Looking back, I had to wonder why I’d agreed to this. What was I
thinking, anyway? Pretty obvious my brain had taken a vacation and was just now
coming back with a big bag of souvenir drek and a hangover.
Little late to worry about it at this point, though. We were here
and we’d taken the job. You didn’t back out of a job once you’d taken Johnson’s
money--not unless you’ve been fragged over, of course, and so far that hadn’t
happened.
Being fragged by Johnson was actually about the last thing
I was worried about at the moment. We should have such simple problems.
Fastening up my armored jacket, I did a quick once-over of my team
as they completed their final preparations. Tony was checking his SMG and
stowing it in the specially-designed leather holster he’d had made for it,
while Gossamer was stashing all those weird-looking doodads she used for her
magic. She didn’t look much like a mage with her camo jacket and shaved head,
but I knew as well as the rest of the team how punishing she could be in a
fight, and her recon skills were first-rate. Next to her Desmo, our rigger,
leaned against the side of his van, picking at his fingernails with his
survival knife. The dwarf didn’t believe in last-minute preparations--he’d probably
been ready for hours.
The van’s sliding door was open, and sitting on the edge of the
cargo area was our last team member. His head was tilted slightly forward, and
a faint rumbling sound reached me through the crisp night air. Ace was asleep.
I sighed, wondering for not the first time tonight how much it
would frag our rep if we just took Ace home and called off the job as a bad
decision.
The whole thing had started two days ago when we got a call from
Frankie, our usual fixer. Things had been pretty tight lately since we’d lost
Kerch on our last run, and we were all grateful for a chance to make some cred
so we didn’t ask too many questions. We met up with him at a little place
called Josie’s and were surprised to see someone with him when we showed.
Frankie waved off our objections and motioned us to sit down. As
usual, Tony remained standing. I checked the new guy out as I settled into a
seat: human, not young, dressed in leather jacket and jeans. His eyes were
watchful and his face hard. I wondered if he was in the same line of work we
were. I waited.
Frankie wasn’t much for preambles. “This is Blueboy,” he said,
indicating his companion. I noticed then what I hadn’t quite registered in the
bar’s dim light: the guy’s eyes were solid blue, and his dark hair was dyed
with a faint tinge of the same color. I remembered the name then: small-time
runner, good rep, been around awhile, never quite cracked the big time. I’d
never met him but I’d heard of him. Folks who weren’t involved in the shadow
community would be surprised to find out what a small fraternity we really were
when you got right down to it.
I shrugged, nodding a greeting. Blueboy returned the nod. He
looked--not nervous exactly, but anxious about something.
Frankie was rising. “I think I hear a drink calling,” he said.
“I’ll be back in a few.”
When the fixer had gone, Blueboy and I sized each other up across
the table. I could feel rather than see the presence of Tony, Desmo, and
Gossamer behind me, near but not too close. They trusted me to do the
negotiation for the team. “So,” I said. “Whatcha got?”
“I got a job for you, if you want it,” he said quietly.
I studied him. Runners didn’t usually hire other runners. In fact,
I think this was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing. My internal
suspicion needle notched up a couple of levels. “What kinda job?”
Blueboy hesitated for a few moments, as if deciding how much to
tell us. “I’ve heard of you guys. You been around awhile. Got a rep for bein’
straight-shooters.”
I made a half-shrug, half-go on gesture. “Yeah, so?” Behind
me, I could feel Gossamer moving in a little closer. Curious, probably.
Couldn’t blame her. This was weird.
“So this ain’t exactly a standard sorta job. I need somebody I can
trust to do it.”
I sighed, leaning forward. “Listen: Why don’t you tell us what
this is about, okay?” I was beginning to wonder what Frankie was up to. “We
ain’t much for pussy-footin’.”
Another long pause, and then Blueboy sighed too. “Okay.” His blue
eyes met mine. “You ever heard of a guy named Ace Mulligan?”
I rummaged around in my brain--the name sounded familiar but I
couldn’t quite place it. Tony moved in, supplying the details. “Ork runner from
a few years back. Good in his day, right? I thought he was dead, though.”
Blueboy shook his head. “He’s not dead. He used to be my partner.”
