“Pita! Hoi, chummer, have you made the patch?”
Pita lay on her back, screwdriver clamped between her oversized teeth. The service shaft was narrow, just wide enough to accommodate her broad shoulders. She’d had to strip off her jacket and worm her way in, her arms stretched out ahead of her. Now she shivered in the cold.
Working by the light of a cheap Brightlight rip-off with a rapidly depleting power cell, she pried open the protective plastic covering the trideo cables. Feeling along one of them, she located the splitter that branched the cable off to individual apartments. Then she smiled as her blunt finger found a free port.
“Hoi, Pita!” One of the other kids kicked her feet, the only part of her that remained outside the service shaft. “Is this going to take all night?”
“Yeah, yeah. Nearly there,” she growled back. She popped one end of the cable feed into the port and then plugged the other end into Chen’s electrode net. “I gotta test it, first.”
The trode net was the poor person’s version of a datajack-a means of translating raw electronic data into a multi-sensory experience without the need for expensive cybernetic implants. She snugged the headset’s electrodes around her temples, closed her eyes, and broke into a wide grin as an image sparkled to life behind her closed eyelids. The upper-right corner was a mess of white static, probably due to the worn cladding of the fiber-optic cable she’d used to patch in. She should have boosted a new cable from the local Tridio Shack outlet, but for now, this dumpster-diver’s special would have to do. At least the rest of the image was sharp.
She’d tapped into an infomercial for the Yamaha Rapier. The sleek, wasplike body of the motorcycle burst out of a shower of chrome confetti and screamed past on a strobelit highway that looped across the flame-filled sky. “Ride the wind. Feel the fire. The ‘54 Rapier. Just ten thousand nuyen.”
Pita snorted and winked to change channels. Ten thousand nuyen? Not in ten of her lifetimes.
She skipped over a nostalgia rock channel and then past Name That Logo, a game show in which children from the Aztechnology arcology competed with each other for expensive simulator sets. The first station catered to sludge-minds who’d been born before the millennium and the game show was kid stuff. At seventeen, Pita was too old for that drek. She curled her lip as she caught a few seconds of a rerun of a speech by Governor Schultz, in which she promised to clean up Seattle’s streets. Didn’t she know that some people had to boost the odd package of Soygrits, just to get by?
She flipped past a Salish-language station and devoted a few seconds to an advertorial by the Church of Sorcerology. “Is your child among the one per cent of the population with natural magical ability?” an overly enthusiastic announcer asked. “In this Awakened world of 2054, can you really afford to let your child’s magical abilities slumber? Our free stress test can reveal your child’s hidden talents. Just call our office at-” Pita changed channels.
Her attention was caught by a local newscast. A snoop who looked vaguely Native American was jamming on about another brain-bashing by the local chapter of Hnmanis Policlub. The trid zoomed in on an ork, a little younger than Pita, whose head had been laid open like a smashed fruit. Then it panned down to the globular red spillage on the boy’s shoulder and the letters scrawled on his chest: “One meta-freak down. Half a billion to go.”
Pita tore the “trode rig away from her temples and fought to keep from heaving. Simsense made everything seem so real. So close. She could practically reach out and touch the spilled brains, could smell the blood that had soaked his shirt. The bashing had taken place just a few kilometers from here, in Seattle’s downtown core. Like the boy who had died. Pita was an ork too. What happened to him could have happened to her.
The aural trode was still in contact with her scalp. A tinny voice squawked in her right ear as she held the goggles in her hand: “KKRU Trideo. The station that puts ‘U’ in the picture”
Pita thumbed the headset off and called back over her shoulder. “Hoi, Chen. I’ve got a patch! Now all we gotta do is scan for the broadcast. What channel do you think they’ll tap into this time?” Funny. It was awfully quiet out there. Then she noticed the flashing blue light.
Something wrapped tightly around one ankle. Before Pita could even shout in alarm, she was hauled roughly out of the service shaft. The fiber-optic cable pulled taut, then popped from the port. Then she was out on the sidewalk, her elbows scraped and hurting like drek, staring up into the barrel of an automatic rifle. The Lone Star cop behind it didn’t look happy. Behind him, a blue light flashed in regular circles on the roof of a patrol car. Lone Star was the private corporation hired to provide Seattle with police services.
Pita’s three friends had assumed the position against the apartment block’s wall and were being patted down none too gently by a second Lone Star officer, this one female. Pita glanced down at her chest where the red dot of the rifle’s sighting laser was targeted and groaned. They were in some serious drek now.
“What’s that in your hands, kid?” the cop behind the rifle asked. “A stolen simsense unit?” His chromed cyber eye whirred softly as he scanned her face.
Chen, the oldest of Pita’s three friends, turned his bead away from the wall. “It’s not stolen,” he gritted through oversized teeth. “My brother gave it to me so I could watch his broadcasts. He’s a-”
The cop behind Chen kicked savagely at his ankle and Chen collapsed. gasping in pain.
“Nobody asked you, porkie,” the cop hissed. “Keep talking, and you’re only going to get iced. Now get back into line.”
Stun-stick in hand, the Star watched as Chen climbed painfully back to his feet. Even though he was just seventeen, Chen was twice the size of the cop. Unlike Pita, who had only goblinized two years before, Chen had been born an ork, and had the broad shoulders and huge hands to prove it. Yet he also had the laser-straight black hair, flat face and eye folds of his Asian ancestors. Aside from his bulk and jutting Canines, he looked almost human. Pita, on the other hand, had a face as coarse and ugly as any true-born ork. No wonder the cop glared at her. She tried in vain to close her lips over her snaggled teeth.
The cop above her plucked the ‘trode rig from Pita’s grasp. He turned it over, inspecting it. “Frag it, Doyle, this is old tech. Nobody in their right mind would boost it. The kid probably lifted the unit out of a trash ‘pacter. You really want to waste time inputting a report for this crud?”
The female officer stepped back from Chen and the two smaller orks, still keeping her stun stick aimed at Chen’s back. Then she shook her head. “Not really. Trash it.”
The cop standing beside Pita dropped the headset on the cement, raised his booted foot, and slammed it down hard. Metal and plastic splintered and circuits crunched, leaving a shattered mess. After wiping the heel of his boot against the pavement, the cop stepped back. The thin red line of his weapon’s sighting laser winked out. “Get up, boy.”
Pita cringed. Was she really so ugly that they couldn’t tell she was a girl? She felt even worse when she saw the look on Chen’s face. His eyes were locked on the broken goggles. Behind him, the two younger orks, Shaz and Mohan, looked stunned. Like Pita, they’d never seen Chen cry before.
Pita rose to her feet, shaking, as the cops backed into the shadow of their patrol car. The first cop still held his weapon ready, hut it was no longer trained on them. While the female officer clicked her teeth, activating her radio headware to call building maintenance, he jerked his head to one side. “Scatter,” he told the orks.
“Disappear.”
They did.
Twelve blocks later, puffing from their run, Pita and her friends slowed. Chen had been running with a peculiar hop-step, and now he settled into a limp.
“Fragging goons,” he panted, surreptitiously wiping the last of the tears from his cheeks.
Shaz and Mohan walked a pace behind him. They were brothers, twelve and thirteen years old. They’d only been on the streets a year, and looked to Chen, with his six years of city smarts, for leadership. They had shaved their heads, thinking it would make them look tougher, and wore matching black T-shirts emblazoned with the grinning face of the ork rocker and go-gang leader who fronted Meta Madness. The group’s logo was stitched across the T-shirts in silver wire.
“Yao gave me that headset,” Chen muttered. “He said I wouldn’t be able to talk to him once he went underground, but that I could use it to watch his broadcasts. Now I won’t even be able to see him on trideo.”
“I know.” Pita untied her black synth-leather jacket from around her waist and tugged it on over her sleeveless flannel shirt. Her threadbare sneaks, cheap like everything else that came out of the Confederated American States, scuffed the sidewalk. Knobby knees poked out of the holes in her jeans as she walked. “At least you know he cares about you. My sister never even…”
Chen jerked to a halt. He turned toward Pita. “I’m sorry.” Wrapping his massive arms around her shoulders, he hugged her close. She felt Shaz and Mohan touch her back with gentle fingers.
Bitterness gnawed at her with sharp teeth as her mind flew back to when she’d first begun to goblinize. She’d hidden it from her family for a week, mumbling into her hand to conceal her expanding canines and wearing baggy clothes to hide her sudden growth. Then her sister had caught her in the bathroom, shaving the curly brown hair that had started to sprout from her shoulders. The next day, Pita came home from school to find the front door locked and her clothes jumbled into foamboard boxes on the lawn. Her old clothes. They’d saved the good ones for her sister.
She’d wound up in downtown Seattle without a credstick. Like so many kids before her, she decided to sell the only thing she had. Herself. She hadn’t been prepared for the jeers, the mocking laughter. Fleeing down an alley, she’d run head-first into Chen, knocking him flat on his ass on a broken bottle. Later, she’d discovered the blood on the seat of his pants. And found out why he gave her the nickname Pita. From that day on she answered only to it, instead of to Patti, the name her parents had given her.
Now he lipped her head back and kissed her cheek. “Hey, there, Pain In The Ass. Null perspiration. We still got each other, don’t we? That material drek is just stuff, eh?”
“Just stuff,” Mohan echoed.
Beside him, Shaz was making a low, throaty grumble. “Fragging goons,” he growled, his voice cracking. “Why can't they leave us alone?”
Just up the Street, a patrol car was rounding the corner. Its blue light washed the buildings in rapid sweeps, chasing the shadows from the streets. A voice crackled out over a loudspeaker. “This is Lone Star Security. Freeze.”
“Leave us alone!” Shaz shouted. Suddenly stooping, he scooped up a broken piece of concrete and hurled it at the patrol car. It bounced harmlessly off the armor plating with a dull thunk. The car braked to a screeching halt, and the front port slid open. The dark tube of a gun barrel poked through.
“Frag it!” Pita yelled. “Run!”
Chen was still turning to look at the car when the first of the shots ripped the night. Pita had barely begun to run when she heard the wet meaty sound of bullets hitting flesh. Chen grunted in pain.
“Run!” Shaz screamed.
Behind her, Pita heard another burst of gunfire. Mohan groaned, and then Shaz began to scream. “Mohan, get up! Get up, frag you! Get-”
The automatic weapon opened up a third time, just as Pita reached the corner. A spray of concrete dusted her jacket as she rounded it. Gulping back sobs, she pounded down the block. Somewhere behind her, she heard an engine rev and the squeal of fires. Lone Star Security was going to make sure there weren’t any witnesses.
Pita rounded another corner, feet skidding to find purchase on the pitted sidewalk. The blue flash of the patrol car’s lights washed her shoulder as she leaped into the shadows. Feet pounding. eyes blurry with tears, she gulped in great lungfuls of air and ran as hard as she could. Around another corner. Over a parked car and across an intersection. Down a side street. And at last into an alley. Spotting a rusted fire escape ladder she leaped, caught the bottom rung. The ladder creaked in a slow descent and she scrambled up it, hand over hand. She could hear the patrol car getting closer, coming down the side street.
With a shrieking groan, the ladder gave way. Suddenly Pita found herself tumbling. She grabbed for a handhold, missed-and fell into an open dumpster. Squishy bags of garbage broke her fall and a rank smell filled her nostrils. The ladder clattered to the ground beside it. She was just about to scramble out when she saw a blue flicker on the dumpster’s open lid. Deciding to stay put, she eased bags of garbage on top of her, burrowing deeper into the pile.
A bright light swept across the alley, searching its shadows like a sniffing dog. Pita heard the thud of a car door, the footsteps of an approaching cop. She crouched rigid as death, trying not to breathe. Please, she begged whatever fates would listen. Don’t let him find me. Don’t let him see me. Her ragged breathing seemed to echo loud inside the dumpster, giving her away. She heard the footsteps approach, saw a flashlight beam linger on the open lid of the dumpster. She closed her eyes, focusing every effort of her will on becoming motionless, on becoming invisible. It was too late now to move, to worry about whether the trash covered her completely. She heard the faint rasp of the cop’s gloved hand on the lip of the dumpster, saw a flash of light sweep across her closed eyelids. Any second now, the cop would point his gun and…
No. She forced the image out of her mind. He doesn’t see me, she chanted, over and over like a mantra. He doesn’t see me.
The flashlight beam swept away, leaving her in darkness. Pita heard footsteps departing and the slam of a car door, then the soft purr of the patrol car’s engine as it motored slowly up the street. Relief flooded over her in a cold, shivering rush. She wasn’t sure who to thank for protecting her, but someone or something must have been listening.
At last she allowed herself to cry. Shaz, Mohan, Chen. She hadn’t seen them go down, but what shed heard behind her as she ran from the cops hadn’t sounded good. Instead of trying to help them, she’d run away. Turned her back on her friends and bolted, Her stomach clenched with guilt. Gnawing her lip until she tasted blood, Pita at last heaved herself out of the dumpster and jogged cautiously back in the direction of her friends.
2
Carla leaned over the shoulder of Wayne, the on-line editor, watching as the letters on the trideo monitor did a slow reveal: “H… U… M…” Gradually they spelled out Humanis Policlub, then turned from black to silver and oozed bright drops of red. Behind them, a man’s face resolved itself. His forehead was puckered into an angry frown, and his white teeth gleamed in a feral smile against his dark skin. His hair was neatly clipped, his face clean-shaven.
“Special rights for metahumans?” The man’s nose flared. “I’d sooner give special rights to a ghoul. They’re animals. Subhuman. Oh, I know, some say that metahumanity was always part of the gene pool. But that’s nonsense. It’s bad magic at work. These people have impure thought processes. That’s why they goblinize when they hit puberty.”
Wayne shook his head and keyed in an edit command. “This guy’s argument isn’t even logical. What about the kids who are born meta? Babies with ‘impure thoughts’? Gimnie a break.”
Behind him, Carla laughed. “The public doesn’t want logic,” she answered. “Just infotainment.”
The screen dissolved to a close-up of Carla’s face. The on-screen image asked a question: “And what does the Humanis Policlub advocate as the solution to the ‘problem’ of metahumans? More brain-bashings?”
Wayne’s fingers flicked across the keyboard, pulling in a series of one-second clips of some of the recent bash victims. Then he froze the screen.
Carla studied it a moment. “Toss in the ‘bash back’ quote from the Orc Rights Committee piece we aired yesterday, and wrap the piece up with a five-second clip of the Los Angeles Meta Madness concert. The part where the lead singer leans into the tens and spits on it, then screams, 'Frag the securi-goons. Madness must rule.’ That ought to stir something up.”
Wayne looked uneasily over his shoulder. “You sure you want to do that?”
Carla smiled. “The only way I’ll ever get noticed by the majors is if I get down n dirty and prove I can muckrake with the best of them.”
As her editor worked, she watched her image on the second monitor. Long black hair pulled back in a single braid, dark hungry eyes. The right eye tracked a fraction of a second faster than the left; hidden behind its iris was a miniaturized cyberoptic camera. Subdermal fiber-optic cables one-tenth the diameter of a human hair carried the images it recorded to a data display link implanted behind her right ear, next to an audio recorder. A datajack just below it had allowed her to download the images that Wayne was manipulating. The shots of herself, repeating the questions she’d asked earlier, had been mixed in later.
Two years after her surgery, Carla was still getting used to her new face. Wider cheekbones, a slightly flared nose, and melanin boosting had shaped her into a passable replica of an Indian. The Native American Broadcasting System actively denied any racial bias in its hiring practices, but one look at its anchors told the story. Someday soon, Carla hoped to leave KKRU’s nuyen-pinching behind and move up to NABS. Their producer had promised her a slot if she could demonstrate to him that she had what it took to “play hardball with the big boys.” By that, he’d meant the ability to do tough, investigative pieces-the kind that probed deep into the dark underbelly of the corporate beast. “Show me something worthy of NABS, and I’ll give serious consideration to your application,” he’d said.
Carla was determined to do just that. And soon. Her exclusive interview with the leader of the local Humanis Policlub chapter was a good start. But it would take a bigger story than that to prove herself.
On the trideo screen, the Humanis Policlub leader was droning on. “We do not advocate violence.” He favored the camera with a sickly smile. “Just segregation. Metahumans belong with their own kind. They’re not happy in the general society. Those of us of pure stock make them feel inferior. And we don’t want them mixing with us. Can you imagine one of those rabid, hulking orks, dating your daughter?” His mouth curled as if he’d eaten a spoonful of warm drek. “Or your son? Do you really want a goblinized grandchild?”
“And cut,” Carla said, stabbing a finger against the on-screen menu. “Add a clip of those three ork kids that were bashed the other night, and fade with some Meta Madness music. Then patch in my usual sign-off and the station call letters and it’s a wrap.”
Stretching, she looked around the editing booth. Someone was tapping on the glass window. Opening the door beside it, Carla stepped out into the studio. “Yes?”
Masaki, one of the other reporters, jerked a thumb at the monitors that lined one end of the newsroom. One of the screens showed a view of the front entrance of the KKRU building. A young ork sat on one of the synthleather lobby chairs, hands clenching the fabric of his jeans. The kid’s eyes darted nervously around the room.
“Some ork kid claims to have a hot story. Won’t talk to anyone but Carla Harris, ‘ace snoop’ for KKRU Trideo News.”
Carla stifled a yawn. It had been a long shift, with three hours’ overtime. “Did he say what it was about?”
“She.” Masaki shrugged. He was overweight, and spoke with a wheezy voice. A graying mustache and beard framed his soft mouth, but his cheeks were clean-shaven. “The kid muttered something about your series on Humanis Policlub. When I pushed for more, she froze up. Hard to tell if she’s got anything worth saying. But there might be something there.”
Carla snorted. “Trying to steal my story, eh, Masaki?”
He grinned at her. “Can’t blame a snoop for trying.”
Carla walked down the hail toward the lobby. Pausing before the reception area’s tinted door, she put her cybereye in record mode. The kid was probably just another streeter, vying for her fifteen seconds of fame. But it didn’t hurt to shoot a little trid, just in case.
“Hi, kid.” Carla crossed the room with smooth. graceful strides, intending to settle on the chair beside the ork. But halfway across she caught the odor that clung to the kid. Had the girl been sleeping in a trash heap? Wrinkling her nose, Carla chose a chair a couple of meters away. Her cybereye whirred as it telephotoed in on a tight head shot, then automatically focused.
The girl visibly started at the greeting. Synthleather creaked as she leaned forward, resting on the very edge of her seat. The toes of her sneakers were poised on the polished tiles of the floor as if she were a sprinter preparing to run. Carla leaned forward in her best reassuring pose. “You got a story for me, kid?”
The ork wet her lips and glanced up at the videocam that monitored the lobby. “Not here.” she whispered.
“Before I’ll let you in the studio, you’re gonna have to convince me you’ve got something,” Carla prompted.
While the ork chewed her lip, trying to decide whether or not to talk, Carla let her camera pan the girl. It was hard to tell how old these ork kids were. They bulked up quicker than normal children. Carla guessed the girl was in her mid-teens. A street waif, by the look of her torn clothes. And by the smell of her. Carla half rose, as if tired of waiting.
“Wait!” The girl cracked her knuckles with nervous twists of her hands. Carla groaned inwardly. If the interview really cooked, she’d have to edit the noise out later.
“That Story you did, on the three orks that died.” The girl’s lip quivered for a moment as she sucked in a deep breath. “Those were my friends.”
“Sorry to hear that, Miz-”
“Pa… Pita.” The girl answered.
“No last name?”
Pita shook her head.
“And you want to make a comment on their deaths?”
The girl nodded.
“Sorry,” Carla answered. “Old news. They died two nights ago. We gave it a thirty-second spot. Quite a long piece, considering the fact that it was the tenth Humanis Policlub bashing this year. Only the fact that their blood was used to paint the slogans made it newsworthy at all.”
The girl’s face suddenly paled. Carla sighed and hoped the kid wasn’t going to heave on the floor. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so blunt. But then, news was a hard-ass business.
Carla nearly missed the girl’s whisper as she walked back to the door. Only the amplified hearing mod in her right ear picked it up.
“Humanis Policlub didn’t kill my friends. Lone Star Security did.”
“What?” Carla spun around, cursing herself for not getting it on trideo. “You got proof of that, kid?”
The ork met Carla’s eyes for a fleeting second, then dropped her gaze back to the floor. “1 saw the whole thing. They were shot from a Lone Star patrol car. The cops tried to scrag me, too, but I ran away. Later I came back and saw… and saw…”
Tears spilled down the girl’s cheeks. Carla crouched low, giving her cybercam a better angle. She did a slow zoom until the girl’s face filled the eye’s field of view, let it linger there for a full three seconds, then pulled back to frame a head-and-shoulders shot.
“My friends were already dead, but the cops were cutting the bodies with machetes,” Pita whispered. “Then they used their blood to paint the slogans on the walls.”
“The autopsy didn’t find any bullet fragments in the bodies” Carla pointed out. “The pathologist said the wounds were consistent with an attack by edged weapons. I trust my sources. If there’d been anything unusual, I’d have heard about it.”
“But there must have been bullet holes in the buildings where it happened.” The girl looked up hopefully. “That would prove-”
“It proves nothing, kid.” Carla resisted the urge to shake her head. She kept the eyecam locked on the girl, waiting for any reaction. “Columbia’s a rough part of Seattle. Every building in it has its share of scars, many of them carved out by Lone Star guns.”
“One of the cops had a cyber hand. If you could find him, you could-”
“Cybernetic enhancements are pretty common among cops,” Carla countered. “There must be dozens of officers with cyberhands.”
“I know it was cybernetic, because it gleamed like chrome,” Pita continued. “I couldn’t see the cop’s face, but I could see that.”
“A chrome cyberhand?” Carla asked. “It sounds like you got that one out of a comic vid. What you saw was probably an interface on the cop’s glove that caught and reflected the light.”
The girl winced, then stared up at Carla with angry eyes. “I’m not making this up.”
“I never said you were, kid.”
Carla sighed and deactivated her cybercam “You tell a very passionate story. Pita, but the Star could refute every word you’ve told me. You’ve got no concrete proof to back you up. No firm details. And without proof, I haven’t got a news story.”
