Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

'Course, I'd get a bonus from Ares if I managed to get the boy back without handing over the files. And another bonus if I found out who this bunch of faeries were working for. Priority was the kid, though. Donna had apparently become pretty important to Ares and their primary interest was to keep her happy, more than anything else.

I stepped to one side and pointed out the three secure secretaries. "Pick one."

The elf looked at me like I was crazy. "Nobody uses that obsolete crap anymore."

"I do," I said, tapping the socket behind my ear. "Couple generations old. You want the data, it goes into the sec. When I get the kid, you get the sec released." I shrugged. "No other way to get it out of my head."

The elf peered at the three units. "Secure, eh? Double biometrics lock and the whole bit?"

I shrugged. "Sure. It all still works. That's why they still make them."

The nice thing about these little secure secretaries is that someone could dissect them but not before they overwrote the data ten or twelve times. The data would be secure enough for the next hour or two, long enough for me to collect the kid and get away, even if everything else went to hell.

Pointing at the Schraeder, the elf straightened up.

I stuck out my lower jaw and nodded. "Good choice. You know your gear."

Schraeder was a very minor player in the corporate world, but that meant they had to try harder. Rugged, reliable, and hard to spoof the security features. I waved the guy behind the counter over and indicated the Schraeder. He reached in and handed it over without even asking for payment.

I probably had given him too much of the roofie. Then again, he already had one of Ares' 10K sticks, so what the hey? He could afford to cover the cost of the Schraeder. Long as he didn't pass out on me.

Someone way back in the 20th Century had invented packaging that you could not open without power tools. It was good to see that they'd improved things since then. I nearly tore off a fingernail getting the damn package open.

The rear of the sec had half a dozen interfaces, none of them compatible with my old, old headware. I poked the sec under the slightly-crossed eyes of the counter guy. "What you got that interfaces to a MD-45?"

He weaved a little but finally a hand rose up and he pointed at a rotating kiosk farther back in the store.

But first.

I rubbed my thumb on the pad I'd glued onto my belt, getting a good dose of ruffie on it. Wouldn't hurt to make the elf relax a bit. Better if he relaxed a lot.

I put my thumb on the biometric pad of the sec and waited for the beep, then handed the unit to the elf.

Secs are pretty standard stuff. Nobody wants to have to relearn a new sec, so they all work alike. Feed the biometric reader, then set up your security.

The elf planted its thumb on the pad and waited for the beep.

I took the unit back. Now I had to stall a bit. It would take a few minutes for the drug to work its way into his system.

Fortunately, I didn't have to pretend that I was having trouble finding the right adapter. I knew there had to be one but damned if I could find it the first time through or the second. I must have turned that kiosk four of five times.

Naturally, the bloody thing was hiding behind a different adapter that someone had hung on the rack in the wrong place. And this one was also wrapped in Impenetrable Plastic.

I always carry my own cable and snapped it to the adapter and felt around behind my ear for the skin pad I had had grafted over the plug to my datalock-quite expensively, if I may say so. Then it was just plug and play.

Like I said, I had been a courier back in the day. Lots of fine storage in my skull, most of it secure in a datalock. All of it obsolete.

Good enough for me, though.

I was just about as obsolete. Tried my damnedest to keep my hands from shaking.

The clock I had started in my head when I got out of the Spirit was starting to get into the yellow zone. I had to push things along.

It still took nearly a minute to download the file. I understand it's significantly faster these days but I've got too many enemies from the old days to risk anyone working on my skull anymore.

The file automatically deleted itself from my skullware when the download completed. Standard courier model. I don't have any sort of access to that memory, either.

I tapped up the first page of the file in the secretary and locked it. Then I stuck in a password to freeze the display. Only the elf and I could access the secretary now, but the elf would need my password to change the display.

Before I had a chance to hand over the sec, the elf's face brightened. "Hey, you're Jacob McCandless. I heard of you. Weren't you with Echo Mirage? I heard you were dead."

No, I wasn't with EM. I was twelve back when they were changing the world, but something I've noticed over the years is that for people these days, anything that happened before they were born apparently had all happened at the same time. That damn elf probably thought we rode dinosaurs like the Flintstones.

Plus, my original name wasn't McCandless, but for the last thirty years I had used it. I stopped the clock I had running in my head. The piece-of-crap ECM in this place had not prevented this elf from getting a facial recognition search started and no doubt that search raised flags all over the place when the search hit on that name.

The elf knew my name and had accessed the Matrix to get it. I had to run, if I was going to get out of this intact, but I could not afford to panic this elf.

Or any of the confederates he no doubt had scattered around outside.

I laughed. "You must be a John Wayne fan."

"Who?"

Yeah. One thing about elves, if it isn't that artsy-fartsy airy-faery stuff, they thought it was too much like crap to be worthy of their attention. When I was a kid, I watched all of John Wayne's movies. On a 2D TV set, no less.

"OK," I said, "I showed you mine. Now you show me yours."

I'd told him when I'd talked to him that one time, I had to see the kid, in person, alive and well, and I'd be able to tell if it was some sort of simsense chameleon program. So the boy had to be somewhere close.

I just hoped he was on this side of the street.

Time was running out and I couldn't afford to run back and forth across the street too many times.

Now the elf decides it's time to talk.

"The kid anything to you?"

I felt like I was in the movie.

"Nope. I get paid to bring the kid home in one piece. If something happens to him, I don't get paid and I become cranky."

"I'm scared. You're a real badass."

Didn't have a clue, which was just as well. He might have been more careful if he had. Fortunately, I had spent a lot of nuyen making sure that sort of data had been purged from all of the pertinent files about me. At least, the files I could find.

"Yeah. Big time." I nodded toward the door. "The kid."

The elf shrugged and led the way.

Out the door, turned right, and into a door right next to the shop. Two steps up from the sidewalk, through the door, and onto a landing with a set of stairs that went up into the darkness.

Someone had knocked out all the lights.

Damned elves can see in the dark, but not old, fat men.

Well, not normal old, fat men. I had the best artificial eyes you could buy-twenty years ago. Not to mention ears, nose, and taste buds. All with full recording capability. Better than any other receipt a courier could provide.

Inside my head, I turned up the gain on the image intensifier and the darkness turned into green shadows rather than utter darkness. I nudged up the IR gain, too, though the only significant heat source was the elf.

I still put in a couple of theatrical stumbles on the steps, just to make it look like I was blind up here.