Shadowrun hell on water, p.2
Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 2
There is a line, as I said before, but as Halim sees it, there are two lines. One line is for most people, and the other is for those who understand that they do not have to wait if they do not want to. That line is for him.
He walks past the occasionally resentful glares of the people waiting in line, with the other team members following him down the stairs. He does not care if they are angry with him, since he does not believe any of them will do anything about it. He also does not worry about how the ferry captains will react to his jumping to the front of the line, for they are capitalists. Any objection can be overcome with the right offer.
Unfortunately, Halim’s timing is not good. He arrives at the lower platform just as the ferry reaches the other side and starts unloading one group of passengers and loading the next. It will take at least five minutes for the ferry to return. Not a large delay, it is true, but Halim has never enjoyed being still when he could be moving.
A glance at the black flag on the back of the ferry tells him that the Black Rogers are in control of this ferry, which is just fine with Halim. They are murderous scum, true, but they are murderous scum whom Halim understands. He can work with them, and that is all that matters.
The loading and unloading proceed at a reasonable clip. Halim looks at the water and finds it is almost pleasant to be here, as long as he does not think about the poisons that are in the water beneath him. The water is cooler than the air, so a breath of a gentle breeze occasionally stirs near his feet, and since the water tends to suck in the dust the air is somewhat clearer here. He does not like to wait, but it is not a terrible spot in which to be.
But then there is the puttering of a motor, and the spot becomes worse. It is a motorboat coming from the south, and the engine is struggling because it is overloaded. There is no flag flying from this boat, but as it approaches, the five people in it stand and, in unison, unsheathe curved, sparkling swords. That gesture is all Halim needs to see. These are members of the Razor Cutlasses, and they clearly have decided it is time for control of this ferry to belong to someone else.
Halim looks back to the two men pulling the raft across. They are straining, pulling hard, trying to get to the other side. There is panic in their eyes. Halim scans the area, looking for reinforcements. Surely the Black Rogers did not leave these two as the only guards on their ferry? But there is no sign of anyone else.
It must be the disease, Halim thinks. This strain of VITAS that has a good portion of the city dying while the rest roil about in perpetual near-riot. The Black Rogers are undermanned now, and the Razor Cutlasses are about to take advantage of the fact.
Halim reaches for his sword, but then thinks better and pulls out a carefully maintained Browning Ultra-Power. He prefers face-to-face combat, but any warrior must understand that there is a time to engage your enemies at a distance.
“What are you doing?” says a raspy voice, and it is Cayman. “Who are you planning to shoot?”
Halim waves his gun at the approaching motorboat. “Them,” he says.
“Not our fight,” Cayman says. “They’re not coming to trash the ferry. They’ll off the two guys on the boat, then they’ll take over business. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
Halim raises his gun. “This is faster,” he says. He fires, and one of the Razor Cutlasses drops into the water.
Cayman curses and drops to the wooden platform, which bobs lightly as he falls. Groovetooth and Agbele Oku move back, and Halim looks at the mage with scorn. Groovetooth he understands—this part of the fight is not her thing. But Agbele Oku could help if she wanted to. Instead, she is holding back, waiting. She will not be involved unless she feels it is necessary.
Cayman has a gun out that makes the pistols X-Prime and Akuchi are holding look like toys. Halim motions those last two back. They can be the second line of defense. If he and Cayman cannot handle this alone, then they do not deserve to travel any farther.
There is yelling on the ferry, and one of the Black Rogers has let go of the boat and dropped to one knee. He has retrieved an AK-97 from somewhere and is firing on the Cutlasses, but he is untrained, and the recoil from the rifle sends his arms skipping about, so his rounds hit mostly water. Then the Cutlasses, who have handguns as well as swords, make an accurate shot, and the Black Roger goes down.
Halim is squeezing off shots methodically. The Cutlasses had turned their boat after their first member fell, and they are running parallel to the broken end of the bridge, making them harder to hit. But the boat is not fast, and it does not take Halim long to adjust. He squints, aims carefully, and fires.
“Watch the—” Cayman says, but whatever it is he wants Halim to watch is lost in a peppering of gunfire. Shots from the Cutlasses dig into the wood beneath him, but Halim has made himself too small a target. They do not hit him.
Then Halim finds the range, and he manages to dispatch two of them with three shots, and Cayman kills one as well. There is one Cutlass left.
Now that Halim has found the range, it should be an easy shot. He is thrown off briefly as the Cutlass abruptly jerks to his right, his arm swinging out. Halim fires, and so does Cayman, and two splotches appear on the pirate. He falls into his boat.
“Dammit!” Cayman says as he jumps to his feet, and Halim wonders what he is upset about. The fight went quite cleanly, and Cayman cannot be upset about the death of the one Black Roger. They will get the ferry across just fine without that man’s help.