The ork girl dropped her eyes, her shoulders bunching in a defensive slump. Carla keyed her security code and opened the door that led back to the studio. She paused on the threshold, debating whether to offer the kid a few words of reassurance. She’d seen the bodies after the Policlub was through with them, If those were really the girl’s friends.
But when Carla turned back again, the lobby was empty.
3
Pita sat in an alley in the shadow of a rotted-out chesterfield. She’d tried sleeping on it the night before, hut the springs had dug into her back. Now she leaned against its padded arn, ignoring the musty smell of moldy fabric. She took a bite of a Sweetnut Puff and washed it down with some steaming soykaf. The doughy pastry made her teeth ache, so she tossed it aside. Then she dug inside her pocket.
The alley was only faintly illuminated by the sodium light up the street. Tilting her hand to catch its dim yellow glow, Pita looked at the capsules that lay on her palm. Three pale white ovals that promised an end to the flip-flops that wrenched her stomach and the nightmares that plagued her sleep. They’d cost her plenty-an unpleasant favor for the off-duty DocWagon attendant she’d met at the local bar. She grimaced, still feeling his sloppy kisses on her shoulders and neck. It hadn’t been anything like what she’d had with Chen.
Blinking away the sudden sting in her eyes, Pita tossed the capsules into her mouth and took a gulp of her soykaf. It was still hot enough to burn her lips, but she drank it anyway, not wanting the capsules to get stuck in her throat. Then she waited.
She heard a rustling noise somewhere to her left and turned her head. A cat with a matted coat and torn ears emerged from a recessed doorway and began to nibble at the piece of Sweetnut Puff she’d tossed. It paused as it sensed her movement, then turned to stare at her. Its eyes were twin red moons, reflections of the streetlights at the end of the alley. Pita felt suddenly uneasy, as if the cat were looking into her soul. Somehow, the cat shared the hunger that burned inside her. Then the animal turned and scuttled back to cover, favoring one leg in an ambling limp.
A wave of warm fuzziness washed over Pita. The Mindease capsules were kicking in. Her hand drifted out in a gesture of goodwill to the cat, willing it to return and share the bounty she’d offered. Her head felt like a balloon attached to a string, floating high above her body. Something hot flowed over her other hand, trickled down her arm to her elbow. The soykaf. It must have been burning her skin. Pita laughed, and raised the cup to her lips to take a drink. The dark liquid sloshed out over her chin. Her wide grin made it impossible to shape her lips around the cup. so she dropped it and watched the kaf splash in slo-mo across the cement.
The bang of a metal door brought her head around. She frowned, peering deeper into the alley. The office buildings in this part of town had been closed for hours. Lights still burned in some of the upper stories, but only for the benefit of the cleaning crews. Were they coming out into the alley to empty the trash? Pita hunched down in the shadow of the chesterfield and giggled. This was just like playing Hide and Search, the virtual reality game she’d enjoyed so much as a kid. She even felt like a computer icon, all thin and transparent.
A man staggered up the three steps leading to street level. He emerged from the doorway clutching his shirtfront. gasping as if he couldn’t catch his breath. Even though the drug blurred her vision somewhat, Pita’s low-light sensitivity allowed her to pick out details. The man was sweating profusely; the under-arms of his expensive-looking suit jacket were heavily stained. His tie had been jerked loose and sweat plastered his dark hair to his head and trickled down his neck.
The man took one staggering step, two, then collapsed on the cement in front of Pita. He landed face-first with a solid smack. When he turned his head, she could see blood trickling from his nose. His mouth gaped open wide and his eyes rolled back in his head. A strange burning smell rose from him.
The Mindease stripped all of her fears from Pita’s conscious mind, burying them deep in the back of her brain. She sat forward, intrigued. Giggling, she reached out a finger and poked the man’s cheek. it was hotter than her soykaf had been.
A dim red light appeared in his mouth and nose. Pita knelt forward, lowering her head to the cool cement to peer closer. The smell of burning meat filled her nostrils. Then a steady rush of smoke began pouring out of the man’s mouth and nose. Sweat steamed off his body.
“Mega wiz,” she whispered, wondering if it was only some crazy effect of the Mindease. Then her street instincts took over. She flipped the man over and patted down his suit pockets. The way he was dressed, this guy had to be a corporate executive, his pockets full of goodies.
The first suit pocket held a smog filter and a melted Growliebar. Pita tossed them aside. The next held a folded hardcopy printout and an optical memory chip, which she palmed. It just might have a simsense game on it. The only other thing the guy had on him was a credstick. But even if it had a million nuyen on it, she wouldn’t be able to access a single credit of it. To do that, you had to give a thumbprint, retinal scan, or voice sample. And Pita didn’t have the technical knowhow to fake any of that stuff. She was just about to throw the credstick away when she spotted the magnetic keystrip on the side of the stick. Maybe, just maybe, it opened a locked door with something worth boosting on the other side. She slipped the credstick into her pocket.
The man was flopping now like someone hooked up to an electric current and his skin was nearly too hot to touch. And something else weird was happening. White light was now pouring out of his mouth and nostrils, the beams straight as lasers. His movements jerked the light around in jittering arcs. As it did, Pita glimpsed a flash of gold around the man’s neck. It was a gold chain, hung with a tiny pendant shaped like an angel with outstretched wings. She reached for it.
“Ouch!” One of the light beams brushed her arm. Even through the dulling effects of the Mindease, she felt it burn. A bright red line now creased the inside of her wrist. She jerked her arm back, afraid the burning light would catch it again, but the man had already stopped flopping and lay still, his bead to one side. The beams now focused on the wall beside her, slowly charring the cement. Still giggling. Pita experimentally held the hardcopy she’d pulled from his pocket in the path of the beam and watched it burst into flame.
Suddenly, the light beams slid away from the man’s head. They merged into a single my of light that ricocheted off one wall and did a zigzag across the alley, bouncing back and forth from one tinted window to the next. The night was filled with strobing light as the light alternately broke apart into a scattering of laser-thin beams, each a different color, then melded again into a solid white flash that left Pita blinking. It was weirdly beautiful, and at the same time terrifying in its intensity. At last seeming to find its way out of the alley, the light shot up into the darkened sky like a reversed shooting star. Then the sky lit up with a flash of sheet lightning. Pita waited for the thunderclap, but none came.
The smell of burned meat was overwhelming. Pita couldn’t help but gag when she saw that the skin around the man’s lips and nostrils had blackened and was beginning to flake away. She glanced down at his wrist and saw a DocWagon wristband. A winking light indicated that it had been activated.
Dreck! The meatwagon could be here any second!
The artificial calm of the drug dampened her fear. She wanted to curl up and sleep. But instead she willed herself to rise to her feet. The last thing she needed was to be questioned about a corpse-especially one whose pockets she’d just rifled.
It took Pita a moment to orient herself. The Mind-ease was making her fuzzy, making it hard to think. With one hand on the wall, she staggered out of the alley. Dimly, she registered a man across the street fiddling with a trideo camera. A tiny red light glowed above its lens. Pita smiled and waved at it, remembering how the cat’s eyes had glowed red with reflected light.
The man’s head jerked up. He flattened against the wall, looking wary, tucking the trideo camera in against his body. Then he relaxed as Pita staggered past him.
“Fragging druggie,” he whispered under his breath.
Lulled by the Mindease, Pita let his comment slide away like oil down a gutter.
“Hey, Carla! Got a minute?”
Masaki grabbed Carla’s arm, jerking her to a halt in mid-stride. Angrily, she turned on him.
“No, I don’t have a minute, Masaki,” she snapped. “In just thirty minutes I’m doing an interview at the Chrysler Pacific showroom. It’s going to take me twenty-three minutes to get there-longer, if traffic is bad. I’m already cuffing it fine.” Tucking the coil of cable she carried under one arm, she used her free hand to pry Masaki’s fingers away.
“Spare me thirty seconds,” Masaki insisted. “I want to show you a trideo clip I shot last night.”
“Jack off, Masaki. I don’t have time to give you any editing tips.”
“Twenty seconds! That’s all it will take!”
Carla turned and strode away down the ball. Masaki trotted after her, speaking as rapidly as he could and wheezing with every word.
“I went out last night to shoot an interview. I had a tip from a junior exec at Mitsuhama Computer Technologies. He wanted to tell me about some top-secret project the corporation’s research and development lab was working on. Some radical new tech that he thought the public should know about. He was going to spill his guts, give me an exclusive. He promised the story would be the biggest one of my career. He was going to give me both hardcopy and a datachip with the project specs on it.”
Carla snorted. “Yeah, right. So why didn’t your source take it to the majors?”
“He owed me a favor. Before signing on with Mitsuhama as a wage mage, he owned a thaumaturgical supply shop down on Madison Street. I did a puff piece on the store that brought in a lot of business.” Masaki sighed. “He was murdered last night before I could conduct the interview. Burned to death.”
“So?” A murder was hardly unusual, considering Mitsuhama’s rumored yakuza connections.
“He was burned from the inside out.”
Despite herself, Carla was intrigued. “How? Magic?”
“Maybe.” Masaki shrugged. “But if so, it’s something I haven’t seen before, in all my twenty-eight years as a snoop. And I’ve seen some pretty weird things through the lens of my portacam, believe me.”
“And the hardcopy and datachip he was going to give you?”
“The hardcopy was nothing but ashes by the time I got there. And the chip was gone.”
Carla pushed the door open and focused in on her headclock. According to the glowing red numbers that appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of her field of vision, she had just twenty-six minutes to make it to her interview. “If you really had the goods on a hush-hush Mitsuhama research project, you’d have a big story-not to mention a tiger by the tail. But it sounds like you’ve got nothing, now that your source is dead and your proof has vanished. So why are you pestering me?” She jogged across the parking lot to her Americar XL, slid in behind its padded leather steering wheel, and voice-activated the ignition. She revved the engine and watched the seconds scroll by over her right eye. She’d give Masaki his thirty seconds.
He leaned in through the car’s open door, talking rapidly. “I was mucking about with my portacam just before I went to meet my source. I didn’t realize it was on. But it’s a good thing it was. There was a witness to the murder. Remember that ork kid who wanted to talk to you two days ago about the Humanis Policlub? I think it was her. She even waved at the camera. And guess what was in her hand?”
“The datachip,” Carla whispered. She smiled, realizing that Masaki had just handed her, on a silver platter, the story that would get her a slot at NABS. She laughed to herself. Had Masaki been a little smarter, a little more cutthroat, he’d have asked her for the name and address of the kid without revealing the reason he wanted it. Oh, well-his loss and her gain.
Carla cut the engine of her car. “Forget the Chrysler story,” she told Masaki. “It’s nothing more than a trideo op for the corporate execs. One of the junior reporters can cover it. We’ve got a real story to follow.”
4
“Hey, mister!” Pita held out her hand. “Spare me something for a burger?”
She stood in the shelter of an awning on Broadway Street, watching the people hurrying past. With the light drizzle of rain falling, there was little foot traffic on the sidewalks. On a sunny afternoon, this trendy street would be packed with shoppers. But today the sidewalk soykaf stands were empty, their plastic chairs and tables beaded with water. Rather than venturing out into the elements, the shoppers were sticking to the connecting network of tunnels and skywalks that laced the city’s downtown shopping core.
Normally, Pita would have been panhandling there. But after her run-in with Lone Star, she didn’t want to face anyone in uniform. Even the mallplex security guards gave her the shivers.
Rain pattered on the awning overhead as Pita tried to catch the eye of the few people venturing out onto the sidewalks. Most stared straight ahead, doing their best to act like they didn’t see her. A few pretended to be consulting their watches or electronic address pads. Others-particularly the humans-glared at her with open contempt, freezing the words in her mouth.
After nearly an hour of this, Pita was about to give up. The cashier in the trendy clothing shop whose awning Pita was sheltering under was beginning to get more serious in her efforts to wave her away. But just as Pita was turning to leave, an elderly woman in a shabby coat, her fingers curled with arthritis, pressed a crumpled bill into her hand.
“Jesus loves you,” the woman said, her eyes bright. “Are you ready to accept Him into your heart?”
Pita glanced at the paper money. It was an old UCAS dollar bill. Not even enough for a basic burger at McHugh’s, “At the moment I’m more interested in accepting some food into my stomach,” she answered. “But thanks for the…”
Pita’s eye fell on a man across the street. He was a dark-skinned elf with copper-colored dreadlocks that had flexible glo-tubes braided into them. A baggy jumpsuit, patterned with rainbow slashes, hung loosely on his gaunt frame. In one hand he held what looked like a small glass sphere. The fingers of his other hand brushed over it lightly, as if feeling its smooth texture. He seemed completely focused on the sphere, oblivious to the falling rain. Then he looked up and his eyes locked on Pita.
The elderly woman stepped closer to Pita, cutting off her view of the elf. “Do you believe in God?’ she asked. “Have you heard-”
A faint yellow glow washed about the woman’s head like a halo. For a moment, Pita almost thought she was witnessing some sort of religious miracle. But then the woman staggered, blinking heavily. With a sigh, she collapsed onto the sidewalk.
Pita could see the elf again. He stood rigid, one hand extended. Then his other hand shoved the sphere into his pocket in a gesture of frustration. With a heart-wrenching shock, Pita realized that the elf was a mage, and that the spell he had just cast had been intended for her. She saw movement up the street. Two burly humans in suits had broken into a rapid jog and were heading her way.
The mage touched his fingers to his eyelids in what Pita guessed was some new spellcasting gesture. She didn’t wait to see what would come next, but plunged headlong through the front door of the nearest shop.
She could see her two pursuers through the windows, on the sidewalk outside. One was heavyset, the other slender. Both were Asian. As the shop clerks shouted protests, Pita hauled herself back to her feet, tipping over a rack of expensive jackets. She didn’t think she’d been hit by a spell, but there was no time to wonder about either that or why people were suddenly after her. The two men were at the door.
Bolting for the back of the shop, Pita swept her arms right and left, knocking over other racks of clothing. One of the men chasing her tripped, landing in a tangle of dresses and hangers. The other leaped the rack like a hurdle, pulling something from his suit jacket. A bright spark crackled just above Pita’s shoulder and she smelled the tang of ozone. The taser wire had just missed her.
As Pita skidded around the corner of the counter that separated the front of the store from its stock room, one of the clerks hit a PANICBUUON near the credstick scanner. A shrill siren filled the air. Pita bolted through the stock room toward its back door. It was held open with a wedge of plastic. Through the crack, Pita could see a store clerk, cigarette in hand. He was just reaching for the door, a puzzled expression on his face.
Pita slammed into the door, kicking away the plastic wedge. Before the startled clerk could react, she spun and pushed the door shut behind her. Electronic locks clicked into place. Until the siren was deactivated, the door would be sealed. But there was no time to heave a sigh of relief. The two men were temporarily stalled, but sooner or later the dreadlocked mage would figure out she was in the alley at the back of the store. From inside the stock room, someone pounded on the door Pita had just run through.
The shop clerk, a moon-faced boy in his teens, watched Pita fearfully. “I don’t have any credit on me” he said, backing slowly away into the rain. “My credstick’s inside the shop.”
Pita ignored him. Her heart was pounding. Which way to run? She stood in a narrow service lane between two buildings. At either end of the block it opened onto wider streets. Cars slid along these, their tires making hissing sounds on the wet pavement. At one end, traffic stopped for a light. Pita saw the distinctive markings of a Lone Star cruiser. That decided her. She turned and sprinted for the other end of the alley.
Pita ran easily now, in long, loping strides. Fear sharpened her senses and gave her a burst of speed. Soon she’d put several blocks between herself and the store. She slowed to a rapid walk, glancing nervously behind her.
Who was chasing her, and why? Were the two men in suits off-duty cops, coming back to button up the only witness to their crime? Neither of them looked anything like the male Star who’d confronted Chen, Shaz, and Mohan the night they’d been caught patching in to the apartment’s trideo feed. But it could have been a different pair of cops who’d gunned her friends down. The dark, uniformed shapes Pita had seen bending over the bodies of her friends had their backs to her. All she could tell was that they were human. She had no idea what they looked like.
And who was that dark-skinned elf with his magic globes and who knew what else trying to hit her with spells? Why would he do that? Was he with the Star? From the way that woman had gone down she knew he had to be a mage. Pita hoped his aim wasn’t any better next time.
She glanced again over her shoulder, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. Her eyes were stinging, but she told herself it was rain on her face, not tears. Why couldn’t the cops just leave her alone? Were they so afraid she’d tell someone what really happened that night? Fat chance of anyone believing her. The reporter at KKRU hadn’t. Nobody else would, either. Except…
Except Chen’s brother Yao. His crew would broadcast the story in a millisecond. They would give a lot of air time to a story about Lone Star Security trying to disguise the killing of an ork as the work of Humanis Policlub. Yao would see to it that his brother’s murderers were put in the spotlight.
But only if Pita could find him. Yao and his friends were pirate broadcasters, always on the move. It was hard enough for Chen to find his brother on trideo, let alone in person. The pirates used a different frequency each time, hopping from one unused channel to another or cutting in on a regular station while it was off the air, ghosting over its test pattern. The few times they’d broadcast live from a recognizable location, they’d only stayed on the air for a minute or two. By the time Chen and Pita hopped the monorail across town in an effort to track Yao down, he was long gone. But that only made sense. The Orks First! broadcasts were an intense scan, literally slinging drek at the windows of corporations that refused to implement affirmative-action hiring programs, or cutting into legitimate station’s newscasts and using graphics to distort the images of anyone who made a disparaging comment about the Underground. They slotted the networks off, and more than one had probably sent out its corporate security goons to deal with the problem. If the professionals couldn’t track Yao down, what chance did a lone Street kid have? Still, she had to try. The best place to start would be the Ork Underground.
Reaching Madison Street, Pita turned right and headed down the hill, toward the overpass that crossed the highway. Seattle’s downtown lay on the other side of the freeway. There, in the shadow of the Renraku Arcology, was one of the many entrances to the Underground.
The orks had claimed the Underground years ago. gradually renovating and expanding the network of tunnels that crisscrossed the city’s waterfront. They’d tossed out the dwarfs in the early 2020s, and had turned the Underground into a city within a city, with its own shopping malls, city ball, and security force. Lone Star Security occasionally entered the Underground to make a bust, but almost never patrolled there.
Pita gave herself a mental kick for not thinking of going to the Underground sooner. Not only was it the most likely place to find Yao; it was also the least likely place for Lone Star to find her. She shrugged and blamed it on the Mindease. She’d been doing entirely too much of the stuff since Chen died. This was the first time in two days that she’d been completely straight.
Pita kept watching for Lone Star cruisers, mindful of the possibility that the mage might still be on her trail. He could be following her in an unmarked cruiser, even now. The thought made her quicken her steps. She turned up the collar of her jacket and ducked her head down into it, hoping that it hid her face from the passing cars.
She crossed the highway and angled down Madison. The Renraku Arcology loomed at the base of the street, a towering pyramid seven blocks wide and more than two hundred stories high. Its silver-green windows shimmered with light; the rain sliding off them filtered it into soft ripples. Behind that tinted glass, thousands of people lived and worked in a climate-controlled atmosphere. Seattle could be experiencing gale-force winds or chilling hail, but inside Renraku, everyone would be wearing shorts and sunglasses.
Pita hung a right and headed down First Avenue, turning her back on the arcology. The buildings along First were modern, but at street level they’d been designed to look like the historic structures they had replaced. The shopfront glass was bullet-proof. but was hand-lettered and framed in dark-grained plastic that was indistinguishable from real wood. The street was lined with brass-trimmed street lights and paved with cobblestones. Cars passing over them made a rumbling sound. This was an area of taverns, restaurants, and shops that sold tourist trideos and T-shirts.
One of the largest of the area’s restaurants served as an entrance to the Underground. Pita pushed through the doors of the Seattle Utilities Building and caught an escalator to the basement. As she descended into the Big Rhino Restaurant, the noise level grew. This was a huge eatery, filled with long dining-hall tables crowded with patrons. The vast majority were orks, although a sprinkling of humans and dwarfs were squashed in among the larger patrons. Waitresses hurried back and forth with stems of draft beer or plates heaped with RealMeat and fries. Blue smoke curled around the ceiling fixtures in flagrant disregard of Seattle’s no-smoking bylaw.
The rich smell of the gravy-smothered RealMeat made Pita’s stomach growl. She wound her way between the tables, inhaling the savory smell. At the same time, her lip curled with disgust. The restaurant was filled with orks of every size and description, all of them chewing noisily and shouting at one another. They stuffed too much into their gaping mouths at once, they picked their teeth with splinters of bone, they slurped their beer noisily and then belched when the stein was empty. Pita knew that some of the behavior was natural, some of it exaggerated. It was bad enough they were orks. Why did they have to flaunt it?
She winced. That was her father talking. He’d never liked metahumans. Any of them. The elves were “pointy-eared pricks,” dwarfs were “foot stools,” and trolls were “horn heads” with the intelligence of a brick. Orks…
Orks were what Pita was now. But she didn’t have to like it.
She hurried through a second hall where most of the patrons were male. She tried not to look at the half-clothed woman who leered at the customers from behind a tall brass pole. The stripper had huge breasts, but it was hard to tell where they stopped and her bulging chest muscles began. Her face was painted in a horrible parody of a human woman; the dark eyeshadow gave her face even more of a greenish tinge, and the jutting canines ruined the effect of her lipstick. Even so, the men hooted and whistled, bellying up to the stage to wave in the hope of catching the stripper’s eye.
Someone pinched Pita as she went by. Still hyped up from the encounter with the off-duty cops, she yelped and spun around, one fist raised. The pinching fingers belonged to a troll, so huge that his eyes were level with Pita’s even though he was sitting down.
“You got a nice ass, girl,” he said. “How about you sit it down here, on my lap.”
“Frag off,” Pita snapped back. She was trying to sound tough, hut her voice was close to cracking.
“Ooh,” said a man next to the troll. “I don’t think she likes you, Ralph. But don’t worry if this one gets away. She’s not much to look at anyhow.”
