Shadowplay Read online

  Sly is a veteran. She’s run more shadows than she cares to remember, and has the physical and emotional scars to prove it. But no matter how violent it became, it had always been business as usual. Until now.

  Falcon is a kid. He thinks he hears the call of magic, and the voice of one of the Great Spirits seems to whisper in his ears. He’s gone to Seattle, to the urban jungle, to seek his calling.

  Thrown together, veteran and novice, Sly and Falcon find themselves embroiled in a deadly confrontation between the world’s most powerful corporations. If this confrontation is not stopped, it could turn to all-out warfare, spilling out of the shadows and onto the streets themselves.

  “KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT UNTIL I TELL YOU TO OPEN THEM,” SHE TOLD HIM SOFTLY. HE NODDED.

  “Breathe deeply.”

  He did so, drawing the warm smoke deep into his lungs. At first the membranes of his nose and throat burned and stung, but quickly the pain was replaced by numbness. The vapors seemed to fill his head - he could feel them billowing through his mind, interweaving themselves with his thoughts.

  “Breathe deeply,” Mary repeated, her voice sounding a million miles away. “Breathe steadily.” There was a sound in his ears. A quiet, musical humming. It's Mary, he realized. He felt a tingling in his fingertips and in his lips. Mary’s humming took on a faint ringing tone. He took another deep breath ...

  The universe opened around him. He heard himself gasp ...

  In alarm, he opened his eyes.

  But it wasn’t the grimy black room that he saw ...

  SHADOWRUN : 9

  SHADOWPLAY

  NIGEL FINDLEY

  To Fraser—This sure beats working, doesn’t it?

  Prologue

  A decker entombed in ice. One of those sights you hope never to see.

  All deckers are comrades, y’see. At some level, there’s a bond between us, even though we can end up on opposite sides of some particular issue, or shadowrun, or what have you. But put all that aside and there’s more kinship between us than between us and anyone else— wives, husbands, lovers, anyone. I mean, there’s us, who’ve seen the electron horizons of cyberspace, who’ve run the datalines of the Matrix, who’ve jacked a virtual reality directly into our brains. And then there’s everyone else . . .

  Anyway, I felt like drek when I saw him. The intrusion countermeasures—the ice—were all over him. I could just see his icon through the dark, translucent tentacles wrapping around him. A silver child, that’s what his icon looked like. A silver child being devoured by monsters.

  He was dying, I knew that. In the real world, it would have been over in an instant. In the Matrix the ice picks up the decker’s icon, then dumps its signal into his cyberdeck. The deck’s filters overload, pouring the signal through the datajack, straight into the decker’s brain. And then . . . Who knows? Convulsions, the kind strong enough to break his bones. Or his blood pressure spikes so high one of the vessels in his brain blows out. Or maybe his heart stops, just like that. Biofeedback, it kills you as quick and as sure as a bullet in the head.

  But in the Matrix time’s different, it runs much faster.

  In the Matrix I can see it happening. I can see him dying. And there’s not a fragging thing I can do about it.

  I'd decked into the Yamatetsu Corporation’s Seattle data core. An easy hack, really. Just pop in through the customer-service line. Yamatetsu markets telecommunications software, and one of their biggest selling points is that all you gotta do anytime you have trouble with a product is hook your computer system into theirs through the Matrix. They’ll fix the glitches for you on-line, even while you keep using the stuff. Frag, Yamatetsu actually advertises that capability as a sales hot-button.

  So that tells me there's got to be some connection between Yamatetsu’s development system and the local telecommunications grid. Not like those barbaric companies that are disconnecting themselves from the Matrix. So I cruise in on their support LTG number, smooth as silk. Of course, there’s some IC in the first node I come to. A barrier program and some light-duty trace and burn. Makes me laugh how easy I went through that.

  And then I’m into Yamatetsu’s development system. One more node, and I’m in their main corporate data core. The defense is about the same, mainly barrier and trace and burn programs, with a little blaster thrown in for good measure. I go past that so sweet and smooth the corp deckers will never spot me even if they review the whole network log. I’m a ghost.

