Shadowboxer (3 page)
“I told you that someday I would repay the great debt I owe for all that you and your associates did for me that bloody night,” said Savoriano, her words echoing slightly above the muted sea. Laura heaved a sigh, feeling better and better by the second. Yes, that had been the worst run of her life until tonight. And the financial repercussions of the matter were still, even years later, shaking the higher echelons of the megacorp world back in Japan. It was reason numero uno why she and Blackjack had come to Miami, here in the Caribbean League. Even the long arm of a megacorp like Fuchi sometimes found it hard to find a wedge into this association of local governments, pirates, cartels, corporations, and anyone else who happened to own land—mostly islands—in this part of the world. Everyone with the least bit of power always seemed to be struggling for power over everyone else, and the only thing they all seemed to agree on was hatred of Aztlan.
“We did what seemed right,” Laura demurred, not wanting to take credit for some selfless noble action. The deed had taken only a moment and seemed a good idea at the time. The enemy of my enemy and all that good ol' drek.
“You did it alone,” beamed the spirit—literally, almost blindingly so. Gulls near the shoals shrieked in response and flew away with more loud screams of annoyance. “And so I have watched for these many years to find a way, any chance to return the great releasing.”
Ah, her stomach went icy even as Laura felt a flush spread over her face. “The sharks.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact. Brought back from the dead? Reassembled like a model car? Holy drek.
“Dead is dead, beyond even my abilities,” answered the fading being. “But wounds can be healed, no matter how terrible, as long as the holy meat and the precious spark of life still remains.”
“Wounds?” barked the bedraggled decker, in sudden fury. “Those fragging goldfish ate my legs!”
“Your flesh was shredded, but not removed,” whispered Savoriano, the ocean vista behind her slightly visible through her form. The mana was as bright as ever, but the shape inside was dissolving. “Energy is matter, even as mana is life. You have been healed. Now I am free even of you, blessed liberator.”
The light brightened, and the spirit was gone. The nimbus of magical energy hung empty in the air. Sea spray from the waves passed through the glow unhindered, wetting Laura’s face.
“Farewell, my friend,” whispered the winds even as the light dimmed with the coming of the dawn. Alone on her clean patch of sand, Laura Redbird opened and closed her perfect hands, watching the scarless fingers flex and move as if she really was a newborn discovering for the first time what those things were at the end of her wrists. Torn into soyburger and then healed by an act of kindness inspired by something that had happened over a decade ago. Life was too strange for words.
Waves crested over her bare feet, bringing back the chill and a metacrab the size of a salaryman’s hat scuttling out of the froth to see if she was alive or dead. Blasted tide was coming in. The pale orange crustacean snapped its twin claws about in the air, its bulbous eyes supported on ridiculous bouncy stalks. It was a silly-looking thing, and fooled a lot of newbies. Its claws could cut steel, its mouth chewed concrete, and they liked to eat the damnedest odd things. And once they got hold of you, you either blew their heads
off or died. They never let go. Only good point was that the
crabs seemed to be especially fond of devil rats, which brought them a lot of goodwill from the locals.
Kicking at the ten-legger, which sent it scuttling off to find easier prey, Laura turned from her birthing spot and began to stride across the beach. Out here, beyond the great adamantine ferrocrete barrier that separated the luxury resorts from the public beach, the local prison didn’t use prisoners to hand-clean the sand every night so that the tourists had a nice place to lay down their fat bodies and get tan in the free sun. The only fragging thing free in this town. The locals could fend for their own amid the corporate filth. Off in the distance, she could see the shining towers of downtown rising high above the rainbow neon ribbon of the monorail that encircled Miami proper.
Reaching a battered wooden ramp that led to the boardwalk next to the elevated road, Laura started climbing. Reaching the boardwalk, she headed southward for downtown and the nearest cab stand. First things first. She had to get to the rendezvous point at the old warehouse and locate Blackjack. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see her!
