Shadowrun hell on water, p.6
Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 6
“The package has been handed off as requested,” she said. “The woman who received it was even led to believe that she was supposed to receive it, or some such nonsense.”
Sir rolled his eyes. “That was unnecessary. Why do people always have to come up with a story? Why not just say thanks for the string, here’s the box, have a nice day?”
“We do not share all information about our workings with everyone,” Baindu said. “Not all of our group who was there was working from the same script. The story was as much for them as it was for your operative.”
“Fine, as long as it’s where it’s supposed to be.” Sir returned to the pacing he was doing before Baindu arrived. He walked across the office, turned, and was surprised to see that Baindu was still there.
“I appreciate the fact that your people handed off the item. The payment has already been arranged and will be made. Good day.”
Baindu, however, did not move. “You are using us,” she said. “Most days you have no use for us, but when it suits you, you decide to make us your couriers. It seems—less than respectful.”
There was much truth to this, but Sir of course knew it would do him no good to acknowledge it.
“This is not a matter of respect,” Sir said. “I have a job with many facets to it, and one of them is keeping the peace in the city.”
Baindu snorted.
Sir smiled. “Yes, it’s a relative term. Sometimes all I can do is avoid actions that I know will directly lead to violence.”
“And you believe this is one of those times.”
Sir turned and looked out his window, and the ocean glittered while he quietly counted to ten. Then he turned back around.
“Since you know my position, you’ll understand that if I tell you what you want to know, you’ll have to promise that the Daughters will not engage in any reprisals.”
Baindu pulled herself somewhat taller. “I will make no such promise. We have our mission, and we cannot decide to ignore it simply because it is inconvenient to you. You say you want to keep the peace—if you are letting the guilty walk the streets unpunished, that is not a peace worth preserving.”
The next part was difficult for Sir, but since all politics involve a degree of performance, he had some experience that he could call on. He could not turn to the window, because he had already used that particular move, so he returned to his pacing, a few strides towards the bookcases, a pause, a turn back to Baindu. A few steps toward her after a short pause.
“My mission,” he said, “is keeping the peace as much as possible. That includes punishing wrongdoers when I can.” He managed to look completely serious when he said this. “These packages that are coming to me, including the one your people acquired and passed along, are evidence. Evidence of a crime against a very prominent woman.”
“Who?”
Sir gave her the name, and that was the end of their conversation. Baindu’s eyes flashed, and she was gone. Sir watched her leave, and hoped, for their sake, that the runners would have the packages in his hands soon. Since now there was yet another group who wanted them.
Chapter Eight
So, the Daughters were in one part of the city and some of them, later, are in another, and they are repeatedly engaged in conversations that are not particularly helpful to the blood pressure of anyone involved.
Cayman taps his toe on the ground in impatience—he really does this, which X-Prime always finds funny, because it makes him look like some old lady from a twentieth century 2D movie. Agbele Oku is not paying attention to these men, for she is engrossed by the conversation she is having with the Daughters of Yemaja, finding for the second time today that she is in the unfortunate position of trying to convince some Daughters that she is in fact a person of good intentions. Cayman wishes he could hear what she is saying to them, but she has been careful to keep her distance and her voice low, so he must wait and hope she is being useful.
You are fortunate to have me with you, then, because I am not burdened by the same restrictions as Cayman. I know the words that were said, and so you do not have to strain to hear them or act in ignorance. You only have to listen to me.
“You don’t need to worry about us,” Agbele Oku tells them. “We are on your side.”
“Really,” says the leader of the group, who introduced herself to Agbele Oku as Mariam.
“Yes. In fact, some of your people gave one of these boxes to us just a few hours ago. If you wanted to have it, your people should have kept it. But they gave it to us.”
“Yes. That was a mistake.”
“Then why did they do it?”
Mariam chose her words carefully, speaking slowly and evenly. “We have spent much of the day learning things we did not know. We are very careful about who we trust, but it seems we have not been careful enough.”
“That doesn’t really tell me anything,” Agbele Oku says.
Mariam’s expression does not flicker, and clearly Agbele Oku’s lack of understanding is not causing the Daughter any great pangs of guilt. Agbele Oku would love to use a spell, something that could help her get a better read on Mariam, but she does not doubt that each and every Daughter around her on the bridge is Awakened, and that anything she did would be noticed. That would not, of course, do much to help convince the Daughters that she is someone that can be trusted. She has kept a careful eye on Mariam’s aura, but all its blue-purple colors are telling her are that Mariam is Awakened and that she is calm. There was a brief flash of red before Mariam began talking vaguely about the things she had learned as the day had passed, but Agbele Oku would have been able to perceive the anger behind her level tones even if she had been blind, both astrally and physically.
“If it were up to me,” Agbele Oku says, “we would give you the box. But it’s not. There’s five other people, and they have a job to do, which is important to them, so they are not going to give up the box easily. We could fight over it, but why not look for some other way to help us both get what we want?”