  That’s as far as I needed to go. All I really wanted were the personnel records. My contract was to pull up any dirt I could find on the executive vice-president, a slitch named Maria Morgenstern. I had to deal with some minor-league ice on the personnel files, of course, and if it took me a millisecond to slip by it, I wasn’t up to my usual game.

  I downloaded the file, dumped it into the memory chips in my head, and that was it. Contractual obligation discharged. I could have jacked out then and there with everything I came after.

  But, you know, what the frag? My contract was to scope out Morgenstern top to bottom. But here I was in the main data core of a corp with a really solid rep in the telecom field. Who knows, maybe I could scoop something to sell on the shadow market. As long as I didn’t totally hose up and alert the system that I’d been having my way with it, any collateral loot I scammed was all mine, that’s what my contract says. So, I figure, I’ll just sashay over to the research and development files, and see if there’s anything worth grabbing that’s not bolted down. I backed on out of the personnel files, wiping my tracks as I went. . . .

  And that’s when I saw the decker entombed in the ice. I knew he hadn’t been in the node the last time I came through, so it had to be that he’d tried to cut and run from another node. The black ice that was killing him must have followed and caught him here.

  Like I said, there was nothing I could do but watch. The black tentacles of the ice were wrapped around his perfect silver body, and were starting to squeeze. Nasty stuff, this ice. The decker should have jacked out as soon as he saw it coming. I know I would have. I recognized it right away as something from Glacier Tech—one of the “Beltway Bandits,” out of Provo in the Ute Nation, the premiere ice programmers on the continent.

  But he hadn’t jacked out, probably thinking he’d hang tough and scrap it out with the ice. Bad choice. Even Seattle’s decker varsity would have a tough go against Glacier Tech black ice, and the silver child sure wasn’t on the hot list. If he’d been a burner, I’d have recognized his icon.

  That’s when I should have turned away, gone on about my business or just jacked out. But I couldn’t do it. I admit it, it was sick fascination that kept me there, the kind of grim curiosity that keeps you watching even when something turns your stomach. I kept my distance, staying to the further reaches of the node, but I watched.

  And the silver child saw me there. He turned his shining eyes on me, and I know he recognized me for what I was—not part of the system that was killing him, but somebody like him, a free decker. A spectator. He must also have known I couldn’t help him. But how would it make you feel, someone watching you die?

  That was when I turned to go, wanting to bug out of that node and make best possible speed for the R and D files, then get the hell out of Dodge. As I did, though, I saw the silver boy move. Something had appeared in his hand, a program construct that looked like a golden apple. Even with the ice tentacles squeezing him, he managed to move his arm and throw the apple toward me.

  For an instant, I thought the ice might shoot out another tentacle and pick off the construct. But no, the apple kept sailing over to me, and I reached to snatch it out of the air.

  As soon as my icon touched it I knew it was a data file. Lots of data, too, a hundred megapulses or more, despite t
he size of the construct. It also was locked and encrypted. I could feel that instantly. Was the file what the decker had been after—what had got him killed? glanced back toward the dying decker, but he was gone. His icon had vanished, which meant that in the real world—the world where his meat body was jacked into a cyberdeck—he was dead as a side of beef. As I watched, the tentacles unwrapped themselves and started questing my way. considered trying for the R and D files anyway—if I was fast, I could stay far enough ahead of the ice to make it—then decided against it. The ice had caught the silver child, crushed the life out of him. I wasn’t ready to let it do the same to me.

  Sometimes discretion’s the better part, and all that drek. I jacked out.

  PART 1

  Prelude to War

  1

  2025 hours, November 9, 2053

  Sly settled back in her chair. The diminutive decker whose face filled the vidscreen of her telecom—Louis, his name was—had just finished his story. His voice was as impersonal as ever and his face equally expressionless. But Sly could tell from his body talk, if not from his voice, that seeing the decker dying in the ice had really slotted him up emotionally.

