broadcast tapes. They never recovered the black box or much of the wreck-age—but the ocean’s pretty deep where it went down.”
“They found a section of the wing a few years later,” Jessica replied. “It had washed up on an island in a storm, and someone was using it as the roof of a fruit stand. It’s just lucky that a tourist recognized it for what it was and re-ported the serial number to the NTSB. It had been there for at least a year, and I’m sure any number of tourists had seen it before, but this one was a pilot and an aircraft enthusiast. A lot of them visit those islands looking for old militar-ia. Anyway, it was enough for the NTSB to re-open the case and retrieve the wing. It looked as though it had been cut with a knife, but they found some-thing rather interesting inside. I’d heard rumors, but this confirms it.”
Ratatosk raised an eyebrow.
“A dragon’s talon. A large one.”
The decker stared at her. “You’re kidding?”
“No.” Jessica opened her purse. “Here are the files; read them for yourself.”
Ratatosk plugged the datachip she handed him into his cyberdeck and jacked in. As well as reading the highlighted section of the file and looking at the photos, he checked for any evidence of tampering. Nothing; the chip was the exact same one he’d given her two days before, and the file was still in its secure read-only format. “Holy…do they have any idea what dragon it came from?”
“If they did, it isn’t on the file, and I don’t know any parazoologists who could tell me. Do you?”
“Possibly,” the decker replied. Magnusson was an assistant professor of magical theory at U-Dub, and Elias was his best student. If neither could identify the talon from the photos, they could probably refer Ratatosk to an expert. “But I’m not sure how much good it’d do. It’s not like Lone Star keeps a database of dragon DNA. Is there anything else?”
“Yes. The NTSB team investigated the pilot and co-pilot to see whether they could find any evidence of substance abuse or anything like that. They discovered that both of them had received a payment from a subsidiary of Lotus Eaters Entertainment shortly before the plane went down.”
“Did they follow it up?”
“The pilots’ families said they didn’t know anything about it, and the ac-countants at LEE said they have no record of such a payment being made.”
“The NTSB didn’t subpoena the financial records?”
Jessica snorted. “Have you ever dealt with entertainment industry ac-countants?”
“Not personally, no.”
“They’re experts at hiding profits, losses, expenses, and probably bod-ies. They’d probably say that they must have paid some sub-contractor a
fee, and he’d just handed the certified credsticks over to the pilots. And unless you could get their complete financial records rather than a set of fakes—like the ones they show anyone who’s entitled to royalties—you couldn’t prove anything. But a good decker who wasn’t scared to break the law might have a chance…”
Ratatosk blinked. “Are you serious? Do you know what that would take?”
“You managed to crack the NTSB’s security. How much more difficult could this be?”
The elf sighed. “Much more difficult, and much more dangerous. Federal government departments use a system designed to make it easy for the head office to access reports from branch offices. While there’s seriously heavy ICE designed to prevent anyone altering or deleting a file, not to mention backups locked in offline vaults, merely copying a few files and decrypting them is fairly simple. Sure, there’s a record of everyone who accesses data that isn’t supposed to be available to the public, but all I had to do to beat that was copy the name of the last person who opened it. No problem.
“A media company like LEE, however, is going to be even more seri-ous about non-disclosure, because it doesn’t want anyone else releasing a competing product ahead of time. So it’ll keep all of its sensitive files locked in computers that aren’t connected to the Matrix, so the only way to get that stuff will be to actually get inside their offices and access one of their terminals—one hooked up to the right computers, which means it’ll have to belong to someone who Needs To Know—without getting caught. Sure, there are people who’re good at getting into places like that one way or another, my fixer can find you the best, but they’re expensive.
And if anything goes wrong, if someone sets off even one alarm, then the decker and everyone else is going to be trapped inside the building while the company’s security guards comb the place—and LEE is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Novalis, which is a subsidiary of NeuroTech, which means they’ll have more guards than even Genocide George could shoot his way through.”