I didn’t let the reaction reach my face, but his words did catch
me off guard. Not for long, though: the memory came back, triggered by Tony’s
words and Blueboy’s pronouncement. Ace Mulligan and Blueboy, along with a
couple of others whose names I couldn’t remember and who were mostly likely
dead, had been a pretty good team in their day. Never hit the big time, but big
enough to be remembered. The particulars weren’t coming to me at the moment,
but the reps were solid. “Used to be? He get out of the business?”
Now Blueboy’s expression was bitter. “Yeah, you could say that.
Kinda forced out by nature, you know?”
For a moment I didn’t realize what he meant, and then Tony’s soft
voice came over my shoulder. “Right. He’s an ork. Natural-born. He’d be, what,
about forty now?”
I looked up at Tony’s face and saw more bitterness in his own
orkish features. Sometimes I tended to forget that he was only twenty-one,
because from the look of him and the way he acted, he seemed quite a bit older.
Orks aged fast and died, at least by human standards, young. Sighing softly, I
turned back to Blueboy. “Hey, I’m sorry about that, but--”
Blueboy waved me off. “Can’t do nothin’ about it, I know that. Not
about what’s happened to him. But I can do something about part of it,
and that’s why I want to hire you guys.” He smiled, just a little. “I want to
give Ace one last run.”
It was about that point that my brain had ordered up a ticket and
departed for sunnier climes. Blueboy had produced a datachip which contained
two things: the address of the Oak Meadows Rest Home, which was Ace’s current
residence, and the location of a small research lab on the edge of Seattle. We
were to bust Ace out of the rest home, outfit him with some armor and a gun,
and take him with us on a run to steal some files from the lab. The cover story
we were to use was that we needed Ace’s knowledge of the place’s
layout--apparently he and Blueboy and the rest had broken into the same lab several
years ago on a run.
I headed off my brain as it stepped onto the jetway toward the
plane long enough to protest: “Are you crazy? You want us to break some old guy
out of a rest home and take him on a run? Why can’t you do this yourself
if you’re determined to give him a last fling? Couldn’t you just go--I don’t
know--sign him out or something?”
Blueboy shook his head. “First thing, I can’t do that. I’m not
family. The security’s pretty tame there, but they don’t just let anybody come
in and take somebody out. Second--he’s old, but his mind’s still there. If I
showed up, or had any part of this, he’d suspect something was up.”
“So we’re supposed to risk our lives for nothing?” Desmo asked.
They had all given up the facade of letting me do the negotiation now and had
crowded in around the tiny table. “I assume these files you’re talking about
are worthless?”
Blueboy shook his head. “No, they’re the real deal. They aren’t
worth much, but if you get them you should be able to sell ‘em for a couple
thousand. Plus I’ll pay you ten thousand up front to do this. I got some cred
stashed, and I can afford it. That should make it worth your while. Another
five when the run’s over.” He paused a moment, and when he spoke again he met
not my eyes but Tony’s, even though he was talking to all of us. “Look...I went
to visit Ace a couple of weeks ago. He’s wastin’ away in there. I could see it
in his eyes. Guy like him, guy used to action--it’s fraggin’ hard on him to
have to stay in a place like that all day, even though he ain’t really up to
takin’ care of himself. They take good care of him. It’s a good place, not one
of them dumps they warehouse people in till they die. But--” He spread his
hands and sighed. “It ain’t right. He ain’t got long left--I figured somethin’
like this might be just what it takes to make things bearable for him until--”
He trailed off, but all of us knew what he was going to say: until he dies.
I took a deep breath, letting the silence hang in the air for
several moments. “Give us a few,” I told him. “I want to talk to the others
about this.”
In the end it was Tony who decided it for us. “I want to do this,
Jason,” he said soberly when we’d moved off, away from the table. “I know what
it’s like. I just lost my dad a couple of years ago--it was like one day he was
fine and the next day he was old. I know it wasn’t really like that, but for
all the times I made excuses when I should have gone to see him--” His tone was
bitter again. “It’s drek the way orks go so fast, Jason. Ace was one of us.
Maybe we never knew him, but he was. I’m in.”
