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  Wall ahead. I hang a skidding, squealing right, and we’re running parallel to the long side of the warehouse. Not particularly where I want to be. At the next lane I hang another right.

  And there’s an FRT trooper standing directly in my path. For an instant he’s frozen there in the lights looking like he’s facing down an Angel of the Lord, then he’s flinging himself aside. I think I tag his boot-heel as we go by. I flip him the finger, even knowing he won’t see it. (Probably won’t see anything but afterimage for the next couple of minutes.) A hard left, and we’re heading down the centerline of the building. The big up-and-over door’s right ahead—closed, of course—so I push the pedal to the metal again and brace for impact. I hear Paco yelp as he sees what’s coming, and I second the emotion. The door looms up, reflecting entirely too much of our own light back into my face.

  We hit the door at sixty klicks or so, and through we go. The only thing that keeps me in my seat is my death-grip on the wheel. Something goes squish-pop in my left wrist and it feels like someone’s set fire to my thumb, but I’ve got other things to worry about. My cargo, for one. Paco and a couple of crates of rifles come forward at high speed, and suddenly I have to deal with company in the driver’s compartment. Some of the metal from the door’s still plastered across the front of the Bulldog so I can’t see squat, and we’re still taking fire from somewhere. We bounce off something—the way this night’s going, it’s probably a fragging Citymaster, or maybe a panzer—but at least the impact removes the metal blocking my view. (The windshield, too, but you can’t have everything.)

  Now I can see where I am, and I don’t like it. The warehouse parking lot’s full of Lone Star patrol cars, all with their pretty lights flashing and sparking. From the number of vehicles, I’d guess we’re dealing with at least two FRT squads. (Two-plus combat guns. Glad I didn’t know that earlier.) Figures scurry around as we tear out onto 144th Avenue, and a couple of cars are firing up for the pursuit.

  Time to make a call. I reach for the radio, but Paco distracts me with a “Whafuck?” or some other pithy comment. He’s already dazed by his abrupt visit to the front of the truck, and not tracking well, so I cold-cock him. Then I place my call. I suppose my radio manner is a little lacking in professionalism, but—to quote the sleeping Paco— Whafuck?

  It takes a while, but eventually the message filters through channels to the right ears. The lights and sirens on our ass turn off, and we’re alone on the streets of Kent.

  About fragging time, too.

  2

  Ranger, the Cutters’ war boss, isn’t happy, but then he rarely is. He claims to be third-generation Cutters, which makes him a real rarity, a gang member whose father and grandfather both managed to live long enough to have kids. Or maybe he’s just lying through his teeth, with the smart money on the bulldrek side of the equation. He’s sitting in his “office,” actually a sparsely furnished room upstairs in the Cutters’ Ravenna safehouse, on Thirty-sixth Avenue Northeast, a block from the Calvary Cemetery. He’s got his Doc Marten drek-stompers up on a table, and he’s giving me and Paco the evil eye out from under his heavy black mono-brow.

  “Three crates,” he bitches. “Three fragging crates out of a dozen, that’s all you bring back. Plus you lose us eight soldiers, and the warehouse is blown. Good night’s work, Larson.”

  “They can’t trace any of the drek in the warehouse back to us,” I point out reasonably. The Cutters, like all first-tier gangs, learned long ago the wonders of shells, fronts, and holding companies.

  “Frag the trace,” he barks. He pounds a fist down on the table and his half-kilo of bracelets, and bangles clatter like scrap metal. “The Star’s going to suspect, and they’re going to be watching the place, right?” I nod. He’s right, that’s just what the Star’s going to do. “So you blew us the warehouse, drekhead,” he finishes.

  Sometimes the tech in my head seems to know I'm mad before I do. This is one of those times. I feel the touch of the wire, feel the i-face reaching out for the circuitry of my H & K (which, of course, is somewhere else). And I realize the wire would like to kill Ranger, and so would I.

  But I bite back on the sudden anger. Out the corner of my eye I see Paco shifting from foot to foot. He’s not mad, he’s embarrassed or scared, and that just seems to fan my anger.

