Shadowrun hell on water, p.20
Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 20
She did not see any other life forms around X-Prime and Cayman, but X-Prime had just sent her a two-word message—
She sighed. The city was not being friendly, though this could not be considered news. She hoped all this was just coincidence. It had to be—since when did shedim, the Daughters, Tamanous, and devil rats plot together? It must be coincidence—and a bad day.
But they would be at the lagoon soon, and it would get better. The obstacles were all out here. The lagoon would be smooth sailing.
She sent a message to Halim, telling him to expect company soon, then got up to leave. If she could manage to have a safe trip across the sprawl, it would be fine. She made her way out of the relatively safe and welcoming confines of Festac Town, away from her haven of consistent Matrix access.
Once she was on the move, Groovetooth was back to her customary grid-hopping, agents always around her like feelers or tentacles looking for a new back door, being ready to switch to one grid if its access seemed clearer and stronger than the one she was currently on. It was a cumbersome way to work, but she was used to it.
There were advantages, though. Hopping around meant making connections with all kinds of hardware, and it is worth noting that you can make all the universal software standards you want, but different pieces of hardware and different pieces of software will work differently. When you are opening your nova-hot new nightclub with your spectacular New York City-in-the-1970s theme, with glitter balls and women in platform shoes and sleek plastic lines to every piece of furniture, you think that everyone who comes in will see it the same way you do. But everyone who has spent any amount of time with hardware knows that Renraku RazorSight goggles emphasize reds a little too much, while Evo’s Hawkeye model is ultra-sharp—perhaps too sharp, giving AROs an edge that you could shave yourself with.
All this is to say that the reality around you can change based on the hardware that is displaying it. Or not displaying it, because even though there are AROs and other graphical representations all around us, it remains true that most of what happens deep in grids was never meant to be seen, as millions of lines of code have never been attached to any sort of icon. But there is still code. There is still something, and that something is handled differently by the different grids it might travel through. And if you are a skilled and somewhat paranoid hacker (and if you know hackers, you know that is what all the good ones are), you might have a program that looks at the transition between grids and devices, that looks to see if that transition makes something noticeable happen in the wireless network, and then looks to see if there are other pieces of code experiencing those same transitions from virtual place to virtual place as you travel along.
Groovetooth had just such a program, and it was designed to attach an icon to suspicious things that might not have an icon on their own. It is not a fancy icon, just a simple humanoid outline, designed to become darker and darker based on the program’s analyzed certainty of whether there was in fact a piece of code following it or not. As she made her way through the streets of the city, Groovetooth noticed that she had a shadow on her tail. She did not know who it was or what it wanted—at the moment it was too early to tell if it was really someone following her or if it was just some innocuous code that happened to be traveling the same course as her.
But with Capstone out there and some Tamanous operatives tracking down Halim and the Daughters and the shedim and the devil rats, it made her think. How much was random, how much was being thrown at them on purpose?
It was a fun thought, but it was idle. Because she was a mouse on the road, and whether people were planning to step on her because they saw her, or they were about to accidentally step on her just because she happened to be where their feet were about to land, from her perspective it worked out the same—move quickly or get squished. The intentions of those doing the squishing are of little importance.
But still, she has some agents keep an eye on the shadow. She expects to be out of range of any decent grids soon, but when she is back in contact, it will be interesting to see what they have discovered.
Chapter Twenty-Six
They do not concern themselves with the proper disposition of Akuchi’s remains, because almost no one in Lagos receives a proper burial. Or anything similar to it. He will soon be gathered up and likely dumped in the lagoon, which means he will be joining many people with whom he has run in the past, and that is as fitting and proper an ending as they can come up with in their present circumstances.
There was a flight instinct that kicked in immediately after Akuchi and his killer fell to the ground, and the team ran, but once their collective lizard brains settled and allowed logical connections to once again take place, they realized that what happened happened the way it did because Akuchi was supposed to die, and the woman who killed him was quite willing to die as well. There were two bodies lying on the street behind them because that was the way it was engineered to be. If there were more bad things the powers that be wanted to happen to them, they likely would have happened already. So, since they are still at large and continue to carry the packages they are supposed to have, they are now free to complete their mission.
But none of them want to.
Groovetooth and Agbele Oku have shielded the runners to the best of their considerable abilities, and they are walking with purposeful gaits while discussing how none of them want to arrive at the destination to which they are now traveling.
“All that stuff I’ve been saying I didn’t want to know?” Cayman says. “I need to know it now.”
X-Prime’s mouth opens, and he has that expression on his face that he gets when he is about to start talking quickly in order to annoy Cayman as much as possible, but then he stops.
“Okay, what can I tell you?”
Cayman is surprised at his tone, but apparently the scene they had just left behind was enough to straighten the boy out, at least for a time.
“We’ve got a scalp, a heart, and a hand. Tamanous wants them, but that could just be because they’re organs. The Daughters want them, and the Daughters might know who these parts belong to.” Cayman pauses for air. “What else do we know?”
