window that Lucky had been staring out through before. The glass gave way as if the sealants all around it had somehow rotted away, and it and the banker tipped out into the wide-open Chicago night.
The hatchet-faced man snarled like a caged animal. "I don't believe you," he said. "This is all just some more of the usual metahuman propaganda you freaks propagate."
"I went into hiding right after I became cursed," Lucky said. "The sorts of things that happen to the people I come into contact with, they're not pretty. I can barely stand to watch.
"For assholes like you however, I'm happy to make an exception."
Lucky stepped onto the green felt in front of him, then beckoned the man toward him, taunting him to try to knock the dwarf from his perch. The hatchet-faced man lost his temper and lunged straight for Lucky.
The dwarf swung a meaty fist out and smashed the hatchet-faced man's nose flat. He felt the bones inside shatter and go straight back into the man's brain. The man fell to the floor with a sickening thud.
"Wouldn't your curse have taken care of him?" the white-haired man said.
"Eventually," said Lucky. "But who wants to wait for something like that when handling it yourself is so satisfying?"
"What about me?" the white-haired man said.
"You're already history. You were dead the moment I came into the room. Just like all the security guards you've been waiting on to show up since then."
The white-haired man clutched as his chest as he broke out into a sick sweat. "My heart."
"Imagine that," Lucky said. "What are the chances?"
"But." The white-haired man gasped. "What about you? Why doesn't the curse kill you too?"
"Because," Lucky said as the man collapsed on the table, "that would be letting me off too easy."
The dwarf got down from the table and strolled toward the door. As he reached it, he looked back over his shoulder at the four dead men. They'd engineered the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of metahumans. They'd have killed Lucky on the spot if they'd had an honest chance-not that he'd given them one.
They'd deserved to die, and he felt good about their deaths.
And more than a little jealous. He'd hoped one of them might have finally been able to release him from his curse. But no such luck.
He spat one last thing back at them as he left the place.
"Lucky bastards." Expectations By Kevin Killiany
Kevin Killiany has been the husband of Valerie for three decades and the father of Alethea, Anson, and Daya for various shorter periods of time. He has written for Star Trek and Doctor Who in addition to several game universes, most notably BattleTech and Mechwarrior. When not writing Kevin has been an exceptional children's teacher, drill rig operator, high-risk intervention counselor, warehouse grunt, ESL instructor, photographer, mental health case manager and paperboy. Currently Kevin is in family preservation services, is an associate pastor of the Soul Saving Station, and is managing to fit short stories in while working on his third novel. Kevin and Valerie live in Wilmington, North Carolina.
I rolled my left hand against the sidewalk, pushing off with the edge and heel before momentum broke my fingers. Hunching my shoulder, I tucked my chin to my chest and did my best to turn the headlong dive into a semi-controlled tumble. The plascrete pavement rolled up my elbow and across my shoulders as I pulled my Colt Manhunter free.
Ice seared my knee. I saw a flash shot image of slashed slacks and a mist of blood as it swung past my face. Flechette round. Dumb luck or my suit had kept the razor slivers from shredding anything more vital than dermis and capillaries.
I ended my roll flat on my stomach in two fingers of water. Dog kept to his feet, daintily avoiding puddles, as I wrapped both hands around my Manhunter and lined up on-
Nothing.
Or more precisely, a ten-meter-high wall of absolute blackness; flat and unreflecting in the orange glow of the sodium lights.
From the layout of the buildings, the black nothing was covering-or filling-an alley. But it could have been a straight shot to the bowels of the Deep Lacuna for all my eyes could tell me.
Then the scent of the spell reached me and everything became clear. • • •
Sight is the easiest sense to fool. Folks notice smells, twitch their ears when the sound's not right, scratch where it itches, and spit out what tastes suspicious, but when it comes to sight, they pretty much run on autopilot.
Which kinda makes you wonder why Fun City spent so much time and effort making their little piece of security look like it was stuck one hundred and twenty years in the past. Don't get me wrong. I'm as fond of pink stucco as the next guy, and riding in the replica of an antique car with no roof and decorative fins was-in the argot of the illusionary period-neato.
But good as the augmented reality overlays were, they didn't hide the fundamental wrongness of the picture. A picture made worse by the not-quite-right scent of orange blossoms they were using to not-quite-mask the stench of the Harbor wafting in over their western wall.
Technology's not magic; this's good enough for mundanes.
"It's February. Real orange trees are full of fruit."
"What?"
I looked at the woman sitting next to me-more like across from me, the back seat of the ground car was that wide-and realized I'd spoken aloud. That happens sometimes when I'm focused out; I forget what I'm doing.
"Talking to myself," I answered. I patted Dog absently. Dog hated to be touched, but the sight of the gesture-man patting loyal twelve-kilo companion-had a universally calming effect.
The woman, who had introduced herself as Rachel, tilted her head to one side, weighing whether she was satisfied with that. The driver skewered me with a gimlet glance; no trust there. These folks had me on constant scan, they knew I wasn't transmitting. But I reminded myself that this wasn't Pasadena, and the local mundanes were suspicious of folks who weren't so mundane talking to themselves.
"My father worked in the groves," I lied by way of disarming explanation. "It's the wrong time of year for orange blossoms."
"Ah." Rachel's teeth flashed white against her dark skin as she smiled. She had an exotic Afro-Latina look-more striking than pretty-and all of her original equipment. Rare in LA. Athletic build beneath the expensive suit, and strong features that I bet looked damned formidable when she…
Focus, Bastion.
So focus I did. Ignoring the very real cloud of approving pheromones being produced right next to me, I spread my senses wide.
My eyes, least trusted of my senses, reported we were passing through a suburban merchants' district, circa 1959. Neatly dressed people-most in period costumes marred by chrome-strolled beneath manicured trees, admired vintage shop displays, or noshed beneath bright awnings in sidewalk cafes. Surface readings were smiling faces, clean streets, cops who waved-even the squirrels looked happy. Everything so saccharine I felt my teeth rotting.
Speaking of teeth, I counted the teeth-grating "silent" buzz of no less than twenty-seven drones industriously surveilling our block of boulevard. A lot of beautiful people were sharing the fascinating minutia of their daily lives with the grateful world.