  Somehow I keep it under control, though. “What were we supposed to do?” I ask, as coolly as I know how. “There was no tail on us. We set out the watchers, and I had Katrina jacked into the surveillance system. There was no sign of trouble.” I shrug. “Then suddenly we’re dealing with two Lone Star FRT squads. Eight of us against ... what? ... twenty of them?” Twenty-four, actually, according to Lone Star SOP, but not a smart thing to mention. “They’ve got armor and heavy weapons, we’ve got fragging popguns.” The anger’s building, so I bite back on it again. “The way I see it, we’re lucky we made it out with even three crates and the Bulldog.”

  Ranger looks away. He knows I’m right, but he’s got to have someone to blame. If me and my team didn’t frag it up, then it will look like he was at fault for not sending enough troops or for fragging up in security. He knows I’m not going to back down and be the convenient little scapegoat, and he hates me for it. Well, tough drek and cry me a fragging river. “So how the frag do we fulfill the weapons order, tell me that?” he carps.

  “We don’t,” I answer simply.

  “Tell the . . .”—I almost say “the Sioux,” which would lead to considerable ugliness— “ . . . tell the clients tough drek. Or just tell them to keep it in their pants for a couple of weeks while we make another connection.”

  I shrug again. “And it’s not our concern anyway, is it?” I ask. “Let the slags in biz development eat the loss. It’s their action.”

  Ranger clouds up again, and I realize that somehow the Sioux deal is actually his action, and the hose-up has cost him bad—money or rep, or maybe both. Which is interesting. The Cutters are compartmentalized. There’s a . . . well, call it a “division”—since some of the members like pretending the gang’s a corp anyway—that handles business deals like the Czech rifles. The war boss and his soldiers provide security, but it’s kind of like interdepartmental loans of resources. Normally, Ranger wouldn’t give a flying frag about the loss of the rifles or the warehouse, and he would simply write off the loss of Fraser, En, and the rest as business-as-usual attrition of his personal empire.

  So why does he give a frag? Were the Sioux hotheads supposed to use those ARs for something besides a little lighthearted antigovernment terrorism? Something that’s important to Ranger as the Cutters war boss? I could guess, but guessing isn’t my job—it’s knowing. Knowing, and passing the word to the right people.

  Ranger’s still glowering and fragging near gnashing his teeth, and my wire still wants to kill him. So I tell him, “Look, chummer, if it’ll make you feel any better to hear me say I’m sorry, well, frag, I’m sorry. Mea maxima culpa and all that horsedrek. But remember I got three crates of rifles, the Bulldog, and two able-bodied solders”—I indicate me and Paco—“out of a fragging untenable position. If you think anybody else could have done a better job against a double FRT squad, then I’d like to hear about it.”

  Again I’m telling the truth, and again Ranger purely doesn’t want to hear it. But he can’t call me on it, and that makes him even madder. Sure, I could have toadied and kissed hoop, but where’s the percentage in that? Ranger hates me anyway—I’ve known that for a while—so brown-nosing wouldn’t buy me anything on that front, and it’d lose me respect from Paco. This way, I’ve edged Ranger a hair closer to doing something terminal to me, while making sure as frag Paco’s going to tell his chummers how Rick Larson stood up to the war boss and made him eat it. And that’s going to buy me bolshoi face among the troops. Looks like a bargain to me.

  “Anything else?” I ask, shading my voice into that gray area between confidence and insolence.

  “Get the frag out of my sight,” Ranger bar
ks, and I guess there isn’t.

  Outside in the hall, I feel Paco wants to say something. I stop and turn to him. He’s a young guy. Thin, stands just shy of two meters, and has jet black hair. When wearing his tough face, he could be in his mid-twenties, but I happen to know he’s only seventeen or so. Hard little cobber for all that. From what I hear, he grew up in the barrios of East L.A., started running with the local Latino gangs and earned his three dots—tattooed in the saddle between left thumb and forefinger—when he was eleven. Then he graduated to the South Central Cutters a year later. He came up here to Seattle two years ago. Nobody knows why and Paco won’t talk about it, but he’s been carving out a niche for himself ever since. With five years in the Cutters, he’s one of the veterans. Give him ten years and he’ll be war boss ... if he lives that long.