Pita hurried away, her cheeks burning. She found the door at the back of the restaurant that led into an underground passage. It was about half as wide as a city street, and was fronted by shops and offices on either side. The walls were cobbled together from a mix of brick, concrete, and plastiform, while rusted metal pillars held up the ceiling. A grid of overhead lights, pocked with burned-out tubes, cast a pattern of shadows. The floor underfoot was heavy-duty linoleum, scuffed by the passage of many feet and littered with drifts of plastic cups and paper wrappers that smelled of day-old food. Orks of every description walked back and forth along it, pausing to look into barred windows or bustling in and out of doorways. A handful wore double-breasted business suits or dresses and pumps, but most were wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes that had been intended for human proportions. Mothers dragged complaining children along by the hand, while teens in baggy stretch pants and MetalMesh shirts lounged against pillars or rattled past on gym boards. Some of the orks rode scooters or electric bicycles, weaving their way between those on foot. The effect was a strange cross between an enclosed shopping mall and a rundown city street.
Pita walked slowly along the corridor, wondering which way to go. Unlike a megamall or an arcology, the Underground had no directory, no color-coded strip lights in the floor to follow. The narrow streets didn’t even run in straight lines. They zigzagged this way and that around the support pillars, disappearing around corners and then reappearing again. The shops seemed to be wedged in wherever they would fit.
Two orks wearing gray jumpsuits and leather holsters with oversize pistols walked boldly down the center of the corridor, scanning the people who streamed past. Occasionally one grabbed someone by the shoulder, dragging the pedestrian over to him. Crumpled dollar bills would change hands, and then the pedestrian would be given a rough shove and sent on his way.
Pita ducked behind one of the supporting pillars and kept it between herself and the two uniformed men until they had passed. These were the ‘security guards’ who served as the semi-official police force for the Underground. They were little more than goons who shook down the inhabitants of the Underground for protection fees. They were also the reason why Pita and her Street chummers never ventured into the Underground much. If you couldn’t pay the fee for the “protection” offered by the uniformed guards, you could always work off your fee as a press-ganged member of one of the maintenance crews who did all of the hard, dirty, and dangerous work of expanding and repairing the Underground’s ever-growing maze of tunnels. It didn’t sound like much fun.
An electronics shop seemed the most likely place to start her search for Yao. The first three Pita tried didn’t produce any results. None of them had heard of Yao-or was willing to admit that they’d sold equipment to Orks First! Exhausted and hungry, Pita was about to give up. She had decided to find a fast food outlet and do some scrap snacking-eating the soggy fries and burger crusts that patrons had left behind-when she spotted an electronics shop. It was tucked into the bend of a street, its merchandise displayed behind barred windows. A flickering holo of a trideo camera floated above the door, slowly rotating. A closed-circuit trideo set in the window broadcast the passing shoppers. The view panned back and forth, as if the holo-camera was doing the recording. It would have been a neat trick if the trideo set’s tracking hadn’t been so bad. The picture was smeared with static.
Pita rapped on the door of the shop, then waited for the clerk to buzz her in. It was a tiny store, just a couple of meters wide and deep. The shelves on either side were lined with home entertainment equipment, most of it second-hand. Large yellow price tags hung from each item. The center of the store was taken up with bins of off-the-rack electronics: fiber-optic cables, datachips, mini-amps, and interface plugs. Glass counters held cheap knock-offs of designer watches and electronic toys, made in some Third World sweat-shop.
The shopkeeper was a female dwarf who sat on a tall stool behind one of the counters. She was hunched over a cyberdeck, her short legs dangling. Half of her head was shaved, revealing multiple datajacks. A cable stretched from one of the jacks to the deck. On the other side of her head, her hair hung down in a thick braid. Her fingernails were covered in a thin layer of polished metal, making light clicking noises as she drummed them against the counter. Her eyes were unfocused at first, but then she blinked and looked up at Pita.
“Can I help you?” she asked, gently tugging the jack from the slot above her ear.
Pita started to shake her head. What would a dwarf clerk from a crummy little shop like this know about ork trideo pirates? But she’d come this far, Might as well ask.
“I’m looking for someone,” Pita said. “Yao Wah. Yao is the first name. He’s a pirate who shoots trideo for Orks First! I thought you might know him. He’s my friend’s brother and I need to tell him someth-”
The dwarf’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think I know this Yao?”
Pita shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought maybe he came in here to buy equipment.”
The dwarf stared at her impassively.
“Guess I was wrong,” Pita said, reaching for the door.
“I know him.”
“You do?” Pita turned around quickly.
“Yeah. He’s a class-A slot,” the dwarf said, wrinkling her nose. “Stifled me for a signal booster. Owes me five thousand nuyen. But is the fragger going to pay me? I doubt it. He’d rather deal with his own kind.”
Pita waited, sizing up the dwarf. “Do you know where I can find Yao?”
“You could try posting a message on the Matrix. Orks First! runs a bulletin hoard on the Seattle network.”
“I don’t even have enough nuyen to use the public telecom,” Pita said. “Besides, I need to see him in person.”
“You need to meet the meat,” the dwarf said. “Why?”
“Something’s happened to his brother. I need to tell Yao about it, face to face.”
“This brother’s important to him? You think Yao would answer if I posted something about the kid?”
Pita nodded. “Tell him it’s a message about Little Pork Dumpling. Then he’ll know it’s for real. He used to call his brother that because he was so fat when he was little.”
“Right. Wait one.” The dwarf slotted the jack back into her head and closed her eyes. After a second or two she opened them again. “It’s done. A friend of his is passing the message along.”
“That’s great!” Pita said. “When can I meet him? And where?”
“Right here,” the dwarf answered. “But not until he pays his bill, plus interest for the three months it’s overdue. And don’t get any ideas about going off to find him yourself. The door’s locked and armed. If Yao wants the meet, he’ll come. We’ll see if his ‘little pork dumpling’ is worth five thousand nuyen to him.”
5
Yao was shorter than he looked on trideo. He was about Pita’s height, but had broader shoulders and a thicker neck. He looked like an older version of Chen, with the same straight black hair and Asian eyecast. He wore his hair “high and tight-shaved over the ears and spiky on top. It was starting to gray a little, although he was still probably only in his mid-twenties. Life on the streets had given his eyes a hard, wary look. But he was good-looking, for an ork. His jaw was narrow and his nose straight. He wore jeans torn off at the knee and a black leather vest over a loose-fitting sweatshirt-probably to deliberately contrast with the carefully groomed reporters of the legitimate news stations.
Yao sat on the other side of a small plastic table, watching Pita scarf down her second plate of noodles. There was no way to tell whether he had anything so fancy as an cybereye cam, but there a datajack showed in his temple and a mini-radio was clipped to one earlobe. When Pita asked what it was, he told her it was a Lone Star scanner and decryption unit. “Keeps me one step ahead of the cops,” he explained, one arm draped across the back of the bench. She noticed he always kept one eye on the doorway, where his friend Anwar lounged.
The second pirate wore jeans, a muscle shirt, and cowboy boots. He leaned against a wall next to the door, one arm cradling a bulky trideo camera whose size gave it away as being more than two decades out of date-nearly an antique. He grinned at Yao and gave him a thumbs-up sign indicating that none of the Underground’s security goons were in sight.
Pita finished her noodles and drained the last of her soda. She toyed nervously with one of her chopsticks until Yao gently touched her wrist. The back of his hand was covered with a mass of spiky black hairs; he didn’t shave his hands to look morn human the way some orks did. “Well?” he asked. “Are you going to tell me something about Chen? Or do you want to soak me for another plate of noodles first?”
The chopstick in Pita’s hands snapped in two. “He’s dead,” she blurted.
“Yes?”
Pita looked up. “You knew?”
Yao shook his head. On his trideo broadcasts, he was animated and expressive, but now his face was strangely still. Only a faint wince of his eyes betrayed what he must be feeling. “I didn’t know. But I could guess. I can read people. I can see that Chen meant a lot to you.”
Pita stared at the tabletop. Its edge was scatted with cigarette bums. The brown stains reminded her of the dried blood she’d found on her jacket the morning after Chen had… After the cops had…
Tears dripped onto the bright yellow plastic. Yao reached across the table and lifted Pita’s chin with one massive hand. “What happened? How did he die? Was it a fight? An overdose? How?”
“The Star,” Pita answered. She had to swallow before she could go on. “They shot him. And two of his friends, Shaz and Mohan. We were hanging out, trying to boost a trideo feed to catch one of your broadcasts. Lone Star stopped us and-”
“And Chen pulled a weapon. Stupid fragger. You’d think he’d know better.”
“No!” Pita protested. “It wasn’t like that at all. At first all the Stars did was smash the ‘trode rig you gave him. But later, they came back in their patrol car. Shaz threw a rock at them, and they opened fire on us. But none of us had a weapon. Not in our hands. Mohan had a knife, but it was still in his pocket. The cops never even got out of their car or gave us a warning. They shot before we even had time to run.”
“But you escaped.”
Guilt washed over Pita like ice water. “Yes,” she muttered, looking down at the tabletop once more. “But I came back, later, to see if the others were all right. That’s when I saw the cops cutting them up. And writing the Humanis slogans on the wall.”
“Humanis Policiub?” Chen leaned forward, a hard glitter in his eyes. “You mean fragging cops belong to that drek-eating hate club?’ A muscle worked in his jaw. “Well, it figures. Orks represent sixteen percent of Seattle’s population, but nearly fifty per cent of the prison population is ork. Not only are we arrested and thrown in jail more often, we’re also under-represented as cops. Only one fragging per cent of the Lone Star cops patrolling Seattle are ork. Nearly eighty per cent are human. Those figures have been documented by the Orks Rights Committee. And their numbers don’t lie. Prejudice against metahumans runs long and deep in the Star. Chief London’s going to have a lot to answer for the day the coalition takes over the city. And that day is coming-soon.”
Pita was impressed by all the facts Yao had at his fingertips. He was informed. He was determined.
He stopped talking as the waitress came to clear the table. She was a pretty girl-human-a little older than Pita. But Yao looked at her with open contempt. “Wait until we’re finished eating, drekhead,” he snapped at her.
Pita pushed her bowl away. “I’m done,” she said quickly. But the waitress had already scrambled away.
Yao stood up, motioning his friend forward. He took the trideo camera from him, then spoke quietly to him. Anwar grinned, then loped out of the restaurant.
“I want you to take me to the spot where it happened,” Yao told Pita. “I’ll interview you there, on location, while Anwar monitors the uplink. We’re using a portable dish to go live. Save your story until we get there. That way it’ll sound less rehearsed. When I give you the sign, you start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.” He smiled grimly as he motioned for Pita to follow. “This could be just the story we need to spark the uprising.”
“Uprising?” Pita echoed, trotting along behind Yao. He walked quickly, threading his way through the crowded corridors. She had to hurry to keep up.
“Look around you,” Yao said, lowering his voice. “The overcrowding, the condition of these tunnels. You don’t think we orks are going to be penned up in the Underground forever, do you? The day isn’t far off when we’ll rise up into the city and push the weaker races aside. When we’ll take what’s rightfully ours and pay the fraggers back for what happened in ‘39. The Night of Rage is going to look tame compared to what’s coming.”
“My parents told me about the Night of Rage,” Pita said. “I was only two, but Mom used to tell a funny story about how Dad made us hide in the basement, then sat at the top of the stairs with his shotgun to protect us. It wasn't until the next morning that he realized he’d forgotten to load the gun. When I was little, I didn’t understand what could have sent him into such a panic. But now I realize he was afraid of the-”
Pita stopped herself. She’d been about to say, “of the metahumaus.” Thinking back on it now, she wondered at her father’s extreme reaction. Seattle’s metahumans had responded with violence to the city’s attempt to forcibly relocate them outside of its boundaries, but that violence had been tightly focused. Their rage-and the burnings, lootings, and attacks it sparked-was triggered by a series of explosions in the warehouses being used to hold the deportees. A militant wing of the Humanis Policlub was rumored to be behind the bombings. Pita knew her father sympathized with the Humanis Policlub, but now she wondered just how deep those sympathies ran. Was her father a member of the racist group, and thus a potential target for the metahuman retaliation?
“Yeah, the Metroplex Guard were even worse than Lone Star,” Yao said, interrupting her thoughts. He glanced at Pita. “You weren’t at the warehouses? Then your family hadn’t been rounded up yet by the Guard when the trouble began.”
“Uh, no.” Pita realized that Yao assumed her entire family was ork. Given the arrogant, hostile tone he’d used when speaking to the waitress in the noodle bar, she was afraid to tell him she’d once been a member of the “weaker races” herself.
“You were lucky, then,” Yao continued. “My father died when the first explosion hit the waterfront. My mother was never the same afterward. She tried to reverse the confiscation order on our house, but the city appealed every court decision, and eventually our money ran out. After that, she didn’t have the strength to do much but sit and cry.
“Governor Schultz glosses over the whole thing now, and talks about our current ‘racial harmony.’ She seems to think the Night of Rage could never happen again.” Yao’s smile tightened. “Well, she’s soon going to find out just how wrong she is. When your interview hits the air, the sparks will fly.”
6
The Street kids were clustered near the base of the Space Needle, listening to a simsense deck, and it looked to Carla like a Sony Beautiful Dreamer. Two of the teenagers were simming the music directly, via datajacks slotted into their temples. They jerked in time with the music, eyes focused on some distant point as the deck pumped sights, sounds, and other sensory input directly into their brains. The rest of the kids heard only the music that blared from the speakers. Some lounged about, smoking, too chill to acknowledge the driving staccato beat. Others danced, arms flailing, occasionally knocking foreheads together like wild rams. One of the kids-a troll dressed in black leather pants and a Japanese kimono hacked off at the waist-even had the curling horns necessary to complete the picture. Overhead, the night sky was a solid black, devoid of stars.
Carla shouted over the din from the speakers. “Do any of you know an ork girl named Pita? She came looking for me at my office the other day, but left before I had a chance to really talk with her. The last bunch of kids I talked to told me she hangs somewhere down here, at Seattle Center. Have any of you seen her? This is what she looks like” She held out a playback imager. Its flatscreen showed a still of Pita sitting in the KKRU lobby.
The teenagers stared at the imager, their eyes a mixture of boredom and suspicion. “You her social worker?” one asked. By the way his nose flared as he looked up and down Carla’s expensive Armante jacket, he wasn't impressed with her corporate image. Maybe she should have dressed down before trying to interview street kids. But the Armante was bullet-proof as well as stylish.
“I’m not a social worker,” Carla answered. “I’m a reporter. Carla Harris of KKRU Trideo News. Pita had a story for me. A story we’re willing to get behind. Be sure to tell her that if you see her.
The troll stopped dancing and ambled over to stand behind Carla. He loomed over her like a building, throwing her into shadow. She resisted the urge to back away, even though he reeked of sweat. Never let a dog see that you re afraid of him, she thought. It only encourages him to bite.
“Unless you got some credit to spend right here, lady, you’d better just frag off,” he grumbled.
Across the parking lot, a car horn beeped twice. That would be Masaki. He had cut the tint on the windows of his car, and was gesturing frantically inside it.
Carla met the troll’s eyes and smiled. “I’d love to stay and chat,” she told him. “But my father doesn’t like it when I stay out late, and he’s quite particular about which boys I talk to. That’s him in the car over there. Perhaps you’d like to meet him?”
Carla almost hoped the troll would call her bluff and say yes. If Masaki saw the huge brute shambling toward his car, he’d wet himself. He’d been working the lifestyles beat too long, and had gone soft. He'd rather spend the evening behind the multiple locks of his apartment door than chasing down stories. Carla had practically dragged him out tonight. She would have gone on her own, except that Masaki knew more about the background to the piece, including the background of the mage who’d wanted to spill the beans on Mitsuhama’s special project. But the way Masaki was acting, she wasn’t sure if her fellow so-called “reporter” still deserved a byline on the story.
The troll shifted his kimono slightly so that Carla got a good look at the Streetline Special pistol tucked into the top of his pants. She knew better than to flinch.
“You got cojones coming out here at night, lady,” he said grudgingly at last.
Carla smiled sweetly at him. “Ovaries, actually.” Behind her, Masaki honked the horn twice more. “Remember,” she told the other kids as she turned to go, “if you see Pita, tell her Carla Harris of KKRU Trideo is looking for her.” She handed the kid her business card.
Carla strode across the parking lot and wrenched open the car door. She and Masaki had been trying all that afternoon and evening to find Pita, but none of the street kids would admit to seeing the girl. She’d disappeared into thin air-and taken the Mitsuhama data-chip with her. Their producer had given Carla and Masaki one day to dig up some proof that there really was a story. So far, all they had were dead ends. And now Masaki was acting like an idiot, honking the horn like a frightened kid. He even had the engine running, as if fearing that a fast getaway would be imminent.
“What the hell are you doing?” Carla asked Masaki angrily. Trying to wake up all of Seattle? If you weren’t such a timid-”
Masaki didn’t wait for the insult. “Look at this!” he said, pointing urgently to the compact trid built into the dash of his car. “I was channel surfing and stumbled across this pirate broadcast. Looks like they’ve found Pita for us.”
Carla climbed hurriedly into the car, thumbing the volume key beside the tiny trideo screen. Pita’s voice crackled from the speaker and her image wavered. At first Carla thought it was just the trideo unit acting up. but then she saw the channel display. The broadcast was coming in on Channel 115-a channel that should have been carrying nothing but a blank blue field. This was clearly a pirate broadcast, fed illegally through a cable booster into a “dead” channel. The pirates were probably transmitting via remote feed to avoid getting caught, should their input be traced. The resulting distortion had caused the color to shift; Pita’s face was distinctly green. But her voice was coming through, loud and clear, despite the occasional pop of static.
“This is where it happened.” she said in a quavering voice. “This is where my friends were killed.”
The camera pulled back from Pita, revealing the wall behind her. The words that had been painted in the orks’ blood were faint but still legible, thanks to an overhang that protected them from the rain that had been falling steadily throughout the day: “Human Power!”, “Goblin Scum Must Die!” and “Keep Our Human Family Pure!”
Carla jabbed a finger at the screen. “That’s Rainier Avenue South, the spot where those three orks were killed by Humanis Policlub. I shot trid there a couple of days ago. If this is a live broadcast, that’s where Pita is right now.”
“It’s live all right,” Masaki said, wheezing with excitement. “But the pirate would be a fool to broadcast from an identifiable location. Lone Star would be all over him before he’d even finished his intro.
“See this faint blue line?” He traced Pita’s outline with a finger. “The kid’s image has been inserted over a shot of the corner where the kids were killed. The pirate is shooting with two portacams. one slaved to the other. He’s using a mixer to paste the two images together.”
“So how do we find him?” Carla asked.
“The portacams can’t be more than a few hundred meters apart,” he said. “He’s got to be within a block or two of that corner or else the signal would suffer too much distortion and the images wouldn’t match up. And he must be shooting outside to capture traffic noise. We’ll find him.” Masaki put the car into gear and punched the accelerator. “Now what was that name you wanted to call me? A timid what?
“Shh!” Carla hissed, “I’m trying to listen to this. Has the kid said anything about the dead mage?”
“Not yet.” Masaki rounded a corner, tires squealing. “It’s been nothing but intro so far. After introducing Pita, the reporter went into this rambling spiel about the coming revolution and injustice against the metaraces. Usual bulldrek. About what you’d expect from amateur propagandists like Orks First! They’re eating up the kid’s story with a fork and-”
“Quiet!” Carla leaned closer to the tiny screen. The camera was back on the ork girl, locked in a closeup that showed the tears at the corners of her eyes. Carla made sure the machine was set on record, for review later in case she missed anything.
“We were stopped outside an apartment a few blocks from here,” Pita began, gesturing up the Street, “by two Lone Star cops. There were four of us. Me, Chen Wah…” She paused, blinking furiously. “And two younger orks, Shaz and Mohan Gill. The cops took our simsense headset and…”
Carla glanced up as the car came to a halt. They were stopping for a yellow light. Cross traffic was light. “Let’s move, Masaki!” she said impatiently. “The pirate is going to wrap this story and disappear.”
“This intersection is monitored!” Masaki protested. “I don’t want to risk getting a tick-”
Carla grabbed the wheel, slid across the seat, and punched her foot down on top of Masaki’s, depressing the accelerator. Masaki gasped in fear as the car leaped across the intersection, narrowly missing the oncoming traffic. Horns blared, but then they were through and racing along Rainier. Masaki glared at Carla as she released the wheel, then drove on, grinding his teeth. Carla was pleased to see that they were at last making some decent speed.
She returned her attention to the trideo screen. The pirate reporter was standing beside Pita, one arm draped protectively over her shoulders. He was talking earnestly into the camera, his eyes glittering with intensity.
“Most of us have gone through what Pita has just described,” he was saying. “Lone Star seizes our property without warrant, stops and questions us without due cause, and talks to us in the most derogatory way they can think of. We live our lives in the Underground, afraid to venture onto the streets of our own city, shut out from the homes we once owned. Governor Schultz and Lone Star Chief Loudon have promised to ‘clean up’ Seattle. They pretend they’re talking about street crime. But anyone who remembers the events of 2039 will read between the lines and realize that the ‘housecleaning’ these humans are talking about is far more serious than the round-up that triggered the Night of Rage. We at Orks First! are about to bring you the true story of the links between our city’s ‘security’ force and the policlub that was notorious for-”
“We're close now!” Masaki called out. “They’ve got to be around here somewhere.” He weaved around another vehicle, cut off a truck, and pulled back into the curb lane.
The pirate’s voice was lost in a roar of static. The trideo screen had gone blue.
“Damn!” Carla thumped the dash above the trideo set. “We’ve lost the transmission.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Masaki wheezed, slowing the car. “There they are!”
Carla looked up. The ork girl was perhaps a block away, standing near the curb. Her body posture was hunched, frozen. She looked like a frightened animal, caught in the glare of headlights and uncertain which way to run. The pirate reporter lay at her feet, tangled in his tripod as if he had tripped over it. He was struggling to raise himself to a sitting position, to point something black he held in his hand. At first, Carla thought it was a portacam. But then she recognized the streamlined shape of a pistol. She was just powering down her window when shots coughed out from across the street. The ork reporter sagged to the ground, then went still.
