Shadowrun hell on water, p.13
Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 13
“I’ll protect you the best I can,” Agbele Oku says. “But the movement part is up to you.”
Halim does not say anything, but there are footsteps behind Cayman, moving quickly, and Halim hits the top of the staircase. There is a glow around him, white with touches of pink, and he is moving quickly, taking three steps at a time, grabbing the handrail and using it to propel him around corners.
Cayman moves quickly too, scuttling to the edge, pulling out his rifle, and laying down cover fire. The fishing boat has moved away from the ferry, so he has to move back and forth, back and forth, keeping fire on both of them as much as possible, but they are still getting shots off, and once Cayman sees a bullet that bounces off the glow around Halim and embeds itself in the staircase, and he swears there was a small spark when it hit the shield.
The ferry has moved backward by the time Halim reaches the bottom of the staircase, and the gap is too large for him to leap. There is no hesitation, though, as he runs to the end of the platform, firing his handgun at the Cutlasses on the ferry, hitting one in the arm, then he is at the edge of the platform and he leaps and dives into the water, and the Cutlasses are running forward, looking to spray to water with bullets and hit Halim while he is under. Cayman focuses his efforts on the ferry, laying down a whole row of bullets across the front of it, hitting the same Cutlass that Halim hit and driving the others back.
These odds, they are not good. There are seven of them down there and only one Halim, and Cayman cannot keep enough cover fire to occupy all of them. He takes a handgun and throws it to the boy.
“You need something more powerful than the damn holdout,” he says. “Help me keep them occupied.”
X-Prime nods and drops to the ground, leaning over the edge of the bridge to fire down on the Cutlasses. To Cayman’s eyes, it looks like most of his shots are hitting water, but even inaccurate gunfire will do something to keep them occupied. Now he had to hope that they didn’t have a mage down there that could mess with Halim’s protections.
“Spell’s gone,” Agbele Oku said.
“What?”
“Protection spell’s gone,” she said. “Someone down there blew it away.”
“So put a new one on!”
“I can’t see him,” she said with a shrug. “I won’t be able to do something to him until I see him.”
Cayman grits his teeth and wishes for the hundredth time in his life that mages could somehow be required to carry signs that said “MAGE” in big letters so they would be easy to identify. While he was at it, he also wished that they all would have bull’s-eyes on their foreheads.
But then he remembers he has his own mage.
“Which one is it?”
“In the boat. The one near the front.”
Cayman is not entirely surprised, because there were a few shots at that one, a squat man with no shirt and a white skull painted on his chest and generous belly, shots that he had felt very good about when they were fired but had turned out to be very far off target.
There is no fire coming from the Cutlasses below. They know Halim has been under the water for a good amount of time, and they are waiting for him to come up for air. They probably have a small hope that one of their bullets found him while he was swimming, but if that were the case his body would likely have come to the surface already. When he comes up, they will be ready with a barrage that will drown him right there.
“Forget protecting Halim,” Cayman says. “We need to keep them busy. Annoy the mage.”
Cayman does not know much about magic, but he knows enough to understand that it is like most other kinds of fighting. There are times when you know you are stronger than your opponent and you can just overpower them. But there are other times when you must be more patient, when you must find the way to get the right blow in, and the way to get the right blow in is to do something your opponent does not expect. One of the keys to success, then, is to have a fine array of weapons and moves that most people would not be looking out for.
He concentrates his fire on the boat, and the boy does the same. The Cutlasses on the ferry immediately see what is happening and all but one of them stop looking in the water and concentrate their fire on the bridge above. They kick up plenty of concrete dust with their bullets, but that is about all they are able to do, and the fire from above keeps raining down on the boat.
Then there is a whining in Cayman’s ear, an annoying high-pitched sound, and his non-trigger hand moves quickly and slaps his cheek. He brushes something large, and he sees a blurred shape move past him. He reflexively jerks back as buzzing wings skim his cheek. It is a mosquito, but it is ungodly large, longer than his hand, and his hand, as hands go, is quite big. He can clearly see its proboscis as the big bug flies away, a long thin tube that tapers to invisible sharpness, a needle that could draw plenty of blood, or even stop a man’s heart if it hits the wrong place.
He looks, and sees more of these bugs descending from every direction. They are going to the same place, and that place is the fishing boat. They are ghede flies, and there is not a moment, not one, in the entire lives of the females when they are not hungry.
They descend on the mage, who frowns both with his real mouth and the skeletal mouth on his belly, and he swats them away. Some of them freeze in the air, drop to the boat, and shatter where they land. But there are more of them, maybe a dozen, and they smell the blood under the mage’s ample skin and they want some of it.
At that moment there is an eruption behind the boat. Water explodes upward, and it is pushed by a head, and that head clears the water level and so does a hand, and the hand grabs the gunwale of the boat and heaves, so the boat bobs down and the head and the body that is under it shoots further up, and another hand emerges from the water and it has a knife, and that hand moves forward, and the knife enters the body of the man in the back of the boat between his shoulder blade and spine, and the hand holding the knife starts to fall back to the water, so it moves down the entire length of the man in the back of the boat and opens him from shoulder to waist.
