Veiled Extraction: Shadowrun, #56, page 14
“We can’t stay here,” the Ancient said. His vision fuzzed out for a moment as he listened to an unseen voice, then he nodded as if in reply. “C’mon back with us. Lucky Liam wants to talk to ye.”
’Hawk looked at Ocelot, who shrugged. With Maya and the spirit continuing to provide astral recon, they allowed the two Ancients to lead them back toward Kustom Rode Bykes. The others stayed behind, hovering around the two crashed vehicles.
“What about the other one?” Winterhawk asked. “Is he dead?”
“No, but he’s gonna hurt like hell for a few days,” the other one said. “Better a few busted ribs than a head shot, though.”
“Who were those guys?” Ocelot asked. “I saw the colors, but we’re not from around here.”
“Bane Sidhe,” the first one said. He didn’t spit, but his tone suggested he’d like to. “Fookin’ bastards. They’re getting’ bolder, comin’ into our turf like that.”
Winterhawk didn’t ask what would become of the prisoner they’d taken. In truth, he didn’t care. “Who’s Lucky Liam?”
The second of their Ancient escorts glanced back over his shoulder as if expecting to be followed. “Just come on. We gotta get back.”
Activity around the bike shop had increased considerably since they’d left only a few minutes previously. The roll-up door was locked down now, and Maya reported several more concealed Ancient gangers hiding in strategic locations on both sides of the street.
“This way,” the first Ancient said, indicating for them to enter the bike shop through a reinforced front door emblazoned with the shop’s name. Beneath it, someone had spray-painted another of the ever-present green A-in-circle logos with more artistic talent than usual.
Inside, several more elves waited, their demeanors tense and watchful. Their gazes all instantly focused on Winterhawk and Ocelot as they entered, but only one of them stepped forward: a tall redhead with the muscular, lithe form of an athlete. His face was as youthful as all the others—elves were like that—but his shrewd, hooded green eyes spoke of both experience and intelligence.
“So,” he said. “Yer the ones who tipped off my guys about the Bane Sidhe attack.”
“Not exactly,” Winterhawk said. “We had no idea who they were or what they wanted.”
The elf’s eyes narrowed and he frowned at Winterhawk’s accent, but he didn’t comment. “Name’s Lucky Liam.”
“So we’ve been told. As my friend mentioned, we’re not from the area.”
A few of the other elves muttered and shifted, but Liam raised his hand to wave them down. Instead of looking offended, he chuckled. “Fair enough, then. I lead the Boston Ancients. And it seems we owe both o’ ye for saving some lives tonight. I also heard ye came by earlier, looking for some information about Vyx.”
Winterhawk nodded. “I was told she’s not here any longer. Is that so?”
Liam fixed a harder gaze on him. “Why d’ye want t’know? What d’ye want with her, anyway?”
“We’ve been hired to find her,” Winterhawk said. “By someone who’s very interested in seeing her safely home.”
Another elf snorted. “Her mam want her back?”
“Shut yer gob, Blaine,” Liam snapped. He considered a moment, then stood. “Come on. We’ll talk.”
“Boss—” the white-haired elf began.
“Shut up. Get on, all of ye—I doubt those assholes’ll try again tonight, but I want patrols out along the perimeter, and tell Bree and Joker to get some more spirits out. You so much as see anything that looks wrong, make sure I know about it. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.” He and the other elves stalked out, talking among themselves, leaving only Liam and two other elves alone with Winterhawk and Ocelot.
“Wait out here,” Liam ordered the elves, and waved Winterhawk and Ocelot into a cluttered office. He closed the door behind them, though a window afforded the two guards a view inside. Winterhawk noticed they’d both drawn guns, though at the moment they held them loosely at their sides.
“Why d’ye want Vyx?” Liam asked again. He shoved aside an exhaust pipe and several empty soykaf cups and settled himself against the desk. His expression revealed nothing.
“I told you,” Winterhawk said. “We’ve been hired to find her and bring her home.”
“Home? Where’s home? Who hired ye?”