Of course we were all in after that. Back at the table, I gave
Blueboy the word. He didn’t smile, just nodded and handed over the datachip and
the location of Ace’s room at the rest home. Oh, and the ten grand. We might
feel sorry for the old guy, but biz was biz.
You can believe me when I say we made some fraggin’ careful plans
before pulling this one off. My brain might have been on vacation, but it was
still calling to check in with Reality Land once or twice a day and I didn’t
plan for myself or my team to get geeked over a milk run with an old geezer,
pay or no pay.
A little research by Desmo (he was doing more decking than rigging
these days, and was equally good at both) turned up the particulars on the lab:
it was a little biotech operation loosely affiliated with a small corp that was
itself loosely affiliated with Ares. As near as he could determine there wasn’t
anything vitally important going on there, and the data we were supposed to
boost was probably just notes on one or more of their projects in the pipeline.
Security was minimal, and the place wasn’t likely to have more than a skeleton
crew hanging around after dark. Looked like Blueboy wasn’t trying to frag us
that way. Desmo managed to download a floorplan of the place (I didn’t ask
where he found it--sometimes it was better just not to know) and two nights
after we’d signed on, we headed off to do the first part of our job.
The Meadows Rest Home was on the edge of a residential neighborhood
in Everett. We parked half a block down the street and checked the place out
from the van. It was a single story building surrounded by parklike
landscaping. Out back was a large grassy area lined with wide paved pathways
and dotted with little benches. The fence that surrounded it was tasteful and
unobtrusive. Still a fence, though--they wouldn’t want anybody wandering AWOL.
Gossamer took a jaunt through astrally and came up with nothing
suspicious. “Just a bunch of old folks,” she said. “Looks like maybe about
sixty of ‘em, some awake, most asleep, and about ten people who are probably
staff.” She sighed. “Some of them are happy, but most of them--they just seemed
depressed. Lost. Like there’s nothing left to live for.”
I ignored her last words--Goss got a little funny sometimes with
the emotions she encountered on the astral and it was best just to move on and
let it pass--and glanced at my chrono. 21:00: a little late for visiting.
“Goss, you and Tony come on. The locks can’t be much--there’s a back door a
couple of hallways from his room. With luck we can just get in and out before
they discover us. If not, Goss can make us look like we belong there. Desmo,
you stay here with the van and stay in contact. We’ll want to get out fast once
we’ve got him.”
The door was a cakewalk--Tony got it open in about five seconds,
and even I probably could have done it in thirty. We waited a moment to make
sure no alarms would go off, then slipped inside. We were standing in a wide
corridor lined with doors which were mostly closed. Two or three were open a
bit, with wedges of light coming from behind them. Overhead dim fluorescents
shone at low levels, making the hallway bright enough for the staff to
navigate. Wheelchairs, IV poles, and a couple of hospital gurneys were pushed
against the walls at intervals.
“Nobody here,” Tony whispered. “C’mon. Let’s get this over with.”
He seemed uncomfortable, but I didn’t ask why.
We crept down the hallway. As we moved slowly in the direction of
Ace’s room I took in the walls: they were lined with holopics, a few
still-lifes of fruits and flowers, and bulletin boards with notices, more
holos, and cut-out crafts. I think I realized then what was bothering Tony:
everything looked so relentlessly cheerful, but around every corner, behind
every cut-out flower and family holopic was the lurking despair that none of
these folks were long for this world. Gossamer touched me on the shoulder and
gave me an are you all right? look. I nodded and moved on. The place
smelled faintly of old-fashioned perfume, cleaning products, the far-off tang
of medicine, and the slightest odor of stale urine. Hospital smells.
Suddenly I felt sorry for Ace Mulligan.
Gossamer, who had taken the lead, held up a quick hand and
pantomimed that someone was coming down the hallway we had been about to turn
down. Tony grasped my shoulder and pointed at a half-open door next to me; I
darted in followed by Tony and then Gossamer. We closed the door behind us.
“Well, hello there,” said a soft, quavery voice. I whirled,
realizing instantly that we might have made a big mistake: we weren’t alone.
I relaxed when I saw her, though: a tiny, gentle-looking human
woman with wispy white hair and a bed-jacket covered with bright violets. She
was smiling at me, her eyes twinkling through her small round old-fashioned
glasses. “Hello,” she said again. “I wasn’t expecting gentlemen callers so late
in the evening.”