Pasadena has it's P2.0, of course, the constant circulation of personal broadcasting and voyeurism that used up Dog knew how much bandwidth, but nothing on the scale of Fun City. In Pasadena the idea that P2.0 was more addictive than BTL was a wry-smile joke. In Fun City the addiction was pretty much a given; if not a religion. Everyone seemed to be trying to point their best profile in all directions at once.
For a moment one of the automated spy-eyes-doing a passable impression of a curious hummingbird-dipped out of the general swarm to pace the car. A cherry-red replica of a 1957 Cadillac convertible cruising majestically down the boulevard must have triggered its "this might be interesting" circuit. The car flashed the drone a signal I only imagined I heard and the roving eyeball turned away; no doubt scrubbing any images in the process.
My canine nose, as always, gave me more information than my ears. I closed my eyes and lifted my chin as I sampled the breeze. Beneath the Harbor stink and the ersatz orange blossom and the omnipresent electric ozone of the AR skins was the faint frisson of spell work. Basic security wards on the businesses for the most part, with more than one illusion-pretty much a staple in the land where image was all. Nothing-
A stench of fear. Bitter sweat and raw emotion flooded my senses for half a second and then dissolved.
"What?"
Rachel's question tipped me to the fact that I'd shed my relaxed pose. Ol' gimlet eyes was watching me, too, having evidently puzzled out a use for the mirror glued to the windshield.
"Nothing significant," I said, glancing down at Dog's relaxed form for confirmation. "We just passed close to something."
"Magic?"
My ears pricked at the note of alarm beneath her casual tone, but I dismissed it. Low-level paranoia over matters magic was par for a mundane who'd hired an occult investigator. Anybody who paid my opening highball price up front without hesitation had to be scareder than most.
Gimlet's ever-watchful gaze regarded me from the mirror. I hoped the car was on autopilot.
"Someone having a very bad day." I patted Dog again, pretending I didn't notice his reproachful glare. "Nothing involving us."
"Us?"
"Nothing involving me, anyone I care about, or anyone in the car."
I braced for follow-up questions. A lot of folks who don't use magic believe the trideo myths and expect mages to "read" spells in a glance, discerning everything from its purpose to the shoe size of the caster.
But Rachel just nodded and absently copied my gesture, stroking Dog's back.
I shrugged apologetically, but Dog was having none of it.
Gimlet caught the wheel when it began turning, belatedly restoring the illusion he was driving as the Cadillac navigated a narrow opening framed by signs warning us not to enter. I had a fleeting impression of a 1950s garage and then we were through the back wall and climbing a steeply curving tunnel that made no effort to emulate the 1950s.
Regularly spaced along the featureless walls were motorized slug guns slaved to armored sensors that followed every curve of our stately spiral. Not terribly sophisticated, but whoever was sitting in the control center would have no trouble from anyone in the tunnel.
Our spiral ascent ended in a round room-high ceilinged and about thirty meters across-with one of their patented armored gun cams at each compass point. The car stopped in the middle of the room, facing floor-to-ceiling metal doors flanked by two human guards in light armor.
A tall specimen with dead white dreadlocks stood slightly to one side, somberly resplendent in an ostentatious costume of studded leather and flowing cape. From his elegance and arrogance I took the posing mage for an elf; but when his scent reached me I realized he was just a pretentious human. Noting the martial runes inlaid in ivory and silver along the length of the ebony quarterstaff in his grip, I took a chance and guessed horticulture was not his specialty.
As soon as the four of us climbed out-Rachel and Gimlet on one side, Dog and I on the other-the Cadillac backed silently out of sight down the tunnel with ponderous dignity. Presentation; real showmanship is in little touches like that.
The worthy in classic wizard garb regarded us regally as the two guards stepped up to check us out. Professionals, they checked Rachel and Gimlet as carefully as they checked me-scanners, then a pat-down. Making sure I hadn't planted anything on my escort for later retrieval.
One of them surprised me by having the presence of mind to scan Dog. Nothing showed but canine, of course: twelve kilos of terrier-sized hound packaged in russet and white stockings. The goon visibly relaxed and finished the quick rub-over with a scratch behind the ear he probably imaged Dog enjoyed.
"What is he?" he asked. His gravel voice implied a poorly healed throat injury.
"Basenji."
"Thought so."
"Some kind of spook dog?" the other goon asked with a hint of nerves.
"African hunting dog," the dog fancier answered. He took another breath to elaborate, but caught Rachel's cocked eyebrow in time. Sketching an apologetic salute, he stepped back without a word.
I'd been pretending to ignore the costumed mage by the door throughout the guards' inadequate pat-down. With no other legitimate distractions, I went for slightly startled-like I hadn't noticed he'd been giving me his best steely stare for the last forty-three seconds-when I met his gaze. Must have looked authentic, because the moment he thought he had my attention he struck a more dramatic pose, the fist on his hip pulling his cloak open enough for me to see the runed hilt of a mageblade.
The astral scent of his weapon conveyed much; as did the fact he thought such a display was necessary or prudent. I made a point of ducking my head a bit, keeping all responses in the physical as I let him know I was suitably impressed. Then I ignored him again, focused on following Rachel's hips out of the chamber.
They led me down an unadorned hallway and through what was evidently the servant's entrance to a penthouse office only slightly larger than the garage. There were ornate doors at one end and a panoramic view of the sun setting beyond L.A. Harbor -which was itself made beautiful by distance and lack of smell-at the other. In between was a plush expanse appointed with objects so ugly they could only be art and antiques that were probably real. Subtle restraint by Fun City standards.
Not so restrained was Julius vanVijrk. Swathed in silk and reclining on a divan, the sole proprietor of vanVijrk Revitalization made a passable case for becoming the default icon for self-indulgence.
I managed to avoid tripping while kicking myself for not demanding six times my usual fee and made it safely to what was evidently the minion's audience position-just to the right of his natural line of sight and nowhere near the guest chairs.
"Sebastian Automne," Rachel presented me, making the Hispanic mistake of pronouncing the final e in my nom du job.