Winterhawk paced the office. “We’ve not got time to dance around—we need to find her quickly. How much do you know about her?”
“If somebody hired ye to find ’er, why d’ye need us to tell ye where she is? Why not just give ’er a call? The network’s spotty, but if ye keep tryin’, ye can usually get through.”
“We ran into a bit of trouble and lost most of our information. Images, address data—all of it.”
Liam looked like he wasn’t sure he believed that. “Well, she was at MIT&T. Didn’t wanna be—didn’t get along with ’er mam.”
“They had certain…disagreements about her future,” Winterhawk agreed. “But her mother cares about her very much. And she wants her home.”
“And I ask again—where’s ‘home’?” Idly, Liam began gathering up the soykaf cups. When he had them all, he tossed them into an overflowing receptacle on the other side of the room. “If ’er mam’s in the QZ, she’s probably safer with us.”
“She isn’t.”
Liam’s eyes narrowed. “So, yer sayin’ ye’ve not just been hired to take ’er home, but to get ’er out of the QZ? Ye got a way out?”
“We’re…working on it. Things haven’t gone quite as planned.”
“Yeah, nothin’ ever goes as planned in this hellhole.” The elf’s chuckle was utterly mirthless. He was silent for several seconds, obviously considering. Finally he sighed. “I can’t tell ye where she is—not exactly. But I can tell ye where she went. I’m just not sure if I should.”
“Why not?” Ocelot asked. “Is she here or not? That other guy said she left.”
“She did. But not because she wanted to.” He pushed himself off the desk and dropped into the chair behind it, leaning it back until it hit the wall. “Maybe you guessed she didn’t fit in so well here.”
“Because she’s human.”
“Yeah, that was a lot of it. Ever since the walls went up, we’ve had to…relax our standards some. Open membership to a few…shall we say…select individuals not of the elven race. But that didn’t mean everybody was in favor of it. Vyx messed up and made some enemies. I had to make a choice—let ’em kill ’er, send ’er packin’, or…the choice I ended up makin’. Which was to send ’er off, but with a job to do to get ’er away from here for a while till people cooled down. Figured if she managed to do it and make it back, she might make up for ’er screwup enough that the guys’d be willin’ to let it go.”
“Why would you do that?” Ocelot asked. “You’re the leader. You’re tellin’ me you were okay with a norm in your elf gang?”
Liam shrugged. “Like I said, we didn’t have a lot of choice. There’s a lot of dyin’ goin’ on here these days. Vyx was good. Damn good. Plus, she’d taken up with my cousin, Virago.”
“So,” Winterhawk said, “As I told you—we’re in a hurry. Can you tell us where you sent her?”
Again, Liam didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t like it,” he said at last. “But mebbe it’s for the best. Even if she succeeds and comes back, she’s still gonna cause trouble. That’s just the way she is. Gettin’ ’er outta here would be good for us, and good for her, too.”
He stood. “She’s gone to Salem. And Virago went with her.” He pulled out his commlink and tapped something in. “Gimme your code—I’ll send ye ’er LTG, and Virago’s, too. Mebbe you can reach ’em if ye want—though if she finds out her mam’s tryin’ to track ’er down, she’ll probably run.”
Winterhawk stared. “Why?” Victoria was in Salem too? Coincidence, or was some larger plan he couldn’t see yet in effect? “Why would you send her there?” He twiddled a setting on his commlink to receive the files Liam was sending.
“Wait a sec,” Ocelot said. “I was doin’ some research on you guys when we were tryin’ to find your turf. You work for the O’Rilleys, runnin’ drugs.”
“I’m not sayin’ anything ’bout that,” Liam said, glancing toward the two guards outside.
“You don’t have to,” Winterhawk said, as things began to fall together. “This has to do with the BADs the witches produce, doesn’t it?”
“That’s a pretty big assumption,” Liam said.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Ocelot said. “Why would you send her on a mission up there if it didn’t have something to do with biz? You didn’t just send her off to stay with your sister or somethin’, did you?”
