Lill
by shapcano
Ok....first off, understand that I am a watcher. It's all a big vid game to me. I am much more at home hitching a ride with a gunslinger than I am at popping caps myself. Ditto all the B&E crap. Let some other slot hang off some skyscraper from a piece of string or creep through some compound crawling with awakened guard animals. I'll guide you past the alarm system or coordinate cover fire, but my hoop is strictly "in the rear with gear".
I'm so non-front line that I deck through a triple-cut off. Nasty ICE or evil corp decker sends anything crawling back up my line, I lose tech, but not brain cells. Of course, developing ways to protect my precious bod is a full time and very expensive obsession but, like they say in the Nerps ad, "What else would you rather buy?".
A lot of deckers I know are sam wannabes. Toting around machine guns, hand grenades and throwing stars like they were full time razors. Laughable. The street Gillettes I know just love it when some plug head provides cover fire or "guards" some approach. They really enjoy demonstrating that if you have expertise, training and experience, you can easily overwhelm somebody who doesn't. They enjoy it as much as a decker would if she met some samurai trying to run the matrix. The part-timer gets shredded without the full-timer breakin a sweat.
The thing is, so many deckers play with guns that it's tough to find a team that will accept somebody who won't. The attitude is 'you risk your blood in the mud or you're a lousy teammate'. Now, if you suggest that somebody else on the team plug in and risk brain-fry with you when you crash a hostile sys, they'd look at you as if you were crazy, but you're supposed to jump at the chance to take your life savings worth of tech into the field, to risk your deck and your gray matter in order to be on the team. Frag that.
Well, that's me.
Oh, yeah. You wanna put a face with this, don't you? What does my meat look like? Frag off! None of your business! Listen to my voice and wonder. My mug's never been on a wanted posting and that's just the way I like it.
All right, then. Why you are listening to me-
I deck for Kane.
I floated my resumé by him years and years ago when he was heading up security for old man Brighton. I'm pretty sure that Kane had been some kind of soldier under the general before handling personal security for the old man and his family. I don't have hard data, you understand, but I've pieced things together. Anyway, word in the virtual was that Kane had lost two deckers in a single week. The way I heard it, the general was this rich fragger. I dunno how-something like he inherited a gazillion dollars and then doubled his money investing, or something. Rumor had it he was traveling around on some kind of high-stakes business deal with his family, Kane and his sec team, when somebody who'd gotten screwed in the deal sent a kick team after the Brightons. In the dustup the first decker, a plugger named volt, got zapped by a shaman's spell. Kane's people fend off the attack, get home, Kane brings another decker on board while he goes off hunting for the kick team (I guess). Decker number 2, a clone named rebus, gets brain fried while mixing it up in the matrix and I get a call from Kane. Wants to talk to me about working for him. Seems like I'm set, right? Wrong. After the initial call, a lotta time goes by. No word, no answer, nothing, so I figure my wanting to watch from the cheap seats was too big a problem. It happens. I find other jobs. Nothing steady but enough work so that I don't have to sell my progs for food.
Then one day, outta nowhere I get a call from Kane. Now, I move around a lot and change telecom numbers like you change your socks. For Kane to be able to find my telecom after all this time was impressive. Unfortunately, he says he wants a face to face, which is not something I do. After telling him no dice, I sigh and wish the world were a nicer place, but basically figure that's it. Until Kane shows up at my door.
Talk about scaring the living shit outta somebody! Nobody and I mean nobody knows where I live. My telecom has no relation to my address. My lines are......well, never you mind about my lines. Just understand that I make it my business to make sure trouble don't come knocking on my door and I am very, very good at what I do. Yet there he is standing outside my secret entrance like it was no big deal. 5'11", dark hair (cropped real close), goatee, and with that patch over his eye you'd have to admit he had that bad-boy-toy-of-mystery routine down. He's well put together without looking like a steroid monster, wearing a dark suit over a black turtleneck. If I swung that way I'd have said he was hot enough to give me second thoughts about my policy of isolation.
If I swung that way. I don't, which meant the only thing that kept me from launching my security protocols was the gleam in his good eye. At some animal level it whispered to me that if he was good enough to find me he might be good enough to live through my "protection" and that I suddenly had no interest in seeing this individual wanting payback for trying to ice him. So I opened the door and let him in. Turned out to be the right choice.
Kane opened up by saying that he'd done some biz around town as an independent (which I guess was his way of telling me that I was not signing on to work for some rich old coot). He said he'd been hiring deckers as he needed them but he wanted somebody reliable. He said he'd thought of me because of my rep and because "I will never again be responsible for others in the field." Kinda spooky the way he said it. He was actually interested in using the tech in his head to get instant access to decker-type expertise, without having to worry about keeping a plug head lead free in a DMZ. I was interested in a nice payday earned without ever venturing out of doors. Perfect match. We've worked together ever since.
