Anthology - From the Street

I can't take him home. There's no way I could control him. I fetch around for that piece of rebar, and hold it up. Chester comes bounding over, jumping up and down on spring-powered legs. I hold the rebar up, and reach down with my other hand to pet Chester. He looks up at me with brown eyes, totally trusting.

A shock goes up my arm as the rebar penetrates his left eye and into his brain. The dog dies almost instantly. His implants take a little while longer to stop twitching.

I make my way back to Soon's, but somehow I don't think I'm up for any more dog. Not for a while, anyway.

THE MAN WITH THE PLANS

by Dave Barton

I have become invisible and intangible. Nobody sees me anymore. I do my job but nothing changes, nobody benefits. Not anymore.

But still I love the sea, the lift and tilt of the waves. Monty Crane gets land-sick, they joke down at the Bleached Whale, and they're right. Vancouver makes me sick to my stomach. I'm only happy when I'm on this old boat of mine and heading out of the bay.

I am invisible. I keep my eyes on the horizon, my hands on the wheel, my mouth shut, and outside the one-man cabin my passengers chat as if I wasn't here.

"I'm just saying: from what I've heard, Skunk won't take money," says the guy who thinks he's their leader. An ork with stud-covered skin. The rest of his body also infested with metal, no doubt. Hints of a Seattle accent, I think. I get a gut-load of deja vu, then and there. But he's right: Skunk doesn't need money. Money's no good out in the Swamps. I know what Skunk will want, and I know it won't be pretty. This isn't deja vu. I have been here before. Too many times. Maybe I should tell them.

"So we save a chunk of our own pay," grunts his human friend, the Amerind punk with the coat full of knives. "Suits me."

The elf girl's looking a little green. I like her but what can I do? The sea's choppy this morning, and anyway it'll be better out than in.

"And I'm just saying: there've got to be other ways to get the-" she drops her voice to a hoarse whisper, eyes darting in my direction "- blueprints for the place. " She needn't have bothered. I could have filled in the blanks even if I didn't have an ear full of electronics. I know how it works with Arty Skunk. I've been there from the beginning.

A cloud of sea spray slaps the elf girl in the face. She retches and folds up onto the deck, cupping her mouth. But she'll be damned if she won't finish her point: "I don't like what I've heard about this Skunk fellow-" she pauses to swallow back the sickness "-and I don't like thinking about what he might ask us to do in exchange."

I smirk, safe in the knowledge that this raggedy old beard will hide it. A shadowrunner with a moral streak. Refreshing. Likeably naive. But I'm guessing she's new to this way of life and she isn't going to go very far with that kind of baggage. More's the pity.

Up ahead their hacker perches cross-legged on the bow of the boat. He's sweeping his hands around in the air like one of those Tai Chi nuts in the park in Chinatown, only ten times the speed. Juggling little panels and streams of information that only he can see. I glance out at the landmarks and the little signs that only I can see. Behind us on the right, the fortress walls of the aerodrome are fading into the morning haze. The silt is merging with the sea. Time to turn hard to port and follow what's left of the coast. And any second now…

Sure enough, the hacker cries out " Fuck it! " and shakes his fists in the air. He stands up and stomps my way.

"No signal? Seriously?" he shouts through the window. I shake my head and shout back, trying to put some sympathy into the tone:

"Aye, and you won't get much in the Swamps either. A few patches here and there, but wireless relays aren't a high priority, I'm afraid."

He curses, and the others fumble with their commlinks to confirm what their friend has just pointed out. There will be moaning and bitching like spoiled children, you mark my words.

"Why are we heading so far out? We wanted to go south, not west!" the ork yells. A Wuxing cargo jet has chosen this moment to roar overhead, spiraling down toward the Vancouver aerodrome behind us. Odd that it isn't heading directly to their facility.

Young punk. Telling me my business? I sigh through gritted teeth.

"Safest way. Lots of Rangers and Border Patrol along the north edge of the Swamps. Watching for trouble and smugglers. Lucky we didn't get stopped already when we skirted it."

Luck, and ten years plying this old fishing boat. I've been stopped so many times they rarely bother me anymore as long as I stick to this route. They never have searched hard enough to find the smuggling bins under the hull, I'm happy to say, otherwise I guess it would be a different story.

They shut up for a while, taking in the view. I think the elf girl's about ready to cry when she first sees the Dyke. And the ork can hardly bring himself to look. All those heads on spikes, looking out to sea-kind of surprised-looking, some of them. I remember when the Dyke was still a symbol of hope. God forgive me. I might as well have put those heads up there myself.

It was over ten years ago when Mother Earth hit the Richmond area with one mother of an earthquake. We were sure it wasn't natural. The aerodrome just to the north got away with a few cracks, and as you'd guess, the corps weren't slow to get it patched up and good as new. But Richmond, sitting on the sands between the two arms of the Fraser River, was a different story. Many of the buildings were reduced to rubble. A few years and another earthquake later and the land had taken more than it could bear. It subsided ten feet or more and let the sea rush in to embrace the remaining real estate.

After the first quake, most of the survivors fled to neighboring districts and the high and mighty managed to pack them all in eventually. The Cascade Crow governors dutifully danced in honor of the dead, then washed their hands and walked away. The place was empty, they said. Nothing more to see. But it wasn't true, especially around the edges of the district. Some couldn't afford to leave (Amerind insurance companies quibbled about "hand of God" clauses and sold their souls to the devil that day), some didn't want to leave, and some people in this world are drawn to suffering like flies to shit. On top of everything else, there were the Shedim zombies: a real nightmare at the center of the district. Not every victim of Richmond took death lying down.

Six years ago, not long before the Crash of '64, I was shipping another team of shadowrunners on this exact same route. In this exact same boat. I remember now: there was an ork pretending to be in charge of that lot too. Razor, I think his name was. Or the name he was giving me, anyway. I don't remember the others so well, but these were the people who gave Arty Skunk his big idea. This was the day that Skunk got a wicked glint in his eye.

Razor wasn't a native of Vancouver either, and although he was trying to pretend otherwise, I don't think he'd even been here very long. I had a feeling that none of them had. They were still buzzing from a trip to the Vancouver Ridge in downtown. Back then it had only been open for a year or two, though I don't think it's mellowed much with age, even after the Crash lost everyone so much money. Two miles of the most expensive shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, and casinos in the Salish-Shidhe Council. Swimming pools, an aquarium, an arboretum in the main concourse, massage and beauty parlors, art galleries, you name it, all of it under the same long roof. The Pacific Prosperity Group's big shiny statement that it could promote greed and glamour even in the tree-hugging SSC. And a shiny slap in the face for all those people trying to rebuild the Richmond Swamps not ten miles away.