Liam started to say something, then stopped and went still as he listened to some unheard communication. “We got more trouble,” he said. “I need to go, so I’ll make this quick. Yeah, yer right. I’m not mentionin’ specifics, but I sent ’er to Salem to try and figure out why certain supply pipelines ’ave nearly stopped. O’Rilley’s people are gettin’ nervous and leanin’ on us, so I figured I’d make the best of a shite situation all around.”
“Salem’s a big place,” Winterhawk said. “Can you give us more detail?”
Liam was already heading for the door. “Not much. I told ’er to make contact with a chummer up there who goes by Beatrix.” He sent Winterhawk an LTG. “That’s a drop she uses for messages. Don’t ask for any other info—I won’t give it to ye. I didn’t want anyone tracking ’er if they overheard anything, so I kept it vague on purpose. That’s all I’m tellin’ ye, so move along—I gotta go.”
“One more thing.” Winterhawk didn’t step in front of him, but he did move in that direction. “We can find her, but it will be a lot easier if we had something to track her with. Have you got anything like that?”
“Vyx took all ’er stuff with ’er,” Liam said, sounding impatient now. Then he frowned, seeming to remember something, and stalked back across the room to a battered metal file cabinet. He yanked open the lowest drawer and pulled out a green synthleather jacket, ripped and stained with patches of blood, which he tossed to Winterhawk.
“This is ’ers—she left it here a few days ago. Maybe ye can use that to find ’er.” He swept out the door and gathered up the two guards with a gesture.
Winterhawk and Ocelot followed them out. A few other elves eyed them with suspicion, but most of the gangers had already left. The bass rumbles of several motorcycles firing up came through the wall from the garage next door.
“Salem,” Ocelot said when they were back outside.
“Seems all roads lead there,” Winterhawk agreed. “I’m not sure how I feel about that, but at least it narrows our choices.”
Twenty-Four
It took Vyx and Virago the better part of a day to make it out of Boston proper. Acutely aware of the interconnected mishmash of rival gang territories surrounding the Ancients’ corner of the Rox, they elected to put aside the usual recklessness they reveled in when riding with the gang in favor of picking their way with confident care around the edges of the Hellriders’ territory to the northwest. It was either that or try going straight through the middle of the Hub, and neither of them wanted to do that.
They barely avoided two potential confrontations on the way out of the area. The first was with the Hellriders, a go-gang that made the Ancients look like law-abiding commuters by comparison. Vyx didn’t know what the gang was up to—they didn’t usually ride in broad daylight—but neither she nor Virago wanted to find out. They had to make a fast detour, but better that than getting caught out. Even though they’d left their Ancients colors back at Virago’s place, Virago’s bright green hair was a dead giveaway for anyone looking their way.
The second was a crowd of shamblers that had gathered in the middle of the road just north of Cambridge. There had to be at least forty of them milling around, blocking a major intersection. Several Knight Errant vehicles were parked nearby, and the KE forces were trying to get them under control. Vyx and Virago didn’t stick around to wait for the outcome, but altering their route to avoid this clusterfuck added still more time to their trip.
Normally, the pre-QZ trip from the Rox up to Salem would have taken less than an hour in decent traffic. To be fair, “decent traffic” wasn’t a concept one often observed in the Boston ’plex, but even so, once they got out of the city proper they could make good time, especially at the speeds they normally rode. That all changed when the walls went up, though—between the ever-present metahuman threats, the patchy fog that had descended over much of the area, and the roads’ general state of growing disrepair, it was wise to add significant padding to any itinerary of more than a couple kilometers. Most regular citizens didn’t even bother traveling anymore unless they had to, opting to remain behind barriers in dozens of small enclaves, trusting the police, security forces, and an increasing number of armed private citizens to protect them and to help maintain the fragile illusion that they were safe.
That was pretty much Vyx’s definition of hell on earth—far worse than anything the QZ could dish up on its own.
They picked up the Salem Turnpike just outside Boston and headed north. Neither spoke much, each one hyper-aware in case anyone tried to hassle them. These days, you could run into just about anything on the roads, especially after dark. The fog made vision treacherous, and the late-fall temperature combined with the damp air to make the ride uncomfortable.
