Veiled Extraction: Shadowrun, #56, page 26
However, they were also civilians. Their power levels varied, everything from simple hedge witches up to initiates of the higher mysteries who had visited numerous metaplanes on astral quests and who could match him spell for spell. But almost none of them followed the path he did—they’d never been shadowrunners, they’d never travelled this world and others into dangerous locations, fighting magical threats and seeking long-lost treasures.
In short, they were afraid. And he didn’t blame them. In their place, he’d be a fool not to be as well. “Vyx—”
She stared at him, her face full of horror and accusation. “You’re not gonna do it!” Her fists clenched. “I should have known—all that talk about promises was just bullshit, wasn’t it?” She spun, back toward the elf. “Well, if you’re not gonna do it, I am. Tell me where this place is. I’ll go myself!”
“Vyx!” Winterhawk pitched his voice to a commanding level that stopped her in her tracks. “Listen to me, damn you, before you do exactly what you said you didn’t want to do and get both of you killed!”
“What?” she yelled, spinning back. “What are you—”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going,” he said. “I never said that. I gave you my word, and I’ll keep it. But there’s more at stake here than Virago. Somebody’s got to deal with this.”
“I’m sorry,” the troll woman said. “I wish we could help you, but that still doesn’t mean—”
“You don’t have to go out into the Wilds,” Winterhawk said. His voice still held the commanding tone, but its animation grew as a plan began forming in his mind. He didn’t know if it was a good plan, but he had to do something. He was on the verge of losing some strong allies due to fear—but he realized they could still be helpful even if they didn’t go along. “Listen to me, all of you! You want to help, right? You want to deal with these toxic bastards before they succeed?”
“Of course we do,” the human woman said, and the others nodded in agreement. “We’d be fools not to. But—”
“But you don’t have to go into the Wilds at all to help us,” Winterhawk said.
“How the hell are they gonna—” Ocelot began.
’Hawk began pacing again. He always maintained that his mind worked better when he was moving, and this was no exception. The words tumbled from him as he walked, and he attacked the small crowd with the fervor a carnival barker trying to coerce them inside his tent to see the freakshow. “This place—this corporate facility—it will be well guarded. Magically, for certain. Spirits, wards—they’d have to have done, to keep anyone from catching on to what they’re up to. No doubt they’ll have made some progress with the ley line, and that will work in their favor as well. There’ll be physical security too, but we can deal with that. What we need is a way to take out some of their magical protections—level the playing field a bit.”
“A ritual,” the troll woman said. Her wide troubled face crinkled into a knowing smile as she nodded.
“Exactly!” Winterhawk stalked the aisles, fixing each person in turn with his intense focus. “I know you lot don’t like to work together, but I also know you’re bloody good at it when you do. I’ve seen some of the ritual work you’ve done together during some of the festivals. If you can convince enough of your coven-mates to work together, do you think you could put together a ritual that would attack their defenses, even temporarily? You might not be able to take them out—not without a lot more preparation, but anything you can do will help.”
The others nodded slowly as the light dawned, and Winterhawk allowed himself a triumphant mental fist pump. They were afraid, but they weren’t fools, and they weren’t cowards.
“We could do that,” the elf man said. “It would take a bit of time to prepare—a few hours to get everyone together and set it up—”
“That’s fine,” Winterhawk said. “We’re going to need some time as well.”
Ocelot pushed himself off the back door. “’Hawk,” he said, and now he looked troubled. “Listen—this sounds like a good idea, and you know I’m in, but—do you really think this is gonna work? We got you, me, Vyx—maybe Melinda and Flea if they’ll go—that ain’t exactly the kind of force I’d want to take in to a place like that, especially since we don’t have much gear.”
Winterhawk nodded. “Quite true. Which is part of why we need time—I need to implement the other part of our plan.”
“Which is—?”
He was sure his grin was a bit manic, but he didn’t care. “We were sent up here to figure out what was going on with a dragon-aspected ley line,” he said. “I think it’s about time for the dragon in question to take an interest in it himself, don’t you?”
Forty-Six
“Do you think she’s still alive?”
Winterhawk turned away from the transport vehicle’s window, where he’d been staring out into the rainy darkness. It was hard to see much: a thick, persistent fog hung over most of the Wilds, reducing trees and other geographic features to indistinct haziness. It was an eerie, unsettling feeling, even for him.
Vyx sat across from him, watching him. She wore a mid-length armored jacket over jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He couldn’t see her eyes behind her tinted glasses, but he could tell even without assensing her that she was troubled.
“I hope so,” he said. No point in arguing with her—she’d already proven to be skilled at seeing through duplicity. “We’ll know soon enough.”
“Maybe,” she said, dropping her gaze to her hands in her lap. “I just can’t help thinking that if she’d dead, it’s my fault. She’d never have run out of there by herself if she hadn’t been chasing my stupid ass.”
“It’s done now,” he said gently. “We’ll do what we can.”
