Lone Wolf (38 page)

I glance over at Argent. Like me, he hasn’t yet lowered his face-shield. There’s going to be plenty of time to stare through that transplast plate, breathing in my own exhalations, and hoping I don’t fog up the heads-up display that’s ready to synch up with the wire in my head and the circuitry in my rifle. The wind—sharp and cold, chilled by the gray water of the Columbia River—helps keep me focused on the present, prevents my mind from drifting into catastrophic imaginings.

Argent’s facing straight forward, his cyber-modified eyes shut against the wind and the intermittent spray. But he seems to feel my gaze on him. The eyes open, and he turns to me. He’s got a Panther assault cannon held vertically between his knees, his matte-black hands lightly gripping the cooling vanes on the massive barrel. His expression’s totally calm, almost detached, more like he’s on a day-cruise to a fragging picnic spot instead of headed for a bloody firefight. But of course he’s done this drek before, I remind myself.

He’s military—corp military, that’s what Desert Wars is, but military just the same—so this is just old home week for him, a return to his fragging roots. Suddenly I feel very much alone. I’m no merc, I’m no soldier, and no new optical chip in my slot is going to change that.

“How’d you get into undercover work, Wolf?”

Argent’s low-voiced question catches me by surprise. I shoot a hard glare at him, but his eyes are clear and his expression mild.

I’m so surprised that I answer him—wheeling up the standard response I've gotten down pat after hundreds of repetitions, of course. “At the time it seemed like the best way of making a difference,” I tell him.

The runner’s lips curl in a smile. Not scornful, but definitely with a hint of irony.

“Why not?” I snap.

He doesn’t answer me, just keeps smiling.

I could just dust him off. His opinion doesn’t matter to me, I tell myself firmly. When this drek’s out of the way, the only time I’ll ever see him again is if I happen to arrest him. The answer I gave him has satisfied everybody I’ve told it to—colleagues, acquaintances, even my superiors at the Star. Who the frag does he think he is to dig any deeper into the dirt, huh?

So it’s a total shock when I hear myself bringing up the secondary justification, the one I’ve never had to mention to anyone. “Okay,” I growl, “it’s for the rush. The fragging excitement. Okay?”

His smile doesn’t fade in the slightest, and the rage is twisting in my gut. Or is it the rage? At the moment, it could just as easily be fear.

“Really?” Argent asks mildly.

“You’re so fragging good at asking questions, why don’t you answer one?” I growl. A couple of the mercs around us turn toward us, their semi-mirrored face-shields reflecting distorted images of me and the runner. But I don’t care. “What happened to your fragging arms, Argent?”

The words are out before I even faintly consider their possible effect on the chromed runner. I guess part of me is trying to get a rise out of him, but just what kind of rise am I looking for? An assault rifle isn’t worth squat in close combat, and even though the escrima chip’s slotted and hot, the cyberarms I’m grinding him about could tear out my throat before I could react at all.

Yet, still, his expression doesn’t change. “Voluntary replacement,” he tells me quietly.

You can bet your hoop that sets me back big-time, priyatel. Voluntary replacement? I’d always figured it was a matter of his meat arms being blown or shot or chopped off. When Lynne Telestrian mentioned Argent’s Desert Wars background, I figured for sure he’d gotten too close to an exploding grenade or some drek.

But voluntary replacement? Chummer, that means jandering into a cyber clinic and telling the doc, “Lop off my arms and replace them with machines.” How the frag could anybody even consider that? (Yeah, yeah, okay, I’ve got cyber mods myself, to the tune of skillwires and chipjacks. But that’s augmentation, priyatel, addition to the meat, like bolting a turbocharger onto the engine of your bike. Very different from the route Argent took.)

If he’d wanted to shut me up, he couldn’t have come up with a better way of doing it. He stays silent for a moment, and I don’t think I could talk if I fragging tried. Then he goes on idly, musingly, “I used to know somebody who was a deep-cover infiltration agent. Nobody knew his real name—sometimes I wonder if
he
knew it—but we called him Steel back then. He was good, chummer, he was really good. But .. .’’

He pauses. “But it didn’t take me long to realize
why
he was good,” he continues, voice softer now. “The same reason he got into it in the first place, I guess. Steel was a loner, the absolute lone wolf. Never had any friends, because he never wanted any, because he couldn’t let anyone in. He couldn’t drop the guard long enough to let anyone close.” The runner chuckles wryly. “He had lots of acquaintances. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a hermit or anything. Nova-hot with the ladies, too. Dozens of people considered Steel a friend, and thought he felt the same. But he didn’t. They were just there, they didn’t mean anything to him one way or the other, even though he always gave off all the right cues to keep them thinking he cared about them.”