There was something in her voice that told me she wasn’t seeing
quite what was really there. Off to the side I sensed Goss sitting on the other
bed and going astral to follow the progress of the person in the hall, while
Tony looked back and forth between the two of us and waited. “We’re--just
visiting for a couple of minutes,” I told her. “Sorry to bother you...”
Her laugh tinkled like a small glass bell. “Oh, it’s no bother,”
she assured me. “I don’t get many visitors here.” There was a slight sadness in
her tone when she said it. She shifted a little in bed, her movements birdlike
and precise. “I’d offer you something, but--”
“No--uh, thanks. That’s okay. We appreciate it, but we really do
have to be leaving.” Gossamer was waving that the danger had passed by, so I
nodded politely to the lady. Her eyes were blue, her face wrinkled with papery
pale skin. The scent of violets surrounded her, maybe to match her jacket.
“Must you go so soon?” Her voice quavered a bit again, and even
somebody as dense as I am about emotional things could hear the disappointment
in it.
Impulsively I gave her a gentle pat on her hand. “We have to,” I
said gently. “We have to get going. Maybe we’ll come back some other time.”
“You do that,” she said, her eyes fluttering as she began to drop
off to sleep. “Such a nice young man. It’ll be such fun...”
I didn’t say anything as we left the room, except to glare at Tony
as if to say, you make a comment, you’re dead. Funny thing was, he
didn’t seem inclined to make one anyway.
We reached Ace Mulligan’s room without running into any other
wandering staff members or residents, except one old guy parked in the hallway
in a wheelchair who looked deeply asleep. We sneaked past him and he didn’t
wake up. The sign on Ace’s door read “Gerald Mulligan.”
The door was closed and the light was out. The three of us
exchanged glances as I subvocalized into my throat mike and updated Desmo on
our progress.
Gossamer used her clairvoyance spell to check out the inside of
the room. “Looks like he’s in bed,” she whispered. “He’s alone. There’s a night
light in there, but that’s it.”
“Can we go out the window?” I asked. It had occurred to me that it
might be easier than trying to make our way back through the hallways to the
door.
She shook her head. “Nope. Too small.”
I sighed. “Okay. Let’s do this before anybody else shows up.”
The door, of course, wasn’t locked. As we slid inside we could
hear the loud snuffling sounds of Ace snoring and the softer sound of a small
fan. Other than Ace himself, the room contained two beds (one empty), a trideo
unit bolted to the ceiling, two nightstands, and a couple of chairs. Two doors
led to a closet and a bathroom, and I grinned when I saw what was hanging on
the wall between them: an R-rated calendar featuring ork pinup girls. Goss was
right: the window was far too small and high up for us to make use of.
Gossamer and Tony watched the door while I moved over next to the
bed and shook Ace’s shoulder. He was still big, but I could see he’d once been
bigger: his wrinkled skin sagged over muscles that had been strong and healthy
only a few short years ago but were now going to fat. I hoped he wouldn’t yell
when we woke him.
He stirred, looked startled, and snuffled deeply. “Hm? What? Is it
morning already?” His voice was deep but not loud. “Frag it, Nurse, I said I
didn’t want to--”
“Shh...” I whispered. “It’s not the nurse. We need your help,
Ace.”
At the sound of the name his wandering gaze focused a little.
“Ace?” he asked sharply. “How did you--?”
I risked switching on the light and let him see me. In the glow of
the bedside lamp he looked even worse: tired and old and wasted. His hair,
white and thin, was plastered over a freckled skull, and one of his tusks was
badly yellowed. His eyes, though, seemed clear--brown and keen. “We need your
help,” I repeated. “We’ve got a job and we heard you’re the guy who knows the layout.”
He looked at me suspiciously, then checked out Goss and Tony. He
seemed to relax a bit when he saw Tony was an ork. “You runners?”
“Yeah. Like I said--we got a job, and we gotta hurry. That’s why
we’re bothering you. If you can help we can make it worth your while...” I
hoped I sounded sufficiently pleading. Somebody was bound to notice the light
under the door and check soon. I hoped too that he wasn’t sharp enough to catch
on to just how thin our story was.
