Tails You Lose (15 page)

Alma
grimaced at the pun. According to Tiger Cat, the only "diving" this cyberpirate did was in the electronic waters of the Matrix. Tiger Cat had told her the man was one of the hottest deckers in Vancouver, but given the surroundings, Alma was starting to wonder about his credentials.

As Alma turned onto the walkway that led to the boat, its on-board cameras panned to follow her movements. At the same time, an ork stepped down onto the walkway from a raft and rolled one of the heavy blue plastic drums that filled every centimeter of its deck space onto the creaking boards. Diesel fuel sloshed from an opening on the top of the drum onto the walkway, which had sagged under the combined weight of troll and fuel drum until it was awash. The ork, who had a scarred, shaved head and eyes so small and squinting that it was difficult to tell whether he was Asian, turned and eyed Alma with a belligerent look.

"You got biz here, dirt-kisser? Or are you just down here slummin'?"

Alma
stopped; the ork and his drum were blocking her way, and he clearly had no intention of moving. He stood braced as if he was ready to fight, ignoring the fast-food containers that washed gently back and forth around his hobnailed work boots.

The ork's timing had been too perfect; it was clear that he was intended as a first line of defense, to slow down unwanted visitors to the boat ahead. Alma had already spotted the comlink in his ear and the slight depression in his neck where a less-than-competent surgeon had implanted a subvocal microphone. The cameras on the patrol boat were just backup; this man was the eyes and ears—and muscle—of the computer hacker that Alma had come to see.

"I have 'biz' with Bluebeard," Alma answered, nodding at the boat behind him. "He's expecting me. Tell him Cybergirl is here." As she spoke, her left hand began to shake. As casually as she could, she shifted her posture so that it was hidden behind her back.

"Yeah? Well, you can tell him yourself—after I shift this drum." The ork leaned to the side for a better look at her concealed hand and then sneered, obviously thinking that he had intimidated her. "Now get your skoggin' little hoop outta my way."

He picked up the oil drum by its sling, balancing easily under its weight as the walkway rocked back and forth. His tiny eyes bored into Alma's, warning her that if she tried to stand her ground she'd get shoved aside.

Alma
glared back at him, her move-by-wire system easily compensating for the rocking. Every security system had its protocols, and if she was going to pass herself off as a shadowrunner, she would have to jump through these people's hoops. She knew from her dealings with Tiger Cat—who had yet to interface with her except by cellphone—that shadowrunners liked to keep a safe distance between themselves and the rest of the world. Tiger Cat had warned her that Bluebeard was reclusive, shielding himself behind a wall of armor and tech. Alma had expected to be scanned, videotaped and chem-sniffed before getting on board the boat. She hadn't expected to have to run a gantlet of insults as well.

She wasn't about to back down—not with Bluebeard's cameras trained on her and the rain steadily soaking through her jacket. She suspected that the ork's belligerence was a test.

She liked tests.

Alma
had already calculated the amount of give in the floating boards beneath her and the length of walkway beyond the ork. Crouching suddenly, she pistolled herself into the air. She landed—for just a split second—in a handstand with both hands on the ork's shoulders and then used her momentum to complete the handspring and land lightly on the walkway behind him, knees bent to compensate for the violent rocking her leap and landing had caused. Behind her, she heard a curse and a splash as the ork, unbalanced both by the fuel drum he was carrying and the sudden extra weight on his shoulders, toppled into the water. He came up sputtering and thrashing beside the bobbing drum, his face coated with diesel fuel.

"Fraggin' dirt-kisser!" he bellowed, scrambling with diesel-slicked hands for a grip on the bobbing walkway. "I'll push your face into a propeller for that!"

A chuckle erupted from one of the speakers on the patrol boat, and then a male voice spoke:
Leave
her
alone
,
Stoker
.
She
'
s
right
.
I
am
expecting
her
.