* * *
Dawn was tinting the horizon pink as Erika Johnson drove the Caravaner along the Miami canal toward downtown. She maintained the speed limit religiously, despite the many blast craters and pot holes. Just as she rounded a curve near the desalinization plant, a barricade of overturned cars momentarily slowed her, the hungry gang awakening to the possibility of fresh meat.
Calmly, almost amused, Erika radically shifted gears and wheeled into an alley. Garbage, both human and food, lined the passageway as one of those groups frantically jumped out of her way. A single shot hit the rear of the Caravaner and musically ricocheted off the military armor plating hidden by the artistically bad paint job. No further rounds came her way, the locals merely shouting their displeasure at the unseen driver’s rank callousness.
Rejoining traffic heading to the west, she rode along with all the other various vehicles—limos, sports coupes, rusted wrecks looking like her own, and lots of remote-controlled semis, some with, but most without, their lights on. This was supposedly an industrial section of town, but from the reports she’d seen the prime activity here was smuggling. Several go-gangs of norms and trolls roared by on their gleaming bikes, talismans and scalps flailing in the wind.
Streetlights lined the road, the twenty-meter posts topped
with wire-reinforced quartz lenses that offered only feeble
illumination down from the sheer distance so necessary to keep the locals from shooting out the lights. The weak glare was tinted gray by the inner-city smog and general miasma of the decaying streets. The pink of the dawn was slowly turning yellowish when all of the streetlamps winked out, officially heralding the city’s declaration that day was here.
They were wrong as usual. Or maybe just saving a few kilowatts, cheap bastards.
Standing forgotten on debris-piled corners was the occasional Lone Star callbox, the panic button showing only as dangling wires. Nobody here wanted the law; it only got in the way of making a few nuyen. And justice, like everything else in the Awakened world of returned magic, was something you made yourself or did without.
Turning onto a side street, Erika now headed south, deeper into the heart of the urban sprawl. Every window was barred or boarded. Tattooed joyboys and garish slotmachine girls called out for anybody’s trade at this hour, while grim people in ballistic dusters and metahumans of assorted types in steel-studded leather coats jostled for supremacy on the littered sidewalks. Simsense parlors and the mandatory rock bars sprouted every few meters, each louder than the one before, or so it seemed to her disgust. Graffiti tried its best to hide the filth on the walls of the buildings and few stores.
The Miami sprawl embraced much of what used to be the Million Dollar Mile along the Gold Coast, going in all the way to Coral Gables. But times changed, as they always do, and now the majestic hotels were half-empty, become hives of chippers and organleggers. Ratnests for gutterkin, squatters, and gangers who preyed upon those too hopeless or too weak from hunger to fight back effectively.
The Overtown DMZ, home of the desperate and doomed. This place should be burned to the ground, Erika Johnson thought for the thousandth time. Painful memories of her own childhood in such a demilitarized zone flashed momentarily, but she forcibly shoved them back down among the rest of her scarred youth. She was out now and never going back. Except for work, of course. Here, where the law was afraid to tread, a sharp operator could make a fortune and
eventually retire someplace clean. If there was someplace
clean anymore. Outside of the corporate enclaves.
Westside blackness marked the middle of the next block, where a series of street lamps were out. As the Caravaner neared, the lamps burst into life, sending dozens of denizens scurrying toward less prominent locations of visibility. Rolling the Caravaner onto the broken curb, Johnson drove straight for the closed doors of a garage. The louvered portal opened before her and shut immediately after, so fast not even an elf with wired reflexes could have followed her. A few ticks later, a sleek black Mitsubishi Jaguar rolled out the other side of the garage onto the next street over. At the wheel a raven-haired woman sporting a blue silk Majeure scarf gunned her vehicle and screeched with smoking tires off for uptown proper, classic Queen blaring from the sixteen tandem speakers.