Julius stopped pretending he couldn't see us and turned his hooded eyes to regard me with evident boredom. No doubt my cue to perform some obligatory obeisance expressing joy and gratitude for being in his presence. Since he was the guy covering my rent for the next six months, I dropped my chin an inch-acknowledging his eminence.
"Ork magic," Julius pronounced in lieu of greeting. "Can you handle it?"
"Yes."
I spent the longish pause watching Julius puzzle out I'd finished talking.
"Yes?" he demanded. "That's it?"
"If you don't trust my answers, don't ask me questions."
I felt Rachel shift weight. Dog, sitting next to my foot, turned his head to eye me.
For his part Julius stared at me like I'd grown a second head for a long three count. Then he laughed-a single, phlegmy bark.
"San Bernardino," he slapped the ornate table at his elbow, rattling the wine decanter. "You can handle ork magic."
Now that was useful. Very few people knew about San Bernardino. And if Julius thought 'ork magic' had been the challenge on that case, he'd been given corrupted data.
"We are undertaking a tremendous project-one that will improve the quality of life for thousands of people," Julius explained, his jowls quivering with passion, "And orks are trying to destroy everything."
I cocked an inquiring eyebrow-standard tactics for getting folk to say what's on their mind.
"Because they're orks," Julius snapped at the prompt. "Without honor, incapable of rational thought, no sense of debt to their betters. Trust them and they turn on you."
Julius took a couple of deep breaths, impressing me with the amount of flesh he could lift with only his diaphragm.
"Forgive me," Julius said after calming his nerves with a sip of wine. "Pembroke, a dear associate of mine, lost his granddaughter to orks only yesterday."
"Orks?"
Julius cast me a suspicious glance and I hastily replaced incredulity with inquiry.
"There has been sabotage," he explained. "My people have not determined how it is being done, but they tell me the magic involved is definitely orkish."
I refrained from telling Julius his people were either idiots or had learned to tell him what he wanted to hear. Judging from the contrast between Rachel's respectful demeanor and racing pulse, I suspected the latter was endemic to his organization.
"I wanted outside talent, a specialist, to deal with this threat," Julius was saying. "I made inquiries. Someone well placed in the thaumaturgical department at CalTech recommended you as an innovative investigator with a nose for the exotic."
I did not wince.
That last phrase was a direct lift from Jesalie's master's thesis- an otherwise fine piece of research into the world of occult investigation marred by a few romantic misconceptions. Last I'd heard she was teaching intro-level courses at Pasadena City College. Evidently she'd parlayed that into a weighty position at CalTech since. Good for her.
I made a mental note to thank her for boosting me for a high-nuyen gig. Then full memory kicked in and I amended the mental note to read: 'arrange for a third party to convey my gratitude.'
"Rachel," Julius interrupted my mental noting. Then, apparently taking a deep interest in the Harbor at sunset, he presented his profile.
I looked to Rachel and she indicated the door through which we'd entered with a sweep of her hand. Subtle confirmation of my suspicion we'd been dismissed.
A short trip farther along the staff corridor led to a much smaller chamber without windows occupied by a large oval table with chairs and decorated with Gimlet eyes and the trideo idol mage. Hector and Franz respectively, I learned when Rachel made introductions.
"Ork magic?" I demanded.
"That wasn't me," Franz said in a heroic baritone. "The lackeys he calls security merely confirmed his paranoia."
"And as a card-carrying combat mage you don't bother to tell him there's no such thing?"
Franz shrugged. He probably meant to imply there was no point in arguing with Julius, but the message I got was he found his boss's ignorance useful.
"However misidentified the source, the sabotage is real," Rachel said. "And magic we can't identify-and can't defend against-is involved."
"Show me."
The data dump was devoid of business-specific details such as costs and materiel sources, but the overall picture was clear enough. There was a major project scheduled for the near future, date obscured, that would reclaim most of a shallow bay in the east Harbor, near where the I-5 bridge launched toward Downtown. Looked like sixty to eighty blocks to my untrained eye.
"vVR is bigger than folks think," I said.
Hector grunted, Rachel smiled, and Franz looked disdainfully down his nose. He had a good nose for it.
"That is an upcoming Horizon Corp project," Rachel said. "They don't know we have this projection."
I refrained from comment.
The visual updated and a stretch of real estate about three blocks wide connecting the newly reclaimed land to the northwest corner of the Fun City enclave glowed a cheery gold.
"This is the vanVijrk project."
Julius wasn't pulling terra firma from the briny, he was revitalizing rubblefield-buildings tumbled by the Twins. Areas of L.A. abandoned by their previous owners were a wilderness of SINless squatters and street gangs lacking the chops to control profitable turf-free land for anyone with the nuyen and balls to rebuild. vVR was building a secure, upscale conduit linking the new Horizon enclave to the northwest corner of Fun City, with the cheery gold spreading out to cover a half dozen blocks hard against the outer face of the Fun City wall. An area that already had a more somber color code of its own.
"That's the center of the PCC resettlement."
"Pueblo Corporate Council-built refugee camps are temporary shelters and classified as undeveloped land under reclamation protocols," Rachel briskly quoted-whether from regulations or an investment prospectus I could not tell. "Refugees have no legal standing. Refugees displaced by legitimate redevelopment are permitted to apply for housing at another facility."
I nodded sagely. One did not question the rationalizations of one's paying clients. Which may have had something to do with Franz staying mum on the absurdity of 'ork magic.' I didn't bother changing my opinion of him.
Aloud I said: "I take it folk currently living in the neighborhood Julius is about to revitalize are primarily orks."
"That portion of the refugee camp is predominantly, but not exclusively, ork," Rachel acknowledged the coincidence. "Mr. vanVijrk has reason to believe it is a Sons of Sauron stronghold."
"Julius believes his problem is racism?" I asked.
Gimlet-Hector-pursed his lips. I made a mental note to scale back the sarcasm.
"If ork separatists are sabotaging his project," I went on, infusing my voice with professional analysis, "He needs street enforcers, not an occult investigator."