Vyx had ridden with the Ancients enough to know that when they were doing a job or trying to put a little fear into the Bane Sidhe or other rival go-gangs, the adrenaline that coursed through her body made the cold a non-issue. Now, though, the chill crept through her gloves, down her back, and made her legs feel like two blocks of ice. She blipped the throttle a bit to catch up with Virago as they crossed through Revere. Beyond, the Turnpike cut a straight line for several kilometers through a swampy stretch called Rumney Marsh, which meant that even if they covered the distance at top speed, they’d still be away from civilization (such as it was these days) for a good twenty to thirty minutes.
Just stay sharp and you’ll be fine.
Even so, she almost missed them when they attacked. Her danger sense twigged her an instant before two figures on bikes pulled out from a tiny hidden side road, catching up fast, engines whining hard. Fuck!
“We got company,” Vyx said over the comm.
“Yeah. Let’s see if we can outrun ’em.” Virago didn’t sound scared—in fact, she sounded pleased to have something to do besides dodge chunks of road and shamblers.
Vyx grinned. “Sucks for them if we can’t.” Already her body coursed with adrenaline, her muscles primed and ready for action. She jacked her bike’s throttle and it leaped forward as Virago’s did the same, opening more distance between them and the bikers behind them.
Vyx called up a view from her rear-facing camera and projected it into her glasses’ HUD. It didn’t look like there were more than two back there. They didn’t have any lights on, but the heat of their bikes and their bodies blazed against the foggy darkness when she cycled the glasses from low-light to thermographic vision. “Can you tell who they are?”
“No colors I can see.”
So at least it wasn’t the Hellriders or Bane Sidhe out here on some kind of biz. If it was just a couple of freelancers thinking they’d found an easy score, they’d be in for a surprise. Vyx scanned the road ahead while keeping part of her concentration on the small vid window showing the approaching pair. The upcoming stretch of the Turnpike was deserted as far as she could tell, but there weren’t many buildings or other roads out here. She didn’t expect an ambush, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t scanning for one.
A sharp crack broke through the steady whine of the bikes’ engines, and the two pursuers surged forward, closing the distance. One brandished a pistol, while the other had some kind of long curved blade. Both whooped into the night as they approached. They wore battered leathers crudely painted with symbols, dark goggles, and cloths wrapped around their lower faces. Their matted hair streamed out behind them.
Next to Vyx, Virago pulled out her own pistol and returned fire. The guy on her side dropped back and the shot missed. Up ahead, a bridge stretched over part of the marsh, though the fog made it look as if the road simply shot out into nothingness.
“Watch it,” Vyx said. She hunkered down lower and presented an erratic pattern to make herself less of a target.
They darted across the bridge, the two other bikers only a few meters behind and still screaming something Vyx couldn’t make out. A round spanged off the side of her bike, barely missing her leg. “Fuck!” she called over the link. In a smooth motion she’d practiced hundreds of times, she drew the katana from the sheath on her back and held it ready.
They were approaching another bridge, this one longer than the one they’d just crossed. “Car up ahead,” Virago reported.
Vyx saw it too, its lights dazzling, glowing bright against the fog. It was heading toward them, a short distance from the bridge on the other side. Its lights made it hard to see what it was, though: some random citizen braving the trip toward Boston? A cop? Would the bikers give up their pursuit? Her hand tightened on her katana, and her knees on the side of the bike.
As soon as she and Virago entered the bridge, they saw that the bikers had planned this ambush. The car, which had been coming toward them, slammed on its brakes and slewed sideways, coming to a stop across two of the bridge’s four lanes, and two more bikers, their lights also off, erupted onto the far end from where they’d concealed themselves.
Even at their speed, Vyx and Virago barely had time to react. Vyx, in front, had only a split-second to make a decision, and it wasn’t one she wanted to make: no matter how fast she moved, the bike was still governed by the laws of physics, and those laws said that a pair of dual-purpose tires and some heavy-duty brakes couldn’t stop fast enough to avoid hitting the car.