Then a thin trail of smoke helps him see what had drawn Cayman’s wrath. Just before he died, the last Cutlass took a final shot. Not at the Black Roger, not at Cayman, not at Halim, but at his own boat. He buried a bullet in the engine, and it did what it was supposed to. Fluid was leaking out. The engine was dying. It would have been a slow replacement for Akuchi’s former boat, but it would have been better than walking. But now it was dead.
Halim returns his attention to his companions and finds that Cayman is glaring at him.
“What was that for?” Cayman says. “That wasn’t our fight.”
Halim jerks his head at the fallen pirate on the boat. “They were Razor Cutlasses,” he says. His voice is so low that it sometimes hits a frequency that humans can feel, but not hear. “Yorubamen. They do not need to be taking this place.”
Cayman rolls his eyes. “Can we stop with the tribal bullshit? At least for the rest of the day? I really don’t care which group in your city doesn’t like the other right now. Let’s get the job done and save the other nonsense for another time. Preferably when I’m not in this city any more.”
Halim makes sure he can talk calmly before he replies. “You only believe it is bullshit,” he finally says, “because it is not your tribe.”
Then, thankfully, the need for further conversation is ended. The ferry and the one surviving Black Roger have arrived, and the pirate will likely be more than willing to take Halim, Cayman, and the others on board, especially if they offer to help haul the ferry. They will be across in five minutes, and they will be moving. Halim wonders how Cayman can be dissatisfied with this result.
Meanwhile, at another point in the city, there is a person that I will call Sir for the moment because that is what everyone else calls him. You may wish me to call him by another name, his given name, but as long as I am telling the story you will have to content yourself with the way I am telling it.
Long ago, the people with money in Lagos discovered that there were two ways to escape the heat, the stench, the dust, and the other assorted miseries that pave the streets throughout most of the city. One way is to retreat to their enclaves on Lagos Island. Another is to build to the only parts of the city that remain untouched by the filth that is everywhere, and that part is the sky. The wealthiest and most powerful people combine the two, and live in high aeries above Lagos Island that allow them to pretend that the rest of the city does not exist.
Sir works in offices that are larger than the combined dwelling places of any six Lagosians, and he welcomes a stream of visitors who all have one thing in common—they all are desperately hoping to give Sir something that he wants, so that he might give them something in return.
This task is difficult for the current set of visitors, for their efforts to please Sir are both easy and hellishly difficult. It is easy because they have been tasked with reporting news to Sir about the conditions of Lagos, and thus all they have to do is deliver some sort of report, and they have fulfilled their duty. Sadly, though, most of the news they have come to report is very much not good. And so while they are diligently doing their job, they are forced to tell Sir very unpleasant things about his city, and they cannot be sure how he will react to this.
These messengers have tried to convince Sir that there are many convenient electronic ways to deliver the information he is looking for, but he brushes all their suggestions aside. He is not a technophobe, not by a long shot, but he believes news items should be delivered by people who know what they are talking about and who can answer any questions he might have. And so the largest news bureau in the city is not a professional organization, but is the force of hackers and reporters that roam the streets and the Matrix looking for news and reporting back to Sir. There is a steady stream of them, all day, moving from the subtle lighting and tan-and-brown carpet of the hallways to the blaze of sunlight streaming into the floor-to-ceiling windows of Sir’s office. His windows face south, because everyone knows that the best views in Lagos are the ones that include as much of the ocean and as little of the city as possible.
Walking into the office can be nerve-wracking, because one never knows where Sir will be. He may be behind his desk, but more often he will be walking here, strolling there, or standing somewhere out of sight only to emerge silently and suddenly when a messenger enters, scaring the poor soul half to death by suddenly looming over them and snapping “Yes? Yes? What do you have to say?” Sir is a large man, and when he looms over you it is somewhat like an angry god looming over a sinful mortal.
He has been especially impatient with his messengers this morning, dismissing most of them before they finished their news. “Sir, reports say that residents of the mainland are demanding medications be released from corporate—”
“Sir, reports of Tamanous activity have surged, and many people believe they have harvested VITAS victims, which could of course lead to the spread—”
“Sir, traffic in the mainland is completely gridlocked. People will not leave—”
None of them finish, because none of them are saying what Sir wants to hear. Either with a wave of his hand, an angry shake of his head, or even just an icy stare, Sir silences the messengers and sends them away.
Then another messenger comes, an area boy with tight, ropy muscles and wide eyes that hunger in many different ways. He has been to Sir’s office three times before, and each time he believed Sir was going to strike him before his message was complete. Even though the blow he has feared has not yet fallen, he steps into the room with worry and trepidation.
He walks ahead on the thick burgundy carpet and looks for Sir. There is no sign of him. He doesn’t hear the sound of him pacing ahead, but then the carpet absorbs many noises. He can only see a corner of the large black desk, so he cannot know if Sir is behind it. He takes a few more steps, and then the desk chair comes into view. It is empty. The sunlight here is bright but not blinding, thanks to the polarized windows. He still cannot see Sir. He takes a few more steps, clears his throat and tries to say something, but a word will not form.