“That’s gunfire!” Masaki said, slamming on the brakes. Around them, other drivers were also reacting, some accelerating away as quickly as possible, others spinning in tight fishtail turns. Two cars slammed together with a dull crunch and the scraping squeal of torn metal in the intersection ahead.
As their car skidded to a stop, Carla peered around Masaki. On the opposite side of the street, a man was tucking a pistol into a holster under his arm. A smaller man sprinted out into traffic, heading for the ork girl.
Cursing the power window for its slowness, Carla stuck her head out the opening. “Pita!” she cried. “This way!”
The girl hesitated no more than a millisecond, then sprinted for the car. The man chasing her changed direction, angling across the Street to intercept her. A car narrowly missed him, honking furiously. But he was gaining on the girl.
Masaki had thrown their car into reverse. It jerked backward, wheels spinning.
“What are you doing?” Carla screamed. “Wait for the girl!”
Masaki was wheezing heavily, obviously scared. His pudgy hands were white on the steering wheel. He shook his head, eyes wide. “That guy’s got a gun! Close the window before he shoots!”
Instead, Carla cracked the car door. The force of the backward acceleration made it slam open. She leaned out, reaching for Pita, who by now was running alongside the vehicle. One hand on the door! the other on the wrist of the ork girl, Carla yanked. At the same time, Pita jumped, knocking Carla back into the car.
The man chasing Pita, a willowy Asian fellow, was barely a few steps behind her. His face was set in a determined grimace. Something snaked out from the gun he held in his hand, licking against Carla’s wrist with a hot electric snap. A wave of pain coursed through her as her body convulsed. For a moment or two, the world spun. Or perhaps it was the car. They were whipping around in a tight backward turn, leaving the man with the Laser behind. The corner of the open car door caught his shirt, tearing it open and spinning him around. Then the car was rocketing forward, away from the spot where the pirate reporter had been gunned down. Something heavy was in Carla’s lap-the ork girl, she remembered fuzzily. The car door thudded shut. Then the kid clambered into the back seat.
Carla shook her head to clear it. Her right wrist was on fire; looking down she saw a bright white circle on the back of it. She blinked, testing the focus on her cybereye. The response lime of the miniature camera inside it was a fraction of a second too slow, but the unit appeared to be undamaged. She hoped it had caught a good, clean shot of her assailant. If this story panned out, she could probably use it.
Beside her, Masaki was cursing steadily, sweat rolling down his temples. His moustache and goatee framed white lips. He was at last ignoring the speeding limit, running lights and driving with terrified determination.
The ork girl sat in the back seat, pounding a fist against the upholstery. “Fragging cops!” Her voice held an edge of hysteria. “Fragging, fragging bastards!”
“Did you see that guy’s shoulders?” Masaki asked in a low voice, his eyes darting to the rear-view mirror. “They were covered with tattoos. Those weren’t cops. They were yakuza. I hope to drek they didn’t get my license bar code, or we’re all dead.”
“Yakuza? But what would they want with me?” The girl twisted around to glance fearfully out the rear window. “They killed Yao, didn’t they? They must have been aiming at me.”
Carla turned her anger on Masaki. “You’re not helping!” she told him. And slow down. There’s no one following us.”
She turned to the girl, who now sat with her arms wrapped around her chest, hunched into herself. Carla took a moment to compose herself, then spoke in a soothing voice. “Everything’s all right now, Pita. We’ll take you back to the station. The building has a tight security system; you’ll be safe there.”
Carla took a breath, brushing her hair back into place with one hand. Her heart was still beating rapidly, but whether it was from fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell.
Things were falling into place now. Somehow, Mitsuhama must have found out that the ork girl had acquired the datachip containing the specs of the research project and had sent its goons out after her-apparent]y the rumors that someone at MCT Seattle had connections with the local yakuza were accurate. The yaks had panicked when they saw her being interviewed by a reporter, and had geeked the guy-while he was on-air, yet. It was stupid and brutal, just the sort of thing you’d expect from gangsters. But it meant that the datachip was a top-priority item. Something worth killing for.
Wetting her lips, Carla did her best not to seem too anxious. “Those men were chasing you because of something you found, Pita. Something you picked up in an alley from a man who had burned to death. An optical memory chip like those used in cyberdecks. Do you still have it?”
Carla scarcely dared the breathe. If the kid had tossed the memory chip away…
“What if I did?” Pita asked defensively. “The guy was already dead. It’s not like I stole it or anything.”
“That doesn’t matter to those men back there,” Carla said soothingly. “They want the chip back, and they won’t stop chasing you until they get it.”
“Then I’ll give it back to them.” The kid reached for the window button. “Right now”
“No!” Carla fought to control her voice. So the kid did have the chip, after all. Now she’d just have to talk her into handing it over.
“Even if they get the chip back, they’ll want to make sure the information it contains doesn’t get out,” Carla told the girl. “You’ve had the chip for twenty-four hours. Even if the information on the chip is encoded, that’s plenty of time for an experienced decker to decrypt it. You’re just a kid, without any connections, but those goons don’t know that. They’ve got to assume you’ve read the data it contains. And that means-”
Masaki cut her off. “Stop it, Carla!” he said. “You’re scaring her. You’re scaring me, too.”
“I was going to say,” Carla said, an icy tone in her voice, “that it means we’ve got to air our story on Mitsuhama as soon as possible. Once the technical data on the chip is public knowledge, there’ll be no need for the corporation to try to keep us quiet.”
“Oh.” Masaki was still driving quickly, but not recklessly. They were only a few blocks from the KKRU building. It was late, but Carla was keyed up with the excitement of the chase. This story was going to be a big one; she could feel it in her bones. After all, Mitsuhama had killed the mage to make sure word of their top-secret project didn’t get out, and had burned the hard copy printout he’d been about to give Masaki, Funny, though, them overlooking the chip.
She reached out a hand. “Give me the chip, and I’ll make sure the story airs. Then you’ll be off the hook with the yakuza.”
The kid rummaged in the pocket of her jacket. She pulled out a tiny bronze disk. But when Carla reached br it, the kid yanked her hand back. “I want you to promise me something, first,” she said.
“What?”
“That you’ll do the story on my friends,” the girl continued. About how the cops killed them.”
“Sure, kid,” Carla promised smoothly. “Just as soon as the Mitsuhama story airs. That’s the important thing right now. Getting those goons off your back”
The kid studied Carla for a long moment, then grudgingly agreed. “O.K.,” she said, dropping the data-chip into Carla’s hand.
“Now!” Carla said, “tell us everything that happened the night you found the dead man.”
7
When they reached the station, Carla immediately popped the datachip into a deck. Masaki fretted about encryption devices and self-wipe programs, but as it turned out, the chip wasn’t even encoded with a password.
As the two reporters hunched over the display, Pita could tell from their perplexed expressions that they didn’t understand what they were seeing. The screen was filled with a series of weird diagrams and symbols and long blocks of text. Whatever was on the chip apparently had something to do with magic because she heard Carla and Masaki muttering stuff about “hermetic circles,” “astral space,” and “multi-something conjuring.” They at last concluded that it must be a spell formula of some sort.
By the time they gave up on trying to figure it out themselves, it was morning. Rather than going home to sleep, the two decided to visit a mage friend of Carla’s. Pita, despite the fact that exhaustion threatened to overwhelm her at any moment, decided to tag along. She was already coming to realize that the reporters were more interested in the datachip than in her. But they’d saved her ass once, and she felt safer with them than in an office full of strangers. Besides, she was curious about the chip.
Their destination was an odd little shop on Denny Way, tucked into the middle of a block of buildings that looked as if they’d been built in the previous century. There was no sign out front, no indication of what type of store it might be. The large window in the front was entirely covered with intricate designs, done in gold leaf. Pita wondered if they were magical wards of some sort.
As Carla knocked. Pita peered in through the glass. The interior of the shop was dark, but she could see that it was filled with untidy stacks of hardcopy texts bound in boxy coverings. These were books-the old-Fashioned, difficult-to-use data storage units that had been so popular in the last century. Pita couldn’t see he attraction of them, and wondered how a place like this could make any money. She’d take a Pocketpad graphic novel over one of these dusty antiques any day.
The door opened suddenly, and the brass bell above it tinkled. Carla stepped inside, then motioned Masaki and Pita to follow. As Pita closed the door behind them, a small white cat leaped down from one of the stacks of books and wove itself. purring, around her ankles. She reached down to scratch its head, looking around the shop. There was no sign of the proprietor.
“Hello. Welcome to Inner Secrets Thaumaturgical Textbooks. Aziz Fader at your service.”
The voice came from somewhere just ahead. Pita jerked back as a human shape suddenly appeared a step or two in front of her. One minute there had been nothing but empty air in front of her; the next, some guy was standing there. It gave her the weirds to think he’d been there all along, watching her invisibly. Masaki was equally startled, but Carla just smiled. “Hello, Aziz. Long time no scan.”
The shopkeeper was a tall man with jet-black hair combed straight back from his high forehead. He was human, but thin enough to be an elf. His nose had a slight hook to it, and his eyes were so dark it was hard to tell where the iris ended and the pupil began. He wore a flowing, one-piece garment with an ankle-length hem and wide sleeves, and held his hands in front of him, fingers laced together.
His eyes were locked on Carla. They took in every centimeter of the reporter, from her neatly braided hair and high cheekbones, to her tailored suit, to her stylish, expensive leather pumps. “I like the new face,” he commented, one eyebrow arched. He barely glanced at Masaki, with his rumpled shirt and uncombed graying hair, or at Pita, who still wore her torn jeans and cheap synthleather jacket.
Masaki cleared his throat. “We’ve come to-”
“I know why you’re here, Carla,” Aziz said, still addressing the female reporter “I did a minor mind probe before I let you in. A little protective measure. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Carla said smoothly. “Let’s get right to it then, shall we?”
Carla handed him the chip.
The shopkeeper waved them to a large wooden desk in the back of the store. A telecom unit sat on one corner. The rest of its surface was covered with a jumble of books, loose papers, and datachips. Aziz pushed these aside, revealing an ancient data display with a fold-up screen and a battered-looking keyboard. It didn’t even have a pickup for voice recognition, let alone a jack for a datacord. The shopkeeper must have a jones for old-fashioned stuff.
Aziz seated himself at the desk and powered up the datadeck. Carla and Masaki pulled up chairs on either side of him, and Pita, left without a seat, perched on a stack of books.
“Get down from there!” Aziz barked. “Those are valuable!”
Pita leaped to her feet, but the mage had already turned his attention to the flickering screen in front of him. He scrolled through the text, muttering to himself. Pita flipped him the finger behind his back.
“It’s a conjuring spell, all right, but not one I’m familiar with,” Aziz said. Definitely hermetic, and definitely related to the summoning of a spirit. But the diagram for the hermetic circle isn’t like any I’ve seen before. Usually it encloses a square pattern representing the four elemental energies. This one omits the square entirely, and instead places a pentagram at the middle of the circle. The first four symbols at each of the lower points I recognize-they’re the standard glyphs for the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. But I’m not familiar with this fifth one, here at the top of the pentagram. It’s almost reminiscent of a yang symbol Hmm…”
Pita was bored by the shopkeeper’s ramblings. If she stood here any longer she’d fall asleep on her feet. She ambled over to pat the cat. It was wedged into a space between books and shelf, licking its paw and affecting complete boredom and disdain. As Pita reached up and stroked it under the chin, the cat broke into a rumbling purr. Now that it was at a level where she could see its face, Pita noticed the animal’s unusual eyes. One was a vivid yellow, the other a soft sky blue.
The cat shifted, rolling over so that Pita could scratch its belly. It used its rear paws to push itself along the books, and as it did so one was dislodged. Pita instinctively picked it up, intending to put it back into place. But then she looked around at the shelves on which books were stacked every which way, wedged into any available space. She was tempted to just drop the thing back on the floor, but the picture on the cover, done in brilliant primary colors and outlined in gold, caught her eye. It showed a beautiful woman reclining on the ground with her arms straight out in front of her, palms flat against the sandy soil, staring forward intently. Just above and behind her, framing her body with its own, was the shadowy outline of a cat whose eyes were twin dots of gold. To either side of the woman were strange sculptures of a creature with a cat’s body and a human head. The statues looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Pita remembered where she’d seen them before-In one of her history vids. They’d had a weird name: finks, or spinks, or something like that.
“You recommend this book, huh?” Pita jokingly asked the cat. It mrrrowed softly in response.
Slowly, Pita sounded out the book’s title: Way of the Cat: The Shamanistic Tradition from Ancient Egypt to Current Day. It didn’t sound very exciting. But flipping through the pages, Pita saw that it was full of beautiful pictures like the one on the cover. The book wasn’t anything like the visual aids she’d been used to at school, with their animated graphics and icon-prompted info blips. With a vis-aid, all you had to do was touch the icon and a voice would explain what you were looking at. In comparison, these old-fashioned books were way tougher, full of long passages of printed text that looked like heavy gray blocks. It would be a real yawn having to Sound out all the words yourself just to see what the pictures were about.
One of the illustrations on an inside page caught Pita’s eye. It showed a woman wearing a cat-shaped headdress and standing in a building whose walls were covered in strange symbols. Around her feet sat dozens of cats of every description, looking up at her with a mixture of awe and intense loyalty. What appealed most to Pita was the woman’s air of self-confidence and pride. Her eyes conveyed a clear message-this was one chummer you didn’t want to mess with.
Instinctively, Pita touched one of the cats as she would a vis-aid icon. Then she sighed and shook her head. Lips moving, she sounded out the words beneath the picture: “Bastet, cat goddess of ancient Egypt.”
Pita flipped to the front of the book, looking for instructions, and found something there called a Table of Contents. It seemed to be a kind of static menu! like the kind they put at the beginning of text-based computer files. The menu was organized into blocks called chapters, each with a title and a brief bit of text that was like a dialogue box underneath. Pita read through a few of them. There were chapters on the ancient rituals used to worship this Bastet, on something called mummification, on the jaguar priests of ancient Aztlan, and on the lion kings of Africa. But the chapter title that really intrigued her was one called: “The Way of the Cat: Empathy and Mind Control.” She liked the sound of that. Mind control. Cats had a way of getting people to do what they wanted. Pita wouldn’t mind being able to do that, too.
She turned her back to the others, then slipped the book into an inner pocket of her jacket. Quietly, she zipped her jacket shut. The cat watched her, its head tilted inquisitively to one side.
“You won’t tell, will you?” Pita whispered to it. It purred and closed its eyes.
When Pita returned to the others, Aziz was leaning back from the display, stroking his chin. Suddenly he jumped to his feet. Pita was worried that he might have been mind-reading again, that he’d monitored her thoughts when she boosted his book. But he ignored her and strode over to a messy pile of papers on the floor. Rummaging through them, he withdrew a book bound in cracked red leather.
“Here it is,” he said, returning to his seat. “Remember what I was saying before, about the pentagram? The five-pointed pattern reminds me of the writings of the fourth-century Chinese alchemist Ko Hung.” Aziz leafed through the book as he talked. “He postulated not four elements, but five: water, fire, earth, wood, and metal. His spell formulas are nonsense-no hermetic formula that omits the elemental energy of air stands a chance of working properly. It’s simply too unbalanced. And despite extensive research, no ‘fifth element’ has ever been found. It’s simply an impossibility.
“But what if the Pao P'u Tzu, was misconstrued? Chinese alchemists used a lot of code words-they called mercury ‘dragon’ and lead ‘tiger.’ It’s possible that the names of the elements were coded, too.”
“Now this passage here”-Aziz tapped a page with his finger-“refers to the fourth element as ‘firewood.’ It’s usually translated simply as ‘wood.’ I’ve always thought that wood was a curious choice as an element, but what if the original translation was ‘burning wood’? When wood burns it produces smoke-not just particles of soot but also various gases. Ko Hung might have used ‘burning wood’ as a metaphor for ‘air.’ That would make more sense.”
Aziz rapidly turned pages, then found the passage he wanted. “Here, Ko Hung refers to the supposed fifth element as ‘bright-shining metal.’ The translators always simplified this to ‘metal,’ but what if they missed the point?”
He looked up at the two reporters. Carla was leaning forward, lips parted, waiting for the punchline. Masaki’s forehead was crumpled into a frown. He blinked slowly, as if he were on the verge of falling asleep.
Aziz had his back to Pita, but his rigid posture spoke volumes about his excitement.
“What if,” he said slowly, “Ko Hung was not referring to a fifth element, but to a form of energy? And what if the text indicated not the metal itself, but its shiny surface? The proper translation would not be ‘metal’ but would instead be ‘shining’ or-”
“Light” Carla answered.
“Exactly.” Aziz tapped the circle-and-pentagram graphic on the display screen. “So what we have here is some experimental spell that’s apparently trying to summon a spirit whose physical manifestation is composed not of the usual four elemental energies, hut of light. He stopped, eyebrows furrowed. “Of course, that just isn’t possible…”
“But it fits with the kid’s eyewitness account,” Carla said. “She said she saw light pouring out of the mage just before he died.”
Pita shuddered at the memory of the brilliant white light and burning flesh.
Aziz turned to face her. “You were the one who saw this spirit?” he asked. His eyes bored into hers. Pita was unable to look away. She felt unseen fingers sifting through her mind and tried angrily to push them away. Then the mage sighed. as if suddenly very tired. “Yes, I see.”
“What?” Carla asked sharply.
“The man in the alley that Masaki was going to interview. He claimed to know all about this spell. If he was the one who was going to spill it to the media, he must have been involved in the research-he probably helped design the spell. Be that as it may, it does Sound like this was the spirit that killed him.”
“But why would it do that?” Masaki asked.
Aziz shrugged. “Once a spirit has been conjured, the mage has to be able to control it. If the spirit’s will proves stronger, it can resist being bound. Sometimes the struggle drains the mage to the point of unconsciousness, and the spirit escapes. An uncontrolled spirit is dangerous-and violent. It quite often tries to kill the mage who summoned it.
“Now here’s the curious thing,” Aziz added, scrolling to the end of the text. “According to this note at the bottom, addressed to you, Masaki, your contact was going to post this spell on Magicknet as soon as your story had run. Looks like your mage friend wanted other mages to try casting the spell themselves. But that would be suicide for most magicians. Not only is this spirit of a type I’ve never heard of before, it’s extremely powerful. You can tell by the number of hours specified for the ritual.”
Carla sat, thinking, tapping a manicured finger against her chin. “So maybe Mitsuhama didn’t kill the mage,” she mused. “Maybe he was stupid enough to try conjuring a spirit that was too powerful for him. You’re lucky you weren’t there when the spirit broke free, Masaki. It might have killed you, too.”
Masaki paled and licked dry lips.
“It didn’t kill me,” Pita observed.
Carla shrugged the comment off. “You were just lucky. I guess.”
“I don’t get it,” Masaki said, sitting up in his chair. “That chip was supposed to hold the specs of a research project Mitsuhama was working on. “Where’s the profit in summoning a spirit composed of light?”
“Like I said, I don’t know how it’s possible, but it would make a deadly weapon,” Aziz observed. “Given the energy that would he bound up in the spirit, its light could blind, burn, or irradiate a person instantly. Imagine an assassin that could travel at 300,000 kilometers per second-at the speed of light. You’d quite literally never see it coming.”
“If such a thing were possible” Aziz repeated, arching an eyebrow.
“But it’s gone now, right?” Masaki asked.
“Possibly,” Aziz answered. “A spirit that has escaped its summoner usually flees back from whence it came. But sometimes it hangs around in the physical world, for reasons known only to itself. The technical term for an uncontrolled being like this is ‘free spirit.’ Some of these spirits are playful and protective, but others are extremely dangerous. Lethal, even. And the only way to summon one is to learn its true name.”
Masaki glanced uneasily at the window. Outside, sunlight was shining through a break in the clouds. It slanted into the shop, painting scrollwork shadows on the floor. “Could such a spirit get through your window, Aziz?”
The mage shrugged. “This shop is protected by every kind of magical ward I know how to create. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all-” His comment was cut short by the buzz of the telecom. An icon on its screen flashed, signaling that the incoming call contained a visual feed. Aziz reached over to answer the call.
Pita glanced down at the datacord that ran down from the telecom unit out to a jack in the wall. “Could the spirit get in through a fiber-optic cable?” she asked.
Masaki’s eyes widened. “Damn!” he wheezed, diving for the cable. He yanked it from the wall, leaving a frayed stub hanging from the metal jack.
“What did you do that for?’ Aziz snapped. “The spirit doesn’t know who you are, much less that you’re here.” He glared at Masaki. “But assuming the spirit did somehow want to attack you, it would have done it out there, in the street. You’d be dead already. What are you going to do-hole up in my shop for the rest of your life without even a bloody trideo feed?”
Masaki glanced nervously around then shot Pita a pained look. She made a face at him. All she’d done was ask a question, one that had seemed perfectly logical at the time. It wasn’t like she’d told him to panic or anything.
“Excuse me, but I’d like to shoot some trideo,” Carla reminded them. “That is, if we’re all calm enough to handle it,” she added sarcastically.
The mage grudgingly broke off the glare he’d been giving Masaki.
Carla smiled sweetly at him. “Now if you’ll just face me, Aziz, I’d like to shoot a little trid while you explain the significance of the spell that’s on the chip. Keep it short and put it in lay terms so our viewing audience will understand.”
Aziz popped the datachip from the deck and turned to face Carla. When she reached for it, he pulled his band back. “How about I keep this for awhile as payment for services rendered?” he asked. “I want to study the spell. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The formula is highly theoretical, real cutting-edge stuff. The spirit it supposedly summons doesn’t fit any of the known categories of hermetic magic. I’d like to know more about it.”
When Carla started to protest, he waved a finger at her, “If I know you, Carla, you’ve already got a copy of this stashed away somewhere. And don’t worry that I’ll spill the beans before the story airs. Living with a reporter taught me all about confidentiality and not revealing my sources. Nobody’s going to scoop you on this one.”