She glanced around the compartment, and he followed her gaze. It was meant to be a cargo hauler, so the accommodations were sparse even by transport standards, but beggars couldn’t be choosers when time was of the essence. The others—Ocelot, Flea, Melinda, and the rest, sat pressed together shoulder to shoulder, watching as best they could through either the vehicle’s armored windows or their AR hookups to the driver’s view out the front window. They rarely spoke aloud, as it was hard to hear each other over the engine’s rumble and the pounding of the rain; any conversations, like Winterhawk’s and Vyx’s, took place over private comm channels.
It was now three hours after the meeting at the community center, and approaching midnight. Winterhawk studied the silent group and began to think they might have a chance to pull this off. Not a good one, mind, but a better one than they’d had when they were nothing but a ragtag, badly geared group in need of several hours’ sleep and a good meal.
He hadn’t expected to get through to Damon—with the communications grid as spotty as it was inside the Zone, it would have been a miracle simply to get through at all, but apparently the shielded, no-frills commlink Anissa had given him had more punch than he’d expected. It still took a little help from Flea, but after only three attempts he’d managed to reach Anissa. He’d given her the bare-bones version of what was going on in Salem, leaving out the part about Vyx and Virago, and asked her to put Damon in touch with him as soon as possible.
The dragon had called back in ten minutes. He listened in silence as Winterhawk provided him with a more detailed account of the last couple day’s events, and when Winterhawk finished, he remained silent for several more seconds.
“I…see,” he said at last, just as Winterhawk began to wonder if they’d lost their connection.
“Can you help us? This is bigger than you led us to believe—if we try to deal with it on our own, we’re likely buggered. If you can come—”
There was a pause. “I can’t. Not personally.”
“Why the hell not?” Winterhawk couldn’t help the edge that seeped into his tone.
“I’m—currently in the middle of something I can’t postpone. If you could wait—”
“We can’t wait. We have to do this now, before they realize we’re on to them.”
Another pause. “All right, then. I can’t come myself, but I’ll send you some help. I’ve got a few people on retainer. I’ll call them and send them up there right away, along with whatever gear they can gather on short notice. I’ll come when I can.”
Winterhawk didn’t like it, but it was the best they were going to get. You didn’t simply call up a dragon and force him to do your bidding—even if this whole thing kind of was his fault.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll take it. And one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“You said you could get us out of here. I’d like to request you get on that. As soon as we’ve sorted out this situation, I want out of here. Be prepared for myself, Ocelot, and two others.”
“Two?”
“Two,” Winterhawk said firmly. “Details later. Send me the data on who we’re expecting and when.”
He’d never hung up on a dragon before. It was strangely satisfying.
Damon had been as good as his word: the team he’d sent had arrived less than two hours after the call, and now sat with Winterhawk, Ocelot, Vyx, Flea, and the others in the back of the rigger’s modified GMC Bulldog. He studied them from behind his darkened glasses; it still looked like a woefully small group to go up against what he expected to see, but he’d faced some pretty tough odds with smaller groups than this.
There were five of them in all, bringing the group’s number to ten. The rigger, a dark-skinned dwarf named Gus with close-cropped hair and a cynical grin, was driving at the moment, but Anissa had assured Winterhawk that his real talent was with drones. Anissa, decked out in her all-black combat armor and holding an assault rifle across her lap, sat next to a massive blond troll named Henrik, similarly dressed with a large duffel bag full of weapons between his feet. The team’s decker, a willowy elven woman named Tweak, was across from Flea, and the two of them had tuned out the rest of the group as they coordinated their resources. Tweak had already managed to locate a floor plan of the facility in the Wilds, though she warned them that it was quite old and, since it came directly from its original owner Shiawase, might include deliberate errors.
“We’ll take it,” Winterhawk had said. “It’s better than going in blind.”
The last member of Damon’s team was Bronwyn, a stocky ork shaman with wild dreadlocks and various a riot of colorful feathers and fetishes attached to her armor. She, Melinda, and Winterhawk had summoned several spirits before they left, keeping some in reserve while directing others to conceal and defend the Bulldog as they rumbled through the heavy forest on the way to the toxics’ facility.
Maya, with her superior abilities to remain hidden, was playing scout. Winterhawk had sent her out ahead of them to watch for threats and report back, but thus far all she’d reported was that she’d located the facility.
“Not going near it,” she told Winterhawk. “It looks deserted, but they’ve got heavy magical defenses. And be careful—there are some nasty-looking things patrolling around the outside.”
When Winterhawk relayed that to the rest of the group, Ocelot asked, “What kind of nasty?”
“She says she doesn’t want to look too closely at them. Abominations, she calls them.”
“Fuckin’ wonderful.”
Winterhawk had left most of the spirit coordination to the Melinda and Bronwyn, focusing on maintaining communication with Althea and her team back in Salem. He had to give them credit—once they had a viable plan that didn’t require them to leave town and face whatever was out in the Wilds, they’d done an admirable job of mobilizing their forces. By the time the team left, they were well into the construction of a massive ritual circle in the gym of one of the local high schools. It wasn’t the optimum location, but in order to be effective against such a large threat, the required circle was too big for any of their covens’ ritual spaces. Althea had assured him they’d be ready to go when he gave the word.