Everyone is quiet. Cayman looks at Groovetooth and waits for her to notice him, but she is walking ahead, eyes focused on the ground, not looking from side to side at all. He clears his throat, but that is not enough to get her attention.
“Mouse!” he finally barks, and that is enough to get her to look up. Her eyes are wide and her face has an undertone of ash.
“I said, ‘what else do we know?’” Cayman says.
“About wha—oh,” Groovetooth says, blinking. It seems she has just remembered who she is, what she does, and that she is currently surrounded by a good-good collection of wireless signals.
“Your agents,” Cayman says. “What have they found out?”
Groovetooth nods, and her eyes start skittering here and there, looking at nothing that is tangible. It is disorienting, for a good decker at work with several AR windows open bears an uncanny resemblance to someone who is on both a manic high and a sugar binge.
Her eyes widen briefly, then widen even more, then narrow.
“Oh,” she says.
Then she is silent for a time.
“What?” Cayman says, and in this he is joined by Halim and X-Prime.
She looks around at the red-tinged sky above and all the people rushing around.
“We should probably find a place,” she says. “A place inside.”
Like everything else in the world, distribution of security adheres very tightly to the exalted laws of supply and demand. That means that all you have to do to avoid security is to go someplace where most people do not want to be. And the quickest way to find a place where people do not want to be is to go someplace that smells bad.
In most of Lagos, that is an easy proposition, as the next bad smell is only a rotten egg toss away. But they are on Lagos Island, which is very careful to redistribute most of its unpleasant smells to other places. Still, as long as you are a place that is burdened with metahumans and their need to eat and defecate, you will have bad smells.
And so Groovetooth manages to find an online work order for the employee restroom of a grocery store where the toilet has been backed up. The work order has not yet been fulfilled. The runners do not exactly look like grocery store employees, nor do they look like plumbers, but what they do look like is people that should not be burdened by unnecessary questions, and so when they spread themselves out and make their way to the break room next to the offending bathroom, no one stops them, no one asks questions, and no one bothers to chase them out of the room that has been out of use for a good week due to the pervasive smell of human waste.
They sit at a single table, a once-tan table now brown with spilled soykaf and decades of absorbed tobacco smoke. They are on benches, so they cannot lean back, but it is of no matter because all of them would be leaning forward for this conversation, no matter what they were sitting on.
There is no preamble. When they are all seated, Groovetooth speaks.
“I lost a lot of good agents on this mission,” she says. “Most of the ones I sent out didn’t come back.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but they’re computer programs,” Cayman says. “I’m sure you’ll learn to love again.”
“I didn’t tell you that for sympathy, jackass,” Groovetooth says. “I said it so that you’d know there are people out there who look like they’re against us, who know their shit. I wasn’t just sending cheap alleyware bots after them. These were good agents. And most of them were wiped clean.”
There are no more cutting remarks. The others nod.
“The fingerprint was pretty easy,” Groovetooth says. “That work has been done for me—any time some corp puts together a biometric database, someone, or a lot of someones, is usually on top of it, trying to hack in. And most of the time they get something. So there’s plenty of hacker havens where you can find a lot of matches, especially if it’s someone who has been with a corporation a while.” She takes a breath. “This person was a lifer.”
“And she was?” Agbele Oku asks.
“Lydia al-Shammar.”
And there is silence. The name even holds some meaning for the oyibos, though it still does not hit them with the same impact as the Lagosians. Global Sandstorm has a major presence in Lagos, with the struggle over the control of the oil pipeline continuing to generate conflict and profits. And at the head of Global Sandstorm sits the al-Shammar family.
Agbele Oku’s mouth is slightly open, and she is blinking rapidly. Groovetooth is sitting up straight, enjoying the impact of her news. Halim, though—he is impassive, of course.
“The thing that cost me my agents was sending them to track a bit of code that I thought was following me. I’m still not sure what it was, program or human or what, but it was definitely following me, keeping tabs on me. I wanted to know who sent it.
“I don’t know much about it, but I do know this—as it was jumping from node to node, sometimes it would clear a passage for itself by using a certain set of access codes. Codes that are used by the Council.”
Again, there is silence. It is finally broken by X-Prime.
“So we got someone tied to the Council involving us in the murder of an al-Shammar family member,” he says. “We should ask for a raise.”
He smiles. No one else does.
“You all are boring,” X-Prime says. “Okay, look. The al-Shammars. What tribe are they?”
“Yoruba,” Halim says.
“There you go,” X-Prime says. “I was right all along. This is a tribal thing.”
“You said it was a Asamando thing!” Cayman says.
“That was only a theory I was toying with,” X-Prime says calmly. “I discarded it. A tribal thing seemed more likely.”
“Funny you didn’t mention that until now,” Cayman says.
“Despite what you think, not every idea that comes to my head goes out my mouth. So, I figured it was a tribal thing, and that whoever’s behind it would be near the top of the tribal structure. We’re not getting retirement money here, but it’s certainly more than most people in the city could pay. And Groovetooth’s information about the Council access codes just clinches it.” He turns to Halim. “Who’s the Yoruba representative on the Council?”