  And who wouldn’t be slotted up? she thought. Running into black ice—getting killed by it—was an ugly reality of the decker’s world. Every time a decker put his brain on the line and jacked into the worldwide computer Matrix, he risked running into some intrusion countermeasures program that was just too tough. Risked having his brain burned out—“slagged down,” to use the argot currently in vogue among deckers—or getting flatlined by some kind of lethal biofeedback. That was just business as usual, no more remarkable than the risks a mage took when evoking a powerful elemental, or a street samurai playing bodyguard for a hot target. Among deckers, it was bad form to talk about ice, except in technical terms or when telling war stories, or bragging about a major score. It didn’t matter that Sly wasn’t a decker anymore. The protocol would never change. The fact that Louis had described the death of the silver child in such detail revealed just how much it had disturbed him.

  She could understand why, of course. For most deckers, death by ice was something that happened “off-stage.” If you were the one that got geeked, you’d obviously not be around to tell about it. And if someone else got the chop-decking being a very solitary profession—you’d only hear about it long after the fact, when Joe Schmoe didn’t show up at his usual haunts anymore. To see it actually happening and to know you couldn’t do anything about it . . . Sly suppressed a shudder. She’d hardened herself to most of the ugly details of life and death in the Awakened world, but seeing the icon of another decker constricted in the tentacles of black ice would have shaken her up, too.

  Sharon Louise Young—street handle “Sly”—was careful to keep her own facial expression just as stony. Showing weakness wasn’t part of the protocol either, particularly when talking to someone she’d hired to do a job, and would probably hire again. Part of the game of being a “Mr. Johnson”—one who hires shadowrunners to operate in the dark wainscoting of society—was maintaining an ice-cold façade. (Not always possible, of course, but definitely something to aim for.) She shifted in her chair, trying for a more comfortable position, then stretched a mild kink out of her spine.

  That brought a frown of displeasure, quickly wiped from her face. Sly knew she wasn’t so young anymore, but why did her body have to keep reminding her of the ugly fact? She kept her tall, lean form in good shape, her muscles in tone, with daily exercise. She was still as strong, as fast, as she’d ever been—or at least so she told herself. But there was no denying that she was thirty-three, no, thirty-four, her birthday had been two weeks before. A hard workout—or a particularly strenuous shadowrun—more and more often left her with a backache. And her left knee, which she’d blown out some years back when taking the quick way to the street from a third-story window, had a tendency to throb when it was raining. Which it did in Seattle nearly all the fragging time, of course. Physically speaking, she could still do anything that she did fifteen years ago—plus all her experience making her much more competent than she’d been at nineteen—but there was no denying it took her longer to recover afterward.

  Sly knew she was still attractive. Her hair and skin were dark, and she had high, well-defined cheekbones— a legacy of her grandfather’s Nootka heritage. In contrast, her eyes were bright green, thanks to the Irish blood of her “male biological donor”—she refused to label the fragging bastard “father” even to herself. The overall look was, she knew, unusual, and enough men to represent a statistically valid sample had told her it was alluring. Sure, she had her share of scars. What shadowrunner didn’t? But most were in places that only particularly close friends would ever see. She had one facial blemish—a short white scar that bisected her right eyebrow, courtesy of a grenade fragment—but it was far from disfiguring. . . .

  She ruthlessly cut off that line of thought. Waste of time, she scolded herself. Work first, vanity later.

  The face of Louis the decker was still on the screen. “So you got the paydata on Morgenstern?” she asked.

  “I said I did, didn’t I?”

