Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (39 page)

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The surviving guards had rushed out ahead of us, mingling with the late-night crowds downstairs who wondered what the commotion was up in the penthouse. I was stopped a couple of times by white-faced security people, but got by each time by saying, “Special security, with Roger Nakamura! I’ve got
wounded
here! Get the hell out of my way!”

Somewhere in all the confusion, I’d lost my nanny … and I’d peeled Cammie’s off her blood-splattered face. They wouldn’t track us. The
humans
wouldn’t, anyway.

Gods of all the Metaverse … what did I
see
?

It still haunts me.

It wasn’t a mouth that got Zayid and Nakamura. I don’t
think
it was a mouth.

Is it true that our thoughts create Reality? That imaginal beings and places and nightmare horrors all somehow take shape and form and mass and seething, malevolent will in some other dimension, some other metaphysical plane?

Our myths may have more reality than we can credit. Beelzebub and Lucifer. Dark Hecate and Ammit, Eater of Souls. Yog-Sothoth, Keeper of the Gate, and Great Cthulhu, dreaming in the depths until the stars are right.

Perhaps whatever
can
be imagined is
real
, somehow, solid and fully manifested, residing just beyond the insubstantial gauze veils of Reality rising around us. Perhaps evil, true evil, arises from the lightless corners of our own hearts and minds. Perhaps even our darkest nightmares take shape and will, gibbering at the gates.

I have nightmares, now. Nightmares about Dee-Dee and Scooter and patient Thud. Dead names, now.

The nightmares where I again see the Thing are the worst.

And at night Cammie takes me in her arms and whispers soothing words in my ear and holds me close and tells me it’s all right.

But it’s not.

I can still hear the screams, the terror-maddened shrieks of souls dragged down into darkness. I still hear the despair. The wrenching agony of dying souls.

And I can still hear the blasphemous whisperings of the Book.

The Book of Dead Names.

Oh, gods! Gods in whom I’ve
never
believed, help me!

The Art of Diving in the Dark

By Ilsa J. Bick

Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling writer of short stories, ebooks and novels as well as a child psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe and former Air Force major. (She is also fairly peripatetic and easily bored, but no fair diagnosing her until she’s left the room.) She has published extensively in the
Star Trek
,
BattleTech
and
MechWarrior: Dark Age
universes, as well as original science fiction, fantasy and mystery. “The Key,” a supernatural murder-mystery about the Holocaust and reincarnation, was named “distinguished” in
The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005
(edited by Joyce Carol Oates); a novelette-length sequel, “Second Sight,” has just been released in
Crime Spells
(eds. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman);
Locus’s
Rich Horton calls the novelette “ the best (in the anthology) … heady and involving.”

Forthcoming are two young adult novels, in hardcover, from Carolrhoda Books:
Draw the Dark
, a paranormal mystery
Publisher’s Weekly
called “inventive” and “riveting,” which also made the semifinals of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as
Stalag Winter
); and
The Sin Eater’s Confession
, revolving around the murder of a gay high school student in rural Wisconsin.

Currently, Ilsa and her family live in Wisconsin where theirs is the only mezuzah in town.

—
Küpau wau i ka manö ka manö nui ka manö nui küpau wau i ka manö:

I am finished to the big shark, all consumed by the big shark, I am finished
.

(Old Hawaiian saying)

I

Somewhere off the Kohala Coast, Hawai’i

May 9, 2070

Something wrong.

A beautiful day, a light breeze, the sea placid as blue glass, the auras of dolphins shimmering like comets screaming to earth.

But something was definitely wrong. A distant hiss of evil whispering from the depths like a murder of crows muttering on a naked limb above a newly-turned grave. The water’s fingers stroked the hairs along his arms and neck into stiff hackles through his drysuit. Something snagged the meat of his brain like the set of a hook. Reeling him in …

Knows we’re here. Maybe that’s what it wants.
Beneath his vest—definitely not standard-issue—a cold sweat pearled his chest. A new and more troubling thought:
Jesus, can its magic reach this far? Can it see what I think?