Reaching 95, Johnson was klicks away, tooling for Opa-Locka, when an explosion tinted the horizon and orange flames tongued the night sky. A glance at her digital. Exactly on schedule. Everything was going fine tonight. This had been the third attempted raid by her shadowrunner teams on the Miami complexes of the Shatogunda Corporation and was the last needed. The first infiltration had occurred via the Matrix and had sent Shatogunda troops scurrying to protect three locations: a downtown office on East Fifty-seventh Street, an underground laboratory in the swamp, and one shoreside warehouse. The second had been a magical penetration by a shaman, which sent the Shatogunda wagemages rushing to protect four radically different locations, two of them repeats from the first time. Tonight’s physical sortie relied heavily on armed guards to rush and protect five points—only one of them a repeat from the other raids. Done and done. Now she knew where the main datastore for Shatogunda was located, and she could use that information in any of a hundred different ways that would all result in her acquiring a lot of nuyen. And power. Always more power.
Sirens from firefighters foolish enough, or brave enough, to challenge the sprawl, screamed in the distance when the thundering music abruptly stopped as the telecom system of the car bleeped for her attention. She stared in mild curiosity at the communications unit below her automatically paused chip-player. At this hour? Pressing a button gave her a garbled read-out of the caller’s number on a small liquid crystal display. It was from the executive offices of the Gunderson Corporation. At this hour? Keying the access code, Erika activated the speaker unit.
“Johnson here,” she said, lighting a cigarette with one hand while steering through the thickening traffic with the other.
“James Harvin,” replied the unseen caller.
Erika stared at her descrambler, the monitor verifying that this was her boss and not a VR simulation. It was fairly rare tech, but Erika herself used just such a simulation when working on her own side deals. When using her VR simulation with callers, she looked and sounded like a grizzled old norm who looked and talked straight off the street.
“Sir!” she said. “What a pleasant surprise. How may I assist you this evening?”
“What I need from you is important,” he said, “And confidential.”
“Of course,” Erika said. She was ambitious, but not glitched. Gunderson Corporation owned Miami, and as far as Erika Johnson was concerned, that meant they owned her too. James Harvin was Gunderson’s CEO.
“Good,” said Harvin. “I always count on you, Erika.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. It wasn’t like him to beat around the bush like this.
“Let me ask you something, Erika,” he said finally. “How much do you know about a place, or a person, called IronHell?”
Only an hour after opening this morning, the mixed crowd of laughing locals at Walt’s Crypt were thick as fleas on a dead gutterpunk, moving irregularly over the smooth ice of the oval rink, going round and round. Sitting comfy in his office, Adam Two Bears watched the patrons on the other side of the huge Armorlite bulletproof window struggle to stay upright, while kids over at the counter happily munched on ice cream cones dished out by his nephew and niece, and a score of oldsters just sat on benches sucking up the AC and luxuriating. It was going to be another blistering day in Miami, and that meant lots of biz.
What a gold mine this place was, Two Bears complimented himself proudly. Walt’s Crypt had started as a dodge to hide his income as a fixer and from doing the occasional shadowrun here in Miami, but the damn thing took off and now was so profitable that Two Bears hadn’t personally done a run for years. Last one was against the Brick Boys, a neighborhood gang who thought they could claim his place as private turf. But Two Bears wanted Walt’s Crypt as strictly neutral territory, and after he did some corrective knee surgery on several of the Bricks with his fave sledgehammer, the go-gang saw the wisdom of his position and all had been arctic since. He and the bloody five-kilogram sledge were a tough combination to reason with. Or escape from. The stainless steel lady had never failed him yet as a precise negotiating tool.
“Well, chummer?” prompted the Johnson, his gruff visage filling the old telecom sitting on the corner of his macroplas desk. The screen was angled so that any callers only saw Two Bears sitting before the smooth blank wall behind him, not the rink beyond the office window. “Do you know anything about it, or not?”
“Iron hell?” repeated Adam Two Bears, scratching his head. Self-consciously, he patted his thinning hair back into place trying to hide his growing bald spot.
The grizzled norm on the telecom screen scowled impatiently. “It’s one word. IronHell.”