  Sly didn’t like Louis. It wasn’t just his manner but his appearance that bothered her on some really deep level. He was a trisomy 11. Thanks to some freak accident of cell division, either his father’s sperm or his mother’s egg had carried two copies of chromosome 11, not the usual one, which meant that the zygote—the fertilized egg— that would eventually become Louis the decker had three copies of chromosome 11, not the normal two. Trisomy was a rare but well-studied genetic abnormality that carried with it a certain suite of physical impairments: retarded growth, a weak cardiovascular system, limited motor coordination, and a phenotype or appearance that reminded Sly uncomfortably of an anthropomorphic slug. It also led to mental impairment. The brain of a trisomy was generally unable to attend to the important features of the environment, unable to extract the “signal”—what the person wanted to concentrate on—from the background “noise”—everything else impinging on the senses. Usually this led to the arresting of the victim’s mental development at a level not much higher than a newborn baby’s.

  That hadn’t happened with Louis, of course. His parents, who were frighteningly rich, had known about the genetic abnormality even before his birth, and had approached the problem in the only way they knew how: by throwing money at it. Almost as soon as Louis was born, and long before his infant skull had hardened to a normal bony consistency, they’d had a tiny datajack implanted in his infant brain. Specialists had hooked this datajack to a suite of sophisticated computers that fed a virtual reality—similar to but distinct from the consensual hallucination that was “life” in the Matrix—into his mind. The computers had “perceived” the world through microphones and trideo cameras, and had electronically handled the problems of attention and distinguishing between “signal” and “noise” that Louis’ own brain would not have been capable of doing. With this electronic assistance, Louis had managed to avoid the mental impairment typical of other trisomy 11s. In fact, his mental capabilities had probably advanced even faster than a normal child’s.

  At the time, some eighteen years before, Louis had become a kind of media darling. The trideo had featured him in several programs, and researchers had published dozens of papers on his progress and the philosophical questions it raised. Most people who saw these shows or skimmed the literature hadn’t really understood what was going on. Frequent re-tellings of Louis’ story on “tabloid-style” news shows had embellished matters until the facts became distorted into a kind of urban myth: “Child Grows Up in Matrix.” (Actually, Sly had heard rumors that there actually were children who’d been raised entirely in the Matrix. But, strictly speaking, Louis wasn't one of them.)

  Eventually, Louis had graduated to the real Matrix, developing his skills as a decker. Even so, he was still a trisomy 11. Without extreme medical intervention—again paid for by his parents—his hear
t would have worn out and his whole cardiovascular system collapsed before he was fifteen. He still needed the assistance of significant computing power (now implanted directly into his small skull) to focus his attention properly. And his sole interface with the real world was through a bulky pair of goggles consisting of miniaturized video cameras and stereo microphones that he wore on his flat face and that plugged into his datajack. Physically, he was almost totally incapacitated. He lived his entire life in a special life-support wheelchair that he controlled mentally through a modified vehicle control rig.

  On top of that, he’d come away with a deep-seated addiction to the Matrix. Only when he was jacked in and running the electron environment of cyberspace was he truly alive. He’d once told Sly that anytime he wasn’t decking was just waiting.

  Sly regarded Louis’ small, ugly face on her telecom screen, struggling to keep from showing her distaste. It didn’t matter that she found his appearance revolting, and his personality—predictably warped by his upbringing and nature—even worse. He was a drek-hot decker, no one could deny that.

  Most of the time he worked as a Matrix “hired gun” for many Seattle corporations. But he still had time left over to do shadow work for people he liked. And—for whatever reason—he liked Sly. Ever since giving up decking herself, she'd hired him on more than a dozen occasions in the last several years. Never for anything really sensitive, of course: she didn’t trust him that much. For really critical projects she chose other deckers. Perhaps not as skillful as Louis, but good enough.

  She sighed. “Sorry, Louis,” she said, “You’re right. You did get the paydata. Are you ready to transfer?”

  He gave her a slack-lipped smile. “You got it. Ready to receive?”

  She hit the appropriate keys on her telecom, opening a capture file. The moment she gave him the go-ahead, he spewed the contents of Maria Morgenstern’s personnel file down the dataline. Sly opened a second window on the screen, watched with satisfaction as it filled with text. Good, he got it all. That was one thing about Louis, he was always thorough. No incomplete files, no garbled data. No doubt he’d already gone through the information and corrected any errors that may have crept into the file.