A slow smile spread across the old ork’s face, and he made a fast
decision--the kind he’d been known for making in his shadowrunning days. “You
got yourself a deal, kid. But you gotta take me with you.” He sounded adamant.
“I don’t know, Ace,” I said, while doing my best to suppress a
grin. “What will the nurses--?”
“Frag the nurses,” he said cheerfully. “I ain’t never had a chance
to get outta here, and I ain’t gonna pass one up. Help me up or no deal.”
We helped him up.
Getting out was easier than we expected: Ace knew all the nurses’
routines, and once we’d gotten him into his clothes he took us unsteadily down
another corridor that led to yet another exit door. In less than ten minutes
(most of that because Ace didn’t move so fast) we were out in the night air and
Desmo was pulling up with the van.
That had been a little over two hours ago, and it was nearly
midnight when the van slid silently to the curb half a block down from the lab
and we began our final preparations. I’d reconsidered three or four times
between the time we took Ace away from the rest home and our arrival here: the
old guy was definitely showing his age both in the wasting of his body and the
wandering of his mind, and I more than a little scared that he’d frag the
mission by doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I was even more scared to
give him a gun, but that was part of what Blueboy had hired us for: to make it
seem like he was a valued part of the team. I compromised with rubber bullets,
telling him that this was a non-lethal run. True enough anyway: no point in
killing a bunch of innocent security guards for a bogus job.
He sat there now on the van’s step, snoring softly, a tiny runnel
of drool wending its way from the corner of his mouth. We’d kitted him out in
an old armored jacket of Tony’s that hung on his once-massive frame, some
low-light shades, and an SMG on a strap. He clutched it now even in sleep, and
all of us made sure to stay well away from the business end as we got our gear
on. “You guys sure you’re still in?” I whispered. “Last chance for any of you
to back out.”
Tony nodded, with a glance toward Ace. “Yeah, I’m still in. Should
be in and out. We can keep an eye on him, keep him outta trouble.”
Gossamer nodded next. “We took the job.”
Desmo was a little slower, but at last he too inclined his head.
“I don’t like it,” he said, “but I can see why we’re doing it. I certainly
wouldn’t want to end up stuck in a place like that.”
I looked around at them, reading their faces, and grinned. “Okay,
then. Somebody wake Ace up and let’s go.”
Ace’s description of the place, which he had given us in bits and
pieces on the trip over, corresponded surprisingly accurately with the map that
Desmo was surreptitiously checking it against. Goss’ astral recon confirmed
that there were only four guards in the whole place, and by their auras they
seemed more bored than anything. The only thing that troubled her was that
there were a couple of places she couldn’t penetrate, but they weren’t near
where Blueboy had told us the files were. Desmo noted them on our map before we
went in. Amazingly enough, it looked like this run was going to go as easily as
it was supposed to. Still, I kept on guard and I could tell the others were
too. Things never went as easily as expected. Thinking they would was
the fastest ticket to Dead.
Normally in a job like this we’d try to pass ourselves off as the
janitorial crew or something, but with Ace that wouldn’t have been possible so
we just found ourselves an out-of-the-way back door and got in courtesy of
Desmo’s electronics wizardry. I could hear Ace’s breathing behind me--he
sounded like a freight train back there and I was afraid he was going to alert
the whole place, but so far things were quiet. Desmo was supporting him on one
side and Goss on the other, while Tony held his SMG ready and crept quietly
down the hallway next to me.
We carefully avoided the cameras until we could find Desmo a
jackpoint where he could plug in and do a little creative doctoring of the
images. Fortunately there weren’t all that many cameras, so it only took him a
few minutes to make the changes so all the hallways looked clear. The rest of
us watched the door and paced around--all except for Ace, who was muttering to
himself.
“Something wrong, Ace?” I asked against my better judgment. I was
relieved to see that he still had the SMG holstered. The original plan was just
to kind of humor him, but his mutterings were getting louder. I figured I’d see
what his problem was before we got back out in the hallway.
“Yeah...” the old guy said in his gravelly voice. His gaze
wandered around the room. “Yeah...Something wrong...”
Goss wandered over to listen. “Something in particular?” I asked.
“Feeling bad?”