“There’s a party at LEE on Friday—the launch for Maria Mercurial’s new single. If I could get you in—”
“I’d still need a plan for getting out if the drek hit the fan—and the chances that it will, are too fraggin’ high for my liking. Sorry.”
“My father died in that plane,” Jessica said quietly. “I need to know why a dragon wanted him dead.”
Ratatosk sighed. He’d always found it difficult to say no to damsels in any kind of distress. “Give me a few days. I’ll let you know if I think of anything.”
SHOWTIME 80
As he headed for the door, he saw Elias sitting at the bar watching Cherry Bomb chatting with a man in a thousand-nuyen business suit and handmade leather shoes. “Forget it, kid,” he said, not unkindly. “What she makes in a night could probably pay your tuition for a semester. I’m not saying she’s not worth it, of course.”
Elias shrugged, and sipped his watered soda. “Does everything have to be about the nuyen?”
“In this place,” Ratatosk replied, “I’m pretty sure it does.”
“What about running the shadows? Is that just the money, too?”
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. I remember playing video games and simsenses about big scores, and I thought…I guess I thought it was about the adrenalin, the rush.”
“Sometimes, but that usually means you’ve fragged up. You’re not going to last long if you think of shadowrunning as a game.”
“You weren’t a gamer?”
“Not really. If I wasn’t winning, I’d just hack into the software and repro-gram…” He blinked, and a grin slowly spread across his face. “Are you a Maria Mercurial fan, by any chance?”
Another shrug. “I like some of her stuff. Why?”
“I may be able to score you an invite to the launch of her new single.”
Elias looked at him suspiciously. “Why me? There must be—” When Rata-tosk didn’t reply, the mage asked, “It’s a run, isn’t it?”
“We might end up running, yes. We might have to run very, very fast – maybe even outrun a dragon. Are you interested?”
Elias bit his lip as Cherry Bomb smiled at him. “I’m not a combat mage,”
he said warily.
“I know, but the skills and the spells you do have will be much more useful.
And you’ll need a good suit. I’ll tell you more later.”
Elias was still goggling slightly as the decker left, so he didn’t need to move a facial muscle when he noticed Cherry Bomb walking towards him.
“Hoi,” she said. “Did Ratatosk just say he could get you an invite to the Maria Mercurial launch?”
t
The black Toyota Elite Ratatosk had appropriated for the evening passed through the gateway into the LEE Studios without even needing to slow down, and didn’t stop until it reached the elevator of the automated garage. Ratatosk, Elias, and the woman Ratatosk had introduced as Claire Obscure all stepped out, leaving Vita Brevis, the dwarf rigger, crouched behind the back seat.
Claire was dressed in the height of steampunk fashion—low-cut, full-length dress with a bustle, festooned with gold braid and silvery gears, plus a black top hat and riding boots. Ratatosk was more conservatively attired,
though his tailored grey three-piece suit made Elias, clad in his father’s Europa jacket and slacks, feel like a dumpster-diving squatter.
From that point of view, things went downhill when they entered the party and saw the dazzling array of fashion on display. Elias scanned the room look-ing for Maria Mercurial, unsuccessfully.
The team had arrived fashionably late, as planned, and mingled for a few minutes before the house lights dimmed and the curtain began to rise. Claire murmured, “Showtime,” and led Elias back through the foyer. The security guards barely glanced as them as they walked towards the lift, which asked,
“What floor, please?” in a breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice.
“Seventeen.”
“Key, please.”
Claire pulled a maglock passkey out of her cleavage and inserted it into a slot beneath the postcard-sized monitor. “I’m sorry, you’re not cleared for—”
Elias, looking away from the camera, tried not to wince. “Sorry,” said Claire. “Wrong key.” She withdrew the passkey, pressed a few buttons, and reinserted it.