“Olabode Lekan.”
“Would he want Lydia al-Shammar dead?”
“I don’t know. I have never concerned myself much with the alliances and feuds of the rich and powerful.”
“Would he want Akuchi dead?”
Something that might be the distant relative of a smile made a motion on Halim’s lips. “Any Yoruba with any power wanted Akuchi dead.”
A thought strikes Cayman, and he breaks into the conversation with it. “Does Lekan want you dead?”
Halim shrugs. “Perhaps. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter if he wants it or not. He won’t get it.”
“He doesn’t have to,” Groovetooth says. “He already has what he wants.”
“Which is?” Cayman says.
“If Lekan is behind this, he knows what’s in the packages,” she says. “That’s why he sent us after them, because he knows what’s in them. There were cameras all around the gate, cameras everywhere, and we got through the gate, but they still must have taken some close shots of us. Shots of Halim carrying pieces of Lydia al-Shammar’s body onto Lagos Island. That sort of thing could be very interesting to the right people.”
There is a pause.
“They think they can blackmail me?” Halim finally says.
“It looks like it,” Groovetooth says. “Lean on you a little to get your sword on their side. Nothing personal, but they probably think your loyalty to any particular employer may not be as strong as your desire not to spend time in jail.”
Halim considers that for a moment. “They are probably right.”
X-Prime is smiling, enthusiastic, with no apparent negative effects from the recent death of one of his partners in crime. The puzzle he is putting together is apparently a healing balm for him, assuming he was feeling much of a wound in the first place.
“So, Akuchi was hired so he could be killed, Halim was hired so he could be blackmailed.” He points to the mouse. “And she was hired because where there are body parts, there’s Tamanous, and she’d be well equipped to help us avoid them or deal with them somehow. So that’s three out of six.”
He looks toward Agbele Oku, who looks older than her years, possibly because the smell in the room tends to make one screw one’s face up in an unappealing fashion. “Then there’s you. Why you?”
She knows the answer, but she wishes she didn’t. “Because of the Daughters,” Agbele Oku says. “Whoever hired us, Lekan or whoever, knew we’d cross their paths, especially once they found out what it was we were transporting. They knew how I’d react to the Daughters. They thought I’d be able to deal with them. To hold them off.” She sounds both flattered and appalled at the assumption.
“And me and Cayman …” X-Prime begins.
“… are hired guns along for the ride,” Cayman finishes. “We’re perfect for the job. We’d come in, finish it, then disappear.”
Again, there is silence. They have very little proof for all of the things they have just said, yet there is not one person in the group who feels like disputing the truth of it. And besides, there is another question on all of their minds, and it is a question that is looking at the future, planning what is going to happen next rather than pondering things that have already happened.
So rather than ponder the past any more, they plunge into the near future. There are things that need to happen when there is a job to finish, and one of your companions has been killed, so the runners set about planning them.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There is an axiom that is occasionally false, but is accurate often enough to have achieved axiomatic status, and it states that when something is going wrong for one person or group of people, there is another person or group of people for whom things are going right in approximately the same proportion. And so, in an office not far from where the runners are, there is a man who is quite pleased because things are going well. The Tamanous interference he had worried about since day one of the mission had been dealt with, the packages were still in the hands that were supposed to have them, and he had honored his entire tribe by eliminating the pest known as Akuchi. There had been many discussions among the tribal elders about whether Akuchi should be killed or should be positioned for extortion in a method similar to what they had planned for Halim. In the end, the elders had agreed that Akuchi’s crimes were too numerous to be ignored. And since the Igbo had to pay for their actions in the matter of the Piri Reis Map—the debt was slow in being repaid, but that only meant significant interest had accrued—Akuchi was deemed to be the price (the elders decided that making the Igbo lose both Akuchi and Halim would perhaps be more than their rival tribe would be willing to bear, and so that action was not warranted).
And so this man, whom I have been calling Sir for the bulk of this story but who is, of course, Olabode Lekan, is happy.
Or at least as happy as he can be in the mess he has been in since his reputation started taking a downward slide a few years back. It had started with that damn auction, which was supposed to bring in a nice sum of nuyen. The auction had gone well at first, and got even better when the area boys sent by the Igbo to retrieve the map failed in rather spectacular fashion. It should perhaps have ended there, with the Igbo viewing their failure as a just punishment for their hubris, but it did not. Reprisals came from the Igbo, and they were more effective this time around. They struck some Yoruba mining operations, and then when the unfortunate VITAS variant came through town they struck Yoruba health clinics, greatly harming Lekan’s tribe’s ability to deal with the health peril. Pressure grew on Lekan to take firm action, and twice he acted to strike at Igbo leadership, but both times he acted on bad intelligence, and the missions came up with nothing. Whispers were spreading around town that he was weak, that he had lost his edge, that perhaps someone more effective should be put in his place. Then, to top it all off, Lydia al-Shammar disappeared.