"The sabotage has relied on magic in every case," Rachel said. A dozen sad blue dots appeared along the happy golden corridor of vVR revitalization. "Either direct assault with damaging spells or obscuring spells shielding saboteurs."
Data windows blossomed beside the blue dots. A quick read told me a couple of the "shielding spells" had been sloppy security. But in other cases the spellwork was very sophisticated-performed by someone with skill and long periods of uninterrupted proximity to the target.
"You're still framing the central skeleton of the elevated causeway," I said. "Are the buildings underneath occupied?"
"The refugees and squatters near the camps have not been evacuated, and there are no doubt squatters in the rubblefield," Rachel said. "The buildings will not be leveled until phase two, when their construction materials are recycled to build the walls enclosing the ground-level cargo concourse."
"Good," I said, rising. "Are my quarters in this building?"
"Excuse me?"
"First I need to feed Dog," I explained. "Then I need to rest. Come midnight, Dog and I will stroll the length of this project of yours and see what we can find." • • •
Sight is not my forte. I've been told my visual illusions stink out loud and I never have much luck penetrating visual effects thrown my way. It's a limitation, but I've learned to deal with it. Case in point, flat in a two-AM puddle staring over the sights of my pistol, I was not surprised my eyes couldn't pierce the dark nothing filling the alley.
Giving up, I canted my ears-listening to the alley. A rustle without weight-a dried leaf or scrap of paper in the breeze. A drip. No life-not even rodents. At least nothing moving.
Cold seeped into my chest and belly. I hoped the water I was lying in was only leaching away my body heat and not soaking through my jacket. Ballistic should be waterproof, right?
Still not willing to get to my feet, I lifted my chin a little, focusing my canid olfactories on the alley. Scents of garbage, mostly vegetable; urine from a few hundred rats-all of which were still not moving; something remarkably soapy-clean; and a lingering trace of gunsmoke.
That last one surprised me by being a recipe I recognized. Lone Star custom, the rent-a-cop corp's trademark homebrew for the Ruger Thunderbolt. As far as I knew it didn't increase the effectiveness of their favorite sidearm-but the sinus-stabbing jolt of cordite was their way of making sure everyone knew they were the ones pulling the trigger.
Which made no sense. Fun City had their own gunsels. There was no reason for a Lone Star or a Knight Errant or even a Pueblo Corporate Council constable to be within a dozen klicks of my puddle. Of course, the fact the shooter had missed me at forty meters implied there wasn't. And since when did Thunderbolts fire flechettes?
Guerilla saboteurs using disposable assets and disinformative clues? Unheard of.
Dog, evidently certain nothing was happening, found a dry piece of pavement and sat. I lay prone and soaked in an empty street with my gun lined up on blackness. After six slow breaths during which nothing at all moved, I decided Dog might have been on to something.
The darkness began fading. Either my inaccurate assailant was towing the spell directly away from me as he made his escape or he was long gone and the blackness was dying a natural death.
The normal dark revealed the alley wasn't exactly an alley. Light from the sodium lamps mounted high on the skeleton of the vanVijrk causeway washed over the front half of what looked like some sort of delivery area: A space just deep enough to let long-haul trucks get off the street and broad enough to let them back up to a pair loading docks barely discernable in the far wall. The back of some no-doubt once fancy establishment facing the next street.
A fading thermal glow emanating from a person-sized metal doorframe between the docks implied it had just been flash-welded shut. I had a momentary hope my incompetent shooter had melted himself into the door, but there was no scent of seared flesh. The quartz-glass security window that had given him line of sight on me was too small even for my narrow frame and carving through the metal would take time. It looked like my shooter had made his escape and sealed off pursuit.
If it weren't for that soapy-clean smell from somewhere inside the blind alley, I might have believed I was alone.
Abandoning the illusionary safety of lying prone in a puddle, I got to my feet. The ice in my knee had turned to fire and the damn thing nearly buckled on me. I stood a moment, letting my knee adjust to the weight. Opening my long coat, I flapped the heavy fabric to circulate air. A stupid move when going into potential combat, but I wanted my shirt to dry.
Besides, if anyone in the alley wanted me dead, the first shot would have passed to the left of my right ear.
Trying not to limp, I moved toward the alley and the soapy-scented witness who might have some answers. Dog kept pace. The tick of his trotting toenails against the pavement brought home the fact that the world around us was absolutely silent. This near the refugee camps the street should have been alive with late-night entrepreneurs and their clientele. Either the jungle drums had warned the natives to stay away or something was persuading folk to take their business elsewhere.
By the time I reached mid-street, the part of my brain that understood the vagaries of breezes and the wafting of scents had narrowed her location down to three or four square meters of deeper shadow between an overflowing dust bin and the right-hand loading dock. And there was no doubt it was a her. Mixed with the soapy cleanness was the unmistakable musk of a young human female.
Human-ish, I amended, with an acrid tang I couldn't place. I'd never smelled anyone quite like her.
Once my nose told me where to focus my ears, I found her breath-slow and shallow as she tried to be silent-and her heart hammering like she was on the last leg of a marathon. I didn't swing the muzzle of my Manhunter toward her-let her think I was still trying to puzzle out an empty alley as I cut off her escape.
Truth was, I was ignoring the alley and casting my senses wide to search out who else might be about. I counted seventeen whos else at the very edge of my senses, none moving in our direction. Dog moved a little away from me, following a path that made sense to him. I didn't bother turning my head to follow.
Three entertainment drones in loose formation whirred overhead, ignoring me as they searched the sprawl for exciting footage to pipe back to their masters in Fun City or Hollywood. Evidently one guy with a gun leveled into an alley did not constitute exciting footage.
Solidly between the very clean girl and her only chance to escape, I lowered my gun. I wasn't quite trusting enough to put it away, but muzzle to the ground was a pretty universal sign of nonaggression. I let her know I knew where she was by pointing my face directly at her hiding place.
The breathing stopped.
"Come on out," I said, putting no power behind the words. Just basic, civil communication. "I don't intend to harm you."
I stood silent through the long pause that followed.