Carla studied Aziz a moment, then nodded briefly. “All right,” she replied. “If you think you can dredge up more information on this, go ahead and try. But be careful. And don’t try casting that spell yourself. I don’t want to see you wind up like Masaki’s friend, burned to death from the inside out.”
Aziz nodded solemnly, and drew a cross pattern over his heart. But Pita caught the greedy gleam in his eye. Carla might be a smart lady, but she was a sucker for a handsome face. Pith wouldn’t trust this guy as far as she could heave him.
8
Carla rubbed her temples with her fingertips. The night without sleep had drained her; only the double-strength kaffetamine pills she’d taken were keeping her awake now. She resisted the urge to catnap in the back seat of the taxi, and decided instead to review the file footage from the interview Masaki had conducted, five years ago, with the mage who’d died in the alley. She jacked into her playback imager, then slotted a datachip into the handheld unit. Focusing on one of the icons that appeared in her cybereye’s field of view, she initiated the playback.
The story was a standard puff piece, describing the opening of a new thaumaturgical supply store. The owner was Farazad Samji, a young entrepreneur from India who was trained in the hermetic tradition. The store specialized in talismonger’s supplies from the Far East-rare herbs, vials of water from the Ganges, raw silk cocoons, polished gemstones, and cobra skins. But its main draw had been glazed bricks inscribed with cuneiforms. They were said to have come from a ziggurat of ancient Babylon. Whether or not this was a legitimate claim, the bricks had proved a popular item with mages who wanted to build their own alchemical kilns. A single brick was said to be enough to increase the magical potency of a kiln by a factor of ten.
Farazad Samji was an affable man with dark hair and a square jaw. Despite the exotic nature of his shop, he dressed conservatively, in a double-zip suit and solid-tone pants. He was keen about his craft, earnest and bright. Although he came from a rural background, he had interesting ideas on the modern technological applications of magic. Carla could see why Mitsuhama had offered him a job in their R D division.
Although the puff piece had been no more than a minute long, the unedited trideo footage ran over half an hour. Carla muted the video portion, and, while half-listening to the audio, ran over in her mind what KKRU’s researchers had learned about the mage thus far. Farazad was married to a woman named Ravinder and had two young children-Jasmine, age seven, and Bal, a boy of three. He lived in a tony condominium in North Beach, an upper-class section of Seattle that overlooked the ocean. He had a solid credit history with only moderate debts, no criminal convictions, and he rarely traveled. He was in every respect a good corporate citizen, devoted to his family. He was said by his neighbors to be a respectable, religious man who sometimes even led the prayers at his temple. Hardly the sort of person you’d expect to find dead in an alley.
Farazad had sold his store and joined Mitsuhama three years ago, back when the company was aggressively hiring for its magical research division. The advertised starting salary for the position had been 120,000 nuyen-twice Carla’s current wage. What Farazad’s salary had been when he died was anybody’s guess; the IRS databanks certainly weren’t telling. But given the value of his home and the small balance outstanding on his mortgage, it must have been plenty.
Carla looked out the window at the passing traffic. As far as she could tell, there weren’t any vehicles following her. But if the Mitsuhama goons were on her trail a taxi was the safest place to be. Not only was the vehicle bulletproof, but it was also warded against magical attack.
The driver, a heavyset man with a round face and wearing a black beret decorated with a Celtic pin, caught Carla’s eye in the mirror. “Weird weather we been having lately, eh? You see that lighting flash last night?” His voice crackled through the speaker that was set into the plexiglass partition that separated the front and back seats.
"No.” Carla answered. “I was inside all night, working.”
“Well, it was tremendous,” the driver continued. “It lit up the whole sky. I’ve never seen-”
His commentary was cut off by the beep of Carla’s cel phone. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve got a call. It may be personal. You mind turning off the intercom?”
“Sure thing,” the driver answered. He touched an icon on his dashboard, cutting the com, then reached into a pouch that lay on the seat beside him. He pulled a chocolate from it and popped it into his mouth, then munched happily, staring straight ahead at the road.
Carla thumbed the talk button of her cel phone. “Yes?”
“Hi, Carla. Its me.”
Carla recognized the voice of Frances, one of the deckers at KKRU.
“Yes?”
“Our subject just accepted a delivery of flowers,” Frances answered. “She’s home, all right.”
“Did you get a digital sample?” Carla asked.
“You bet.” Frances sounded smug. “I’m going to work on it right now.”
“Perfect. And thanks.”
Carla thumbed the phone’s Off button and smiled. She was taking a risk, coming to the Samji house unannounced. But although it was possible to do a pickup straight off the telecom line during a phone interview, face-to-face interviews always looked best on trid. Of course, when Carla confronted her, Mrs. Samji might just shut the door in her face. On the other hand, she might open up and tell Carla everything she knew about her husband’s work. All Carla had to do was find a subject that would get her talking. Children, maybe. Carla could always pretend that she had children the same age as the Samji kids. Or pets, perhaps. People always warmed up when you asked them questions about something they loved. It was then just a matter of easing them around to the more difficult questions. Like why her husband wanted to divulge corporate secrets. And whether Mitsuhama might have killed him because of it.
Carla gazed out the window, reviewing what she lew about the mage’s employers. The Mitsuhama corporation specialized in computer technologies such as neural interfaces and guidance systems for autonomous robotic vehicles. It also did a substantial business in defense contracts, particularly smart guns and computer-controlled targeting systems.
From its headquarters in Kyoto, Mitsuhama Computer Technologies had expanded rapidly in the few years since its founding and now was truly multinational. Its multiple branches and divisions encompassed the globe, and its net worth was said to rival the GNP of a moderately sized nation like the Confederated American States. MCT North America had hundreds of offices, labs, and manufacturing plants in the continent’s various nations. In Seattle alone the corporation had a set of posh executive offices, a factory that produced data processors, and two separate R D labs-one devoted to cybernetics, the other to pure magic research. Heading them all up was Tamatsu Sakura, vice-president of MCT’s UCAS division.
Once she had a better grasp on her story, Carla would try to arrange an interview with Mr. Sakura. The job at hand, however, was to establish-on the record-the links between the Mitsuhama Corporation and the spell formula Farazad had intended to hand over to Masaki. Carla could speculate all she liked about the possible applications of a spell to conjure the ultimate stealth weapon. But what she had so far-a formula on an unmarked datachip that could have originated anywhere-was hardly conclusive evidence. If only the mage had lived long enough to be interviewed by Masaki, the uses to which the corp had intended to put the new spell could have been documented on trideo.
Pita would provide an eyewitness account of how the mage had died, but once again, that wouldn’t prove anything. It merely implied that a mage-who just happened to work for Mitsuhama-had died at the hands of a weird spirit, probably one that he had conjured up using the spell on the chip. The fellow hadn’t even had the courtesy to die outside the Mitsuhama offices. Instead, he’d been found in an alley behind the brokerage firm where his wife used to work. It was hardly the incriminating tie-in to Mitsuhama that they needed.
Carla drummed her fingers on her lap, hoping Masaki wasn’t so bagged that he’d blow the interview with Pita. It was to be a straightforward take, a head-and-shoulders shot of the kid repeating her account of what she’d seen in the alley that night. They would run it as a picture-in-picture over the trideo that Masaki had shot when he found the dead mage. The trid was underexposed and jumpy; Masaki had only captured a ten-second clip before a DocWagon arrived on the scene. Rather than answer their questions, he’d scuttled away. But Wayne could probably enhance the image and use pixel splicing to stretch the clip into half a minute or more. If the story went to air tonight, Carla would use the interview she was about to shoot with Farazad’s wife. Then tomorrow she'd chase down Mitsuhama Seattle management for a reaction. She’d probably get a “no comment” or a denial, but if she barged into the corporate offices during a live feed, the story would wrap with a bang.
If only Masaki had arrived at the alley a few seconds earlier, he might have gotten a shot of the mage’s death. Now that would have been some take, to hear the kid describe it. In hindsight, it was a wonder Masaki had set foot outside at night to meet with the mage in the first place. Maybe there was some reporter left in him yet.
If so, it certainly didn’t show in his interview with the young Farazad. Restoring the video and watching the unedited footage, Carla was amazed at all the loose ends Masaki didn’t pick up on. If it had been her doing the interview, she’d have quizzed the shop owner about the bricks, which had a distinctively modem-looking glaze. And there, when Farazad called himself a “parsee,” she’d have asked what that was. It was probably some obscure Indian caste, but Carla wouldn’t have just let it slide the way Masaki did.
She focused on the icon that switched off the playback imager, then pulled her Encyclopedia Cybemetica data-pad from her purse. Pressing the icon for a dictionary format keyword search, she spoke the word “parsee” into the unit. A second or two later, text scrolled across its microscreen.
Parsis. Literal translation: “People of Persia.” A name given to Zoroastrians who emigrated to India in the 7th century AD.
Carla looked out the window. They had nearly reached the Samji home. She tried again, this time keying the unit for full encyclopedia mode.
“Zoroastrian.”
Zoroastrian. A follower of Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion founded approximately four to nine thousand years ago by the Persian philosopher Zarathustra. Traditionally, both lay membership and membership in its priesthood were hereditary; the religion did not accept outside worshipers, nor did it admit children whose parents were not both members of the faith. In 2047, the religion had fewer than 20,000 practitioners most of them in the Indian city of Bombay.
The scroll of words paused for a moment as the screen showed a graphic of a flame, burning in a silver chalice. It slowly dissolved into another graphic: a human figure with outstretched wings, which the encyclopedia identified as a farohar, or angel.
With the increase in inter-faith marriages, it was thought that the Zoroastrian faith would die out in another generation or two. But in 2048, the religion opened its doors to outsiders and the first conversions were sanctified. Today, the membership is slowly increasing, but it remains to be seen if this relatively obscure faith will survive into the next century.
The Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda, is worshiped in a temple that contains an eternal flame that repre-
Carla shut off the encyclopedia as the taxi came to a stop outside a brick wall fronted by a heavy, wrought-iron gate. The wall completely encircled a number of ultramodern condominium units designed to look like terraced pueblos of adobe brick. The dun-colored condos looked strangely out of place against the gray Seattle sky.
A security guard in a neat beige uniform leaned over and tapped on the window next to Carla. She powered it down and handed the woman her press card. “I have an appointment to do an interview with Mrs. Samji, in unit number five.”
The guard slid the card through a hand-held scanner, then stepped inside her booth. She would be calling Mrs. Samji, confirming the appointment. Carla waited, hoping that Frances had done her job. If all went well the guard’s call would be subtly re-routed to the station’s telecom unit, where a sampled image of Mrs. Samji-copied from the telecom call she’d just answered, and hastily remixed-would give permission for Carla to be admitted. It was a classic reporter’s trick, highly effective, albeit illegal. And it worked. The guard stepped out of the booth, handed Carla her press card, and waved the taxi inside the wall.
As the taxi pulled up in front of the Samji residence, Carla inserted her KKRU expense-account credstick into a scanner and keyed in a tip. Payment accepted, the driver unlocked the doors. Carla asked him to pull into a nearby visitor parking stall and wait for her. If the Mitsuhama goons showed up, she wanted a safe haven close at hand. She realized that the interview with Mrs. Samji might take some time. But with the overtime Carla was putting into this story, the station could bloody well pay to keep the meter running.
Carla stepped out of the taxi, smoothed her skirt, and climbed the three steps to the front door. A message board in the door scrolled a greeting and warning in one: “Welcome to the Samji residence. These premises protected by a watcher spirit.”
Despite the rustic Western took of the condo the door was solid enough, made of heavy wood that had been carved with ornate designs. Carla suspected that these were magical wards capable of blocking unwanted astral intruders. There was no maglock; just a thumbprint scanner, set into the middle of the door. It would be an easy security system to fool, but the high walls and guarded gate of the complex provided most of the protection. For visitors, there was a com unit set into the faux adobe brickwork beside the door.
As Carla touched the pad, a woman’s voice issued from a hidden speaker. “Who is calling, please?” The screen inside the unit remained blank.
The response had been too swift to be anything other than an automated answering program. But Carla activated the camera in her cybereye and made sure her audio pickup was working, just in case Mrs. Samji activated the com screen. As soon as Carla identified herself as a reporter, anything she recorded was fair game, and could be aired on the news.
“It’s Carla Harris of KKRU Trideo News,” she answered.
“I have no wish to talk to reporters.” This time, the voice sounded live.
“It will only take a moment or two, Mrs. Samji.”
“I have answered enough questions already,” the voice continued. “Of course I recognized my husband’s body, even though it was badly burned. I had to identify him for the officers, it was a terrible experience. I wish… Please leave me alone. You reporters ask such horrible questions.” The woman sounded close to tears.
Carla frowned. Had Mrs. Samji already spoken to other reporters? As far as Carla knew, the other news-nets hadn’t bothered to pursue the item. They were playing it as a straightforward crime story in a city where muggers used magic as often as they used muscle. As far as they were concerned, Farazad Samji was just another wealthy corporate exec who had wound upon the wrong end of an unusual form of fireball in a violent robbery attempt. Hardly a lead story, considering the nightly body count. But maybe someone was having a slow news day, and had decided to try for a reaction piece from the family. Worse luck, they’d slotted Mrs. Samji off. She wasn’t likely to want to talk to anyone now. But if Carla could just get her to open the door, maybe she could fire off a question or two and get a reaction shot before the door was slammed in her face.
“I’m not here to ask ghoulish questions, Mrs. Samji,” Carla said quickly. Searching for inspiration, she remembered the information she’d gleaned from the encyclopedia. “1 work the religion beat. I understand that Mr. Samji was an important member of his temple. I want to do a profile on him… a simple obituary. I think the story could help to increase awareness of the Zoroastrian faith. I’m sure your husband would have liked to see an increase in membership in the temple, and this story just might-”
The screen beside the com pad flickered to life, framing Ravinder Samji’s head and shoulders. Carla quickly focused her cybereye on the image.
Mrs. Samji proved to be a small woman with long black hair that was twisted up into a bun at the back of her neck. She wore a mauve jumpsuit that looked as if it were made out of raw silk, and gold earrings that glittered against her dark skin. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, as if she’d been crying. There were dark circles under them that she hadn’t bothered to hide with makeup. Although she met Carla’s gaze, she kept glancing down.
“Farazad would have liked a story on the temple,” Mrs. Samji said softly. She gnawed at her lip with white teeth. “I do not have to talk about my husbands death?”
“Not if you don’t want to,” Carla answered. She kept her fingers crossed, hoping the corn unit didn’t have a lie detection spell built into it. At the home of a mage, anything was possible.
Mrs. Samji looked down at something off-screen again, hesitated, then nodded. “Very well.”
Locks clicked and the door swung open.
Mrs. Samji stood just inside the door. Carla glanced down to see what she had been looking at. It turned out to be a hazy, doglike shape-a magical spirit of some sort. As the creature trotted out from behind the door, Carla could see that it had only partially manifested on the physical plane. It had a translucent, ghostly body about the size of a terrier, with a head like a Chinese lion.
“This must be the watcher that your message board warned me about,” Carla said. “Is it one of your husband’s magical creations?”
“A watcher?” Mrs. Samji shifted uneasily. “Yes, I suppose it is. But it’s one of Miyuki’s creatures, not Farazad’s. She left it here for me yesterday, as… protection for the children and myself. She said that people might try to take advantage of a woman whose husband had recently died. It’s much more powerful than our usual-”
“That was kind of Miyuki,” Carla said, smiling. “She must be a good friend.”
A peculiar look crossed Mrs. Samji’s face. “Yes. A good friend. Of my husband.” The comment seemed to be directed as much at the lion-headed dog as it was at Carla.
Carla filed that away for future use. Clearly Mrs. Samji didn’t like this Miyuki-whoever she was. Yet she’d accepted a magical creature from her that made her nervous. Interesting.
“May I come in?” Carla asked. She braced a foot against the floor, in case Mrs. Samji changed her mind about the interview and tried to shut it suddenly.
“I suppose that would be possible,” Mrs. Samji answered, glancing down again at the creature.
The lion-headed dog backed up, but kept Carla under its scrutiny. She thought she could see tiny drops of mist dripping from its bared fangs, but that might have just been her imagination. The creature, despite its small size, projected a palpable aura of menace.
Mrs. Samji ushered Carla into a living room furnished with two overstuffed leather couches and an expensive-looking trideo home entertainment unit that took up most of one corner. Children’s toys were neatly lined up like soldiers on parade at one edge of the room. From the plush feel of the carpet, Carla suspected that it was real wool. The lion-headed dog followed them into the room, its feet leaving faint gray smudges on the white carpet. As Mrs. Samji settled onto one of the couches, it sat by her ankle. She glanced uneasily at it before beginning to talk. Carla thought she saw the creature’s head move slightly, a bobbing motion something like a nod.
“Where is your camera?” Mrs. Samji asked.
Carla settled into the opposite couch. “I don’t need one,” she said. “This is an informal interview-more like a chat.” While she spoke, she adjusted the zoom in her eyecam for a tight shot of Mrs. Samji’s hands. The woman was twisting the rings on her fingers; the shot could be edited into Carla’s story as evidence of a widow’s grief. Noticing that a vase was slightly blocking the shot. Carla reached across the table between the two couches to shift it slightly. As soon as she sat back, Mrs. Samji leaned forward to slide the vase back into its original position. It was an instinctive action, the habitual act of someone who liked everything in its proper place. Exactly in place.
“You wanted to know about my husband’s work with the temple?” Mrs. Samji asked.
“The temple, yes” Carla answered. “Please tell me about it.” Having bluffed her way in here, she decided to let Mrs. Samji talk and see what came up. She would work in questions about Mitsuhama as the opportunity arose.
Zooming out again to capture a full-length shot of Mrs. Samji as she started to speak, Carla spotted a holo image of Farazad on a side table. She shifted along the couch until it appeared in her field of view, just over Mrs. Samji’s shoulder. The holo of the mage, holding what Carla presumed was one of his infant children in his arms, would make a nice graphic element.
“Farazad often spoke at the mabad-at the temple,” Mrs. Samji began. “His father was a mubad-a priest-and his grandfather before him. My husband could have claimed the title as well, but instead he chose to study magic. He regarded his studies as a religious practice, as a way of becoming closer to his god. He often spoke of this at the temple, and encouraged others to follow the hermetic tradition. He said that magic was a manifestation of the divine spark that exists within all-”
“Let me make sure I have your husband’s history correct,” Carla interrupted. “Instead of becoming a priest, Mr. Samji worked as a mage. For which company?”
“Mitsuhama Computer Technologies,” Mrs. Samji answered, after a brief glance at the creature at her feet.
“He was employed there at the time of his death?” Carla asked.
Mrs. Samji’s lips whitened slightly as she pressed them together. “Yes.”
“Working in their magical research and development lab?”
The pause lasted longer this time, “Yes.”
“What sort of work did he do for them?”
“What does it matter?” Mrs. Samji replied. “Farazad was planning on taking a leave of absence from Musuhama, and devoting himself to the temple.”
“But if you could just tell me a little more about his work with Mitsu-”
“I thought you wanted to talk about the temple,” Mrs. Samji said, frowning.
“Of course,” Carla answered smoothly. “This is just background material-the usual sort of questions a reporter asks when doing an obit piece. Name, occupation, age, names of surviving family members, number of years spent with the corporation, the type of work he did for Mitsuhama, whether he was working on anything especially important when he died…”
“1 thought you were a religious reporter.” A hint of hostility had crept into Mrs. Samji’s voice.
“I am,” Carla said, backpedaling quickly. “I find Zoroastrianism one of the most interesting of the world’s religions. I’d like to hear more about its history. and its founder, Zarathustra. Perhaps you could start by telling me more about him. And about the significance of the eternal flame that bums in your temple.”
She seemed to have allayed Mrs. Samji’s suspicions. at least for the moment. The woman picked up a framed flatscreen portrait of Zarathustra from the table beside her and held it out for Carla to look at. It showed a young man with a full brown beard and flowing hair, wearing a white robe and hat. His eyes looked earnestly up-to heaven, Carla supposed. Mrs. Sarnji began talking about the life of the prophet, explaining how he had aided the poor and extolled the virtues of morality and justice. Carla bided her time, waiting for another lead that would allow her to ask about Mitsuliama. In the meantime, she focused her cybereye on a point just over the woman’s shoulder. A door in the wall behind her was partially open. Using her low-light boosters and image enhancers, Carla could see that it led to a study. A desk just inside it held a typical business work station. Everything in the room was neat and orderly, from the two pairs of men’s slippers lined up with perpendicular precision against the wall to the precisely aligned row of family portraits on the shelf above the desk. The only exception to this rigid neatness was the work-station itself. An interface cable lay in an untidy heap on the floor, and empty plastic memory chip cases had spilled onto the chair. A cyberdeck lay wrong-side-up on the desk, its circuitry exposed. It looked as though the decks central processing unit had recently been removed.
Carla rose and began walking toward the open door. “Is this your husband’s study?” she asked. “Perhaps we should do the interview in here. It would help to give me a feel for his-”
“No!” Mrs. Saniji leaped to her feet and grabbed Carla’s arm. She yanked Carla back toward the couch, a frightened look in her eyes. “You can’t go in there,” she said. “It’s a mess. I haven’t had time to clean it since Miyuki… since Farazad died. He left it in a jumble.”
Carla paused. The explanation just didn’t scan. Mrs. Samji was a neat freak who went to the extreme of organizing her children’s toys into neat rows. The sight of the messy den should have driven her nuts by now. Unless…
The lion-headed dog was focusing all of its attention on Carla. It had shifted away from Mrs. Sarnji’s ankle, and stood directly in the path that Carla would have taken to the study. Suddenly, Carla realized what must really be going on. The desk was rifled because Mitsuhama had been here already, picking up any incriminating pieces of data that Farazad might have left behind. They must have had some inkling that he’d been ready to blow the whistle on their research project when he died, and had come to his home to make sure he hadn’t left any files at his work station. And just in case Farazad had shared information about the new spell with his wife during pillow talk, they’d left the magical creature behind as a reminder to her to keep quiet.