“Seventeen,” said the lift. Eliot exhaled, relaxed, and sat in a corner before sending his astral body up the lift shaft and towards the office of the VP in charge of contracts. He returned to his meatbody a few seconds before they reached the seventeenth floor and nodded, indicating that there was neither magical or physical security in their path—all the magical wards and other protection were on the outside of the building.
They walked casually towards the western corner office, where Claire looked at the door and the frame and swore under her breath. When Elias looked at her quizzically, she murmured, “Retina scanner. I’m going to have to try next door; cover me.”
Elias nodded and cast an Invisibility spell over both of them as Claire used the maglock passkey on the adjoining door. He concentrated on maintaining the spell in an effort to calm his nerves, but he felt much older by the time the door finally opened. Claire removed her skirt, petticoats and bustle, revealing a shapely pair of lightly armored legs and a large collection of tools concealed in the fabric, including Ratatosk’s deck. She scanned the room for security devices, and when convinced that it was safe to enter, crept over to the secre-tary’s desk and examined the computer peripherals.
A moment later, she nodded, and Elias relaxed slightly. He conjured up a watcher spirit as an astral sentry, then left the room and returned downstairs.
Ratatosk was waiting in the foyer as the lift arrived, and Elias handed him the passkey as though desperate to get rid of the incriminating evidence.
Maria Mercurial was on stage by the time Elias returned to the party, and he remembered Cherry Bomb’s offer—the night of his life if he could get the singer’s autograph. The light show meant he could barely see where he was go-ing, so he switched to assensing in the hope that it would prevent him walking
into anyone. A moment later, his jaw dropped open and he backed up hurried-ly, his face pale.
t
The architecture of the LEE secure network mirrored that of the building, though the few rooms with high-level access were often much larger than their physical counterparts, and those without were small and sparse. Ra-tatosk explored the datalines and slave nodes, leaving custom-made logic bombs in place in case he had to resort to Plan B, then returned to the SAN between the secretary’s node and her boss’s. The huge gate looked like as though it had been copied from a sword and sorcery epic, though the trea-sures beyond it would definitely have been beyond Neil the Ork Barbarian’s understanding. Ratatosk hit the layers of Barrier with his strongest Sleaze program, more than half-expecting to hit grey ICE at any instant…but the program slowly slipped through weaknesses in the countermeasures, open-ing cracks wide enough for him to sneak a Browse program into the SPU to search for the data he needed.
The browse program wasn’t scoring any hits, so Ratatosk changed the pa-rameters, hunting down the files with the heaviest IC. Most of these proved to be clearly labeled contracts for LEE’s most profitable stars, but some had names that were incomprehensible to anyone without inside knowledge. Ra-tatosk remembered one of his first teachers telling him about the difference between a cipher and a code—a cipher replaced letters, and could be broken mechanically given time, but a code replaced entire words with other words or symbols and could be almost impossible to crack. Even if he downloaded them all and decrypted them later, it would take time, and the files that looked most promising were also protected with Access as well as Scramble. He clicked his teeth, then stared at a file name that seemed out of place amid the con-tracts and legal briefs. Curious, he sleazed through the IC protecting AUDT-N46A19RLCNC, uploaded his best decryption utility, and had unscrambled nearly half of the title card before the glowing icons suddenly turned black – the telltale sign of Tar Baby ICE.
t
“What’s the matter?” asked the woman. “Never seen a dragon before?”
Elias stared at the woman, first astrally, then in the normal spectrum. In the flesh, she was only slightly taller than a dwarf and nearly as thin as an elf, with black hair in a braid down to her hips. She wore a tight, sleeveless, near-ly backless synthsilk dress in a pattern that resembled snakeskin, and had an eastern dragon tattooed along her left arm and a western dragon tattooed on her left. Elias found himself wondering whether she had an image of a
feath-ered serpent tattooed on some other body part, and struggled to maintain his poker face. “Not up close,” he admitted, “and never an Eastern one.”