He shook his head impatiently, then paused for awhile, dizzy and
breathing hard. “No, not me. Not me. Something--” Once more he shook his head
and then said no more. I thought he was looking even older than when we’d
picked him up: his shoulders were slumped under his heavy armored coat, his
skin pale, his chest heaving in and out with his labored breath. I hoped his
old body would hold together long enough for us to get him out of here and back
to the home.
“There,” Desmo said, pushing the chair back from the console.
“That should take care of it. I also unlocked the door to the room we’re headed
to, so this should be an in-and-out.” I didn’t miss the significant look
he cast toward Ace to go with his emphasis, but he didn’t comment further.
Almost as an afterthought Gossamer used her clairvoyance spell
before we went out--I could already see we were all getting a little sloppy.
That changed in a hurry when she stiffened. “Hey--there were only four guards
here before. Now there are--” she paused to count “--eight. And they look
agitated about something.”
I was immediately on guard, and the others weren’t far behind.
“Where?” Tony asked, his hand on his SMG. “They seem like they’ve noticed us?”
Goss closed her eyes and looked some more. “No. They’re on alert,
but they’re not headed this way.”
“Expecting somebody else?” Tony mused.
“Thought Bl--” I caught myself fast before mentioning our
employer’s name in Ace’s earshot. “--Johnson said there wasn’t much else worth
taking here. They’re not guarding the room we’re headed to?” I was more worried
about where they might have come from, but no time to worry about that now.
Gossamer shook her head. “Nowhere near it. They seem to be
concentrating on the south end of the complex.”
That was where we’d gotten in. “We’ll have to find another way
out,” I said. “And we’d better hurry. It won’t be long before they find out
somebody’s been fragging with the cameras.”
Ace had started muttering again. He’d drawn his SMG but he still
wasn’t aiming it at anything. He kept looking around the room and at the views
on the cameras as if trying to puzzle something out. He didn’t give us any
trouble as we headed out, though, and in a couple of minutes his mutterings
didn’t matter--they’d been drowned out by the sound of the alarm klaxon that
went off almost directly above our heads.
Goss and Desmo just about jumped out of their skins. Tony and I
stayed relatively calm, and surprisingly so did Ace. His gun barrel swung
around toward the speaker but he didn’t fire.
“Come on,” Tony snapped. “Let’s get this thing and get the frag
outta here while they’re busy at the other end.”
“Are you sure?” Desmo asked, casting a significant look at
everybody but Ace, who was busy examining the walls. I knew immediately what he
was getting at--Blueboy had hired us to give Ace a thrill and steal a mostly
worthless set of files on a cakewalk run. Something had clearly gone wrong--did
we keep up the pretense, or cut and run while we still could?
Everybody looked at me. I was the team leader, so I got the fun
decisions. I forced myself to ignore the sound of the klaxon and think. “How
close to it are we?”
“There,” Goss said, pointing at a door at the end of the hall we
were in.
Tony gripped my arm. “Look!”
I looked. Between us and the room that was our destination was a
large, heavy double door. Above it in green, glowing, government-issue letters
were the sweetest words in the world: “EXIT”.
I grinned. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Come on--hurry. We’ll get out
there and Desmo can bring the van around by remote.”
I started off toward the door and felt cold bony fingers on my
arm. “Wait...” Ace said. “Something--not--” He was looking around wildly,
frustration clearly showing on his wrinkled face.
“Come on, Ace!” I yanked him impatiently in the direction of the
door. The others were already headed that way. “Whatever it is, we’ll worry
about it when we get out.”
Just as Desmo had said, the door was open. The room was empty
except for a bank of old-fashioned file cabinets and a desk with a chair. While
Tony and I kept watch, Desmo and Goss quickly found the file in question and
Goss tucked it inside her jacket. “Done!” Desmo yelled. “Go!”
Ace had been leaning against a wall, catching his breath. This
time he grabbed Goss’ arm. “Wait!” he said again. There was a strange look in
his eyes--it was like the rest of him was old but his eyes were leftover equipment
from the old Ace. His hand shook on her arm. “Please--” He looked like he was
about to cry from frustration. “Can’t--remember--”
Tony swept the door open and moved out into the hallway, covering
it with his SMG. No sign of guards yet. “Come on!” he hissed, moving
toward the exit door.
