Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (13 page)

“After they talked with enough specialists, though, they realized that they didn’t have some kind of genetic anomaly on their hands, but a child in the vanguard of a new resurgence of an ancient race.”

Lucky held up his hands to stave off the scoffing.

“Save it. You think I’m a freak of nature, and I think you’re a murderous bunch of assholes. Maybe we’re both right, but that’s not the point of the story. So, if you’ll let me go on?”

The others looked to the white-haired man, who nodded his assent.

“Back in those days, there weren’t a whole lot of things a dwarf could do. I didn’t fancy joining the circus, thank you, so I had to forge a new destiny for myself. When I was eighteen, the computers all crashed, and my identity was lost. I took that as a sign and never registered with the rebooted systems. Instead, I slipped into the shadows, and I’ve never come out since.

“The year I turned twenty-eight, I was a hardcore shadowrunner. That was back in ’39, back when it all went bad. I lost a lot of friends in the riots on the Night of Rage.”

Lucky stopped for a moment and gazed up at the spot where the Sears Tower had once stood. Although it had been gone for so long, it still felt like someone had cut off one of his limbs. When he got this close to it, it almost seemed like he could still feel it out there, teeming with thousands of lives.

He didn’t bother drawing any cards. He just kept the ones he’d been dealt. Still, he called every bet and every raise.

“My parents worked downtown, right near the Sears Tower. They died the day it went down. I was somewhere off in Manhattan, still trying to help clean up, to make a difference after the riots.”

The banker threw down the winning hand and raked in the chips. The deal passed to the white-haired man, and the cards came sliding across the felt again. Lucky didn’t even bother to look at his cards this time. He kept playing mechanically while he talked.

“As you might imagine, all that made me pretty mad. I was a real revolutionary for a while there. I cut off all contact with humans.

“As far as I was concerned, you guys were the enemy. A dead-end branch on the evolutionary path to the top of the food chain. If I’d have had my way, I’d have pushed all the resurgent races into havens on the West Coast and then nuked the rest of the continent until it was a sheet of glowing, green glass.”

Lucky paused for a moment to relish the looks on the faces of the men staring at him. They were used to being the haters, not the hated, and the swap in positions discomforted them.

“Instead, after a lot of soul searching and no little amount of beer, I decided to switch tactics. Instead of doing runs for anyone with enough credits to spare, I swore I would only take on contracts for missions that would help the resurgents and do something to keep disasters like the Sears Tower from ever happening again.

“I specialized in curses.”

The breath in the white-haired man’s plastic lungs caught. Lucky was sure he was the only one who noticed, as it came at the end of another hand. The gunman won this time, and after raking in his winnings he started to deal as well.

“Magic came back along with the metahumans, as I’m sure pisses every one of you off to this day. You probably think the only kind of magic is eeeevil magic, but you’re as wrong about that as you are about everything else.

“Magic is a tool. It doesn’t tell you how to use it. You just pick it up and do what comes naturally.

“If you have a chainsaw, for instance, you might start knocking down trees. Paul Bunyan might hate the chainsaw, but every other lumberjack around loves it.

“If you decide to use it for something more, ah, antisocial, though—like knocking off heads instead—then you’re the evil one. The murderous urges come from inside you. The chainsaw is innocent.”

The gunman shook his head. “But that’s not true. Magic doesn’t work that way. You just mentioned curses.”

“Yes,” the banker chipped in. “Aren’t you supposed to be cursed?”

Lucky tapped his temple with a thick index finger. “Exactly,” he said. “Magic can be bad, just like people can be bad. Curses are bad, but they’re not the worst.”

The dwarf called the bet and raised it again. He waited for play to continue, but the hatchet-faced man held up his hand for it to stop.

“What is it then?”

“What?”

“The worst sort of magic. Does it have anything to do with something that causes perfectly normal women to give birth to genetic freaks?”

“Do you know to keep an asshole in suspense?”

The man shook his head.

“I’ll tell you later. Now see that raise or fold.”

The man tossed in his chips, and Lucky began speaking again.