Finally the girl shape rose from behind a busted crate of junk beside an overflowing dust bin. She stood, not moving, until I holstered my Manhunter. Then she stepped hesitantly into the open.
I saw immediately why she had a human-ish scent-one of the few cases of sight trumping scent. She was mid-Expression.
Sometimes when an ork and a human got together a kid resulted. If dad was human and mom an ork, she'd have a litter of orks with maybe a human thrown in. If dad was the ork and mom human, the kid looked human until puberty. Then it was a fifty-fifty crap shoot; emphasis on the crap. At an age when most humans were getting sweaty-palmed over the idea of their first date, hormones hit the poor kid with seventy-two hours of metamorphing hell.
By the time the process was fully done, there'd be no sign she'd ever been human. But mid-process…
Mid-process she should be writhing in ungodly agony as her bones grew and shifted and her muscle mass doubled. I caught another whiff of the acrid beneath the little-girl-changing scent and the penny dropped. She was sweating out some expensive pain killers. Real high-end stuff if it was keeping her upright and scream free.
I could see my little ex-rich girl's Afro-human features had once been aristocratically sharp, but now her high cheekbones were spreading, flattening as her face became broader. Her tusks were barely big enough to protrude, but her cheerfully bright jumpsuit was stretched taut across her bulking form.
A cloud of pubescent hormones and pheromones washed over me. I twitched as the scent registered. The girl caught the motion and stopped, covering her mouth-her new tusks-with one hand. I knew Dog was amused at my reaction, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of looking in his direction.
"It's all right," I said, knowing how stupid that had to sound. "You surprised me is all."
She didn't react. She just stood with her wide eyes staring at me over her concealing hand, blank with fear. And/or expensive pain killers.
Her jumpsuit was expensive-some sort of upscale school uniform with all the identifying logos cut off. Neatly, like whoever had dumped her had cared that her clothes kept her warm. Or maybe they were just thinking about appearances. The hand not covering her mouth held the strap of a kid's shoulder bag blazoned with advertising that declared her loyalty to a half-dozen trendy products. Among other things, she was a fan/member of Gang Life! L.A.'s most popular teen P2.0 network! I wondered if she was plugged into the network now, if anyone was seeing what her life had become. I doubted it. Beautiful people were not interested in the way real life could screw you over.
The bag was nearly empty, but had once been stuffed with what smelled like high protein soy bars, and toiletry articles-including that expensively effective body wash. The fact that she had such a carefully packed bag told me whoever'd dumped her hadn't wanted her to suffer. Too bad they hadn't wanted her at all. What kind of person abandoned an innocent kid who'd never been on her own to the sprawl beyond the refugee camps and packed her a lunch?
Family. Nothing but. From the gilded enclave of oh-so-human perfection I was working for.
"My name is Bastion," I said, hoping the silence hadn't stretched too long. "What's yours?"
"Monica," she said, moving her hand just enough to speak. "Monica Pem-"
Her face crumpled. The name she'd been commanded to never say again got lost in a despairing wail.
I had my arms around her before I thought about it. Pembroke. This was the "missing" daughter of Julius vanVijrk's dear friends. Lost to the orks. For a long count I just held her, letting her sob her heart out against my still damp chest while I stared into the now natural dark of the alley and weighed options. • • •
"What the vut?"
Monica tried to bury herself in my chest-the guttural challenge instantly transmogrifying her wracking sobs into a terrified tremble that threatened to rattle my teeth.
I shifted my weight, shielding the kid with my body before looking over my shoulder.
The broad street was still empty, but now a knot of three ork males stood dead center in the only way out of the alley. My nose belatedly warned of a distant fourth I couldn't see. Ignoring him, I focused on the more immediate threat.
My canine nose told me two of the three were a sibling set, and all of them about Monica's age-but full-blooded orks, which meant near-adults with twice her height and three times her mass. I caught the whiff of a pricy floral cologne that had been hip in the clubs around Lacey Park about eight months back, but there was nothing effeminate about their visage. They were dressed for the street-waterproof boots, synthleather thick enough to be body armor and improvised clubs.
I smelled machine oil, gunpowder, and brass-at least two slug throwers-and altered my assessment of the tactical situation accordingly. Screwed pretty well covered it.
"Cruising for some local exotic?" Demanded the ork who was not a brother. "Humanis get hard for a ken joytoy?"
For nearly three tenths of a second I considered explaining I'd been down here on legitimate business and the girl had found me, but common sense kicked in. A, I wasn't all that sure my business was legit, and two, these jokers didn't give a damn. Anything I said would be shpita.
If it came to a firefight I'd never get clear of the girl in my arms fast enough to get off a shot. Worse, ork punks habitually blended maximum firepower with minimum accuracy. From the looks of things, it was a smart money bet any rescue attempt these warrior wannabes launched would kill Monica.
Don't let the urgent distract from the essential.
I filed that bit of philosophical flotsam where it belonged and kept my gaze level-trying for something between "not scared" and "not confrontational"-while I worked on the problem.
Conventional street wisdom has it that if you kept your mien cool and didn't look like you're looking for trouble, four out of five times you can avoid a fight. Standing in a blind alley facing three angry-looking orks with my arms around one of their girls, I didn't think my odds were quite that good, but I gave it my best.
My three dance partners spread out, positioning to keep me the center of attention. The diverging smells of gunpowder told me right and left carried the guns while the fine mineral oil and steel straight ahead told me middle man favored a blade. Ork tradition would dictate a combat axe, but that would have been redundant, given his twisted steel club. From the scent of sandalwood and the cut of his long coat, I was betting katana.
Keeping all three in my gaze was a trick, but I managed without nervous head jerks.
Visually occupied, I set my canine ears and nose to sweeping the street. I still hadn't pegged where the fourth strain of eau d'ork originated and I strongly suspected that bit of information was vital. I had a sense the real danger was watching and waiting while these picadors got the measure of the gaijin.
In my arms, Monica's seismic shudders had subsided to a tremble. I hoped that indicated she was getting a grip, but under the circumstances exhaustion was the more likely option.
"Ujnort vut." The third ork, the one to my left, revealed himself as a minimalist. Also not much of a curser if he thought "non-ork shit" was a cutting remark.