It was a little hard later to reconstruct what happened next, but
I think I got it right. I was moving to follow Tony when suddenly a form shoved
past me. At first I thought it was a guard, or maybe Desmo, but I realized in
shock that it was Ace Mulligan--yelling “NO!!!” at the top of his old lungs and
slamming himself into Tony just as Tony pulled open the door.
After that things got even crazier. There was a bright flash of
light followed by the unmistakable staccato pattern of automatic weapon fire
from some automated rig behind the door. Ace screamed, then Tony screamed, then
Desmo slammed the door shut and it was just the klaxons again.
At first I was afraid it had gotten them both, but Tony rolled up
and was on his feet so fast I knew he couldn’t be hurt. Ace, however, was
another story.
The old ork lay on the floor against the wall opposite the deadly
doorway, curled up in a ball with a red puddle slowly spreading beneath him. He
still clutched his SMG and was moaning softly.
Tony and I dropped down next to him. “Ace!” I called in his ear.
“Goss, get over--”
Ace shook his head. His eyes were bright. “Map--wrong,” he
whispered. “Door--didn’t match up with--outside--” His head slumped to the
side.
My eyes widened and met Tony’s. Above us, Desmo’s voice was harsh.
“He’s right, frag it. How did I miss--?”
Gossamer cut in on us. “They’re coming,” she said. “We’ve gotta
get out of here. I’d say about a minute at most.”
“Come on, then.” I bent down to pick up Ace, motioning for Tony to
help me.
He shook his head; his eyes were hard. “He’s gone, Jason. We’ll
never get out of here if we have to--”
I could hear the pain in his voice, but also the professionalism.
I could also see that he was right--Ace was staring up at us with glazed,
unseeing eyes. We had less than a minute to get to the real exit and get out.
“Let’s go,” I said, rising quickly. “Leave him.” It was one of the hardest
decisions I’d ever had to make.
I spared one last look back at him as we pounded down the corridor
toward the way out. “Thanks, chummer,” I whispered, and wondered if somewhere
out there he hadn’t heard me.
We almost didn’t show up back at Josie’s. We almost just called to
give Blueboy the news and tell him we didn’t need the rest of our payment. None
of us thought we deserved it. Still, though, we were professionals and pros saw
things through even when they weren’t pleasant. It was four pretty hangdog
runners who showed up at that meet.
Blueboy was already there waiting for us. He checked us out, then
cocked his head to the side a little. “Where’s Ace? Did you already take him
back to the--?”
“Ace is dead, Blueboy,” I said. I sounded a little more blunt than
I wanted to, but the quicker it was out in the open, the better.
Oddly, he didn’t look surprised. “What happened?”
We gave him a quick rundown of the job. Even more oddly, as we got
to the part about Ace’s contribution and his demise, a slow smile spread across
his face. “You mean he was actually useful? He helped you guys out?”
“That old geezer saved my life,” Tony growled. “Hadn’t been for
him, I’d’ve--Why the hell are you smilin’?” he demanded, glaring at Blueboy.
But right then I got it. I nodded slowly. “You--expected Ace to
die on that run, didn’t you?” I asked Blueboy. “In fact--you hoped he
would.”
The rest of my team just stared at me like I’d sprouted wings, but
Blueboy nodded. “I know it’s a hard thing to say, that you hope somebody would
die--especially somebody as close to you as a brother--but--” He spread his
hands and didn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah. I did.” There was an edge to his tone, as
if daring one of us to challenge him.
The others were catching on now. It was Tony who spoke next. “You
sent him out there because you knew dyin’ doin’ something he loved--doin’ something
where he felt useful--would be better than wastin’ away in that place.” Tears
glistened at the corners of his eyes and his voice shook a little. “Frag...”
was all he said as he turned away. In all my life, I’d never heard a word
spoken with more respect.
We didn’t take the second half of the payment. Instead, we told
Blueboy to find something Ace would have wanted to do with it. “Just figure
it’s his cut for his last run,” I told him.
Blueboy didn’t say anything as he left, but I was pretty sure he
approved.
(c)2001, 'Moriarty'