Jak Koke - Stranger souls

He found his strength a few minutes later, part of his Roxborough past coming to his aid. Memories of his disease and the treatment for it, the submergence into the vat. If he could live through that treatment and the certain knowledge that he would never come out of his vat, then he could live through anything. He had never given up, never relied on anyone besides himself.

Ryan wiped his eyes and escorted Nadja back inside. Back to bed. They held each other for a while, and soon she was sleeping soundly. Ryan lay awake next to her, thinking about his two pasts, about his mission, and about the new emotion that was welling up inside him.

Anger.

Anger toward Dunkelzahn. Rage toward the creature who had let him down in the end, leaving him alone. Isolated for the first time in his life.

Jane-in-the-box paced around her electronics, trying to pump some blood into her bony limbs before jacking back into the datastream. She took another bite of her ham and swiss croissant, a special gift from the cook, Enrico-a troll with a huge gut and a penchant for French cuisine.

Her trid interface beeped, indicating that her smartframe had completed its scan-and-evaluate cycle. And found a match, she noted. "Fragging sweet," she said. There was no one else in the huge chamber, and her words echoed off the hewn stone walls of the cavern. Jane often spoke to herself when she wasn't jacked in. It kept her company and helped to organize her mind.

After Ryan's call asking her to dig up any information on the location of the Dragon Heart, Jane had scanned the security video to try to get an ID on the perps who had lifted the Dragon Heart. One of her image-recognition routines that searched for distinctive markings picked out a tattoo on the partially exposed forearm of one of the runners. A woman, and probably a mage, based on what she was wearing.

The tattoo was a crescent moon, under a flapping narrow banner and a sword. On the banner was a word, "Tal'shai." Jane had laughed aloud. This was almost too easy.

She'd programmed another frame to search the datanets for several variables, including a match or partial match to the tattoo, and any known elven shadowrun teams with the rep or resources to pull off a run against the high security of the lair.

Now, Jane jacked in, entering the oh-so-familiar virtual space of her riveted steel box. Six sides of brushed gray metal animating around her. The results of the smartframe

flowed in the dataspace in front of her, and as she scanned it, she separated the data into two bins, hits and misses.

The smartframe had found the tattooed word in Jane's online Sperethiel dictionary. It meant "black widow spider." That didn't narrow down the choices at all. Any elven runner could go by that name. But as Jane continued her scan, she reprogrammed on the fly to modify the smart frame to narrow its search parameters as she rejected the bogus and reinforced those her gut told her were on target.

She found the trend at the same time as her frame. A dead elf with the same tattoo had been discovered by Seattle Lone Star. Except there were no words on the banner. This one had a small black symbol-three triangles with their points almost touching, slightly offset from center. This dead elf was male and didn't look like any of those who'd taken the Dragon Heart.

The Lone Star report said that the tattoo identified the deceased as security for the Atlantean Foundation. The smart-frame had searched the personnel files of the Atlantean Foundation, but there were no security personnel listed. Jane knew they got their security from the Mystic Crusaders, an enigmatic organization whose purpose Jane did not know.

"Very interesting," Jane said to herself. She knew that the Atlantean Foundation collected artifacts and powerful magic items. Even if the Mystic Crusaders were mysterious, it was likely that the AF was behind the theft. But where had they taken the Dragon Heart?

Jane prepped to enter the Matrix. She would do some digging into a few of the Foundation's hosts, and see if there had been any deliveries of a special nature in the past twelve hours. She chuckled to herself. This was going to be fun.

There was only one detail that nagged in the back of her mind. Conspiracy theorists claimed that the Atlantean Foundation was run not just by elves, but by immortal elves. Elves whose existence had never been proven, but who were said to have been born thousands of years ago. Jane believed that one or two immortal elves did exist; she'd done enough decking for Dunkelzahn that she knew certain things. But she didn't think they were behind the Atlantean Foundation. There was no direct evidence to show it.

At least she hoped not. These immortals were extremely

powerful and cunning. Even Dunkelzahn had respected their power. If they had the Dragon Heart, even Quicksilver himself, Dunkelzahn's greatest operative, would be severely outmatched.

In the cold of the Canadian Rockies near Lake Louise, Burnout stood as still as a statue, taking in the scene. He stood on an icy slope overlooking a small airstrip that had been chiseled out of the mountain. Forty-two minutes earlier, Burnout and Slaver had descended from the helicopter, coming down on hoist wires into a small clearing nearly a kilometer away. The rigger had remained inside the hovering machine, waiting for the completion of the mission-the death of Ryan Mercury.

Now, the late-evening sky was moonless and dark, but not to Burnout. His eyes self-adjusted to the low light. The few sodium lamps outside the mirrored glass buildings next to the airstrip flared brightly on his cybernetic retinas, streaking his vision with cold blue-white.

The perimeter was marked by a three-meter-high wall, topped with looping monowire, security cameras, and rail-mounted drones that tracked back and forth, no doubt wired into a closed-circuit simsense rigger who could activate their weapons with a thought. Periodically, one of six guards walked the perimeter inside the fence. The guard was always leashed together with some sort of animal. A dog or a parani-mal. Something with a good sense of smell, no doubt. The guards had light body armor under their uniforms, and carried pistols and Ares Cascades.

"Burnout, capture one of the guards." Slaver's voice came as if from a great distance away, like out of a dream across a windy lake. But Burnout heard, and it was all the prompting he needed. He moved. Quickly and quietly, picking a spot where the sec cameras would have a harder time seeing.

He knew he was normally an easy target for astral creatures, but Slaver had supposedly masked his aura as much as

possible. No matter. There was nothing more he could do about it now. No hesitation, he told himself. No second thoughts. Just the quick fluidity of this mechanical body.

He passed down through the pines, crossed the short clearing like a ghost of metal, and reached the wall. He jumped as he came close, using all the strength of the hydraulic jacks in his legs. He cleared the wall and the mono-wire and the track with ease, landing without a sound on the other side. Looking around for a microsecond, he honed in on a guard walking away from him. Target lock.

Then Burnout was moving toward him, taser in hand. The dog saw him first, spinning toward Burnout just as he loomed up behind the guard. The taser made a tiny springing noise, and the beast fell with a small yelp.

The guard didn't even get that far. He moved as if in slow motion, his hand not yet reaching his weapon.

Burnout's palm came across the guard's mouth, clamping down tight before abruptly pulling back. Jerking the man off his feet. Burnout had to stop himself from snapping the man's neck. Slaver had said capture, not kill.

The man's pupils widened when he saw Burnout, and he tried to call out. His cries were muffled, and he stopped completely when Burnout placed the barrel of his silenced Predator II to his face. A quick, hard punch to the gut knocked the man's wind out and left him gasping while Burnout sealed his mouth with his stash of fiber tape, then bound his hands and feet with the same.