Dog, ever battle savvy, found a spot a few meters in front of me and sat down. He looked expectantly from one ork to the other, as if hoping for a treat, but none of them acknowledged his presence. Apparently unbothered by the lack of attention, Dog yawned hugely, then rolled his head over his shoulder to cast a sideways look back toward me.
It took me a moment feel safe taking my eyes off the ork turks. I turned my attention to the curly mass of black hair pressed against my chest.
"Monica," I murmured. "Look at them."
She scrunched against me tighter. In her heart I was her kind; her protector. The protection part was a given, but the her kind part was no longer true-her genetic expression was unstoppable. In another-day? two?- she'd be fully ork and this scene would not be happening. She was already ork enough that the three thugs-and by extension their distant leader-read her as one of their own. Which, from her size, meant a child of five or six. Hence the chivalrous hostility.
"It's all right, kid." I was getting sick of that phrase.
Monica pulled her head away from my chest and tilted her face up toward mine.
"They need to see so they can understand."
She hunched back down. Pressing her forehead against my sternum, she rocked back and forth. I could imagine her eyes scrunched shut in denial.
Guttural growls made what the gang imagined clear.
Focus.
A new scent. A fifth ork; female. Near the fourth, wherever that was.
The breeze swirling in eddies worked against me. I might never have gotten a fix if Dog hadn't simply pointed his nose left to sniff the new smell. A shape-two shapes-in the dark beneath a stoop across the street. A doorway I'd walked past ten steps before getting shot at.
Now that I knew where to focus my senses, I picked up the heady tang of magic. There was a weaving back and forth between the spaces surrounding the ork woman in the shadows. She was one used to both worlds.
I tasted long enough to be certain this was not the magic that had blanked the alley, then withdrew.
"Kid," I said, keeping my voice low and comforting.
I pulled my left arm-the one on the side away from our audience-down and got my hand between Monica and my chest. Finding her chin, I lifted gently until she was looking up at me. Her face, shielded from the others by the hunch of my shoulder, caught a few rays of sodium light. It wasn't as wet or as blotchy as you might have expected from the amount of crying she'd been doing-which was good, because I wasn't sure I could keep a grip on the situation if our ork audience thought I'd been hurting her.
"You got choices. There are places besides the sprawl, orks that aren't squatters," I explained, pitching my voice to her alone. "Don't think facing these guys means you have to stay with them or on these streets. I got places you can go, people you can count on."
I cocked an eye at the three ork toughs. They were about where I'd left them, shuffling their feet and growling ork-like noises. I didn't speak or'zet well enough to track everything, but the gist of it was spurring each other on mixed with hints of disgust that no one had smashed my skull yet.
I was peripherally aware of the two shapes beyond them moving forward.
I looked back down at Monica, her chin still between my thumb and finger. She was gazing at me with something like surprise.
"You've got choices," I repeated with better grammar. "And the first one is how we go about getting out of here.
"These young gentlemen," I tilted my head in their direction, inspiring a fresh chorus of growls, "Are trying to rescue you and I do not want to hurt them. We need to show them what's going on before things get out of hand. Okay?"
Monica licked her lips, flinching slightly when her tongue hit a new tusk. She nodded.
I let go of her chin and put the arm back around her shoulders. Lowering my right arm, I turned her slowly until our audience could see her clearly in the streetlights.
There was a moment of silence.
"Huh," minimalist ork quipped cleverly.
The two from the stoop paused mid-street. Standing in the full glare of four sodium lamps, they were still shrouded in shadow-as though they'd brought the gloom of the hidden doorway with them. I knew the reality was I was being persuaded not to look directly at them, but I didn't bother pressing the issue.
"She got dumped," I explained. "She asked me for help."
"How you plan on helping, ujnort?" middle ork demanded. "What you think you going to do with her?"
My ears pricked at his awkward phrasing. My guess was street jive was not his default argot. Which appeared to support Julius' Sons of Sauron theory-you'd expect ork separatists to speak or'zet exclusively.
"I was thinking I'd take her home."
"You got a nice apartment?" Second ork, ranged to my right, gestured vaguely with his club. "Maybe some pretty pictures and toys for her to play with?"
"Pasadena," I said, keeping it simple.
"What's that? A Humanis dumping ground for freaks?"
Second ork was clearly the humorist of the group.
"It's a blended community," I said to Monica. "No ghettos. And between the college and the university there's a lot of opportunities."
I didn't come right out and say she could do a lot better in Pasadena than in the L.A. refugee camps, but no one in the alley misunderstood what I meant.
"She belongs with us."
The woman's voice was low, but it seemed to resonate off the plascrete beneath my feet. The alley walls didn't so much echo as repeat her words.
I was not surprised to discover the middle of the boulevard was no longer shrouded in darkness.
The speaker was ancient by ork standards and wrapped in several layers of symboled robes. Her hair was gold. I mean the metal, not blonde. Most folks would have thought it was a wig, but the filaments grew from her scalp. Fine as optical fiber, they were braided into intricate patterns-an echo of the web that connected her to the astral and to the city.
Her eyes were white with cataracts but she had no trouble keeping them locked on me as she strode forward. The black staff in her hand rang softly against the plascrete; metal, no doubt crafted from whatever she considered the bones of the world around her.
Middle ork shifted, making way for the street shaman without looking at her.
"This is our child, a daughter of this city." The resonance wasn't illusionary. I felt the vibration through my soles. "She belongs with us."
I felt Monica tense beneath my arm.
Another step, halfway between us and Monica's would-be rescuers, the shaman stopped as though she'd hit a wall. Her eyebrows-silver wire, I noticed-climbed toward her hairline. She looked down at Dog, sitting with his tongue lolling from his grinning mouth, and then back up at me. It took no great leap of logic to deduce what had happened; Dog had raised the astral curtain enough to let her know what she was up against.
The shaman gathered herself, and for a moment I thought she was going to try to overcome. I braced myself as well as I could while maintaining my reason, and tried to anticipate what attack would make sense to an urban.
Instead, she relaxed visibly. "Respect."