A second later, Alma's cyberears picked up the faint whine of an electric motor and the muffled clunk of maglocks opening. A metal ladder near the stern unfolded itself against the patrol boat's hull.

Welcome
aboard
.

She climbed the ladder to the small deck at the rear of the boat. A square hatch in the rear deck opened smoothly on hydraulic lifts as she walked toward it.

Alma
climbed down a ladder and found herself inside what looked like a dimly lit electronics repair shop. She had to activate her cybereyes' low-light vision to see anything; the only light came from the hatch above her, which was closing again, and from the spark-bright glow of red on/off indicator lights.

The interior of the patrol boat had been gutted, its separating walls removed to create one large space. Cheap metal shelving bolted to the walls held electronic parts of every description, and a host of tools dangled on spiral cords that hung from the ceiling. Gimballed tables tilted gently back and forth as the boat rocked. A profusion of computer equipment was spread across them, but there wasn't a single monitor screen in sight.

An enormously fat ork sat in the middle of the room on a reclining chair fitted with rollers. Fiberoptic cables were plugged into datajacks in his temples and into ports at the side of his head where his ears had once been. He was Asian, with black hair that had gone from receding to patchy, and fully cybered eyes with silver irises. A goatee straggled down across his bare belly to touch the faded sarong that was his only article of clothing. Mentally, Alma shook her head at his slovenly appearance. Tiger Cat had assured her that the fellow was one of Vancouver's top Matrix experts, but the man didn't have a speck of professionalism about him. He could at least have put on a shirt for this meeting.

Reluctantly, Alma took a step forward, wrinkling her nose in anticipation. But despite the man's size—he looked as though he only rarely moved from his chair—he didn't smell as stale as Alma had expected. The odor of linament lingered in the air, making Alma wonder if the hacker had a masseuse who kneaded the circulation back into his body while his mind was deep in the Matrix.

"That's close enough," he said.

Bluebeard was sitting with his chair turned partially away from Alma, his hands resting on a belly as massive as a Buddha's. He didn't bother to turn around while speaking to her, and his eyes seemed unfocused. Alma suspected that he was using the video cameras that were mounted around the interior of the boat to look at her.

Alma
bowed in the direction of the nearest vidcam. "Thank you for agreeing to meet me in person."

He grunted and waved one hand in a jerky motion. "Tiger Cat can be very persuasive. He said seeing you would be worth my while. What kind of data are you looking for?"

"There's someone I'm interested in: a man by the name of Akira Kageyama. I need to know his movements, to find out where I can access him. My Johnson wants him extracted—by midnight tomorrow."

Bluebeard's eyebrows jerked up and then settled. "That's a tough order to fill without a starting point."

"I've got one." Alma reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a credstick and the business card that Ajax had given her yesterday. "I have some—connections—with the security industry. They tell me that Kageyama has used Priority One Security's bodyguards in the past. Priority One will have a record of where Kageyama went on those occasions, and when." Bluebeard's jowls quivered as he shook his head. "Priority One's been bought out by Knight Errant. If you want me to try and skate past their black ice, you'll have to triple your price."

Alma
held up a zero-balance credstick whose optical chip had been wiped of all information save one vital piece, pulled from her own medical file: her DNA scan. She knew that Priority One would use the same scanning procedure that PCI did, taking a random sampling of the one hundred thousand genes in the human genome and looking for a one hundred percent match with that sample. The scan typically skipped the twenty-third chromosome pair, since the smaller Y chromosome found in men carried so little genetic information. That meant that it would miss the one difference between Alma's genetic coding and Ajax's: an XX instead of an XY chromosome pair.

"I have a way to bypass Priority One's Matrix security: a back-door key to their network," she explained. "That's why I insisted on coming here in person. This credstick contains a DNA scan of a Priority One employee named Ajax Penzler. I'm not sure what kind of clearances he has, but you should be able to use his ID to get into the employee scheduling system. Penzler himself may not have been assigned to bodyguard Kageyama. but someone else at Priority One will have."