“How will we do that, when what we want is the box?” Mariam quite reasonably asks, but there is a yellow tinge now to her aura, and Agbele Oku hopes that represents openness to discussion.
“Why do you want the box?” Agbele Oku asks.
“Because it contains something important to us.”
“Do you know what is in the box?”
Mariam pauses only slightly before answering. “No. Do you?”
“No,” Agbele Oku says—thankfully, the box the Daughters want is not the one that had already broken open, so her answer is the truth. “How do you know it is important?’
Again, the very careful tone appears. “We know someone who knows what is in the box, and that is what he told us.”
“Is this someone you can trust?”
There is another red flash, so brief that Agbele Oku must wonder if she actually saw it or if was just afterglow from the blink of her eyes. “No,” Mariam says. “In many respects, it is not. But in this respect, we think he is telling us the truth.”
“Can you tell me who this person is?”
“Absolutely not,” Mariam says, with no hesitation.
Agbele Oku feels the impatience of the other runners, and she worries that Halim might be preparing to attack at any moment, to use the virtue of surprise to offset the Daughters’ magical advantage. Both his face and his aura are calm, but she has looked at him when he is fighting and there is almost no change in the color of his aura—in fact, there are parts of it that become a richer, cleaner blue and green when he is fighting, showing that he is more at peace than he is at other times. So she cannot guess what he might be about to do.
She tries a new tack. “You don’t know what’s in the box, but you think it’s important. What’s important about it?”
“It is evidence of a wrong.”
“A wrong you want to correct,” Agbele Oku says, which is not that difficult of a guess because righting wrongs is a major preoccupation of the Daughters.
“A wrong we will correct,” Mariam says.
“And if we deliver the boxes to our employer as intended, you’re worried you’ll never know what this evidence was.”
Mariam nods.
“How soon do you need to know what is in the box? I know it is important to you, but can you wait to find out?”
Red and orange blaze quickly but brightly. “Justice should never have to wait.”
“Of course. But neither should payday. We’re delivering this package as soon as we can, and after that we’re done with it, and you can do whatever you want with it.”
“Who are you delivering it to?”
Mariam says that last line with a rapid nonchalance, but it does not fool Agbele Oku.
“You don’t want to reveal your contact, I don’t want to reveal my employer. Assuming I knew who it was, ultimately, which I don’t.”
“Then how do you know we will be able to do anything with the package once it is delivered? Maybe it will just disappear, and no one will ever see it again.”
“Then we’ll find out what’s in it for you, before we give it away.”
And that, sadly, after all the other lines, after all the things that are said that he does not hear, that is something that Cayman in fact hears, and he does not like it one bit.
“No!” he says, storming over, surrounded by dark, angry red. “We are doing this job right! No changes! No screw-ups! We’re not opening anything more!”
“Okay,” Agbele Oku says mildly. “Then we’ll sit here and negotiate for a while longer, maybe fifteen minutes or half an hour, and then maybe we won’t come to an agreement, and the Daughters will try to take the box by force, and we will have to kill them, and we’ll do our best not to die while we’re doing this. But that won’t change the mission, will it?”
She has not known Cayman long, only for this mission, but she has seen enough to know that he is pragmatic beyond any other impulse. She knows how he will respond, and she knows he will scowl when he does it.
And so he does. “Fine,” he says. “When we get to the Island, when we’re near the delivery point, if everything’s okay, we’ll take a peek. You can assense it, cast a spell on it, whatever. All right?”
“I think so,” Agbele Oku, and she turns to Mariam. “You won’t have to wait long, and you’ll find out what is in the box.”
“We’d learn more about it if we actually had it,” Mariam says, but aura or no aura, Agbele Oku knows how she is leaning.
“None of us gets just what we want,” Agbele Oku says, looking at Cayman and then Mariam. “But we all get something. What more could we ask for?”
Mariam looks Agbele Oku up and down, and she can feel the force of the other woman’s gaze, and she knows this is how a book feels when it is in the hands of an expert scholar. Then Mariam looks her in the eyes.
“We will find you soon,” she says. “And then you will tell us what you know.”
And then the deadlock is broken, and the Daughters walk one way, Agbele Oku and the others another way. No one has had to die, and Agbele Oku hopes there is some force in the universe, somewhere, that acknowledges that fact and credits her for it.
Chapter Nine
Three and a half hours before the bridge
And as I think about Agbele Oku walking away from the Daughters and feeling calm, I cannot help but feel that there is another conversation I should have related, that perhaps when I was telling the story of Akuchi and Agbele Oku in Alimosho, I should have continued it and told the story of Akuchi and Agbele Oku leaving Alimosho. They were eager to leave, because who would stay in Alimosho except the desperate, the insane, and the people who dearly love hideous bugs and the undead?