No wonder Mrs. Samji was reluctant to talk. One word about her husbands work and she’d be lion-dog chow. The spirit creature might be only semi-corporeal, but Carla was sure it had a nasty bite. Or that its handlers did.
Mrs. Samji continued steering Carla toward the door. Clearly terrified, she was trying to end the interview. Carla tried to get her talking again. She focused upon the playback icon in her cybereye, keying an instant replay of the last ten seconds of data. “Uh, you were telling me about Zarathustra,” she prompted. “You were starting to tell me the origin of his name…”
They had reached the door. Carla glanced behind her, saw that the lion-headed dog was close at her heels. Now that it was closer to her, Carla could feel the chilling cold that radiated from it.
“The word is Persian,” Mrs. Samji answered. “In the ancient tongue, it translated as ‘the golden light.’ We conceive of Ahura Mazda as the source of all light, of all love. And thus his prophet shared this attribute. Now I really must insist that you leave. My husband’s death has left me feeling very drained. We will continue this interview at another time.” She held the front door open, motioning for Carla to leave.
“The source of all light,” Carla mused. “How interesting.” She turned to capture a good, clean image of Mrs. Samji. The lion-headed dog squatted behind the woman, its mane ruffed. Carla had no way of knowing if the creature would react to the question she was about to ask, but decided to take a chance. She stepped closer to Mrs. Samji, and framed her in a head-and-shoulders shot.
“Is that why your husband wanted to make public the spell formula for summoning a spirit made of light?” she asked suddenly. “Did he really believe they were messengers sent by Ahura Mazda, your god? Did Mitsuhama murder your husband because of what his religious beliefs compelled him to do?”
Tears welled in Mrs. Samji’s eyes. “Farazad was wrong,” she cried. “If the creature had been a farohar it never would have-”
The lion-headed dog lunged forward. It was amazingly fast-quicker than Carla expected. She gasped and leaped backward, expecting to feel its cold fangs lock on her throat. But instead it thudded against the door, knocking it shut.
“Drek!” Carla pounded a fist against the door. She'd almost had it in the can. And what was going on in there? Carla stabbed at the corn unit on the wail. “Mrs. Samji! Are you in there? Are you all right?”
“Please,” Mrs. Samji said through the speaker. “I have my children’s welfare to consider. The interview is over. if you do not go. I will call security to remove you.”
Carla felt a rush of relief. The woman was unharmed! Then the reporter’s instincts took over. “Mrs. Samji! Can you make a statement on the record? Can you confirm that the spirit that killed your husband was conjured as part of a Mitsuhama research project?”
“The Samji family thanks you for stopping by,” an automated voice replied. “Unfortunately, we are not receiving visitors at this time. Please call again.”
The pills Carla had taken earlier were starting to wear off. She blinked, trying to fight off a sudden rush of exhaustion. She’d been so close to confirming the link between the spell on the memory chip and Mitsuhama. If only the lion-headed dog hadn’t.
Then it struck her. The doglike spirit had acted in a sophisticated manner. What if it had been providing a direct, telepathic feed to Mitsuhama? The corporation certainly had the resources to have someone on the scene immediately, possibly even the corporate goons who’d tried to gun down Pita last night. And given the knowledge that Carla had just displayed about the contents of the datachip, they might be ready to take measures to keep her quiet. Measures like those they’d taken against the pirate reporter. Measures that could kill both the story-and Carla.
Carla sprinted for her taxi. This story was getting hot. It was time to get back to the station and its nice, bullet- and spell-proof glass.
9
Pita rolled over in her sleep. She knew she was dreaming, but was unable to shake the terrifying images from her mind. She was being chased by people whose tattooed skins were made of thick dabs of water-soluble paint. They followed her through the rain, their skins melting from their bodies, revealing skeletons beneath. The click-click of their bony feet was growing closer, closer.
“Hey, kid, wake up.”
A hand shook Pita’s shoulder. She awoke instantly, her heart pounding.
Wayne, from the editing department, looked down at her. He was a red-haired man in his thirties with a slight pot belly. Tucked under one arm was a miniature decks whose flatsereen displayed a freeze-framed image of an oil rig going up in flames. Wayne smiled and jerked a thumb at the door. “There’s someone at the front desk asking for you, kid”
“There is?” Pita was immediately wary. “Who?” She swung her legs over the edge of the plastifoam cot that was tucked into a storeroom just off the newsroom. Through the partially open door, Pita could hear the buzz of voices and the sound samples that were being mixed in the studio.
“Some guy with goofy-looking hair. He wouldn’t tell the receptionist his name. All he would say was to tell you he wants to talk to you about ‘little pork dumpling.’ ”
Pita jumped to her feet. “Yao’s here?” Her streetwise skepticism warred with hope and relief. “But I thought he was dead.”
“Doesn’t look like it to me.” Wayne pushed the door open. “Come and see for yourself. I’ve got the guy’s image on the monitor that’s patched into the surveillance camera in the lobby. Maybe you should scan it, just in case.”
Pita followed Wayne into the studio. It was laid out in an open plan, with glass-doored editing booths along one wall, work stations at the center of the room, and banks of telecom equipment and computer terminals. An entire wall was devoted to hundreds of flat-screen monitors. Each displayed a different trideo channel. On several of the monitors, large letters that spelled out the word “RECORDING” were flashing.
“Which monitor?” Pita asked.
Just as Wayne was about to answer, his wrist began to beep. He glanced at the watch implanted into his skin. “Uh, oh. Thirty minutes to air. I’d better get back if I’m going to finish editing the interview Masaki did with you.” He pointed toward the left-hand side of the bank of monitors. “It’s the one just over there. Between the satellite feeds and the foreign language channels.”
One of the reporters called out urgently from across the room. “Hey, Wayne! You added that take to the Quetzalcoatl story yet? We’re running out of time!”
“It’s nearly done!” Wayne shouted, then hurried away. Pita glanced at the monitors, but their sheer number overwhelmed her. She didn’t see any that seemed to be showing the lobby. Besides, did it really matter? Only Yao knew about the “Little Pork Dumpling” code. It had to be him.
Pita hurried down the corridor that led to the lobby, but paused before opening the door, just to make sure. Looking through its tinted glass, she peered out past the reception desk. An ork in frayed jeans and a loose synthleather jacket was standing in the lobby, his back to the door leading to the Street. He held one arm tucked against his chest and his shoulders were hunched, as if he were in pain. When he crossed over to one of the chairs and sat down, Pita recognized him at once by his narrow jaw and the wary look in his eyes. It was Yao, all right. Alive. For the first time in days, she smiled.
Somehow, Yao had escaped from the corporate goons. Pita was intensely curious to find out how he’d managed to survive the hail of bullets that had cut him down. But she was also reluctant to face him. She’d abandoned him on the street after he’d been shot, lust like she’d run off when Chen was gunned down. It would be easier just to hide in the newsroom, to let the receptionist send Yao away. But he’d promised to do a story on what Lone Star had done to Chen and the others. Unlike Carla and Masaki, he would surely keep his word. His own brother had died, after all. Pita should keep her end of the bargain and finish the interview Assuming Yao still wanted to.
She opened the door and stepped out to the receptionist’s desk. Yao immediately looked up and flashed her a smile. “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry Iran away, Yao. I thought you were-”
He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “It wasn’t anything a bulletproof vest couldn’t stop. I’m just bruised is all.”
“But I saw blood on your-”
“One bullet did hit my arm.” He shrugged it gently. “So who was that woman in the car?”
“Her name’s Carla. She’s a reporter here.”
“How do you know her?”
Pita scuffed at the floor with the toe of one sneaker. “Uh, I asked her to do a story on how the cops killed Chen.” She glanced briefly at Yao to see if he was angry. “I would’ve come to you first, but I didn’t know where you were. So I went to Carla, instead. But she wasn’t interested. She didn’t seem to give a frag about Chen.”
“So how come she showed up when I was interviewing you?”
Pita shrugged. “I guess she changed her mind. She says she’ll do the story now.”
“I see,” Yao said with a sneer. “So you were going to give my story to the competition.”
Pita looked up. “I thought you were dead. Yao. I didn’t know what else to-”
“Forget it.” He stood awkwardly, shoulders still hunched. “Now then, are you ready to finish our interview?”
Pita chewed her lip. “1 don’t think I should leave the station. Masaki doesn’t think I’d be safe on the streets. He says those guys who shot you were yakuza.”
“We won’t be on the streets,” Yao reassured her. “I’ve got a room at a hotel, just down the block. We’ll finish the interview there. I’ll walk you back here afterward if you like.” He gestured at the door that led to he newsroom. “You got all your stuff? Need to get anything before we leave?”
“What you see is what I got,” Pita answered. “Not much. So how did you know where to find me?”
“I got the bar code of the car, and had a friend of mine deck into the vehicle registry databanks to find out who the owner was. Imagine my surprise when I found out it belonged to Jun.”
“Who?”
“Jun Masaki. The reporter who was driving the car. “I wiped him out with a news story once before I started working with Orks First! But he probably wouldn’t remember me.”
“Oh” Pita said. “Everyone calls him by his last name, around here.”
Yao pushed the door open. “Anyhow, I knew that Masaki was a reporter for KKRU. I figured that he might have brought you back to the station.” He held he door open for her. “And I was right.”
Pita hesitated. “I should tell him where I’m going.”
“Why?” Yao asked. “You’ll be back soon enough. He won’t even miss you.”
Pita sighed. Yao was probably right. Masaki had been working furiously ever since they’d returned from Aziz’s shop, and the lack of sleep had made him irritable. He’d practically bitten her head off during the interview, snapping at her for mumbling and for playing with the junk in her jeans pockets. He said the rattling noise spoiled the audio, and told her to empty her pockets. Grumpy old fragger.
“O.K.,” Pita told Yao. “As long as we’re back in half an hour.” She wanted to be back at the station in time for the six o’clock news to make sure Masaki kept his promise and blanked out her face to hide her identity. Those corp goons knew what she looked like by now. But there was still a chance those Lone Star fraggers didn’t.
She followed Yao outside. “Hey,” she said, noticing his ear, “you lost your scanner.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
He led her down the steps, one hand resting protectively on Pita’s shoulder. As she descended them, something nagged at her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Then it hit her. She’d had to tip her head back to look at Yao’s ear. He should have been shorter than that. And some of the things he said had been odd. As far as Pita could remember from things Chen had told about his brother, Yao had never worked as a real reporter. He’d only done pirate trideo broadcasts. And the body language had been all wrong. Yao kept a careful watch on doors; he didn’t stand with his back to them, the way he had just now in the lobby.
Pita glanced nervously at the man beside her.
This wasn’t Yao.
She didn’t want to find out who it really was. Ducking out from under his hand, she bolted for the top of the stairs, back toward the main entrance of the KKRU building. But before she’d taken two steps, the man behind her barked out a sentence in a foreign, lilting language. Suddenly Pita was running in midair. She struggled wildly, trying to make contact with the ground. But the stairs were a good half-meter under her feet. She twisted about-just in time to see the man who’d been posing as Yao shed his skin in a shimmering transformation. Clothes, hair, features-all blurred and changed. The man was suddenly thinner, darker. With a shock, Pita recognized the dreadlocked elf who’d tried to cast a spell upon her earlier. The mage! The one who’d led the goons to her! Like a fool, she’d fallen into his trap, despite the dream warning, despite Wayne’s reminder that she should scan her visitor on the monitor first-where his true form would have been revealed. Now she was trapped, and he would kill her, Pita cried out, but even as she did, a bolt of yellow streaked from the elf’s fingers toward her, enveloping her. Pita’s eyes closed and she fell forward into darkness.
Pita woke up in a hotel room. She was lying on her side on a bed, her wrists tied tightly behind her back. Her eyes felt gummy and her breathing was slow and deep, despite her pounding heart. She found it difficult to think, to focus. It was like waking up from a dream that you didn’t want to end-except this was a nightmare. With a start, she realized she was naked.
The two men staring at her were the same pair who’d been chasing her earlier. The heavy-set one was sitting on a chair near the bottom of the bed, feet propped up on the mattress. He regarded her with an utter lack of expression that Pita found frightening. His arms were folded across his chest, and the sleeves of his shirt had lifted a little so that Pita could see the dark blue tattoos extending from his arms onto his wrists. Yakuza, she thought, all hope fleeing at the thought.
The slender man was standing, leaning back against a table with his hands on the edge of it. One hand moved, clicking the rings on his fingers against the wood. The tip of his little finger was missing. As Pita groaned, he said something in Japanese to the other man, who grunted in reply. Then he leaned toward Pita.
“You took something that didn’t belong to you,” he said in perfect, unaccented English. “A small bronze disk about so big.” He held his thumb and forefinger about three centimeters apart. “A datachip. We want it back.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pita said.
The slap across her cheek took her completely by surprise. The man had moved as fast as a striking snake. Pita’s head bounced off the bed with the force of the blow, and tears welled in her eyes. Her cheek stung.
The man leaned back against the table once more. His eyes ranged up and down Pita’s naked body. She suddenly felt horribly vulnerable.
“We can do anything we like with you,” the slender man said. “Anything at all.” He let the words hang in the air for a moment. “And don’t try to scream for help We'll kill you if you do.”
The larger man shifted in his chair. Pita looked fearfully at him, blinking back her tears.
“We know you take chip,” he said in a low voice that was devoid of all emotion. “Chip not in pockets of dead man. DocWagon not take; cops not take. Mage do sensing, say you take. But chip not in your clothes You tell us where chip is”
Pita gnawed at her lip to stop herself from sobbing.
“What if I tell you?” she asked. “Will you let me go?”
The slender man’s lips curved in a smile that did not reach his eyes. “Of course.”
Pita knew she was trapped. There was no way out of this; the best she could do was buy herself a little time. “I thought the chip was a simsense game,” she said. “I tried it in my digideck, but it didn’t work. All that came up were these weird diagrams. They looked like something maybe a mage would use. I thought maybe I could sell it for a few nuyen, so I took it to a shop on Denny Way. The guy there gave me ten nuyen for it.”
The larger man lifted his feet from the bed and sat up. “What is name of man?” he asked.
Pita tried to shrug, to look as casual as possible, but her bound wrists prevented any motion. “I only know his first name: Aziz.”
“And the name of the shop?” the slender man asked.
The Secret something-or-other,” Pita answered.
The slender man glanced at his companion and said something in Japanese. Then he turned for the door.
“Wait” Pita said. “I kept my part of the deal. I told you where the chip was. Let me go!”
“Not until we get that chip back.”
“But you could at least untie me and let me get dressed,” she pleaded. She gave a meaningful look at the larger man, who was plainly intent on staying behind to watch her. “Even with my hands free, I’m not going to get past him”
“You may dress,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “I’m sure that Tomoyuki is tired of looking at you. But afterward you will have to be tied up again. And if I find that you have lied to me about that chip, you will die. There will be no second chances.”
10
The blare of the telecom’s alarm snapped Carla awake. She groaned and wiped the sleep out of her eyes, then sat up and looked around her apartment. She’d slept in her clothes after kicking off her shoes and neatly folding her jacket over a chair. She’d only intended to take a quick nap. but she’d set the alarm for six p.m. just in case she slept too long. Now the logo and call letters of KKRU Trideo News scrolled across the screen as the newscast began.
The camera zoomed in toward Rita Lambrecht and Tim Lang, tonight’s celebrity news anchors. Carla winced. Rita was a ditsy elf who smiled even when reciting the night’s body count, and Tim was a dwarf wrestling champion who’d been chosen for his rugged good looks and deep baritone voice. It looked like Rita would give the lead-in to the top story. Carla hoped she didn’t muff her lines.
Amazingly, the lead story wasn’t on the dead mage. Instead, it was about a group of rebels who’d blown up an oil refinery in the Yucatan; killing 127 technicians in the explosion. A grim-faced Aztlan spokesman promised “swift and thorough” retribution for the attack. The footage that accompanied the piece was gruesome and graphic, but Carla still didn’t think the story deserved the three minutes KKRU had given it.
Nor was the dead mage mentioned anywhere in the international slot. Carla fumed through the first seven minutes of the newscast, debating whether or not to call the station. But then the local news segment began to roll, and Tim “Tiny Terror” Lang began to read the first story.
“In local news, a Seattle resident whose body was found in an alley two nights ago appears not to have been the victim of the thief who has been dubbed the ‘Magical Mugger.’ Instead he apparently died at the hands of a new form of magical spirit that may still be at large on the streets of our city. Here, with an eyewitness report, is Jun Masaki”
Carla sat on the edge of her seat, waiting for the report. She had to wait for the end of a ten-second infomercial between the lead-in and the news clip. Annoying, but these commercials were what kept KKRU on the air. Indirectly, they paid her salary.
The piece opened with a shot that superimposed a framed image of Pita over the footage Masaki had shot in the alley. When she pointed at the ground, describing what she’d seen, the ork girl seemed to be gesturing at the body itself, then at the mirror-like windows from which the rays of light had bounced like a ricochet. As she spoke, white rays seemed to emerge from the body while the words GRAPHIC SIMULATION scrolled across the bottom of the screen. It was a standard editing technique; the dotted lines didn’t look enough like beams of light to arouse complaints of news fabrication, while the frame around Pita told the viewers that her take was a superimposed shot. The take ended with Pita describing how the dying man had dropped a datachip he’d been holding, and how she had picked it up. Funny, how she called it a “personal chip.” Masaki should have called her on that one. It might weaken the Mitsuhama connection.
Carla was also irritated to see that Masaki had used a “Jane Doe” face to digitally mask the girl’s features. But the kid was speaking well, giving a vivid description of what she had seen.
The take dissolved into a split-screen pairing, the left half of the screen showing Aziz seated amid the clutter of his shop, while the right showed Mrs. Samji. Wayne had done a seamless job of editing; the two seemed to bounce comments off one another, livening up an otherwise boring “talking heads” take.
Aziz: “The spell on this chip is unknown in the hermetic tradition.”
Mrs. Samji: “My husband followed the Zoroastnan faith.”
Aziz: “It’s a formula for conjuring a spirit.”
Mrs. Samji: “Farazad regarded magic as a religious practice. He often used it in his sermons.”
Aziz: “The formula seems to summon a spirit I am unfamiliar with.”
Mrs. Samji: “We Zoroastrians conceive of God as light.”
Aziz: “The uniqueness of the ritual seems to indicate the spirit manifests as a blinding light.”
Mrs. Satnji: “Farazad was wrong… to… call on… the creature.”
Carla caught the slight tonal shifts that indicated Wayne’s splicing of the last comment. But it was extremely subtle, something the average viewer would never notice. The story would be getting to the point any second now, by revealing the Mitsuhama connection. She leaned forward expectantly as the right screen did a fast cut to an interview with the medical examiner who’d examined the body. The doctor reiterated that the mage had died of massive internal trauma due to heat-“cooked alive from the inside out” as she so eloquently put it. She also speculated that the burns were assumed to be magical in nature, since there had been no evidence of fire in the immediate vicinity.
The frame containing the image of the medical examiner did a flickering dissolve, as if it were being consumed by fire. Carla smiled and gave it the thumbs-up. “Nice touch, Wayne,” she said to herself.
But her smile soon evaporated. There was one last clip from the Aziz interview, in which the mage speculated that the powerful spirit might have been conjured by Farazad and then somehow escaped from his control to become a free spirit-a magical wanderer. The story did a quick cut to a meteorologist, who noted that sheet lightning-a rare occurrence over Seattle-had been spotted over the city skyline in the past two nights. Then Carla and Masaki appeared for a quick voice-over byline.
And that was it. The story ended with a dissolve back to the studio.
“Well, well,” Tiny Terror commented. “A dangerous new spirit on the loose in Seattle. That’s not something to make light of.”
His co-anchor laughed brightly at his pun. “Keep an eye on the sky tonight, folks. In other news…”
“What?” Carla leaped to her feet. “That’s it?” She snatched up the telecom remote and furiously stabbed the icon that would fast-dial the station. After a second or two, the screen displayed the image of Gil Greer, producer of the six o’clock newscast. He was human, but large enough to be taken for a troll in the wrong light. His shoulders strained the fabric of his suit, and he usually ambled about the office like a large, untamed bear, scratching his back on door frames and glowering at the reporters. He frowned out at Carla from the telecom screen. A single word was all that was required; this was a line reserved for use by KKRU reporters only: “What?”
“The story on the dead mage-Farazad Samji,” Carla said. “What’s the idea of runing it as a metro piece?”
“The death is two days old,” Greer answered. “The only thing that made the story fresh was the free-spirit-as-cause-of-death angle. You’re lucky your boyfriend is such a looker and that the story had a tie-in with the weather update, or we wouldn’t have run it at all.”
Carla stopped short of protesting that it had been more than three years since anyone could have called Aziz her “boyfriend.” instead she kept her professional cool. “But where’s the Mitsuhama angle? This is a story about a corp dabbling in a dangerous new magical technology-not about unusual fragging weather patterns!”
“What Mitsuhama angle?” Greer grumbled.
“Didn’t Masaki tell you?” Carla asked, dumbfounded. “The chip from the pocket of the dead mage. The spell. It’s a Mitsuhama project.”
“I didn’t see any footage showing that connection.”
“Farazad Samji worked for Mitsuhania’s research lab,” Carla explained. “The day before he died, he contacted Masaki, telling him he’d turn over the specs on a top-secret research project the corp was developing. He was on his way to meet with Masaki on the night the died!”
“I guess Masaki didn’t think his own testimony was enough to establish a link. Without outside confirmation and hard evidence, we haven’t got a story.”
Carla was dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe Masaki had given up so easily. A story about the contents of the chip that deliberately did nor mention Mitsuhama probably made him think he was safe. He could curl up in his cozy little world of feature pieces and the big bad corporation and its goons would go away. The sad part was, he was probably wrong.
“We’ve still got a story,” Carla argued. “A good one. About a corp that’s experimenting with dangerous new magical tech.”
“No, we don’t,” Greer countered. “At least not until I see some evidence that directly links this crazy spirit thing to Mitsuhama.” He sounded irritable; his patience was obviously wearing thin. Still, Carla wasn’t one to give up a story without a good fight.
