Veiled Extraction: Shadowrun, #56, page 29
Ocelot stepped inside and swept the area with his light and his gun. “Looks clear.”
“What am I looking for?” Flea asked.
“Offline files,” Winterhawk said. He spotted a terminal on the desk. “Probably in there. Anything pertaining to CFD and toxic magic. Grab anything that looks remotely interesting, and hurry. We’ll sort it later.”
“And anything about Virago, or prisoners,” Vyx added.
Winterhawk was beginning to suspect Virago wasn’t here at all, but he didn’t think it was wise to tell Vyx that. He waited tensely with the others until Flea pushed himself back from the desk, an odd expression on his thin face.
“Did you get it?”
“Yeah…I think I got it all. Some of it might be corrupted, though—this rot isn’t good for electronics.” He continued to look troubled.
“Problem?”
“No. It’s just…” He let his breath out and swiped his hand over his face. “This is heavy stuff, chummer. Do you know what they were tryin’ to do?”
“Yeah,” Ocelot said. “Just like the ork said. Tryin’ to cure the headcases. Come on. We gotta go.”
Flea stowed his deck in its bag and followed them out. “There was some serious protection on that stuff. But I can see why they kept it off the Matrix.”
“I didn’t think these toxic fuckers were Matrix-savvy,” Ocelot said. He’d taken point along with Vyx, and together the two were scanning the halls and doorways as they headed back toward the rest of the group.
“It’s not the toxics,” Flea said. His tone was as odd as his expression. “Not just them, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Winterhawk looked sharply at him. “Who else is it?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But whoever they are, they’re working with a corp. It’ll take more digging to figure out which one.”
“Wait a sec,” Ocelot protested. “You mean a corp is working with toxics?”
“If they thought they had something to use against CFD?” Winterhawk frowned. It was plausible—especially if it was some renegade executive or small research team, desperate or ambitious enough to take a big gamble for a lot of potential glory.
“Looks like they didn’t succeed,” Vyx said.
“Maybe that’s what the ork meant about everything going wrong,” Ocelot said.
Winterhawk was about to answer when Maya’s voice spoke in their link. “They’re ready,” she said. “They’re not confident, but they’re ready.”
“Right, then,” he said aloud. “Let’s get back to the others and do this. Flea, take good care of that data. If nothing else, we should be able to leverage it for a good payoff.”
They met the rest of the group at the main hallway. They were around another corner now, gathered outside a set of double doors. They’d brought Tweak’s body with them; her bloody form lay against the opposite wall, her jacket covering her face. Gus hung back, leaning against the wall, his dark skin ashen.
“This is where they are,” Melinda said. “There’s a circle of protection around the room—a big one. Going to be hard to punch through it with this background count, so I hope Althea and the others come through.”
“Better hurry,” Henrik said. He indicated the wall a few meters down, where another crack had opened up. This one, like its counterpart in the other hall, oozed green energy, and a dark stain crept out from its edges so quickly the group could see it move.
The floor shifted again, and a chunk of ceiling came down, barely missing Melinda.
“Go,” Winterhawk sent to Maya. “Tell them to do it. Now!” He waved the others back. “Get ready to open up on that door when I give the word.”
“Can you shield us?” Henrik asked. “If so, I can take it down with grenades.” Gus nodded, moving his drone into position.
“That wise?” Ocelot asked, glancing up at the ceiling as another rumble passed through the hallway. “You don’t want to bring the place down on our heads.”
“We’ll contain it,” Bronwyn said. “Put them in place. We’ll put up barriers around them so most of the energy will reflect back on the door.”
“Not bad,” Henrik said. He pulled a couple grenades from his pocket, set them just outside the wide, pockmarked door, and stepped back.
Bronwyn, Winterhawk, and Melinda began casting. Glowing barriers sprang, up, forming an enclosure around the area.
“Stand back,” Gus said.
And then, as suddenly as if a curtain had been lifted, the overpowering feeling of pressing interference faded from Winterhawk’s brain. “They’ve done it!” he called in triumph, though he could see he didn’t have to tell Melinda and Bronwyn. They, like him, appeared abruptly energized by the sudden damping of the majority of the astral interference from the warring dragon and toxic energies.
He didn’t think it would last long, though—from this point forward, every second was a gift. “Go! Now!”
Henrik’s and Gus’s nest of grenades detonated with loud booms, though not as loud as they would be if not for the magical barriers surrounding them. The explosion blew a two-meter hole in the door, its energy reflecting back just as Bronwyn had predicted. Metal and debris blew outward, where they too smashed against the fading barriers, but at least for the moment the walls and ceiling of the hallway remained stable.
“We need to punch through their circle!” Winterhawk called, spotting another glowing, semi-translucent wall a meter inside the door.
The others fell to the task, glad to have something to attack. With all of them shooting, casting spells, or otherwise pummeling it in a small, concentrated area—not to mention the temporarily reduced background count adding power to their efforts—it lasted only a few seconds before flaring up and winking out.
“Go!” Henrik yelled, as more small chunks of plascrete rained down from the ceiling. “Spread out!”