“No need to worry—Li’s a sweetheart, unlike some others I could name. He produces fantasy movies—Tea With the Black Dragon, of course, and the Bridge of Birds series.”
“You’re his…”
“Don’t say ‘vet’,” the woman warned. “Ever. Li might forgive you, eventu-ally, but Lofwyr would tear you to shreds. I’m a healer—of humans, too, but dracoforms are my specialty. Would you like me to introduce you?”
Elias nodded slowly. The woman’s aura had indicated that she was a sha-man, probably with Snake as her totem. And a movie producer might be able to get him closer to Maria Mercurial and improve his chance of scoring an autograph. “Thanks.”
t
Ratatosk pulled the ruined decryption utility out of his deck and replaced it with Slow, which he used to try to stop the grey ice from sending an alert to the security station before he’d finished downloading the file he needed.
Making a quiet exit would probably be impossible, but that was why he had a backup plan. The feed from the ballroom camera showed that Maria Mercuri-al had nearly finished her encore, which meant that many people would soon start leaving. Even as the download bar crept towards 100%, the decker silently congratulated himself for his sense of timing. He activated the speakerphone on the secretary’s desk, and murmured, “It’s showtime, folks.”
t
Thorsen, LEE’s security chief, was looking at the crooked line of fans waiting for autographs, shepherded by guards in armored tuxedos, when the head of cyber-security called to say that they had an intruder. “He’s in one of the pri-ority datastores,” Bryce said. “I don’t know what he’s after—it’s above my pay grade—but we can’t afford to let him leave.”
“Copy that,” said Thorsen, hurrying toward the foyer. He didn’t know ex-actly what was in those files either, but he knew what was likely to happen to him and Bryce if one was hacked. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know; the offices that have access to that network aren’t moni-tored,” said Bryce sourly. “But they’re all on the top six floors. Corridors, stair-wells, and elevators are all clear.”
“Send a couple of strike teams up there. Shotguns and stun rounds—they do less damage to the furniture.”
Bryce relayed the order, then scanned the monitor as it cycled through the views from the corridors and stairwells. Barely two minutes later, a painfully
SHOWTIME 82
loud and obscene exclamation issued from the speaker. “This is Blue Team,”
said the same voice, a little more calmly. “The fragging elevator’s stuck be-tween floors nine and ten. I think we’ve been hacked.”
“No drek,” muttered Bryce, “Which one?”
“Number one.”
“On it. Red Team, your position?”
“We’re—frag, we just stopped too, between eight and nine. Number Four.”
Bryce shook his head. “Thorsen, you copy? I’m going to try to fix this, but I don’t know how long—”
“I’ll pull some of my people off crowd control down here and send ‘em up the stairs,” said Thorsen sourly. “You’re sure there’s nobody in the stairwell?”
“Not unless—son of a slitch!”
“What?”
“I just saw a fragging air elemental on fourteen! Heading towards the stairs!”
Sitting at the security post behind the reception desk, Thorsen quickly called up the images from the cameras on that level, and beckoned to Fari-no, the on-duty wagemage. “I don’t know drek about elementals, but they can hide people, right? And move ‘em?”
“Yes,” came the quiet reply as she wheeled her chair over to the desk. Like most of the other mages on duty that night, she’d been casting detection spells to make sure none of the guests were armed, and was almost exhausted.
She looked at the screen and shrugged. “It looks like an elemental, but that shouldn’t be possible. No spirit that powerful could have gotten through our wards without somebody noticing.”
“Go and check it out anyway,” Thorsen commanded. “I’m not sending a team up against an elemental without magical backup.”
Farino shrugged, leaned back in her chair, and sent her astral body up through the building. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” she reported a few seconds later. “Are you sure it’s the right floor? Could the decker have switched the feeds?”
“Maybe,” Bryce replied in a tone of venomous respect. “I’m still trying to regain control of the lifts without dropping any of our own people. Try the other floors.”
The wagemage closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again for nearly a
The wagemage closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again for nearly a