To his credit, the chubby mage does not worry about the bugs or the fact that his fellow Cutlass is dead. He turns and makes a small hand motion, because, necessary or not, hand motions just seem to make a spell feel right, and the air waves and wobbles like it has become extra hot, and something is coming toward Halim there in the water, but without astral perception Cayman cannot be sure what it is.
Halim is already back under the water, but Cayman is not sure that will offer enough protection. He is firing at the mage, but the mage’s protection is holding, the bullets still are not finding a landing place. But there is only so much a mage can do at once, and with the bullets, Halim, and the ghede flies, this particular mage seems to have found his limit. So when another wave of air flies out from Agbele Oku, it penetrates whatever defenses he has and connects with the back of his skull. He drops.
He is down, but not out. He scrambles quickly to his feet. Cayman fires once, twice, three times, and he thinks he made contact, but not enough to stop the mage. The mage is turning, getting something special ready, but then the boat tips, the bow raising high out of the water, and the mage stumbles, falling back toward the engine. And just like that, Halim is there, his hand makes a fast motion, and the butt of his gun hits the mage in the back of the head. And once again the mage’s knees buckle.
Perhaps the mage was strong enough to have gotten up again, but that will never be known, as Halim is not one to take a chance. As the mage falls, Halim’s gun muzzle finds its way under the mage’s chin, and he fires. That results in such a terrible mess that it is, for once, possible for someone such as Halim to enter the waters of Lagos Lagoon and actually become cleaner.
The rest is just clean-up. When your mage goes down, if you’re good, you adapt, you move to new tactics. If you’re not so good, you pause, you feel panic in your throat, and you start firing wildly as if the very high amount of lead in the air will make up for the lack of mana on your side. But it doesn’t. There are fewer shots coming from on top of the bridge, but they are more accurate. And there is Halim, who has climbed back into the boat and assumed a prone position, and is doing damage of his own.
It does not take long, and then Cayman is on his feet, moving down the stairs, while Halim motors over to the ferry. The sight of the boat, that wonderful boat, sends Cayman’s heart soaring, until it sinks just as Halim pulls next to the ferry.
“Did you do that?” Cayman screams.
“Do what?” Halim asks, in level tones that still easily cross the distance between the ferry and the stairs.
“Sink that boat! Did you sink that boat?”
Halim looks at the slow procession of bubbles moving to the surface to mark where the boat went down. Then he looks up.
“The boat was hit. A few times. It wasn’t too sound to begin with.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cayman says. “Lucky none of them got through to you.” Then he looks closer, and he sees there is red on Halim’s robe where there had not been red before. “Oh, shit,” he says. “How bad is it?”
Halim looks at himself, as if just realizing that second that he had wounds on him. “They are not bad. I do not think.”
Cayman turns to X-Prime. “You get to play street doc.” Then he turns back to Halim. “Good thing we didn’t try to negotiate, huh?” he says with an amount of sarcasm that could undoubtedly be detected by satellites hovering far overhead.
On Lagos Island, Sir is not happy.
He saw the wave. It came out of the clear blue, blue water and blue sky, no visible cause, no visible anything, and suddenly there is a towering wave in a lagoon that for the most part is not deep enough to go over an average person’s head. He doesn’t know where the water got sucked in from, he doesn’t know what or who is causing it, but whatever or whoever it is, he hates it or them. Because his packages, they were supposed to be on the way, but they are not here yet, and he has good reason to believe that the wave is the reason. Or, at least, one reason.
He has many eyes in many places, and none of these eyes can tell him where the runners are. He knows that keeping track of six people in this city is no easy task, but he had put so much effort into this, and it had worked, and then this wave comes out of nothing…
He is standing at one of his windows, his hands balled into fists, both raised and leaning on the window above his head. It wouldn’t take much to pound the window with them and shatter the glass. Not much effort, and certainly not much thought.
He backed away from the window. He had used others’ anger against them so many times that it would not do to display his own.
Besides, anger is not necessary. His eyes, all those eyes on the street, are not necessary. They were a luxury, one he didn’t need. He had put together a professional team, and he had offered them enough money to make sure the job was done. They would want to collect the fee for finishing. They would find a way to get the money. They would find their way south. He was firm in his belief that six of them would make it to the checkpoint to Lagos Island.
And five of them would move on.
Chapter Seventeen
Three and a half hours
before the bridge
It is possible that Cayman would not have been thinking so much about talking to the Razor Cutlasses instead of killing them if it were not for what happened earlier in the day. There was a part of the day when Cayman and X-Prime were able to enjoy the luxury of being driven by Akuchi. And it was not just on a cycle, or an okada, or anything else without a roof. It was an honest-to-god car, a Citroën Ztana, with the popular rust-colored paint job that makes the actual rust spots virtually invisible.
