Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

They'd have headaches when they woke up, after Thud finished with them, but probably no broken bones. Probably.

The elevator required an electronic passkey. Dee could have finagled it… but one of the guards was nice enough to furnish us with one. We crowded inside-it's always a crowd with Thud present-and told it we wanted the 68th floor.

Of course, we weren't born yesterday. Thud had the maintenance hatch in the car's ceiling open with one, heavy-fisted bam, and we were already scrambling up through the opening and on top the roof when the car came to an abrupt and unscheduled halt between floors 64 and 65. When the gas came hissing into the car beneath us, we were already on the maintenance access ladder and climbing.

Cammie paused long enough to drop an RFID gas sensor down the open hatch in the elevator and check the result on her commlink.

"Shit!" she said, pocketing the comm and starting to climb. "Neurotox! One-whiff deadly! Climb!"

Hell, that just sucked big slimy ork toes. The corp-bastards could have used sleepy-gas. These guys were trying to kill us!

At the sixty-sixth level we let ourselves in through a maintenance hatch, and quietly slipped into a nearby stairwell. We were two floors from our goal and well ahead of sched. We didn't have the luxury of much time, though. It would take them maybe ten minutes to ventilate the elevator, and then they'd know we'd stepped out. And up.

Scoot used another of his bolts to slam an armed and armored guard in the stairway senseless, and Dee tripped the maglock on the door to the 68th floor. We were in.

But I scowled at my watch and signaled for the others to wait. The toughest part about this op was the timing. We knew from our informant that Zayid expected to get the "merchandise" at midnight tonight… and we were running about four minutes fast. If we burst in on the chanters now, we might interrupt the circle, keep them from opening the gate… which, of course, meant we couldn't get the merchandise either.

Assuming there was any merchandise to get. I still couldn't make myself believe that we were going to find the storied Necronomicon when we broke up Zayid's little party.

But we waited, waited as sweat prickled at our necks and backs, waited as Scooter psychically scanned for approaching trouble.

The nanny on my forehead itched. The thing drew power for the cam and mike set from my skin. The larger transmitter on my belt had a built-in power unit all its own. I hoped our unseen employers were getting an eyeful; we were counting on them to airlift us off the roof after we'd completed the hit. It was better than trying to fight our way all the way back down the M amp;M Tower to the street.

Time.

I looked back at Thud, who crouched behind me with his usual patient mountain-presence. His forehead sloped back so sharply between his massive horns that we'd placed his nanny on his throat. Otherwise, our peeping Toms would've seen nothing but the ceiling through his minicam. "Get to the roof," I told him. "Clear it and wait for us. Got it?"

"Got it," he rumbled. He unslung the autocannon he'd been wearing over his shoulder and gave it a friendly pat. "I wait for you."

So now it was just the three of us, stepping through the stairwell door and moving along the passageway looking for Conference Room 68-4. That was where our informant had said Zayid was casting his circles. It ought to be just ahead.

And we could hear it now… an eerie, droning harmony of male voices. We couldn't make out the words, but we could hear the tones easily enough, moaning and buzzing and humming from the next doorway down the hall. There was another guard standing there, but Scooter was muttering under his breath again, throwing up a stealth spell around us as we closed in on him. He saw us… but too late. He went down as Dee burst-fired three silenced rounds into him from her Ingram Smartgun.

The door beside the body was locked, and the passkey on the body didn't work.

By now, the building's defenses must be fully alerted to our presence. We had minutes now, at most, before a small corporate army converged on the 68th floor.

Midnight. Now the only question was whether Zayid's people were on time inside that conference room. I considered waiting another minute… but a minute is forever on a run, and I didn't much care to hang around in a corporate hallway waiting for the M amp;M goons to show. I nodded at Dee, and she went to work on the lock with a sequencer.

I could hear the chanting much more clearly now. Funny words… incomprehensible, like people trying to gargle and cough at the same time.

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"

The maglock hummed and opened and the door slid aside. A cloud of pungently sour incense wafted out as we plunged into darkness.

The room was huge, and seemed larger with the lights off. An oval pool of light marked the center twenty meters up ahead, where robed figures stood in a circle filled with a shifting, auroral glow.

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"

Twelve men with raised hands continued the eerie chant. That could only mean that the thirteenth figure, robed and hooded and standing at the circle's center, hadn't yet managed to establish the astral gate.

I hesitated, unsure, now, as to what to do.

The chant faltered as we stepped into the room. "Keep going!" the central figure shouted. "Keep the chant going!"

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"

The guy in the center had to be Zayid, and he seemed flustered. Good, because that gave me my chance to take control of the situation. "Good evening," I said, and I walked forward, keeping my Predator aimed at Zayid. "Hope you'll excuse the interruption. Don't move-and don't try any magic on us-and no one gets hurt."

Sure, it was trite. But I wasn't thinking real clearly at the moment.

"What are you doing here!" Zayid snapped. "You have no business here!"

"On the contrary. I have some very important business here."

Zayid was a big man, hooded and robed like the others, but I saw his eyes glaring at me from beneath the cowl. Behind him was an altar, with a sword, a chalice, a bell, and a clutter of less readily identifiable stuff. A couple of six-foot candle stands to either side cast most of the physical light… but that weird aurora shifted and danced in the air around them.

"You do not understand what you're dealing with here," Zayid said. "You have no possible conception! I recommend that you and your people turn around and quietly leave. Now."

"Thanks, but I think we'll hang for a while. This looks interesting."

I was taking in the chalked-out marks on the floor surrounding the thirteen magicians. They'd drawn your standard nine-foot circle-a double circle, actually, filled with your standard arcane occult sigils, signs, and squiggles. Just outside the circle, touching it at one point, was a chalk triangle three feet across.

"How about it, Scoot?" I asked.

Scooter had his hands up, facing the circle and the chanters in a kind of magical stand-off. They outnumbered us, but they were penned inside their protective circle. I hoped that meant they couldn't flame us from in there, or worse. And Scoot was working some protective spells, just in case.

"Looks like an ordinary Hermetic ritual," Scooter said, his brow furrowed with concentration. He was using The Voice. "Complete with a triangle of evocation. The circle protects the magicians inside. The triangle is where whatever you're summoning is supposed to appear. Now don't break my concentration!"

I stepped closer, keeping my Predator aimed at the black-robed bunch inside the circle. I was pretty sure that whatever protection those chalks marks conferred on the chanters, they were more effective against spirits and beings and forces coming out of the astral than they were against copper-jacketed slugs with a muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second.