Akuchi wanted to take the same way out that he took in, but Alimosho has a way of changing underneath your feet—plants grow where they weren’t before, creatures crawl in new areas, and the movement of the sun across the sky casts light into new places and reveals dangers that you had overlooked before when you had passed by blithely without knowing how close you were to someone who would craved the taste of your flesh and was a half meter or less from being ready to claim you for their own. Not for any personal reason, of course, but for a deep and abiding hunger that comes when you crave something fresh in a district where everything is rotten.
He turned down the alley he thought had brought them there, then he had emerged onto one of the streets choked with vines and broken pavement, and he knew he was generally traveling in the right direction, but he cannot be sure how long it will take for him to get out or if he will run into dead ends, which is an unfamiliar feeling for someone who cannot see any image of intersecting lines without knowing which intersection in Lagos those lines resemble. But there were times, years ago, when most of what he did was improvisation, and those skills have not gone away, and he is not entirely displeased to have the chance to use them again.
There was a street that looked promising, broad and reasonably intact and heading east. But perhaps it was too promising, too broad, because if a street was taken too often, then there would be things attracted to it that wanted to encounter the things that used that road. So ahead of him, Akuchi saw a group of people-looking things, and they were moving slowly with their arms extended, and he knew they were shedim.
He had encountered shedim before, and he knew some of them find it strangely amusing to imitate zombies from trideos. And sometimes it was not just done for laughs—there are people who find the shedim morbidly fascinating, especially the shedim of Lagos, who have access to a full range of bodies, including those that have died violently or decomposed somewhat, and people approach them as hideous displays of anatomy in motion, where they can see muscles flexing as the shedim walk, and they come a little closer because they know that if anything bad happens, they can just run off, dash away from those slow trideo zombies, and then they get close enough and the shedim move at their normal speed, and there is no lurch or shamble to them, only hunger, and hunger helps make them faster.
So Akuchi was not fooled. He saw the shedim grouped to one side of the road, shuffling slowly ahead, making it look for all the world like he could just move to the road across from them and pass safely, and he knew that was the last thing he should do. He quickly turned the cycle so he could go back from where he came, and that was when the second group of shedim came out of a building behind him, and these ones were not putting on any act, they were running, ready to throw themselves in front of the bike, to do whatever it took to stop the cycle and get the fresh meat that was on top of it to hit the road so they could taste it.
Then there was a wall, coloring the air purple ahead of him, and it was right in front of the shedim, slowing them down. It was not there for long, they pounded it, and it was gone almost as quickly as it appeared, and the shedim were moving ahead, but there was a gap and Akuchi took it. He wasn’t going to admit he needed help, but at that moment he was grateful to have Agbele Oku on the cycle with him.
He could feel the road. The dark asphalt was warmer than the green leaves, and the leaves were smoother. He could feel rocks, he could feel rusted metal, he could even feel the odd squish of unidentifiable, rotten matter. None of it hurt, because he was feeling it with reinforced polyurethane, and blows that would hurt his other skin didn’t do anything to that. The tires gave him a rolling grab on the road, almost as if he was continually seizing the pavement and heaving the cycle forward on top of it, pushing left, edging right when he needed to. He had sensors giving him all sorts of information about his surroundings, but he didn’t bother to translate that information into some tacky visual interface. The data went right into his head so there were just things he knew, where to go, where to not go, things he knew even if he did not always exactly understand why he knew them.
He felt the shedim as he passed them, felt both pulled toward them and repelled away from them, but the inputs from his cycle were far more powerful than the juju the shedim tried to implant into his brain. They reached out as he wheeled by, he leaned, he felt Agbele Oku lean with him, and they were past.
He saw an alley, he turned into it, and there were bugs in the alley. Large ones, with smooth, hard brown backs and quivering antenna moving every direction at once. Maybe he could drive over them, maybe he couldn’t, but he did not need to worry about it because Agbele Oku had apparently decided she had enough. He felt a pulse of heat pass over his right shoulder, and when he drove over the bugs, crunching and squishing, they were on their backs with their legs twitching.
He came out of the alley and saw a street with an uncertain passage through twisted metal and spined plants, but even though it was not certain if the passage was in fact there, it was enough for Akuchi; he cut through the path and did not know everything he was avoiding but avoided it anyway. And soon the plants began to recede and the road began to clear and it was safe to talk. He made himself heard over the noise of the cycle’s engine.
“Have you ever had a whole group of people pissed at you before?”
“What?”
“The Daughters. They seemed like they might not be happy with you, and you didn’t seem to like that. Have you ever had a group like that pissed with you?”
“I am an Awakened woman in Lagos,” she said. “Many groups hated me as soon as I was born.”
“Yeah, but that’s hating you as a concept. What about hating you specifically? Personally?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Akuchi nodded. “It’s a first-time thing, then. Anytime you do something for the first time, you feel a little nervous. More than a little, if it’s a big thing. But then you survive, and when it happens again, you go in knowing that it’s a thing you can get through. That’s what will happen. The Daughters might be a little mad at you, but you’ll survive. The next time you have to cross a group, it won’t bug you as much.”
“Who says this is bugging me?”
“Your face. Your words. You were practically begging them to like you.”