The interior of the car would not be recognized by the manufacturers, as all the controls and dials and everything else they had put in were gone. There was other equipment, better equipment in there now, but to anyone who was not Akuchi it looked like plain metal cases. To Akuchi, of course, it was the body of the car and the world around it, and he was so absorbed in his driving that he never would have noticed anything Cayman and X-Prime said, even if they were commenting on his mother’s propensity to engage in sexual relations with wildebeests. So they talked freely, and they seemed to have been continuing a conversation, though whether it was a conversation that had started five minutes ago, five weeks ago, or five years ago was not clear.
“We don’t have different jobs, really,” X-Prime said. “I mean, I know, I know, that’s your thing, you like to talk about how we’ve all got our jobs to do, and we all have to do our part and that, but some of the things you think are separate really aren’t. Your thing and my thing really aren’t that different.”
“You’re flattering yourself,” Cayman said. He did not look at X-Prime when he was talking to him, instead looking out the window and watching the city, counting the number of ways it could kill him. Here, the most likely fatal element seemed to be the air, which had a brown-and-green haze that reminded Cayman of a very thin split-pea soup. He was very accustomed, of course, to seeing industrial areas that contribute plenty of smoke to the air, but he could not recall seeing such a variety of colors coming from the various smokestacks in the factories around him. There were the normal shades of grey, black, and brown, of course, but he also saw greens, dark reds, and hints of blue. From some angles, the plumes lined up next to each other like the end of a muted, dirty rainbow.
“No, I’m not. Look, we’re both in the persuasion business. The main reason we do things is to help people understand that it would be better for them to do things the way we want them to than some other way. Except for those times you’re just pointing guns at people and shooting them because it’s fun.”
“It’s not not fun.”
“But you don’t just go around randomly shooting people. I mean, it pains me to say this to your face, but you’re not a psychopath.”
“Thanks.”
“To begin with, you’re not charming enough,” X-Prime said, then grinned broadly in a way that was far more annoying than the actual joke. “Anyway, you usually have a purpose when you point a gun at someone, and that purpose is to get them to do what you want them to.”
“Okay.”
“And it’s the same with me. I talk to people so that they’ll see things my way and go along with what I want them to do. Same goal as you, just different weapons.”
“Your voice is a weapon now?”
X-Prime smiled. “Damn straight. In fact, in some ways it’s better than your weapons, because I can use it to make everyone happy. I can convince people that doing what I ask them to do is actually what they want, so when they do it, we will all be happy.”
“I do the same thing,” Cayman said. “When I point a gun at people, they think they are going to be shot. So when they find out a way they can avoid being shot, then they’re happy to take it, and I’m happy they’re taking it, too.”
“I suppose. But it’s nice to, you know, have the lighter touch. To get to the point where everyone gets what they want without someone having to think they’re about to die.”
Cayman finally turned from his window. “You’re slipping back into old X-Prime. Worrying about other people and shit.”
X-Prime frowned. “I guess.”
Cayman looked out the window again and didn’t say anything.
“But it’s not just being nice,” X-Prime said. “It’s walking lightly. The smaller the weapon you have to use, the smaller the impact. You don’t leave as big a trail behind you.”
“Why are we talking about this?”
At that moment, as if on cue, the Ztana slowed to a stop. Coming out of his driving daze, Akuchi turned to them.
“We’re just a few blocks away,” he said. “It’s probably better to approach on foot.”
X-Prime straightened his collar, since he had gone to great trouble to wear a shirt that looked as presentable and nondescript as possible. “We’re talking about this,” he said, “because I want you to fully appreciate the value of what I’m about to do.”
He got out of the car and led the way, while Akuchi and Cayman followed, and X-Prime seemed to enjoy walking in front.
Their walk took them a few blocks down a crumbling street, then they turned into an alley and pushed open a fence door that was no more than a sheet of corrugated metal. On the other side of the door was a dusty piece of land that, judging by the various kinds of footprints and the flecks of blood, fur, and feathers on it, was often used as a combat arena for animals of many different types. There were people in there, sitting on many things, none of them chairs. They sat on tree stumps, sideways garbage cans, cinder blocks, or anything else that was horizontal and more than a third of a meter off the ground.
There was a shack in the back of the lot, and the people there gathered in a way to clearly communicate that if you approached the shack and were not supposed to, you would meet with a host of consequences that could very well cause future nightmares, assuming your mind was left in a condition well enough to allow for dreaming.
There were seven of them in the yard right now, and Cayman estimated their ages as being between fourteen and twenty. They had the expression common to all people who have learned to strongly dislike anything that is not themselves. Cayman had seen hundreds, or maybe thousands of people just like this, and there was one crucial thing about the first moments in dealing with them—you have to know that you cannot win. If you try to be tough, they will refuse to be intimidated. If you try to be low-key or friendly, they’ll mock you for being weak. Whatever you do will not be enough. The only thing to do is ride it out and hope you’ll get beyond the initial chest thumping before violence breaks out. This was what X-Prime was bragging about, that he could handle this kind of situation without the always-useful threat of violence, so now he had to put his words where his mouth had been.
“You oyibos in the wrong place,” one of the men inside said, an older one who wore his sheen of sweat like a bodybuilder wears mineral oil.