That brings you up to speed. Now-
When they got to the estate, Kane gave the troll precisely the right amount of humiliation. Meaning he pushed the big fragger right to the edge without instigating a shootout. Made the rigger stammer his way through the entire apology and then said, in a completely natural way, "What? Sorry, I didn't hear you." Now if I didn't know for a fact that Kane's audio is sensitive enough to hear a heart beat at 100 paces, I swear to you I would have believed him. Absolute deadpan. Even though Williams didn't have enough data on the chief's audio capabilities to argue about it, the look on his face said he knew his stones were being broken and also knew there wasn't a thing that he could do about it. He apologized all over again. When he was finished the second time and asked "Do you accept my apology?" Kane said "I'll have to get back to you on that". Like I said, the chief is not somebody you want to have looking to get even with you.
Unfortunately for me, Kane was familiar with the Brighton estate. He spent like point zip seconds gawking at the most incredible entrance hall I've ever imagined. Huge expanses of patterned marble and onyx practically screaming wealth, statuary and columns that museum designers have wet dreams about, masterpieces in oils and watercolors fighting to draw the eyes to the walls, a staircase worthy of great European opera house and all, all of this breathtaking beauty flashing past my/Kane's eye at warp speed. I'm trying to drink in the sights from the eyes of an individual who is not only completely unimpressed by them but wants to get past them as quickly as possible. The chief devoted more attention to the secman/butler escorting him than he did on anything he was walking through. Pissed me off. Oh, I'm able to review the download later, of course. Slow it down to 1/100th of actual, freeze sights, etc., but its just not the same as soaking in a long lingering view, you know?
So after blasting through the most opulent entrance I've ever imagined, the chief is escorted into a library that was to die for. Two stories, floor to ceiling, leather bound paper. I swear it's true. Fireplace large enough for 8 foot logs, leather wing backed chairs on a Persian carpet that must have been about priceless. Every place that isn't holding rare folios and 1st editions is mahogany so old and dark as to be almost black. Damn! Before I die I want to have enough creds for a room that rich.
Sorry. Where was I? Oh, yeah. My next surprise is that old man Brighton is a rigger. A geriatric looking to be about 200 years old, but damned if he isn't running a Caduseuscorp Alpha motorized wheelchair by way of a plug in his head. Of course, judging by the animation of the meat in the chair, he might have died years ago and the chair might be driven entirely by remote. At least that's what I was thinking before I saw those eyes. One look at the old bird's eyes and you knew there was still a very active mind buried in all of those wrinkles.
There were probably tremendous subtleties to the interplay between Kane and Brighton. Facial gestures, pauses, even the emphasis on certain words, pointed to volumes of history between the two. Unfortunately, without any real background for interpretation, the volumes were written in Sanskrit for all I could make out of it.
The long and the short of it was that the old man had misplaced his grandson and he wanted Kane to find and return the waif. Simple, neh? Well, not really. First of all, the kid belongs to Brighton's daughter who Kane apparently doesn't like at all. (Even the general seemed not to care for her, but then, you don't get to pick your family). Second, the daughter, Elizabeth, doesn't like Kane either. In fact, after the old man gives Kane a sort of embarrassed apology for the fucked up invitation, he warns him to watch his back because Lizzy is likely to remain a problem (read- looking to get the chief killed in painful ways) for the duration of the assignment. Some fun, huh?
There was one final teensy-weensy little point about the job that might slightly complicate things. The kid, the old man's grandson, Elizabeth's son- he had another month in the oven until he was ready to breathe air. Yup. Unborn. A fetus created through artificial insemination, the kid was traveling in the "birth mother", a young woman "of impeccable credentials" who suddenly disappeared from the Brighton household. Oh, and by the way, all attempts at tracing her magically have failed. How do we know this? Because the sec people who Kane originally recruited and trained, well paid competent professionals all, with unlimited resources and a 24 hour head start, have exactly no clue where she is.
Now here's the worst part about decking for Kane. Most times he's so paranoid that even I feel he's overdoing it. But sometimes its like ridding real fast in a car without brakes or steering. You know, you just know, that there's going to be a disaster. You can see all the signs that say "there will be a motherfragger of a crash" but the clown behind the wheel keeps stomping down on the accelerator. This was one of those times. I got this real sinking feeling as the chief sub-vocalized "notes" and got ready to ask questions.
We'd accepted the job.
This story is copyright of the author. Shadowrun is a Registered Trademark of FASA Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used without permission. Any use of FASA Corporation's copyrighted material or trademarks in this file should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks.
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