Bluebeard's lips twitched into a smile. Alma knew what he was thinking: that she was about to hand him a master key to Priority One and a possible entry point to Knight Errant itself. What he didn't know was that the credstick included a program that would erase the optical chip after one upload of its data. Priority One's security would be compromised only until Bluebeard exited its system—which he'd need to do in order to tell Alma what he'd found.

Bluebeard leaned over slowly, pausing to catch his balance several times as he did so, and plucked the credstick and business card out of her hand. Alma let the card go reluctantly. She'd only just connected with Ajax, and he was the closest thing she had to family in this world. Now here she was, doing the same thing to him that the shadowrunner who had abducted Gray Squirrel had done to her. She couldn't even claim altruistic reasons: she was using Ajax to salvage her reputation and her job.

The ironic thing was that, even if she was successful, she'd never work in security again. Besides Aaron, Aella and Akiko, who were either dead or about to die—and Ajax, whom Alma trusted—there were eight other Superkids out there. Three of them were women whose genetic coding was nearly identical to Alma's.

Intellectually, she'd realized that they were possible security risks, but after losing contact with them for so many years, she'd doubted that their paths would ever cross. Even so, she was negligent not to have given Hu the full details when she'd first joined PCI. He'd run a background check as part of her job-application screening and learned that she was a Superkid. He knew that she'd been bionically augmented at an early age as part of an experimental program but had no idea that each of the Superkids in Batch Alpha was gentically identical to all of the others.

Bluebeard had already slotted both the credstick and the auto-call business card into a cyberdeck on the table in front of him. His body slumped like soft dough and his eyes fluttered shut as he accessed the Matrix. Six minutes and fourteen seconds later, his eyes opened again.

"It's your lucky day," Bluebeard said. "Akira Kageyama visits the Executive Body Enhancements cyberclinic in the Woodwards Arcology just twice a year, but he's got an appointment with them tomorrow at 10 a.m. A Priority One Security bodyguard has been assigned to escort him to and from the clinic, but the guard has instructions not to accompany Kageyama inside the clinic itself. That's your window of opportunity."

Alma
frowned. "That's a serious breach of security. Standard ops is to wait outside the door of the examining room itself."

Alma
heard the lens in a camera next to her zoom in and realized that Bluebeard was scrutinizing her closely. His body language told her that she'd just revealed a greater knowledge of security procedure than she should have.

"I wondered about that, too," he said. "So I dug a little deeper—that's what took me so long. The ice around the clinic's patient records was pretty thick, but I managed to melt it and sneak a peek at Kageyama's file. He's only got one cybernetic enhancement, but it's a strange one: the little finger of each hand. It's a cosmetic job; the fingers don't physically interface with his nervous system. They aren't even connected to muscle tissue. They operate independently, taking their cue from the other fingers of the hand and slaving to their movements—and they're battery-driven. Kageyama has to visit the clinic twice a year, for a tuneup and battery change."

"Do his medical records say how he lost the ends of his fingers? " Alma asked, even though she had a hunch that she already knew the answer. In the Japanese yakuza, subordinates who committed grave errors apologized to their superiors by ritually severing the last joint of the little finger. Kageyama was originally from Japan. On the surface, he was a law-abiding resident of Vancouver. Alma wondered if there were gang connections in his past—if that was why someone wanted to extract him.

Bluebeard seemed to be on the same wavelength. "If Kageyama was a yak, he was a real screw-up," he said with a chuckle. "His entire little finger's gone—on both hands. But we're not talking self-mutilation. According to the chopdoc's notes, it's a genetic defect, present from birth."

Alma
mulled that one over. "Why cosmetic cybernetics?" she asked. "Why not just hardwire the fingers to his nervous system?"

"He must be Awakened," Bluebeard answered. "Your target has probably got magical capabilities. This isn't going to be an easy extraction for you."