“I got sent on one of my last missions back in ’45. I wound up at a secret base up in northern Michigan, near Sioux St. Marie. The scientists there had located a cursed artifact of some sort or another and were trying to weaponize it.”

The gunman scoffed. “Are you telling me that some of those damned elves were trying to figure out a way to throw the evil eye at a whole city at once?’

Lucky waited for the man to stop chuckling at himself. Then he started in.

“Ever read
The Lord of the Rings
?” he asked.

The gunman shrugged and shook his head. The hatchet-faced man and the banker followed suit. Only the white-haired man seemed prepared to admit he’d ever even heard of the books.

“I’ve seen the movies,” he said. “The trideo remakes, not the originals.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the gunman said. “The ones with the dwarves in them.” He glanced at Lucky as the others nodded in recognition at last. “I’ll bet those are your favorites.”

“In
The Lord of the Rings,
there’s this dark lord named Sauron—”

“As in ‘the Sons of Sauron.’” The white-haired man glared at Lucky. “Who did you say you worked with again?”

“I didn’t,” said Lucky. “But I try to avoid those pro-metahuman wackos whenever I can. Their agenda is almost as stupid as the crap you Humanis idiots spout.”

The gunman started to say something, but Lucky cut him off. “That’s not what I’m trying to get at here. This Sauron—the one in the book—he had a ring of power.
The
ring of power. It corrupted anyone who touched it. Drove them mad.”

“Including him?”

“He lost it.”

“How’d that happen?”

“Just go back to school, learn how to read, and then open the fucking book. That’s not my story here.”

Lucky waited for a moment for the gunman to sit back in his chair and shut up.

“All right. Imagine—now, I know that’s hard for calcified brains like the ones you guys tote around in your skulls—but imagine, if you will, what would happen if you could take that cursed ring and atomize it.”

“Atom-what?” The hatchet-faced man scowled.

“Grind it up into a fine dust and then mix it with an aerosol spray,” the white-haired man said.

“I see someone paid attention in chemistry class,” Lucky said. “Now, imagine if you did that with the One Ring. If you could grind it up and aerosolize it, think about how many people you could corrupt at once. And they’d never stand a chance of not getting infected by it.”

“That’s insane,” the banker said. “Nothing like that’s ever been done before.”

“Insane,” the dwarf said, “but not impossible. In any case, that’s what these scientists had set out to do.”

“Are you saying they had the One Ring? I thought those books were supposed to be fiction.”

Lucky gestured at himself. “Do I look like fiction?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he just shook his head. “No, there’s no such thing as the One Ring, but the scientists up there near the Soo Locks didn’t need an artifact like that. Instead, they had something else.”

“Which was?”

“Ever hear of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
?”

The men at the table stared at him with blank looks.

“Nobody listens to the classics anymore,” Lucky said. “The
Edmund Fitzgerald
was the most massive ship to ever sail the Great Lakes. It went down in a storm in 1975, almost a hundred years back. Twenty-nine men died.”

“So what does an ancient wreck have to do with anything?”

“The
Edmund Fitzgerald
didn’t go down due to mechanical failure or due to the storm. It went down because it was cursed.”

“Bullshit.” The hatchet-faced man cleared his throat and spat on the floor. “That’s too early. Before the aberrations began.”

“Back in the ‘good ol’ days,’ right?” Lucky shook his head. “You Humanis schmucks never get it, do you? Magic isn’t something wrong with the world. It’s the natural way of things. It waxes and wanes through the centuries like the moon in the sky.

“Just like during a new moon, though, even when you can’t see magic, it’s still there. It’s just waiting for its time to shine again.”

“That’s just a bunch of Sixth World crap,” the banker said. “The same foolishness street shamans and other charlatans have been spouting forever.”

Lucky smiled. “Believe what you like.” He gestured at himself. “I think the facts are on my side.”

“So what sank the
Edmund Fitzgerald
? The One Ring? Or was it made of white gold this time?”

Lucky shook his head. “A sailor on the ship had been having an affair with a Chippewa woman, the daughter of the Bad River band’s chief. When she dumped him for another man, he stole something from her home, an ancient spear that had been part of the band’s history ever since they’d taken that name.