  But right now he wants to say something. “Yeah?” I ask. He won’t meet my eyes. “Just wanted to say thanks, ’mano,” he mumbles. “For not leaving.”

  I wave it off. “Zero that,” I tell him. His gratitude embarrasses me—he may have capped a dozen people, like his rep says, but in some ways he’s still a kid. We walk in silence a few more steps, heading for the stairway down. Then I say conversationally, “Ranger’s sure got his pecker in a knot about those rifles. Almost like he’s on the line for something.”

  Paco picks up on it right away. He grins like a jackal. “Be kinda nice to know why, huh, ’mano?” he says quietly. “Always good to have an edge.”

  I shrug, but inside I’m smiling. Sharp kid. He got the point immediately. He thinks I’m angling to finesse Ranger, and that I’m after some kind of leverage. Let him think that. He also thinks he’s in my debt, and probably figures he can pay it off by finding out what Ranger’s percentage was in the Sioux deal. A win-win deal: he frees himself of a debt to me, and I learn what I want to know with no risk to my personal skin. I wish it always worked that way.

  I check my watch, not surprised to see how late it is. Just past 0400. I’m scragged to the bone and my mouth tastes like something died in there. What I want most in the world at this moment is a bed—even an empty one—but there’s still biz to be done, still an unspoken agreement to seal with Paco. I slap the ganger on the shoulder. “It’s Miller time."

  "Echo that,” he grins.

  3

  I’ve never been to a full-on Cutters council of war before, and it’s got Ranger totally bent to see me at this one. I’m nominally one of his boys, a mere lieutenant whose only job should be to liase between the street monsters of the Cutters’ rank and file, and him and the other rarefied upper echelons of the gang. But lately I’ve been. . . . moonlighting, you could call it, working with other high-ups in the hierarchy, generally making myself as indispensable as possible. I started off slow with the social chameleon drek, something that always came easy even before my extensive training. Whenever you meet someone import, the general idea is to feed back exactly what that person wants to see or hear. If the cobber likes people who show they’ve got big brass ones, I lay on the bravado and the machismo. If he likes people who think before they act, I hit him with a well thought-out plan for avoiding Lone Star entanglements on certain operations. Etcetera etcetera drekcetera. From there it’s just a matter of doing gofer work for them when they need it—no job too large, no job too small—until they come to trust me and eventually depend on me as a kind of unofficial advisor. That’s how I worked my way up to become one of Ranger’s lieutenants. Once there, and at least partially secure in my position, I was free to branch out.

  So that’s how I come to be here in the “ops room” of the Cutters. Ranger would probably rather lose his left nut then see me here, but the war boss doesn’t have the juice to contradict Vladimir and the Deer shaman Springblossom—two Cutters top dogs who specifically requested my presence.

  The ops room is in the basement of the Cutters’ biggest safe house—the one on South 164th Street, right under the final approach for the transpacific suborbitals. It’s a dark and stuffy place with no ventilation to clear away the smoke from Springblossom’s super king-size Menthol Ultra-Js—which she chain-smokes to “feel the spirits.” Yeah, right. The way I feel just from breathing her side-stream smoke, it’s a wonder anybody can make a sensible decision down here.

  The centerpiece of the room is a corp-style board-room table—a real high-tech model whose mahogany top is inset with flatscreen displays and datajack sockets at each place, tri-D display facilities, and enough number-crunching horsepower to put an Ultra-VAX to shame. Fragged if I know how the Cutters got their hands on this baby—the tech alone would cost nearly a mil, not to mention what mahogany must go for these days. (That’s right. Real wood, not macroplast veneer.)

  All the movers and shakers in the Seattle Cutters are sitting around the table. Blake the big boss at the head, with Vladimir at his right hand and Springblossom smoking her brains out at his left, and Ranger sitting opposite him and looking generally slotted off. Filling the rest of the seats are Musen the accountant, Fahd of biz development, a real hard-case name of Cain (I had him tagged as outside talent, maybe a shadowrunner on contract or some such drek), plus a few more I don’t recognize. Standing along the walls are the lesser lights who have some reason to be here but don’t warrant a seat at the table. Me, for one, and Blake’s personal Praetorian guard—including Box the troll looking like a nightmare out of the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm—plus a couple of other toadies.