Then he hears a book—a book, of all things!—slam shut, and heavy footsteps coming toward him. Reflexes kick in, and the messenger jumps backward and almost runs away. But he holds his ground as Sir rounds the corner and towers above him. He doesn’t say anything, and the messenger knows if he does not quickly say what he has to say, than things will not be well for him.
“Sir, I’ve been told, that is, I’ve been asked to say that the things—Sir, the packages—Sir, those three packages you’ve been concerned about? They are on the way. They have been retrieved, and they are on the way.”
Then tension drains out of Sir. A day’s, a week’s, a month’s worth of worries fade away, and Sir smiles, and the messenger is entirely unnerved.
“Wonderful,” he says. “You have done well. What is your name?”
And for a few brief moments, the messenger cannot remember.
Chapter Three
One hour before the bridge
Now, at this point, I must say that as I was describing how Halim and Cayman fought the Razor Cutlasses, I saw in my mind that I was not telling the whole story that needed to be told. The story showed how Halim is gifted with a gun, but that is not his native mode. To truly understand how Halim fights, you must see him in the way God intended him to be. You must see him hand-to-hand.
Fortunately for us, we do not have to go very far in order to see that. We only need to move slightly backward, two hours before the unfortunate Razor Cutlasses met their demise at the wrong end of Halim’s gun, to see Halim in his true element.
Two hours before that encounter, one hour before he embarked on the Third Mainland Bridge, Halim was in the streets, alone, assured that Groovetooth was where she was supposed to be, and that he would soon meet her there. The streets were difficult to cross, as I have mentioned, and there was a certain amount of pushing and shoving involved in Halim getting to where he needed to go.
Halim is not holding a weapon. He is carrying many, yes, but none of them is in his hands. In his hands, he holds only a package. It is a box, not much larger than his palm, black, with some sort of fake leather exterior. It is oddly cool to the touch. It is sealed tight by mechanisms that Halim has not taken time to investigate and that he will not take time to investigate. For that is not his job. He is delivering the box to its intended destination, and that job does not involve knowing what the box holds.
Besides, for someone like Halim, the contents of the box are a simple mechanism, abi? A reason for him to travel from place to place, a reason for him to try to do something, and others to try to stop him. That is how he lives, that is where he is comfortable, walking forward against the current of people trying to stop him. The box he was carrying made it more likely for someone to want to stop him than if he was just walking alone, and he was just fine with that circumstance. He was tempted, occasionally, to lean into someone, to catch them extra hard with his shoulder and make them mad so that they would be goaded into fighting with him. But that would be a violation of his code of conduct. He can fight people, and he can even provoke fights with them, but he cannot provoke fights for a reason no better than the fact that he feels like fighting. If he did that, he would just be a street thug, and Halim is not a street thug.
He knows, though, that he does not need to pick a random fight with some anonymous passerby. There were people in the city who are quite willing to fight him, and they were looking for him, and there was a good chance that they were getting closer. There were some, four people, that he just dispatched, and it was not entirely unpleasant, but it was also not entirely fulfilling. So, he would be happy for another opportunity, and he had the feeling he would have one soon. Groovetooth had not told him anything about any other people out there, but Halim was beginning to believe that there was a selective nature to the hacker’s knowledge, though how this selection occurred remained a mystery. Without Groovetooth’s input, he was left to rely on his own instincts, which had been perfectly satisfactory for him a thousand times in the past.
And then some people moved one way and others moved another, and there was a group of five standing in front of him. One passerby looks at these five and points at them and yells, “Anya onye ori!” but Halim did not have the luxury of wondering what they were talking about. They had the rusted seams and inflamed scars of the hastily cybered, and two of them were either wealthy or connected enough to have guns. They were advancing, they were spreading out, and that meant it was time.
Then there was no noise beyond this circle of six people, Halim and his five seeming assailants. The city sounds, the whining engines, the yelling voices, all of it disappeared. Instead it was just his feet scraping over the dust, the cotton of his robe rustling as his hand reached underneath it, the sound of metal rubbing leather as his gun came out of his holster. There were pop-pops of guns from the men down the street from him, and bullets sliced the air near his head and one hit his chest. It thudded harmlessly into body armor—it would leave a bruise and a hole in his robe, which was irritating, but it would not slow him down.
The scraping was loud because Halim was close to the ground; he was moving fast but felt slow because he could carefully consider each move. He moved his arm and saw a red crosshair flying past him through the air, and then it turned yellow and Halim fired. He rolled, he kept moving, and when he was on his feet his sword was in one hand and gun in the other, and the heavy breathing of the four goons around him was like music. His vision narrowed, with the four men in sharp focus and everything else a dark blur. He felt his robe brushing against his legs, he saw motion, he reacted. His sword blurred, his gun fired, he heard grunts. The quieter the grunt, the better, he had always felt. If they grunt loud, then he had left them with too much energy and life. When they grunt quietly, he has hit so hard and fast that their body cannot muster any significant sort of reaction besides falling to the ground.