“We could have at least worded tonight’s piece to imply that-”
“You don’t take on the big boys without documentation,” Greer cut her off. “You don’t even drop hints. Not when Mitsuhama’s legal department has a bigger budget than our entire news network.”
“Give me one more day,” Carla pleaded. “1 know I can get something. If I follow up the angle that-”
Greer was glancing at something to one side, only giving Carla part of his attention. “We’re on the air,” he reminded her. “I haven’t got time for an extended debate on the merits of this supposed story.”
“One more day!” Carla insisted.
“All right,” Greer at last agreed. “But if you don’t come with anything new, I spike the story.”
11
Pita edged around the bed to the spot where her clothes lay in an untidy heap. The big yakuza stood by the door, arms folded across his chest. The look in his eye warned her not to try anything. Pita had never seen such an empty, merciless expression. She knew, deep in her gut, that this man could kill her with as little remorse as if he were swatting a mosquito.
Turning her back to him, she pulled on her underwear and jeans, then yanked her shirt over her head. She wrinkled her nose at how filthy her clothes were. It was warm in the room, but she put on her jacket anyway. If she got a chance to run…
The yakuza loomed over her, a police-style plasticuff strip in his hand. Pita rubbed her chaffed wrists. The plastic had been cinched tight, and had bitten into them. Deep red creases encircled her wrists. Her hands still tingled.
“Please,” she said. “You don’t need to tie me up. I won’t try anything. I promise. When your friend comes back you’ll see I told you the truth. You won’t need to…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest: to kill me.
The book Pita had stolen from Aziz’s store was lying on the floor. She bent to pick it up. The yakuza had obviously searched it, perhaps thinking the disk was hidden inside. The spine of the book was bent and the cover had come loose.
The yakuza shoved her onto the bed and grabbed one wrist in his huge hand. “You stay quiet. No talking.”
“Wait!” Pita said. “Couldn’t you tie my ankles this time instead? Your friend’s going to be a while; the magic shop is probably already closed. If you untied my wrists I could look at the pictures in this book to pass the time. That way I won’t bother you by talking or anything. I’ll keep quiet. And I still won’t be able to escape, with my ankles tied together.”
The yakuza grunted, then grabbed Pita’s ankles and cinched the plasticuff strip firmly around them. He sat down again in the chair at the end of the bed. “You look at pictures,” he said, still watching her impassively. “Keeping quiet.”
Pita caught sight of her soiled face in a minor behind the yakuza and reflexively wiped at the dirty smudges with the back of her hand. She’d been dirty and sweaty and smelly plenty of times before, but this time it seemed to get in her way somehow. But then she turned to the book, fumbling it open to the picture of Bastet, the woman whose expression of confidence had so appealed to her. On the next page was a picture of the same woman in a different pose, this time with her fingers curled into clawlike hooks. Her eyes were closed, but the eyes in the cat headdress she was wearing stared out from the page with glittering intensity. Pita scanned the block of text on the accompanying page and saw the words that had previously caught her eye: thought control. Tentatively, she touched a finger to the illustration, feeling the raised bumps of the golden eyes on the cat headdress, then running her finger down to the woman’s clawlike hands. Without consciously meaning to do so, Pita flexed her fingers, curling her hand into the same shape.
She tried to read the text, but the yakuza who sat only a few steps away kept distracting her by his ominous presence. She didn’t dare look around the room for a means of escape; his eyes followed her every move. Even when he lit a cigarette, he stared at her through the curling blue smoke. Unable to concentrate, she closed her eyes, trying to block him out.
She ignored the sound of his chair creaking, instead concentrating on the soft hum of the heating unit in the corner. It had a stutter to it, and the rasping of the fan made it sound as if the heater were breathing. The noise was almost like a cat’s purr. It was soothing, somehow, and as Pita focused upon it, she felt her own breath slowing, synchronizing with it.
Although she’d had difficulty with some of the words, Pita had managed to read one section of the text, a passage describing how ancient shamans had controlled their fellow humans by emulating the patience and determination of the cat. She touched her finger to the illustration now, feeling the raised gilt that had been used to outline Bastet’s headdress. Pita suddenly wished the headdress was a computer icon that would trigger the reassuring voice of the woman.
Without warning, a thought came unbidden to Pita’s mind, the image of a house cat that desperately wanted to go outside, but who could not because of a closed door. In her mind, Pita saw the cat sitting and staring at the door, completely focused upon it, as if compelling its owner to come and open it. She saw a hand reaching for the doorknob. The purring of the heating unit grew louder and louder as the hand grasped the knob, began to turn it…
The image dissolved as Pita heard footsteps outside the door. Her eyes sprang open. Was the first yakuza coming back? Were they going to kill her now? Her mouth went dry, and a cold, sinking feeling settled in her stomach. Should she run-or hop, rather-to the door and make a break for it? She glanced at the yakuza seated at the end of the bed. He sat up a little, as if expecting her to make a move. Pita gnawed at her lip and winced with indecision. What should she do?
The footsteps continued on down the hall, past the door of her hotel room. Somewhere outside, Pita heard a door open and close. Then silence.
The yakuza settled back into his chair.
Pita stared at the door of the hotel room, the door that led to freedom, to escape. She focused on the doorknob, imagining it turning, imagining herself passing out through the door. So sharp was her imagination that she could visualize every detail, She curled her hand into a clawlike shape, imagined long sharp hooks digging into the back of the yakuza’s head.
Tugged by their grip, he would stand up, turn the knob, and swing the door open wide. Pita would hop through it and be off down the corridor outside. Instead of chasing after her, the yakuza would quietly close the door, sit back down in his seat, and…
The yakuza gave a small groan and shook his head, as if troubled by a headache. The hand holding his cigarette hung at his side, ignored. The other hand gripped the arm of the chair. Its knuckles were white. Instead of his usual inexpressive look, the man was frowning, blinking rapidly. Then suddenly, his face went utterly blank. His jaw dropped open, and he swung his head over to focus with staring eyes upon the door.
“Open it,” Pita whispered, “Please. Open it.”
The yakuza lurched to his feet and crossed the short distance to the door with slow, wooden steps. He reached for the doorknob, his hand slipping off it twice before he finally got a grip. Then slowly, it turned. He pulled open the door, stopping as it bumped against his foot.
For the space of a heartbeat or two, Pita was too amazed to react. Then she realized what she had done. Just like the woman in the picture, she had controlled another human, had placed silent commands directly into his mind. But there was no time to stop and wonder at it, now. She swung off the bed and hopped as quickly as she could to the door. Avoiding the large yakuza, she slipped around him and out into the hallway of the hotel. With a series of ungainly hops, she made her way to the elevator. Slapping the call button with one hand, she turned fearfully back to look at the room she’d just vacated. The door swung slowly shut, locking with a soft click.
“Now sit down,” Pita whispered. She imagined she was staring through the door. She visualized the yakuza taking a seat and resuming his watch over the now-empty bed. She imagined herself still lying upon it, quietly looking at her book.
The elevator doors hissed open. Pita, who had been leaning on them, fell headlong into the elevator. Thankfully it was empty. Glancing at the numbers above the door, she saw she was on the sixth floor. When an automated voice asked for her destination, she ordered the elevator to the bottom parking level. Hopefully that would give her enough time.
She tugged her jacket down to protect her hand, then smashed her fist into the glass panel that covered the emergency stop button. Grabbing a shard of glass from the floor, she began to saw at the plasticuffs around her ankles. The plasticuffs were tough enough that even a troll couldn’t snap them by brute strength alone. But if they were cut sideways, against the grain…
The elevator slid to a stop at the lobby. Pita sawed frantically with the shard as the doors began to open. All she needed now was to meet the smailer yakuza, who even now might be on his way back from the magic shop. Just as the doors slid open, the last strand of the plasticuffs parted. Pita struggled to her feet, but all she saw was an empty lobby. Whoever had punched the button must have taken the second elevator, which was just closing with a soft ping.
Laughing with relief. Pita sprinted for a side exit. She was free! She burst through the door and ran out into the familiar cover of darkened streets.
12
Carla slid her magkey into the slot and waited for the voice-recognition system to cue her sample phrase. A series of red lights flashed across the keypad, but the system was being unbelievably sluggish. Five full seconds had elapsed, and still the voice prompt hadn’t activated.
Carla waited, tapping her foot. She was tired and just wanted to get inside her apartment. She’d fix herself a double martini, power up the bubble tub, and try to forget about the day’s frustrations.
She’d pounded the pavement all morning and afternoon trying to crack the Mitsuhama story. But every attempt to get an interview with corporate vice president John Chang had failed. The director of the Mitsuhama Seattle Hermetic Research Lab had also refused to meet with her, as had the lab’s project manager. None of the clerical employees whom she’d been able to corner was willing to talk, and nobody would provide her with the names of the mages who worked at the lab. Carla had finally been able to interview Mitsuhama’s public relations officer, but the woman had been pleasantly uncooperative. No, Mitsuhama was not prepared to reveal details of the projects currently underway at the lab-certainly not until adequate patents and spell formula copyrights were in place. And to the “best of her knowledge,” Mitsuhama was not currently experimenting with any spells similar to the one Carla described.
Yeah, right.
Carla pulled her magkey out of her purse and pushed it into the slot a second time. At last the system responded: “Please provide voice sample”
“I’m tired, I’m hungry, and my feet hurt,” Carla said. “Now let me inside my apartment, you stupid machine.”
The lights on the pad cycled to green. “Voice sample accepted. Alarm system is… off.”
Carla pushed open the door. She stepped inside, peeling off her jacket and adjusting the apartment's lighting and temperature controls. Then she stopped. Something was wrong. The cushions on her couch were lying on the floor, and the doors of the cabinet beside it were open. One end of the throw rug in the living room was folded back, and it looked as if a drawer in the telecom cabinet had been tipped upside down, scattering its Contents.
“Damn,” Carla whispered. Letting the door close silently behind her, she pulled a narcoject pistol from her purse. The weapon was small enough to fit in a pocket, and could be carried anywhere since its plastic parts wouldn’t trigger security alarms. Carla raised it to chest level and flicked the safety off. If the burglar was still in her apartment…
She didn’t hear anything except the ticking of her kitchen clock and the low hum of the telecom unit in the living room. The unit’s screen art was on, feeding into the speakers a low-frequency noise that mimicked the tonal harmonies of a Gregorian chant.
Quietly, Carla slipped around the corner, pistol at the ready. The living room was empty. So were the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, The burglars must have fled, but just to make sure, Carla checked in the closets and under the bed. Nothing.
Lowering her pistol, she began to take inventory. They’d obviously found her personal electronics, but had left them tossed on the floor. That was curious, because the laptop and digital camera were worth a lot of money and were easy to pawn. They should have been the first things grabbed.
Nor had the intruders stolen any of her jewelry, even though they’d dumped the clothing drawer in which it had been hidden all over the bed. They’d also dumped out the jar of coins in the corner, but hadn’t taken any. The intruders had also gone through the kitchen cupboards-and the fridge, Carla noticed, when she rached inside it for a cold drink. She was thankful they hadn’t dumped all the food on the floor.
She pulled a gin cooler from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table, surveying her jumbled possessions. Calling Lone Star would be pointless; the cops would merely take a brief look around, make a few notes on their datapads, and leave again. Break-ins were so common these days that sometimes the police didn’t respond until a day or two later. By that time the victims had usually become frustrated and already cleaned up the mess.
The more Carla thought about it, the less certain she was that robbery had been the motive for this break-in. The intruders had overlooked just about every valuable in the place. Oh, sure, they’d taken all her simsense games and a few of her computer chips as well-the kind of thing kids usually went for. But these hadn’t been kids. They were professionals. They’d gotten past her voice recognition system-and it was a good one, not likely to be fooled even by a digital recording-as well as the motion detectors and sensor unit in the hallway. To get that far and not be detected, the intruders had to be good. And motivated.
Carla suddenly realized what they must have been after. If she hadn’t been so tired, she’d have guessed it right away. While she’d been out knocking on Mitsuhama’s doors, the corporation had come to her. She hurried into the bedroom and picked up from the floor the jacket she’d worn yesterday. She slid a hand into its pockets. Empty. The intruders hadn’t gotten what they’d originally been looking for, but they’d taken the next best thing. The chip onto which Carla had copied the spell was gone.
It didn’t matter that much. Aziz still had the original, and she could always get it back from him. And the cops had a copy; they’d demanded one as soon as they saw the story. In the meantime, the intruders had probably been fooled into thinking they’d gotten the original. One datachip looked much the same as any other, and the one Carla had used for the copy was bronze, just like the original. Since it contained the spell formula the intruders were looking for, they probably wouldn’t be back. They’d taken all her other memory chips, too, even though all they had to do was pop them into the telecom unit to see what was on them. But perhaps they’d wanted to be in and out quickly.
It was annoying to lose the other chips. The simsense games had been expensive, and the home trideo she’d shot of her niece couldn’t be replaced. As for the rest of the chips, they were all blank except…
“Oh, drek,” Carla moaned, closing her eyes. “Not my personal stuff.”
But they’d found it. The drawer where Carla hid her “private” recordings had been overturned. The chips she’d stuffed into the back of it, behind her neatly folded sweaters, were gone.
She sat on the bed, looking up at the ceiling-at the spot where decorative, tinted glass blocks hid the lens of a holocamera. The closed-circuit camera was automatically activated every time anyone came into the bedroom. Carla used it to record her romantic encounters, then later would replay and savor her favorite moments. She wasn’t sure if it was the reporter in her, compelling her to record her affairs, or some weird sexual kink. But it didn’t matter now. Somewhere, somebody was no doubt having a good laugh at her expense, titillating themselves by watching her private recordings. Or perhaps the chips were already on their way to a porn shop. Or perhaps to a rival trideo station for broadcast on the evening news.
Carla groaned and threw her head into her hands. How could she have been such an idiot? She should have erased those chips long ago, or disconnected the holo camera before the intruders…
The intruders! The camera would have recorded them! Carla dragged a chair over to the spot beneath the hidden camera and clambered onto it. Reaching up, she swung aside the false front of the glass block. She hit the power-off key for the camera, then popped the chip out of it. Carrying it to the living room, she slotted the chip into her home editing equipment and hit the Play icon. She had to skip around a little bit; the first track she viewed showed her sitting on the bed, staring up at the camera, while the next one she jumped to was of a romantic evening from three weeks ago. But at last she found the right track. She watched, leaning forward for a good look at the screen as the first of the intruders entered the bedroom.
The camera was looking down on the room, and thus it caught the top of the man’s head and shoulders from an overhead angle. But by using the logic-rotation system built into the holo unit, Carla could fill in the rest, patching together a composite from the images the camera captured as the intruder moved around the room.
He was human-a Native American-perhaps in his mid-twenties. His hair was crewed to sharp points, and he had a black bird tattooed across the back of his right hand. His left hand was gleaming chrome. He wore jeans, a brown leather jacket with fringed sleeves, and heavy black boots. He had paused only briefly to scan the room, then moved immediately to the dresser and began methodically opening and dumping its drawers.
After a minute or two, a voice called from another room. Carla paused the recording, skipped back a few seconds, then boosted and sharpened the sound.
“Found anything, Raven?”
The crew-cut intruder sorted through the clothes on the floor, picking out datachips. “Yeah,” he answered. “But there’s more than one. Any idea what color it was?”
“It looked bronze in the broadcast,” the other voice instructed. “But grab anything you can find. They might have used another chip for the story, just to be cute.”
“Do you really think this is worth it, Kent?” Raven called back. “The reporters might have lied about what was on the chip. We may not find anything here to interest Ren-”
“Don’t be such a fragging pessimist,” the off-screen voice said. “Of course the spell is valuable. And even if its not, what do you care? I’m paying you well enough, aren’t I?” The voice grew louder as a figure moved into the camera’s field of view. Once again, Carla let the recording run, selecting pieces to edit together into a composite image.
The second man was a pale-skinned elf with thinning blond hair tied back into a scraggly ponytail. He looked to be in his late thirties, and wore baggy trousers, a white shin, and a black opera-style rain cloak. A fiber-optic cable with a universal port hung out of one pocket, and his hands were sheathed in surgical gloves-probably to avoid leaving fingerprints.
He bent over to fish out a datachip that had fallen under the dresser. Carla, watching the screen, winced as he slipped it into a pocket. She hoped it wasn’t the recording of the guy who’d wanted to…
Raven was talking again. “So let me get this straight. The mage hired you to extract him so that his bosses wouldn’t geek his family after he spilled the beans on their hush-hush research project. He was gonna ask the newsies to make the interview Look like a tape they’d gotten from his kidnappers, right? So how come he got himself scragged?”
The elf leaned against the door frame. His eyes scanned the room warily. “You sure you disconnected the security system?” he asked.
Carla held her breath, hoping they wouldn’t stop talking.
The first man glanced up, a smug expression on his face. “I’m sure. Ain't that why you hired me, chummer? For that-and to crawl around on the floor, searching for chips so you wouldn’t get your nice clothes dirty?”
The elf gave him a thin smile. “You want to know why he got geeked? Use your wetware. It’s simple. Obviously Mitsuhama learned what their golden boy was up to and decided to shut him up. But in doing so they let the genie out of the bottle. Now everyone knows the secret-even if they don’t know whose secret it is. That was sloppy of them, overlooking the datachip in his pocket.”
From inside the closet, the other man made tsk tsking sounds. Silly fraggers.” he said in a mocking voice. “Rule number one: always check the pockets.” He stepped out of the closet, one hand rifling the pockets of a pair of Carla’s pants. He tossed them playfully at the elf, then began rummaging through the other garments.
“So you didn’t do the hit?” Raven asked. “I thought you said you sold out Mister Mage.”
“Not to Mitsuhama, I didn’t. And now my employer is getting nervous. He wants to see some results for his down payment.”
“You’re sure the guy who was geeked in the alley was your boy? He might have figured your double cross and hired some other runners to fake his death.”
“I’m sure it was him,” the elf answered. “His wife confirmed it when I called her the next morning.”
“Just like that?”
The elf chuckled. “I told her I was a reporter.”
Carla, watching, nodded to herself. No wonder Mrs. Samji had felt pestered with “horrible questions.” These two looked as if they would be anything but subtle.
On-screen, the elf nodded to himself. “We can still turn a profit on this one if we can find the chip. My ‘Mister Johnson’ would probably like that even better than a potentially uncooperative mage. A datachip doesn’t take as long to give up its secrets.”
The first man closed the closet door. “That’s it,” he said. “Nothing else in this room to search.”
The elf consulted his watch. “We’ve been here twenty minutes,” he said. “We’d better get going if we’re going to make our second stop.” He stepped out of the bedroom.
“Are we going to the shop?” Raven asked, following him.
“Too late for that,” the elf answered. “Last night it-” The recording ended abruptly as the Native American stepped out of the bedroom. The screen flickered, then showed Carla entering the room, narcoject pistol in hand.
She hit the screen’s Pause icon, then skipped back to review the last few seconds. A time code in one corner of the screen showed the hour, minute, and second that the recording had been laid down. It had ended precisely at 2:16 p.m.-more than five hours ago. The two intruders could be anywhere by now.
Carla jumped when her phone beeped. She pulled it from her pocket, flipped it open, and saw Masaki’s face on the tiny screen. He looked wild-eyed and nervous. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple. He wiped it away, then broke into a hurried rush of words as Carla activated the visual pickup.
“Thank god you’re all right, Carla,” he wheezed.
“What’s wrong, Masaki?”
“While we were at work today, someone broke into my apartment and turned it upside down. As soon as I saw the mess I shut the door and called the cops. I had them go in first. I’m not taking any chances, after the yaku-” He glanced warily around as if expecting the yakuza to leap out at him from a corner at any moment, then wet his lips. “-after our run-in with those goons on the street the other night. They must be looking for the chip. You’d better not go back to your apartment. If they find you there alone-”
“I’m sitting alone in my apartment right now, Masaki,” Carla said. She smiled at his shocked expression. “And thanks for the warning, but it’s too late. My place has been trashed, too. And probably by the same people.”
“Have you called the cops?” Masaki asked.
“Oh, come on, Masaki. You must know how useless that would be.”
“I guess so,” Masaki agreed. Then he shot her an accusing look. “I thought you said those goons wouldn’t come after us if we aired the piece.”
“It wasn’t them,” Carla said. “It was runners.”
“Who?”
“Shadowrunners,” Carla explained. They saw our story and came after the chip, hoping to steal it and sell the spell formula. They were originally hired to fake a kidnapping of Farazad. He told them he wanted a cover for an unauthorized leave of absence, but the extraction was probably designed to prevent Mitsuhama from taking revenge on him after he went public about their research project. Farazad had planned to disappear the morning after his interview with you. But it looks like the runners he hired got greedy and were planning to sell him to the highest bidder.”
Masaki gave Carla an incredulous look. “How do you know all this?”
Carla nearly told Masaki of the recording made by her hidden camera. But then she paused. Masaki liked to gossip; if Carla told him she had a camera in her bedroom, the story would be all over the newsroom before Carla had poured her morning soykaf. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to say, over an uncoded frequency, that she had good, clean images of two professional shadowrunners on file. Given the right scanners, anyone could listen in on a cel phone conversation.
“I have my sources,” Carla said, winking.
“You say they wanted to sell Farazad? Who to?”
Carla thought back over the conversation her camera had captured. What had the shadowrunner named Raven said? He’d started to say a name-something like “ren.” Carla had thought it to be a man’s name. Renny. Or Reynolds, perhaps. But now she realized what it had to be. “Ren” wasn’t a who, but a what. A corporation.
“Renraku,” she whispered.
Masaki caught the whisper. “Renraku Computer Systems? That fits. They’re Mitsuhama’s chief rival. They’d naturally want to know what the competition was up to.”
“And now they do,” Carla answered. “The runners got what they came here for.”
Masaki frowned, then realized what her comment meant. “You mean they got your copy of the spe-”
“Masaki!” Carla said abruptly. “I think we’d better save this chatter for tomorrow morning in the newsroom.”