The group poured through the opening, moving fast in an effort to get inside and separate so they weren’t sitting ducks for any spell that might be headed their way. For one brief second, Winterhawk allowed himself to hope whoever was on the other side was either surprised or focused on the ritual, giving them enough time to get into position.
He got most of his wish.
As he tumbled through and dived to the left side, he got a brief impression of the room: huge space, high ceiling, more eerie green light, walls cracked and coated with slime and crawling tendrils of diseased plant life, overwhelming stench of decay.
And in the center, surrounded by shadowy figures, loomed the vast, misshapen form of the toxic wolf spirit. Behind it, a glowing gateway hung suspended, casting its own sickly light into the cavernous room. Winterhawk only got a fast glance at it, but it was enough to fill him with nausea and profound unease. He wanted nothing to do with whatever was on the other side of that gateway.
That was all he could take in, though, before Vyx yelled, “Look out!” and shoved him sideways before vaulting half the distance to the left-side wall.
The wolf-thing roared, a loud, wailing howl that spiked into Winterhawk’s bones, and flung a wide swath of liquid toward the group like some kind of vile tidal wave of rot.
Winterhawk hit the ground and rolled, jumping back to his feet as a shriek sounded from his right. “Melinda!”
Most of the team had avoided—or mostly avoided—the wave. Ocelot had leaped free to the right, along with Anissa and Flea. Bronwyn was safe next to Winterhawk, but slower to rise, gripping her wrist and wincing. Henrik didn’t move as fast, but his heavy armor and the group’s magical protection had shrugged off most of the damage.
Melinda screamed again. For a moment Winterhawk could only stare in horror.
She must have slipped when trying to avoid the wave—they’d never know the truth at this point. It had directly hit her, washing over her, punching through her magical armor. Her scream grew to an agonized crescendo as the substance simply consumed her, eating through her flesh, dissolving muscle. Her body juddered for a second, and then what was left fell in a wet, steaming heap to the cracked floor.
He couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t think about the fact that he’d brought a noncombatant into the kind of fight that would challenge seasoned shadowrunners. If he stopped to think about it—about the fact that Vyx was a noncom too, by his standards—he’d freeze and get more people killed. Instead, he made sure the magical defenses he was providing to the group were shored up to the maximum and dived behind a pile of rotted desks that had been shoved to the side of the room.
Meanwhile, the toxics hadn’t been idle. Using the wave of decay as a diversion, they’d abandoned their ritual and taken cover on the other side of the room behind more derelict furniture and fixtures.
The massive Wolf spirit remained defiantly in the center of the room, the troll shaman standing behind it, making mad gestures. She was tall even for a troll, dressed in ragged, stained robes. Her hair, matted and crusted with dirt—or worse—stuck out in all directions, and her eyes burned with an insane light.
Behind them, but in front of the shamans, two amorphous, barely humanoid forms shimmered into being from clumps of reeking vegetation on the floor.
Winterhawk took it all in with growing dismay. Unless he’d missed his count, they had six shamans counting the troll, two “normal” toxic spirits, and that Wolf abomination they’d been unable to make a dent in so far. Two of their own number were already dead, and even though it was reduced, he and Bronwyn were still fighting the hostile background count.
Things weren’t looking good for the home team.
And then Gus had to go and make it worse. “We gotta do this fast,” he said over the comm, his voice full of an urgency that hadn’t been there before.
“Why?”
“Take a look at the walls. I’m not feelin’ good about how long this place is gonna stay up, ’specially with all this rumblin’ and crackin’.”
“And the doorway!” Anissa added.
Winterhawk didn’t have much time to look at anything for long, but he took a quick glance up and behind him. They were right. The toxics had no doubt been here for a long time—probably months—if they’d gotten this far with the ley line. This place had certainly been a state-of-the-art corporate facility a few years back, which meant even when abandoned, its construction should have been robust enough to outlive all of them. But that was what toxics did—they brought ruin and decay wherever they went. And it was increasingly clear that their activities here, along with the presence of the gateway to whatever vile metaplane that spirit originated from, had accelerated the process.
And now they’d thrown around grenades, not to mention adding different types of magic to the mix and probably destabilizing whatever uneasy equilibrium that had existed before they’d arrived.
Bringing the place down might be the best way to take out the opposition, but it wouldn’t do them any good if they went with them. Yeah, they had to get out of here. “Take down the shamans,” ’Hawk called over the comm. From the astral plane, he could see which two were responsible for the two spirits, and he marked them on the team’s AR. “That’ll get rid of the spirits.”
“Roger that,” Anissa said, already moving. Henrik and Gus’s roto-drone likewise began firing toward where the shamans had taken cover.
The Wolf spirit roared and flung another toxic wave toward the group, but all of them were moving fast, spreading out far enough around the vast room that hitting more than one of them at a time would be impractical.
The troll shaman glared at Winterhawk and pointed her hands at him, screaming something in a language that made his mind recoil. He dived sideways as a stream of acid hit the desk he’d been hiding behind, cutting it into two sizzling pieces.
“Want to play, do you?” he called. She might be good, but so was he. Hitting her directly wouldn’t be the best use of his power—her protections in here had to be impressive. Instead, he picked up a heavy workbench from the other side of the room and flung it with all his considerable telekinetic strength at her.