Not good. He’d have to watch himself. No use tipping it off …

These are the demons.
Daniel Ben-Yusuf raised a finger to his throat. Rachel’s mezuzah hung around his neck—a focus, or simply a protective amulet of silver and amethyst, he was never sure—but his gloved fingers met only chilled trilaminates and butyl rubber.
These are the princes of enmity dwelling in the abyss …

With the sleds, the light went fast, turning thin and watery at twenty meters. There were still plenty of fish—a rainbow of gobies and triggerfish and angels—darting in and around dense pinkish-white forests of elkhorn coral and the bristly quills of sea urchins. By the time his HUD said he was at twenty-five, the water was a weird blue-gray, and by thirty, as they stopped to purge their low-pressure lines and switch out to heliox, the reef was completely vertical, the fish petering out, the anvil of water palming Daniel’s body dense and heavy. Far below, the sea was a very cold cobalt blue, the color of a lost day slipping inexorably toward night.

At sixty meters, they tied off their bail-out tank, double-checked their spare air canisters. (Hey, call him a cockeyed optimist, but if something went wrong at depth, the spare air might get one, or both of them to the bail-out.) At ninety-seven meters, a click sounded in his full facemask, and Alana’s voice fizzed through, tinny and flat because of the depth: “Oh shit. Look down, your two o’clock.”

The maw of the cave—a dead, unknown undersea volcano between the Big Island and Maui—yawned deep and fathomless, a nearly perfect circle as black as an empty eye socket. Just below the rim, a pair of motionless dive sleds was suspended on tethers.

But that kind of paled when you considered the sharks.

A school of white-tip reef sharks spooled up in a silent swirl, their auras ghostly, nacreous penumbras as insubstantial as cobwebs.

“Oh my God.” Alana’s voice was shaky. “Daniel, what … ?”

“I don’t know. Take it easy.” He watched the phalanx of animals ascend, saw them veer as one toward Alana.

“Daniel?” A note of panic now. Her hand moved to her dive knife.

“Alana, no. That’s a fight you don’t want and can’t win.” Her aura blazed in his astral vision: a fierce, fiery orange-red sunburst, a supernova. He watched as the sharks angled right and began to circle the woman in a stately clockwise procession, maintaining their distance, never closing, never peeling away. “Honey, listen to me: It’s
you
, don’t you see?”

“Yes, yes, kayn.”
For the first time during the dive, the Rebbe’s voice sizzled through his aural implant. A novel design, the implant could penetrate at depth and halfway around the world if need be.
“It is the only explanation.”

“What?” She was startled. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s like the petroglyph. You’re calling them somehow.” He had an idea, a theory and the Rebbe echoed his thoughts:
“She’s a latent. The tooth is a focus, kayn? But it’s old, there is DNA
…”

Daniel said, “Alana, were they here when you and Harriman …?”

“No. I don’t know. The only thing I remember is the descent and …” She drew in a sudden sharp breath. “You
feel
that?”

He did: a tug. Not like the touch of magic this time but palpable, a swirl of current grabbing his body, first gently and then with more insistence like the subtle rush of water upstream that signaled the beginning of rapids just around the bend.

Something else homing in on her … on
us
…

The sharks felt it, too. They closed, their circle tightening round Alana, but he didn’t think that would do any good.

“Okay, here’s where you get gone,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Lo, lo!”
The Rebbe hissed.
“No, what are you doing? You must replicate the conditions of her encounter
exactly
.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah
. At that moment, he wished like hell that the Rebbe was psychic instead of eavesdropping.
You’re way the fuck in Israel. We’re the ones on a one-way trip to hell
.

“Not a chance,” said Alana. “We go together. Lee’s still in there.”

“That wasn’t the deal.”

“No, lo, take her. She’s …”
the Rebbe began but then abruptly cut out.

What the hell?
Then he felt it: how the sea went turgid and thick, the pressure fisting his body. Instead of rising, Daniel’s bubbles hung in shuddering silver pearls, caught in a pocket scooped out of time.

Oh shit …
“Alana!” His voice came out as a wheeze, barely audible. His body felt gluey, like a fly upended on its back in a puddle of honey. “Alana, go, swim, take your sled,
go
!”