Masaki’s eyes widened. “Oh. Right.” He tried to feign a casual air. “Well, good night, then. See you tomorrow.”
The screen of Carla’s cel phone went blank.
13
Pita sat in a corner of the main branch of the Seattle library, wedged into a space between two stacks of archaic twentieth-century books. She’d run here after escaping from the Yakuza at the hotel, and hadn’t set foot outside since. The library offered everything a street kid needed-warmth, shelter from the rain, washrooms to clean up in, free entertainment, and the cafeteria had plenty of vending machines that offered Growliebars, soykaf, and nutrisoy snacks. Best of all, the library was open twenty-four hours a day. The only trick was in avoiding the security guards. who would turf out anyone they caught sleeping.
The secret was to keep moving from one area of the building to the next. Pretend you were scanning a chip at one of the data displays in the reading room, and had fallen asleep because it was boring. Then catch a nap in one of the viewing booths on the second floor. Then off to the children’s department, where animated holos played continuously. The volume was a little intense, but the padded benches were soft. Then over to the reference department, where you could use an old piece of datacord to make it appear you were jacked into one of the municipal decks. If you could sleep sitting up, it was easy to look as if you had merely closed your eyes to eliminate noncybernetic input.
But the best place to crash was in the tiny, cramped section that contained old-fashioned hardcopy-books. The aisles were narrow and cluttered, and hardly anybody could be bothered with the cumbersome task of turning pages and manually scanning each one. The data display units, with their instantaneous keyword searches, animated holo graphics, and automated download systems were vastly more popular.
By moving from one area of the library to the next, Pita had been able to catch a few quick, brief naps. When morning broke and her stomach began to rumble, she jimmied one of the vending machines and grabbed a Growliebar and a kaf, then returned to the hardcopy section. She pulled the paperback she’d stolen from Aziz’s shop out of her pocket and began to look through it. The colorful illustrations called to her somehow, and she couldn’t stop looking at them. They aroused in her a curiosity that the vis-aids at school never had. Driven by yearning to know more about these fascinating images, the forced herself to read the accompanying text.
Most of it was pretty complicated and difficult to understand. But Pita was able to glean a few of the basic concepts. According to the book, everything-people, plants, stones-even the book she held in her hands existed both in the physical world and in astral space. But there were some things whose true form could only be seen in astral space-totem animals, for example. Like the one called Cat.
The human shaman who followed Cat could do the same thing. And it was the totem that did the choosing, not the other way around. It wasn’t just a matter of getting someone to give you magical training, or of building a “medicine lodge”-whatever that was. You could do all that drek, and still not become a shaman. Not until Cat called you.
Pita smiled at that one. It sounded pretty silly. She imagined a cat calling to her, just as her old neighbors had called their pet cat home at supper time. Instead of, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Come and get your dinner!” it would be, “Heeere Pita! Come and get your magic!”
Tired of reading. Pita set the book down and sat with her chin on her knees, thinking. A lot of strange drek had happened to her over the past couple of days. First there’d been the dream she’d had in the studio that had warned her about the disguise the elf mage would use to lure her out of the news station. She should have paid more attention to that. And then there was the weird trance that Pita had been able to put on the yakuza guard, back at the hotel room. Did that mean she had some kind of magical talent? She hoped so. Because that would also mean she wasn’t just another gutterpunk-some ugly ork girl that didn’t amount to anything. She was magic. She was special.
Pita’s mouth broke into a wide grin as she thought about the possibilities. Just wait until she met up with those kids from her old school who’d called her “porkie.” She’d show them.
She heard footsteps, and looked up. A security guard-the same one who’d rousted her earlier from another corner of the library-rounded one of the stacks. Spotting her, he stopped, then pointed a finger at her.
“All right, kid, this is your last chance,” he said. “This is a library, not a hotel for street trash. You’ve been here for hours, and now it’s time to go. Shift your sorry ass out of here.”
Pita smiled smugly at him. Staring hard at the man, she visualized him turning around, walking away. She curled her hand into a claw. “Go” she whispered. Leave me alone.”
Nothing happened. Pita’s heart began to beat more rapidly. The power that had infused her earlier had deserted her. She was alone again. Just a powerless kid, about to be turfed back out on the street, out into the open where the yakuza could find her.
She looked wildly around, preparing to make a break for it. But she couldn’t focus clearly. Something had happened to her vision. The shelves around her had gone all shimmering and fuzzy, and the books on them were translucent. The guard had a weird glow surrounding him, an ugly purple and green smudge that she instinctively recognized as his anger.
Pita had a wild image of her eyes gone round and small, with pupils that were slitted, like a cat’s. She imagined her ears flattened back against her head in fear. Was she going crazy? Was this a Mindease flashback? Or was this some new sort of magical power manifesting itself? If so, it wasn’t helping any. She felt so dizzy she didn’t trust herself to move.
The guard’s hand fastened around her collar. He yanked Pita to her feet. All at once, the world snapped back into focus as her vision returned to normal.
“I said move!”
“But my book…” Pita twisted around to see where had gone. The book had fallen to the floor.
“You planning on taking out a book, kid? You got a library card?”
“I don’t need one,” Pita protested. “That book is mine. I brought it in with me.”
“Sure, kid.” He picked up her book and reached up to place it on the shelf.
Pita grabbed his arm. “It is mine,” she insisted, wrenching the book out of his hand. She flipped open the torn cover. “Look. There’s no library code.”
“That does it.” The guard was really slotted off now. ‘Out!” Grabbing Pita by the collar of her jacket, he hustled her through the library and out the door. She twisted, she protested, but the guard was as oblivious to her complaints as he had been to her silent mental commands. She was pushed put the revolving doors and onto the sidewalk.
Pita stood outside the library, shivering in the cold night air. She stuffed her book into a pocket, then slammed her fist against a pole that was holding up an awning. She was rewarded with a shower of water that doused her hair. From inside the building, through the glass of the revolving door, the guard watched to make sure she would leave. Pita tried again to penetrate his thoughts, to make him turn away, but even though she concentrated so hard that her head hurt, nothing happened. It seemed her magical talents appeared only when they felt like it. She couldn’t call upon them at will. And that was fragging useless. Unless…
Pita flipped the finger at the guard, then trudged away up the street. If she went back to Aziz’s shop, maybe the mage could put her in touch with a shaman who could help her. At the very least, she needed someone to explain what had just happened to her, to assure her that she wasn’t going crazy after all. Aziz would probably still be slotted off at her for telling the yakuza that he had the Mitsuhama datachip. But if she explained that they’d forced her to tell them, they’d have killed her if she didn’t, he’d probably understand. She was just a kid, after all. Not a powerful mage like him. And knowing that sly fragger, he'd probably have made a dozen copies of the chip by now. He'd have handed the yaks the original chip, befuddled them with a spell, and sent them on their way.
For now, Pita didn’t worry about how she would persuade Aziz to help her. She might have to flatback for him, or trade him some favor. But one way or another she was determined to satisfy the curiosity that her strange experiences had awakened in her.
Pita stood in the rain, guilt washing over her. Across the street, where Aziz’s shop had been, was an empty, blackened ruin. The stores on either side were intact, but the space between them was a darkened concrete shell, the interior filled with soggy piles of charred books and fallen ceiling tiles. Rain streaked across the broken shards of glass that still hung in the place where the front window had been, smearing soot across the ornate scrollwork. The smell of scorched wood, wet paper, and melted plastic hung in the air like a shroud.
People walking along the sidewalk in front of the store seemed oblivious to its demise. They hurried along the sidewalk, chins tucked against the evening rain. The burned-out shop was empty, devoid of life. Pita wondered if Aziz had died in there, and if the inferno had been triggered by the spirit somehow slipping in through a crack in his magical defenses. But perhaps he’d had some warning and was able to escape.
A flash of white amid the charred remains of the shop caught Pita’s eye. Something was moving in there, in among the ruined books. Pita pulled back into the shadow of a doorway, hoping it wasn’t some spirit left by the yakuza mage to watch for her. But then the creature slipped out through the empty window, and Pita saw what it was. She breathed a sigh of relief, recognizing the shop’s cat.
The cat was probably hungry and looking for its master. Pita reached into her pocket, found the nutrisoy bar she’d boosted from the library vending machine. It was supposed to smell and taste like smoked beef. She wasn't sure if the artificial flavors could fool a cat, but it was worth a try.
Pita waited for a break in traffic, then slipped across the street. She crouched beside the broken window, unwrapped the bar, and held it out to the cat. The animal approached delicately, whiskers twitching as it snifed the food. Then it started lapping at the salty coating with a pink tongue. Pita crumbled off a corner of the bar and dropped it on the ground. The cat ate it, then looked up plaintively at her with one yellow eye done blue, and mrrowed.
Pita gave the cat more of the bar, then scratched it behind the ears while it ate. “That’s it, kitty,” she said. “You can’t afford to be finicky when you’re on the streets. You eat what you can get, and sleep where you can. I hope you have a dry place to curl up for the night.” The cat turned and trotted down the sidewalk. Curious to see where it was going, Pita followed it around the corner. The animal padded down the sidewalk for another half block, then turned into an alley. At first, Pita couldn’t see where it had gone. But then she spotted the cat’s tail disappearing through a broken window.
The window was at ground level and led to the basement of a department store. The glass was broken, and the mesh that had covered it was loose at one side. It would be a simple matter to yank it away, reach inside, and turn the latch.
Kneeling beside the window, Pita peered into a darkened room and a jumble of old junk. Mannequins lay on top of rigid foam boxes, display signs had been piled up in a corner, and an old sink fixture lay broken on the floor. A thick layer of dust covered everything; Pita could see the cat’s footprints on several of the boxes. It was obvious that no one had entered the room in ages.
Pita glanced up the alley to make certain no one was passing by. Then she eased the mesh cover from the window, It squeaked a little, but soon she could reach inside. She shoved on the rusted latch, and the window opened. She slithered inside, feet first. Then she closed the window and reached between the shards of broker glass to pull the mesh back into place.
The room was quite dark; only a little light filtered in through the dirty glass of the broken alley window. Above, the store was silent, closed for the evening.
Satisfied that nobody would disturb her, Pita lay on her side behind some boxes, next to a heating vent. The cat leaped down beside her, then rubbed its head against her hand. Pita stroked it, then yawned. She hadn’t slept that well the night before; the security guards at the library had kept her from taking more than a series of brief naps. This place was much better. Warm, dry, a little dusty, but a good place curl up. Here she could hole up for a while to hide from the yakuza. She cuddled the cat against her chest, pretending it was Chen. She hadn’t felt this safe in…
She awoke from a fitful sleep to the sound of boards creaking overhead. Sunlight was streaming through the broken window and people were moving about in the store above. From somewhere down the hall came the sound of water gurgling in pipes.
Pita sat up and stretched. She was hungry, and still tired, and needed to go to the washroom. She stood, brushed the dust from her jeans, and made her way to the door. Opening it a crack, she peered out into the hallway. Like the room she’d slept in, the corridor was also piled with junk. Pita stepped between storage boxes and battered display signs, testing the doors as she went. Most of them were locked, including one at the end of a short flight of steps. Pressing her ear against it, she heard nothing. She decided it must lead to the store above. From the amount of dust on the landing, she doubted it had been opened in recent months.
Pita retraced her steps and found an unlocked door. She reached in and groped for a light pad. Palming on the light, she saw that this was a washroom. The fixtures were old and stained, but when she tried the taps she found that they still worked. She shut them off quickly; the running water made a hollow, groaning sound in the pipes.
Pita smiled at her discovery. All she had to do to avoid detection was time her uses of the washroom to coincide with shoppers’ visits to the bathroom in the store above. The water that rushed down through the connecting pipes would hide any noise.
In the meantime, she could stay here. There was a Growlie Gourmet and a Stuffer Shack just down the block. She ought to be able to boost a few snacks from the latter, and if she timed her visits to the dumpster behind the restaurant right, she’d be able to snag the kitchen scraps before they went bad. She wondered what time it was, and tried to remember when she’d last had a decent meal. She was pretty fragging hungry. And despite her sleep, she felt jangly and weird. She could tell herself over and over again that she was safe now, that she had found a place of refuge from the two goons who’d jumped her. But she still felt tense and on edge.
Something soft rubbed against Pita’s ankles. She jumped, then realized it was only the cat. She picked it up and stroked its head, listening to its rumbling purr. If the cat had escaped the fire, perhaps Aziz had, too. And if he was still in the city, maybe he could help her, could put her in touch with a shaman who could tell her if she really did have any magical talent. Running the type of shop that he did, Aziz must have known plenty of people who practiced magic.
There was just one problem. Aside from the shop- which now lay in ruins-Pita had no idea where to find Aziz. He might be listed in the city directory, but she doubted if he’d just be sitting at home, waiting for the yakuza to come and get him, No. it was fragging hopeless. She’d never find him.
Pita heard footsteps in the alley outside, and ducked as she saw someone walking past the grimy window. It was someone in suit pants, someone with expensive shoes. A yakuza? Her heart thudded in her chest until the footsteps had faded into the general traffic noise.
She held the cat close against her, stroking it with one trembling hand. The animal gave a soft mrrow and rubbed its cheek against her chin in response. Pita closed her eyes and nuzzled against its soft fur. She’d wait until later to venture outside, until there weren’t so many people on the streets. She’d just have to ignore the rumbling in her stomach and the dizzy feeling in her head. Her life was on the line here, and she didn’t want to risk it for a fragging Growlie Bar.
14
Carla sat at one of the data terminals in the KKRU newsroom, scanning the files the computer had flagged for her. She’d set it to automatically download anything to do with Mitsuhama, and in just one day the file was already enormous. She tapped the icon at the bottom of the screen, rapidly flipping through the articles. It looked like nothing but noise-PR blurbs about corp executive appointments, announcements about the openings of new plants in Osaka and London, business articles analyzing MCT stock performance, a ridiculous “consumer bulletin” on a customer who claimed that his MCT neural interface was the cause of his marital problems, puff pieces on a new robotic mini-drone that the company had developed, a story about CEO Toshiro Mitsuhama taking tea with the crown prince of Japan…
Carla sighed. Going through all this drek made her eyes ache. Maybe she should limit the search to articles with a Seattle dateline.
She leaned back in her chair, glancing toward Greer’s office. Officially, her Mitsuhama story was dead, spiked. But that didn't prevent her from trying, in her spare moments, to pick up a lead that would bring the story back on line again. She wasn’t getting anywhere, however, with this passive search. Maybe it was time for her investigation to take a more active direction.
Officially, she was working today on a story about the Matrix. A number of system access nodes in the Seattle telecommunications grid had been experiencing problems over the past few days. Names were getting scrambled, passcodes and retinal scans weren’t being recognized, and Matrix traffic had to be rerouted through alternative servers. Elsewhere in the Matrix, entire systems had shut down; one of the most recent casualties was the one serving the theological college at the University of Washington. The telecom providers were scrambling to assure their customers that all was well, that this was a minor, localized problem. But the systems experts Carla had contacted that morning were speculating that a powerful new virus was on the loose. The more nervous among them had drawn comparisons to the Crash of 2029, which had started in a similar fashion.
That had been a great interview, one destined to put the fear into deckers everywhere when it aired at six o’clock. But it was pure speculation. When you boiled it right down to the facts, the story didn’t really have much bite to it. Who really cared if the datastores of an obscure university department were hopelessly corrupted? Carla had to admit that the eventual crash of the theology department’s computer system made for some great puns about the virus being an “act of God.” The deckers had even come up with a cute name for the virus: Holy Ghost. It had also struck the databanks of a televangelist network in Denver.
Carla had managed to inject some life into the story by including a take from the interview she’d done with a woman who seemed to draw the virus to her like a magnet. No matter which computer Luci Ferraro logged on from, the virus found her. She’d burned out her own telecom, six public terminals, and the one at the dental office where she worked as a receptionist. The interview had been great comic relief, especially Luci’s comment that her son had locked her out of his room to prevent her from touching his hologame set. It gave the story just the edge it needed to become the lead piece in tonight’s Metro news slot. It was just as well. The only other news item of note was yet another demand by the Ork Rights Committee to meet with the governor. That one was stale a week ago.
Carla wound her way through the busy newsroom, heading for the station’s research department. It was a room next to the studio, removed from the noise and bustle, that contained a Formfit recliner and a fully equipped kitchen. A private washroom, off to one side, ensured that the researchers didn’t need to waste precious seconds waiting for the restroom, like everyone else.
The three young deckers who made up this “department” were technically on call at all times for the reporters, but typically only one hung out here “in the meat,” playing simsense games or writing utility programs to pass the time. The other two clocked in from remote work stations at home.
Today the decker on duty was Corwin Schofeld, a young ork barely out of his teens. In person he looked big, slow, and stupid. But Carla knew that, inside the Matrix, his persona was as quick and slippery as they came.
Corwin looked up as Carla entered the room. He was just preparing to jack in, and sat with his deck across his legs, a datacord snugged into his temple. “Hoi, there, Carla,” he said with a big smile. “How’s it scannin’, snoop? Wus’up?”
Carla smiled at Corwin’s streeter slang. She knew he’d grown up in Rosemount Beach, an upper-class suburb of Bellevue. The affected speech was as much a part of his image as his synthleather T-shirt, high-top sneakers, and torn denims. Normally she’d tease him about it. But today she couldn’t be bothered.
“I want you to do a run for me, Corwin,” she told him. “Wiz.” The ork nodded his head eagerly. “Jus’ name your node.”
“It’s a tough one. Corporate research files. There’ll definitely be ice. Maybe even black ice.”
“Yeah? So?” He gave her a lazy, cocksure look. “What’s the scan?”
Carla pulled up a chair beside the Formfit couch on which Corwin was sprawled. “Mitsuhama Corporation’s magical research lab,” she said. “It could be dangerous.” She hoped Corwin was up to it. She didn’t relish facing Greer with the news that one of his pet deckers had burned out station equipment on an unauthorized data snoop. The producer would chew her head off, then demote her to the sports-entertainment beat and make her cover the urban brawl matches, just to watch her squirm.
Corwin let out a long, slow whistle. “Mitsuhama you say? Sure, it’s a tough system. But I’m rezzed for it. What’s the scan?”
“I’m looking for information on a high-level research project Mitsuhama’s been working on,” Carla explained. “I want you to deck into the project files, searching for anything connected to the words light, spirit, or the name Farazad Samji. The project was a current one, so hopefully you won’t have to spend too long scanning through old records.”
“Mitsuhama Computer Technologies, huh? This story you’re working on got anything to do with their new deck hardware or ASIST interfaces? I heard from a decker in Kobe that MCT’s developing a new co-processor that will exponentially boost the response time of a MPCP chip.” Corwin had slipped out of street speech in his excitement.
“As far as I know, the research project has nothing to do with computers,” Carla said, shaking her head. “If anything, it’s probably connected with Mitsuhama’s defense contracts.”
“Oh” Corwin’s hand hovered above the toggle that would power up the deck. “Black ice for sure, then. Well, it may scope out to be a high-rez jolt jump just the same. See you in a few millisecs.”
“Wait.” Carla laid a hand on Corwin’s thick arm. “I’m coming along.”
“Uh-uh,” Corwin shook his head. “This cowboy rides alone.”
Carla slotted one end of a datacord into the hitcher jack on Corwin’s deck and twirled the other end in her hand. “Not if he wants this run authorized by a reporter, he doesn’t.”
“Black ice doesn’t scare you?” Corwin asked. “It can fry your brain, you know.”
Carla smiled. “It doesn’t scare me. How about you? Are you sure you’re not looking for an excuse not to make this run?”
Corwin gave her along, level look. Then he returned smile. “O.K., cowgirl. Jack in.”
Carla jacked the other end of the cord into her temple and closed her eyes. The next instant she was inside a brilliant landscape of flickering neon colors, intricate grids, and floating, three-dimensional icons. Corwin’s icon in the Matrix seemed to hover a meter away from her. It was a gray and white cartoon rabbit with white doves, big floppy ears, and a mischievous expression. It turned and winked at Carla. “Wus’up. Doc?”
Carla could only see portions of her own “body” as It appeared in the Matrix. When she held out a hand, it was a glowing, slightly blocky imitation of a human one. Her legs were tapering cylinders that ended in rounded stumps. Obviously Corwin hadn’t put as much work into designing a persona program for his hitchers. Carla tried to speak, but found she didn’t have a mouth. She would be an observer, only, on this run.
“Heeeere we go!” Corwin gleefully quipped.
His rabbit icon stretched out a hand along one of the bars of neon blue light that made up the grid that surounded them. The arm lengthened like a rubber band, then snapped back to its original size. As it contracted, Carla found herself rushing through space, pulled along behind the rabbit like a balloon tied to a string. Grid patterns whizzed overhead impossibly fast as they raced through a landscape of shifting geometric forms, they changed direction several times as Corwin routed them through a confusing combination of local and regional telecommunications grids. It was a standard decker’s tactic, designed to hide their point of origin.
They paused for a moment at the end of one of the tubelike lines, as the rabbit stabbed a finger at an icon shaped like a silver coin. Again they rushed through space, this time through a red field punctuated with a spangling of what looked like three-dimensional corporate logos that hung in the distance like stars. Ahead loomed a huge pagoda surrounded by halos of glowing light, apparently made out of coiled fiber-optic cables that bristled with datajacks. The stuff looked like barbed wire. They rushed toward the pagoda, then stopped abruptly at its base. The rabbit paused, brought its palms together in front of its chest, and did an elegant swan dive that carried it between two strands of wire.
Carla’s perspective suddenly did a flip-flop. Now they were inside what looked like a reception area, Walls, floor, and ceiling were made of chrome. Behind a desk made of a slab of frosted glass, a robotic head hung in mid-air. Its eyes were whirling kaleidoscopes, its mouth a dark oval. Words scrolled across the front of the desk: YOU HAVE ENTERED THE MITSUHAMA COMPUTER TECHNOLOGIES SYSTEM PLEASE ENTER IDENTIFICATION CODE.
The rabbit pulled a key out of its pocket and tossed it at the robotic head. The key slotted neatly into its mouth, turned, and the head dissolved in a sparkle of green light.