She did flinch—that was something. But the Wolf spirit easily knocked it away…and then focused its baleful glare on Winterhawk.
Fifty-One
Vyx concentrated on moving fast, letting her body’s natural instincts override conscious thought, leaping and dancing over bits of fallen rubble and broken fixtures like a child skipping through a playground obstacle course. If she didn’t do that, she was sure her fear would paralyze her—both of the situation in general and of the fact that if Virago was here, she was probably either dead or turned into one of those hideous things they’d been fighting in the hallway.
This was nothing like what she’d been doing with the Ancients. They were a go-gang—they rode their bikes fast, fought fast and hard, and took down anything in their way. But the things in their way were usually other go-gangs, maybe low-level mobsters or KRB operatives—the magic they faced was usually garden-variety combat spells, normal types of spirits, and stuff that boosted combat abilities. She’d never even seen anything like this. Sure, she’d heard of toxic magicians—everybody had—but to her, they were the stuff of horror trids, not something she ever expected to fight.
She watched the others taking this in stride, as if it were something they did every day. Were they bluffing? Were they as scared as she was, but just better at hiding it? She glanced across the room in time to see her father fling an enormous workbench toward the Wolf spirit, making it look effortless despite his obvious exhaustion. His friend Ocelot, as fast as she was and a lot more experienced, leaped and twisted like a mad gymnast, sweeping the room with his shotgun, flicking his hand as he went by—
A toxic shaman, not one of those Winterhawk had marked as the spirits’ summoners, crumpled to the ground, his severed head dropping a second after the rest of him, and then Ocelot was gone again. “One down,” he announced over the comm.
Holy shit, was that a monowhip? Even with her legendary speed and confidence, she’d never been brave enough to try learning to use one. The only other Ancient she’d ever seen with one had been Lucky Liam, and even he rarely used it. But this guy swung it like an extension of his arm.
She gritted her teeth and gripped her katana. She was not going to be the weak link in this group. She wouldn’t let them down—not her father, not the rest of the team…and not Virago. Whether her girlfriend was here or not, whether she was dead or alive, Vyx owed it to her to take down as many of these fraggers as she could get her hands on.
She ducked behind cover, focusing her mind, feeling the magic and the adrenaline singing through her body. Her danger sense wasn’t much use to her here, since danger was everywhere, but she concentrated on picking up subtle nuances that might warn her of imminent threats. Maybe if she could get to the other side of the room, she could take out one of the summoners who’d be too focused on the bigger guns to see her coming. She fixed her attention on one and made her move.
Winterhawk threw himself behind another workbench, bolstering his defenses a second ahead of another toxic wave from the enraged Wolf spirit. They had to take that thing out! It was more powerful than the rest of them combined, and as long as it was here, it and the others could just wear them down until they were all dead.
He checked the AR map, picking out the dots indicating his team. The flickering green light and the sickly glow from the wavering gateway made it hard to see, but they were all over the room now. Ocelot had just taken out one of the shamans, but not a summoner. The spirits had taken off in two different directions, heading toward Henrik and Bronwyn. “Cover Bronwyn,” he told Gus. “Maybe she can banish it if she gets enough time.”
Immediately, the dot representing the roto-drone moved into position, its twin guns blazing as it fired burst after burst into the blobbish, reeking thing.
“We gotta move,” the rigger said again. “Gettin’ hard to breathe in here.”
He was right. At first, Winterhawk had thought it was nothing more than the overpowering stench from rotting vegetation and the rest of the decay in here, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to draw a deep breath. His heart pounded, and sweat ran down his back. They had to make this quick—but how? They were already outmatched.
“Boss?” Maya’s voice spoke in his mind. “Althea says something’s strange. They can’t hold the ritual much longer.”
“Yes, we know,” he said, trying not to sound impatient. “Working on it. Tell them to hold it as long as they can.”
“Something’s resisting them. She said it felt like the magic is…twisting.”
“As long as they can!” he sent.
He rolled again as the wolf, which still hadn’t moved away from the gateway, threw more toxic muck at him. It hit the wall and sizzled. Another rumble ran through the room, and more chunks of ’crete rained down. If they didn’t bring this place down soon, the decision would be taken out of their control.
Winterhawk saw an opening. He picked up another chunk that had landed near one of the shamans and, once again using a powerful telekinetic punch, aimed it and hit the shaman square in the gut, driving him backward and through the gateway. He screamed as he went through, and didn’t reappear. One of the spirits immediately dashed after him and disappeared into the gateway, returning to its home plane as soon as its connection to its summoner severed.
“Shaman and spirit down,” he called as their corresponding dots faded from the map. The one thing—the one tiny thing—that they might have going for them was that these shamans—probably even the troll—weren’t combat-trained. They were like most of the other witches back in Salem: powerful, but unused to dealing with the kind of split-second thinking necessary to survive in a firefight. After months of frightening off, kidnapping, or killing anyone brave enough to come near their hidey-hole, they probably hadn’t expected a team of shadowrunners to drop into their backyard.
“Press them,” he said. “Don’t let up. We can do this.”