Too late. Alana gasped, and then her body gave a great, convulsive jerk as something clamped round her ankles and yanked, hard. As one, the sharks knotted in a swirl, but they were creatures that must always move, or die and so there were gaps, and he saw what would happen before it did.

No
, he thought frantically,
take me!
I’m
the one you want … !

“D-Daniel!” Alana wailed. “Help … h-help me!”

No, no!
He wanted to scream, he wanted to hurl something killing, banish her someplace safe—and he should’ve while he had the chance and damn the drain; what a fool! But too late now: He couldn’t move. Blood pounded in his temples. Blackness ate at the margins of his vision. He fought to clear his head, looked down at the seamount—and his heart nearly died in his chest.

A swirl of astral energy, livid as a bruise, spiraled up from the maw of the cave, twining round their bodies like the sticky weave of a spider’s web. At its touch, the sharks writhed, and their formation faltered.

“N-no!” Alana’s hands flew up, her wrists pinned together, and her back arched in a sudden, agonized rictus. Her sled spun away, and then her screams filled his ears as the astral web drew her down, down …

The web closed round and then he was hurtling, the water roaring, the ring of sharks flying apart and blurring at his passage …

And then the darkness took them both.

Four Days Earlier

II

Kohala Neuropsychiatric Institute, Hawai’i

May 7, 2070

The psychiatrist’s voice, brisk, officious:
Let’s try again, Alana. Go back to the beginning and maybe we can push through some of your …

Denial?
The word was muddy and Daniel thought that, yeah, she’d been medicated up the yin-yang. Understandable, though. The emergency evac records indicated that Alana Kamakua had been distraught, disoriented: her hands pulpy, drysuit in tatters after her mad scramble over knife-edged lava. She hadn’t wanted to leave the beach, insisting the evac unit rescue her lover … As if the bits of drysuit washed ashore in a swirl of purple water belonged to someone else.

Given that, who wouldn’t be, well, a little upset?

I’ve told you: I remember going into the caves
. Alana’s voice seethed with frustration.
Then our lights went out—and then I don’t
remember
. The next thing I know, I’m on a stretcher …

The doctor paused the recording. “Her thoughts get pretty derailed after that. She goes on about some old Hawaiian myth, or family story, I don’t know, something she says her umptity-ump great-grandmother passed down. Even if I believed in psychoanalysis, I’m not sure you’d find much symbolism in an old Hawaiian legend of a fair maiden and a shark.”

“Don’t make the mistake of accepting his presumptions.”
The Rebbe’s rich baritone was a faint faraway hiss, like the fizzle of a commlink tuned to a dead channel.
“Besides, he’s a
tachat
.”

No argument there: The doctor
was
an ass. Daniel said, “But didn’t the police think Harriman was attacked by a shark?”

“Who the hell knows? Maybe
she
did him in.”

“You believe that?”

“Hey, call me a cynical bastard, but I’m always suspicious.”

No, you’re just a bastard.
His thought, not the Rebbe’s. “Yet many stories have personal valence. Maybe the myth means something.”

“Uh-huh.” A pause. “Look, Mr. … uh …”

“Fehrmacht.” The alias, the well-doctored background information, and the vague implication that he worked for Saeder-Krupp, with the hint that Lofwyr might be, well,
interested
, opened a lot of doors. That, and plenty of nuyen. An Israeli Mossad agent, even one in semi-retirement and with more than a little bit of a death wish, had a lot of tricks up his proverbial sleeve. It was one of the reasons why the Rebbe had chosen Daniel in the first place.

“Yeah. Well, look: I don’t do stories. I’m not into magic. I’m a shrink, and I practice without the voodoo, thanks.”

Okay, so the doctor was also a self-righteous little prick. Daniel was jet-lagged, nearly dead on his feet from the long flight, first from Tel Aviv to Sydney and from there to Honolulu International and
then
, finally, a hop to the Big Island. He’d been stewing in the same clothes for the last two days. The last thing he was interested in was playing footsie with a tin-pot dictator. “You’re not prejudiced, are you, Doc?”

The Rebbe:
“Lo, Daniel, don’t provoke him. We need his cooperation.”

“No, I’m pragmatic,” said the doctor. “Now, I’m willing to entertain the theory that there were earlier metahuman ages—”

“Theory?”