“‘Bad River.’ Makes you wonder what must have happened for a whole band to get slapped with that name.”

“No,” the gunman said. He had his hands flat on the table before him, framing his still-smoking gun. The fingers of his right hand twitched toward it. “I don’t wonder. I don’t care.”

“Course not. It’s not all about humanity, is it?” He looked at each of the men in turn. “It’s about white, male humanity. If you ever got rid of the metahumans, you’d just turn on each other again. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays. Anyone who’s different from you in any way.

“Hell, if you got rid of them, you’d start in on the people with brown eyes. Or black hair. Or crooked noses.

“It’s not about preserving rights with people like you. It never is. It’s about preserving power. Yours.”

The men stared wordlessly at Lucky. After a moment, he continued.

“The
Edmund Fitzgerald
went down because the spear the sailor stole was cursed. Of course, the spear sank with the ship, and it sat at the bottom of Lake Superior for decades before someone finally figured it out and then went to find it.

“Ares Industries got its hands on the damned thing, and somebody there decided that it wasn’t enough to have a cursed spear around. After all, a spear can only affect one person—or ship, or building, or whatever—at a time. The Ares eggheads set their sights higher than that.

“So they ground it up, mixed it in with some nanites, and aerosolized the whole mess.”

Lucky let that sink in for a minute.

“You’re fucking nuts.” The hatchet-faced man folded his hand. The chips sat untouched in the middle of the table.

“Ever heard of anthrax?”

The men squirmed in their seats.

“People hear the word ‘anthrax,’ and they break into cold sweats and then reach for their ultra-antibiotics. Remember the attack in Sacramento last year? Killed three hundred orks before it was done.”

Lucky stared at the silent men. “Yeah, I expect you do.

“The funny thing about anthrax is that it’s usually harmless. Cattle everywhere carry it. You can pick it up by walking through any pasture. It’s more common than cow pies, and only about as annoying as stepping in one of them.

“But you refine it and then aerosolize it, and it’s deadly.

“Imagine doing that with a cursed spear.”

The men remained quiet. The white-haired man ran his tongue along the inside of his lips as if he had something to say, but he kept it to himself.

Lucky shrugged. “Wasn’t my idea. I just got mixed up in it.

“Someone else from inside Ares got wind of the plan and hired me and my team of runners to go in and put an end to it. They’d lost the argument in the boardroom, it seems, but they weren’t willing to just let it rest.

“Of course, they didn’t exactly tell us everything about what we were after. Just that we had to snatch it and then confirm its destruction.”

“Everything went smooth as silk at first. Our decker—that’s what we called them back in the days when they still had to jack into a system—he blew through their IC defenses like they were made of toilet paper. Our mage took out most of the security with a nappy-time spell, and I took care of the rest of them with less than a single magazine.”

Lucky’s hand pulled an imaginary trigger as he spoke.

“Then, when we got our hands on the package, it all went to hell. Matrix feedback fried Bones’s brain. Misha’s spells fizzled in his fingers at the exact worst time. My guns jammed.

“I grabbed the package and high-tailed it out of there. The others were already dead. Our rigger scooped me up, and we zoomed away, watching the Soo Locks vanish in the rear-view mirror.

“We would have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the rain—and that damned moose.

“The damned thing went right through the windshield and crushed Jeremy dead. I sat there, stuck in the shotgun seat, and watched as we spun out of control and smashed into a stand of pine trees.

“The fucking airbags saved my life.”

Lucky closed his eyes and took a moment to collect himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thick, stubby fingers until the screams in his head went away.

When Lucky opened his eyes again, the men were still staring at him, waiting for him to continue.

“The package shattered in the crash. All that dust. It got all over everything. Into everything.

“Everything.

“Me.”

Lucky coughed at the memory, and the men around the table all jumped.

“There’s a reason most people figured I died on that day. The paramedics that showed up to save my life were killed when the damn car exploded just after they pulled me out it. The kind man who stopped to give me a ride to the nearest hospital, he blew a tire on the way out of the parking lot and died in the resultant crash.