  Anyway, Vladimir’s got the floor at the moment. He’s wearing a suit, for frag’s sake, and looks more like a European banker than a ganger. With his quiet, reasonable voice and perpetually calm, placid manner, you might even mistake him for a wuss. But good old Vladimir has more blood on his hands than anyone else sitting at that table—with the possible exception of Blake—and he’s always ready to add to his score of kills. But, of course, only if it makes good business sense.

  “I disagree with the war boss,” he’s saying calmly. “We stand to gain nothing from war with the Ancients at this point in time, to say nothing of the potential risks. A war would be costly for both sides, and might .. . hmm, bleed off enough assets to encourage one or more of the Seoulpa rings to try to take advantage of the situation.” He shrugs and brushes an invisible fleck of dust off his cuff. “In any case, the Ancients have done nothing to warrant a declaration of war at this time.”

  Fahd, who looks like a rabid weasel, shoots back, “They took out one of our fragging transfer depots, isn’t that enough? Five thousand units of beetle chips—that’s two point five mil street value, gone.” Musen nods agreement, but shows some hesitancy. He agrees with the figures, but not with Fahd's conclusions.

  Vladimir shrugs again. “Stipulated,” he says carefully. “Yet intelligence hints that the Ancients weren’t aware the depot was ours, and would probably have chosen another target had they been. Correct?” He looks at me for confirmation.

  “That’s right,” I tell the table. Vladimir thinks I’ve got mondo contacts on the street and in the shadows, and he’s come to trust my “intelligence estimates” on a lot of subjects. (That’d change right quick if he found out that most of my contacts are within the Star, but fragged if I’m going to let him find out.)

  “Bulldrek,” Ranger snarls, ready to spit venom, and the battle lines are drawn. Ranger and Fahd are for war; Vladimir and Musen are against it. Springblossom’s been feeling the spirits so much her eyes aren’t focused, so she’s a null. As for Cain, the way his cold eyes are flicking around makes him look like he’s just sitting back and enjoying the show, maybe even contemplating taking side bets on the outcome. Box just wants to tear somebody’s head off, but, then. Box always just wants to tear somebody’s head off. The others are staying well out of it—smart of them—and boss-man Blake is showing slightly less emotion than the mahogany tabletop.

  And me? From the looks Ranger and Fahd are throwing me, I must have planted myself firmly in Vladimir’s camp by confirming his fix on the situation. Fragging marvelous.


  Vladimir looks down the table at Ranger, and you can almost feel the room’s temperature suddenly drop a dozen degrees. He holds that long, piercing look for ten seconds or more, then lets a faint and oh-so-supercilious smile twist his lips. “If you say so,” he says mildly, and Ranger goes red then white, like he’s been accused of hoopfragging devil rats. But old Vladimir doesn’t care, he just goes on, “To reiterate, I believe that outright war with the Ancients would be counterproductive to our best interests." He looks around the tabie, as if soliciting comments. Nobody seems to have any they want to utter at the moment—except for Ranger, of course, who’s saying it all with his eyes.

  Vladimir nods as though he’s made his point. “Yet,” he continues, “we have lost money. I would propose approaching the leadership of the Ancients with a comprehensive statement of our losses.” He turns his cool gaze on Musen. “Two point five million nuyen. Is that correct?”

  Musen nods, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like he’s trying to swallow a racquetball. “Plus structural damage in the sum of five hundred twenty-one thousand. Plus the expenditure of four personnel assets.” He means dead Cutters. “The adjusted total would be”—for a moment his eyes seem to roll back in their sockets as he accesses his headware— “three million one hundred two thousand nuyen. Conservatively.” I wonder how the four “expended personnel assets” would feel if they knew that Musen was valuing their lives at just over twenty-two K nuyen each.