“I watch very little trid. I especially avoid fiction.”
“Fiction?” she exclaimed quietly. “ ‘Confessions’ is all true. They tell you so at the beginning of each episode.”
“If it’s real, why don’t any of the corporations mentioned ever appear on the world stock exchanges?”
“Why, you’re right. You’ve shattered my illusions,” Roe declared with mock seriousness.
“Somehow I doubt that.” She was trying to set him at ease and Sam was beginning to like her.
She smiled, dismissing her frivolity, but then her expression quickly became sober. “Seriously, though, my associate, Mr. Drake, and I are already arranging for an extraction. It would be little additional trouble to take you out at the same time.”
“I don’t know your principals. How do I know I want to work for them?”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m supposed to believe that you and this Mr. Drake are doing this out of the goodness of your hearts?” Sam asked skeptically.
“Of course not,” Roe smiled confidently. “We’ve got an angle just like everybody else. Our principals are paying the freight for the extraction. If we add you to it without telling them, you’re out for free. Then Mr. Drake and I work with you to get a corporate placement in another city, say, San Francisco. Once we arrange a nice new home for you, we get a finder’s fee from the corporation you join. It’s practically free credit.”
“I won’t compromise Renrako,” Sam said.
“You won’t have to, We’ll put it into the hiring contract. It’ll make the sale go a little harder, but it’s not impossible. You may have to settle for a slight drop in your standard of living.”
Sam suddenly realized that he had made his decision and was in the process of implementing it. The future was opening up. “If I can get on with my life, it’ll be worth it.”
“Then we have a deal?”
“Not so fast. I want to meet this Mr. Drake.”
She hesitated, but Sam thought that it was just for effect. “Sure. I’ll set up a meet for as soon as you can get away.”
“I thought Hanae told you that I can’t leave the arcology without a guard.” He tapped the continuous plastic band that encircled his wrist. Fine wires and flat chips could be discerned through the translucent surface of the screamer. “This will alert security should I trespass beyond the boundaries encoded in its memory. It cannot be removed without setting off an alarm, and the Renraku Security Directorate controls the ‘off’ switch. Your Mr. Drake will have to come here.”
“No good,” she said with a slight shake of her head. “The big guy can’t come in. You’ll have to wait until you’re out to meet him.”
From the hardening of her manner, Sam sensed the matter was not negotiable. “That’s not reassuring.”
“Do you want out or not?”
He did. He had walked too far down this path to turn back now. He just wasn’t sure that this was the best way. “Let me think about it.”
“Don’t think too long.” she warned. “I’ve got a schedule to meet.”
9
“Is it time?”
“No.
“But I’m getting hungry.” Petulance accompanied the statement.
“Soon, Tessien.”
Rainbow plumes rustled, colorless in Hart’s night vision as she watched the serpent settle its coils. With its wings folded against its sides and the great fanged head tucked under the left pinion, it soon resembled nothing more than an uneven pile of feathers. It was hardly camouflage. In the lane between warehouses of United Oil’s docking facility on Puget Sound. such a pile was even more out of place than a dracoform.
For all its uncharacteristic impatience, Tessien was a dracoform, one of a variety of creatures that laid claim to the powers of legendary Dragons. It-Hart was unsure of the beast’s gender-was of a type known as a feathered serpent, the most common of the greater dracoforrns in the western hemisphere. Stretched out, it would measure ten meters of feather-scaled muscle, and its wingspan matched its length. Tessien was a dangerous beast, and had been her partner for four years of shadow business.
She almost trusted it.
A soft beep from the box in her jacket pocket alerted her that someone had broken one of the sensor beams she had placed earlier that evening. A second beep of a different tone told her the vector on which the target was moving. She slipped her hand into her pocket to silence the receiver. Its sound could betray them before they sprang the ambush. Any additional information the sensor could give wasn’t worth that.
She glanced at the mirror she had propped across the lane to give her a view toward the main warehouse. Four figures were running away from the building, headed toward Hart and Tessien’s position. From their silhouettes, she judged them to be shadowrunners. Three men and a woman. A faint jingling came from the leader as amulets and talismans swayed and clashed on his chest, marking him either as a mage or a very superstitious fellow.
The faint sounds were drowned out as a group of United Oil security men poured from the warehouse. The slap of their boots pounding on the concrete covered the noise made by the fleeing intruders but that rhythmic sound was soon overwhelmed by the screeches of the brace of cockatrices they loosed on their prey.
Cockatrices were an avian paraspecies favored for security work because the animal’s touch could shock its prey’s nervous system into collapse, paralyzing an intruder for easy arrest by the paranimal’s handler. Of course, the handler must pull the cockatrice away before it dined on the helpless victim, but the multinationals didn’t worry much about a few trespassers unavoidably mauled or killed. It made for less trespassers These paranimals were eager, flapping their stubby wings and pumping their long legs as they devoured the ground separating them from the shadowrunners.
The lead cockatrice closed with the trailing runner. It leaped for its prey, going high to swing its long, scaled tail at the man. One touch would paralyze him, leaving him helpless as its claws ripped into him. The runner dodged left, away from the tail as it swung forward and missed him.
Hart pegged the runner as a razorgoy, one of those cybernetically enhanced punks who liked to call themselves street samurai and always seemed to be working as muscle for a shadowrunning team. It usually took a jacked-up nervous system to react so quickly and evade attacks so easily.
Steel glinted in the moonlight as a blade extended from the man’s forearm, confirming Hart’s guess. The samurai twisted as he moved, slicing his weapon into the animal’s flesh. It squalled and crashed to the ground.
The second beast engaged another runner, who desperately blocked its attacks with a boxy object that Hart recognized as a cyberdeck. Hell of a way to treat expensive technology.
Before the cockatrice could pierce the desperate runner’s guard, the samurai cancelled its options. He ripped several bursts of full automatic fire into the creature before raking his aim back to his first opponent and gutting it as it started to rise.
Hart noted that the samurai had not hit his partner as the muzzle of his weapon swung past. Smartgun link, she surmised.
“That one’s fast, Tessien,” Hart observed as she pointed out the street samurai. “Take him first.”