"Respect," I agreed and dropped the confusion spell. If she was giving respect, the three tough guys weren't going to give trouble.
For their parts, the bully boys blinked and muttered, looking disoriented as their minds suddenly cleared. The erstwhile comic gave me a bug-eyed stare, apparently the only one to realize why they'd been too bewildered to attack.
Monica stood straight as her own uncertainty evaporated. She didn't pull free of my arm, but she was no longer leaning against me for support.
My own cranium took a deep, cleansing breath. Don't try this at home, kids.
"This child is as connected to this city," the shaman said, speaking clear and straight, with none of the drama and declaration of her earlier pronouncements. "She belongs here."
"That's her choice to make."
"She has made it."
I wasn't surprised when Monica stepped forward, breaking her contact with me.
"Wait a sec, kid."
She turned back to face me. She looked excited, anticipatory, maybe a little nervous. Pretty much confirming what I already knew. You can't get complex expressions like that under compulsion.
I took her too-young hand in mine, pressing one of my old-fashioned business cards into her palm.
"If you need us, send 'Bastion Chien' to Pasadena."
Monica smiled, her eyes clear despite the pain meds.
"You're a good man," she said.
She turned away again. The shaman half-turned her head, indicating the street behind her. Monica walked past the old woman, close enough to touch but not touching, and joined the older ork male still standing in the middle of the boulevard.
The shaman's white eyes were on me. I thought of six clever things to say in as many heartbeats and kicked myself for each of them. Instead I kept my eyes locked on to her gaze and bowed, leaning forward about thirty degrees at the waist.
She acknowledged the respect with a deep nod to me and then a bow of her own to Dog. Without a word, she turned and made her way across the street to the shadow beneath the stoop. Monica and the ork fell in step behind the shaman as she passed.
The three toughs were still milling and bemused, looking after the shaman and back to me a few times. Two of them knew something they didn't understand had happened-the third wasn't talking. I cocked an eyebrow; he flinched. No doubt when he felt they were safely out of range, he'd tell his chummers how close they'd come to death by magic. Eventually the three decided they couldn't see me and headed off into the night on whatever mission I'd interrupted.
Leaving Dog to watch the street, I strolled over to the dustbin Monica had hidden behind.
Five minutes later I was on the street, headed back toward Fun City. The sidewalk, empty throughout the little passion play, was again busy with the foot traffic of late night. People scurrying with heads down, hoping not to be noticed; others strutting their stuff, ready to do business.
I bought a skewer of scorched and seasoned meat from a vendor with a trash can grill. Catching a troll hooker's eye, I flashed her a grin and a wink, earning a raucous laugh in return.
Julius was not going to like my report one bit-but I was no longer interested in what he thought. • • •
"Horizon?" Julius looked pale.
"You were right in that there are orks involved," I said. "But they are being used as cats' paws."
I described the darkness spell, again, in detail.
"A spell of that size and density requires both native ability and a thorough grounding in thaumaturgy-at least a university education. Something well beyond the resources of the refugee camp.
"There are ork street shamans," I dismissed the ilk with a wave. "They might be responsible for the concealing spells-that's a simple matter of dissuading people to look in a given direction. But the direct assaults were carried out by a mage or mages who can command corp-sized salaries."
"Horizon?" Julius repeated.
"If we posit there's another corporation that wants to stop you from linking the new Horizon enclave to Fun City, Horizon is the corp that fits the bill."
"I was providing them with a service…"
"Unasked."
Julius couldn't quite muster a glare.
"You were anticipating a need you were not supposed to know about. It is not beyond reason to suspect Horizon might not want an outside agency calling attention to a project still in the planning stages," I styled my summation on a popular trideo barrister, narrowly resisting the urge to parody. "It also takes very little imagination to assume Horizon would want to maintain exclusive control of all access between this future enclave and Fun City-already their enclave in all but name.
"Given these assumptions are valid, I think they were showing uncharacteristic restraint. Assassinating you would have solved the matter more quickly, cheaply, and thoroughly."
I counted three before Julius closed his mouth.
"Rachel," he said and presented his profile.
She would have turned us right, leaving the sanctum, back toward the garage exit. Instead I turned left, heading for the room where she had briefed me on the job fourteen hours ago.
Rachel hesitated, then followed.
I could not help but notice yesterday's approving pheromones were missing. It also seemed that Dog, whom she'd pretty much ignored previously, now occupied much of her attention.
I was not surprised when Franz and Hector appeared some distance ahead, vectored for rendezvous.
I preceded the trio into the meeting room and made a point of sweeping around to the far side of the oval table without hesitation. Let them think they had the safety of covering the exit. I remained standing and Dog jumped onto a chair next to me so he could see over the table.
For their parts, Hector stood watching me, Rachel divided her attention between me and Dog, and Franz had eyes only for Dog.
"Two out of three conspirators talk to street shamans."
"What?" Franz glanced at me to ask.
"You three are lucky Julius ignores lackeys," I answered. "Bad acting can be a fatal flaw."
"What makes you think-"
Rachel stopped, her eyes big on the Tiffani needler in my hand.
I kept my eyes on Rachel, peripherally aware of Hector's reach for whatever he carried. The big man stopped mid-motion when the tiny weapon left my hand to clatter on the table.
"Your sister, on the other hand, could make a fortune in the trideos."
"Sister?" Franz asked in a puzzled tone that almost redeemed my respect for his acting abilities.
"You're mistake was trying to spook me into a reaction in the garage," I told him. "A seldom smart way to assess an opponent. Once Dog had a whiff of your mageblade, I was able to smell your work everywhere."
"That makes no sense."
"Okay," Rachel cut of my cuttingly clever retort. "What is it you think you've got?"
"Three smart people who work for a self-absorbed, dangerously ambitious idiot and trying to banish Dog will get you killed, Franz."
The mage lowered his hands.
"Make that two point five smart people," I said. "Julius had concocted a scheme anyone with half a brain could see would piss off Horizon-if only because it revealed someone was selling their plans to idiots.
"My bet is he knew but did not care that he was going to level the hometown of half his faceless minions."
"What?"