He glanced at Vyx again. She looked older now, barely recognizable in her multi-pocketed armored jacket and dark glasses, her jaw set and her fists clenched in her lap. Her aura vibrated with tension—he suspected if she thought she could get away with it, she’d bust out of the back of the Bulldog and run off in search of Virago herself.
She caught him looking at her and frowned. “What?”
“Nothing,” he replied, and returned his attention to the others.
If Vyx had to sit still for much longer, she was certain she’d explode.
Sitting on the narrow bench, pressed between Winterhawk on one side and the enormous troll on the other, she felt as if the world were closing in on her. All around her the low murmurs of voices, the smell of sweat and armor and gun oil, the sudden jounces as the Bulldog bumped over the uneven terrain all served to remind her that every minute longer it took to reach the toxics was another minute when they could be torturing or killing Virago. What if she’s already dead? What if she isn’t even there?
She studied Winterhawk out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he had some kind of magic way to tell she was looking at him. He appeared to be deep in thought, leaned back against the wall. Probably communicating with something in the astral plane, she thought. She’d watched him as he coordinated the mission, taking in reports from Ocelot, from Anissa, from the other team’s shaman, adjusting the plan based on the changing intelligence they’d received from the spirits, the deckers, and the witches. Whatever she might think of him—and she wasn’t anywhere near drawing any definitive conclusions yet—he was clearly good at what he did. People respected him. They listened to him.
She’d never worked with shadowrunners before. She’d met a couple as a young teen—a hard-eyed pair who’d chatted briefly with her mother while the two of them had been out to lunch one day—but aside from that, all of her (woefully limited, she was beginning to realize) real-world experience had been with the Ancients. She’d admired Lucky Liam, the way he led the gang with a combination of even-tempered strategy and occasional bouts of passion when they were warranted, but this group of shadowrunners made them look like a disorganized mob by comparison. There was no anger, no emotion, simply a laser focus on the business at hand. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t all get out of this alive—and she was pretty sure they all knew it, too—but they didn’t act like that was even a factor.
Would they be able to do this? She’d been on hand when they’d formulated their plan, though she didn’t have much to offer. It was deceptively simple: the witches back in Salem would use their ritual to weaken the wards around the toxics’ base and try to counter some of the ley line’s background count, and the team on the ground would gain entry—either by infiltrating or storming the place, depending on whether the toxics anticipated their arrival—and stop whatever the toxics were doing to the ley line.
And get Virago out, she’d reminded them.
A small part of her wondered if they were only humoring her with their assurances that Virago’s rescue would be an important part of the plan. Funny how they never spoke about her girlfriend when discussing their strategies.
It didn’t matter, though—they didn’t have to care. She cared. And she was damn well gonna get Virago out, or die trying.
“Are you all right?”
She started, discovering her father turned toward her again. She thought she could feel the heat of his arm against hers, but it was probably her imagination, given the armor they both wore. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He shrugged. “This is all new to you.” Smiling ruefully, he added, “Your mother would kill me if she knew I was bringing you into something like this.”
“Fuck Mom.” She clenched her fists in her lap. “I’m sick of her trying to keep me safe from everything. That’s why I left in the first place.”
“That’s why she did too, you know,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her now; his gaze was pointed at one of the armored windows, watching the dark, twisted hulks of trees rolling by.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“That’s why she left me, and never told me about you. She was afraid you might turn out like me. That I might be a…bad influence.”
She snorted. “Worse than running with the Ancients? Wait till she hears that story. You can’t—”
She stopped when Winterhawk raised a sudden, urgent hand. “What?”
“Something’s coming,” he said, all business now. All around him, the others tensed. “It’s—”
The Bulldog rocked and bucked as something large erupted from beneath it.
“Hang on!” the rigger yelled over the link.
An instant later, the Bulldog canted sharply to the right, tilting on its wide off-road tires as it tipped over. Yells and shouts filled the air as Vyx, Winterhawk, and the others were flung sideways, slamming into the walls as it crashed into the trees and came to a stop at a crazy angle, its wheels spinning uselessly.
“Out! Out!” the troll’s voice boomed, and something hit them again.
Forty-Seven
Voices erupted over Winterhawk’s comm as everyone scrambled to extricate themselves from the disabled transport.
“What the hell was that?” he asked Maya. Already Henrik and Anissa had thrown open the rear doors and the runner team was pouring out.
“Holy shit!” Ocelot yelled. Of course he’d been one of the first out of the vehicle. “What is that thing?”
Winterhawk grabbed Vyx’s arm and dragged her after him, clambering over the boxes, duffel bags and other disarrayed gear. Gunfire chattered around them, the runners using the overturned Bulldog for cover against a bulky, misshapen form looming in the moonlight.