"Hector, a refugee camp and its environs do not do that well without a steady infusion of outside resources. It's an economic model as old as haves and have-nots," I spread my hands, including my audience. "Loyal sons and daughters with jobs in the promised land sending home all they can."
"If your speculations were true," Rachel said. "If. All we'd have to do to stop him is tell Horizon."
"At which point vanVijrk Revitalizations would disappear in puff of greasy smoke and all of you-and likely your families-would become either dead or broke or both. You had to convince Julius he was waking a monster without waking the real monster. However Julius, Humanis to the bone, looked at your carefully crafted evidence and saw his own monster-and made wiping out the refugee community an even higher priority. You couldn't tell him he was jumping at the wrong shadow without showing your hand, so you had to find an outsider to connect the dots."
"And out of all L.A. we picked you?"
"If those college kids pretending to be street punks hadn't been from Pasadena, I might have considered that a long shot," I agreed. "As it is, I think someone took Jesalie Pilar's hundred-level culture of street magic course at City College. I've met enough freshmen over the years to know she makes a minimal attempt to conceal my public professional persona while dwelling exhaustively on my affinity for scents. Inadequately informed, you convinced Julius I was a big deal and staged a little drama to convince me Julius was up against the big boys and the orks were innocent victims.
"My guess is your sister's expression was an added bonus-you probably had some suitably innocent waif originally cast for the role of guide through whatever expository journey you'd concocted," I shrugged. "I spoiled things by going off script and your shaman friend had to improvise."
Rachel shook her head.
"I have no sister," she said, and I lost my mental bet with myself that she'd deny the whole thing.
"Olfactories."
"An olfactory scanner can't identify individuals," Hector seemed glad the conversation had hit on an area of his expertise. "There's no way to establish family relationships by smell."
"For a chemsniffer it's impossible," I agreed. "For a dog's nose it's inevitable."
Hector made an inquiring noise.
"He's a mystic adept, talented in all the usual detection, inquiry, and discernment skills. Nothing obviously remarkable about him," Franz explained, bearing down just a bit on the obviously. "His key investigative tool seems to be an animal attunement of an intensity that strains credulity."
Hector looked unenlightened.
"He's got an open channel, for want of a better word, to the dog," Franz explained. "He experiences through the dog's senses. He sees and hears and smells everything the animal does."
"Not so much see," I corrected. "There's a reason you've never heard the phrase Basenji-eyed." I stopped short of explaining my limitations in the optical sphere.
"Franz here cast that darkness spell through a quartz security window in a steel door he'd welded shut to ensure Dog here didn't get a whiff of him. Effective, but like the potent sanitizer Monica used to get rid of the gunshot residue after shooting at me, it called too much attention to itself.
"Speaking of smell, the touch I really liked was loading needler ammo with cordite gunpowder. I suspect that was your handiwork, Hector. You don't need a dog's nose to smell that stench, and everyone knows it's used only by one of the big corps' favorite head-busters and that they only use it in cannons too big for little Monica to handle.
"Franz didn't realize that was wasted effort," I spared that worthy a smile. "I already had his astral scent from his mageblade."
"That's the second time you've spouted that nonsense," Franz snapped.
"But that nonsense isn't what's really got you pissed," I countered.
Franz made an angry gesture at Dog. "You have neither the skills or the power to craft this vessel or bind a spirit into it."
"Not even close," I agreed. "That is no vessel, that is my dog; a real dog really named Dog, now possessed by a free spirit with no name he's willing to tell me but answers to Dog."
The three took a long hard stare at Dog. He grinned back a canine grin, all sharp teeth and mocking eyes. He clearly had no intention of showing them what he'd shown the shaman in the alley.
"You've said you feed Dog, and that you need to rest after doing so. And from that confrontation with-" he stopped himself mid-word. "In the alley, we know Dog loans you his energy for spellcasting; so there's a quid pro quo in play.
"I can see the shape of it, but I don't understand the mechanics," he frowned. "This is not… usual."
I considered explaining, but didn't see the point. Jesalie hadn't figured it out in a month of living with me; there was no way I was giving away the trick of my trade to some one-off customers who'd never see me again.
Franz had been right when he pegged me as unremarkable. I like to think I'm unique, but if you were to graph the talents and abilities of all the psychic investigators in LA, I'd be about dead center on the bell curve. What made me was my partner.
Dog, by which I mean the free spirit possessing Dog the Basenji, gives me direct access to astral data-way beyond my ability to assense. But he gives it to me in doggish: very little sight, lots of smells. Where top-dollar wizards see an astral fingerprint, I get an astral scent. You can research it-believe me, I have-and find enough evidence to make a case for the way Dog conveys information being dictated by the limitations of the creature he's inhabiting.
Personally, I think he does it because it amuses the hell out of him.
Like Franz said, everything is quid pro quo. So what does Dog get from me? Hard to say. He explained it once, I think, but I'm not sure I followed. Call it context. Interpretation. Maybe it's because he's a dog; maybe it's because he's a spirit, but everything we people do seems random. Dog finds humans fascinating; he just needs me to understand the natural world.
"So," Rachel said into the stretching silence. "What do you plan on doing with this information?"
"I'm kinda torn between telling Julius and getting killed or telling Horizon and getting killed," I shrugged. "One of the things that makes me unremarkable is the fact that I honor a confidence when there's no compelling reason not to."
Hector and Franz glared with varying intensities, but Rachel's smile was wry.
For a moment I considered asking about the Pembrokes. Maybe they were her grandparents. Or maybe there was a network of families helping kids make it out of the ghetto into the promised land. But it was none of my business. Nothing here was.
I circled the table, Dog preceding at a thoroughly terrier-esque trot. The three made way.
"If Monica wants to go into the business, tell her to call," I said in the doorway. "I can connect her with some resources. She's got my card."
"Business?" her sister asked.
"Investigator," I said in dripping ain't-it-obvious. "She can play a role, keep her wits while loaded on painkillers in the middle of a confusion spell, and-to come that close with a needler at forty meters and not hit me? She's a hell of a shot."
Rachel smiled unexpectedly.
"She says you moved so fast she almost hit you."
"Story of my life."