Argent shrugs. “I don’t know what made him that way. Yeah, sure, I could guess—all that facile psychobabble about family of origin and that drek—but it doesn’t really matter. He was a ... a social chameleon, that’s the best way I can put it. Drop him into a group
—any
group—and in a hour hell have the best-looking woman in the sack and everybody else thinking he’s their best chummer ever and that he respects and cherishes them. All without him ever giving the slightest flying frag about a single one of them.

“And I always figured that’s why he went into deep-cover,” the runner concludes. “That’s the way he was, and deep-cover was the only job in the world that actually rewarded him for that kind of behavior.” He turns his slightly silvered gaze on me. “Neh?”

My gut twists—it’s got to be the rage, what else could it be? “You’re saying I’m like that?” I demand.

He shrugs millimetrically. “How many people do you trust, Wolf?” he asks. “How many can you
bring yourself
to trust?”

“None,” I shoot back. “Just like a shadowrunner."

"Wrong.” Argent’s voice is firm, but there’s no anger in it. “I can trust my chummers. Like Peg, and Jean, and Sly, and Dirk.” I only recognize half the names, but it doesn’t matter. “And there are the ones I used to trust before I lost them—Hawk, and Toshi, and Agarwal. Not many, Wolf, but some. Shadowrunners don’t have many friends, that’s true. But we cling to the ones we’ve got.”

“Frag you,” I snarl. It’s the only answer I can give him. “Just frag you, okay?” I snap down my helmet’s face-shield, and concentrate on the HUD’s symbology.

“It’s gotta be lonely, Wolf.” The closed shield muffles the runner’s voice, but not enough so I can’t hear it.

A voice sounds from the button earphone built into my armored helmet, sharp and tinny. “Point One.”

And again I feel like time’s just this big wheel that keeps turning, round and round. For just an instant, I believe I can shut my eyes, then open them again, and I'll be in the Bulldog with Paco and the rest, about to bust through the gate of the Eighty-Eights’ warehouse. I force Argent’s words—and the strange effects they’ve created in my gut—deep down into the swamp, to deal with later. Strange time to play the psychobabble game, I think ... but then I realize that those few minutes of conversation kept me too busy to get freaked out about the upcoming op. Was that why he did it?

Who the frag knows, and who the frag cares? More important things to think about at the moment. I stand up, gripping the gunwale to steady me.

The Riverine’s boring west, downriver from our staging area halfway between Skamokawa and Cathlamet, at its cruising speed of about thirty-five klicks. From what Argent told me, it’s water-jet impellers can boot it up to three times that speed at full emergency power, but at the moment anything more than cruising would draw a lot of attention we just plain don’t want. Standing, I can see over the combing that leads to the upper deck, built on top of the main cabin, past the gun position. The gun—a Vanquisher minigun, very nasty—is currently unmanned and safed, its multiple Gatling-gun barrels pointed at the sky, but I know there’s a crewer poised to put it to use at a moment’s notice.

The whole Riverine is painted a vivid green, with yellow-gold trim—the livery used by most companies in the Telestrian empire, including Nova Vita Cybernetics. The transponder is also ready to identify itself as a Telestrian asset to any radar beam that interrogates it. (The livery and transponder aren’t some kind of scam, at least not at this level. The Riverine—and every other vehicle involved in the assault—is a Telestrian asset, owned by some portion or other of the Telestrian empire. The key issue is which portion ... ) To our right—starboard?—and slightly back, I can see another Riverine just like the one I’m aboard. Assault Team Baker. Beyond our sharply raked bow is the gray water of the Columbia, and maybe a klick-and-a-half ahead, the shore and the dark, blocky outlines of the NVC facility. This is where it’s going to get nasty.

I reach down and run my fingers over the tiny keypad mounted on my left hip. The keys control the more sophisticated features of the “commander-style” HUD and comm package built into my armor. (I’ve also got a tongue-activated version on the chin-guard for those times when both hands are busy, but I’m just not comfortable with it.) The HUD symbology changes, giving me a schematic representation of the forces under my command.

My command, it is to fragging laugh. Yeah, sure, Lynne fragging Telestrian insisted I take nominal command of the strike, for all the twisted reasons she laid out during our phone call. But that’s got exactly zero relationship to reality. It’s Argent and a couple of the other mercs who’ve worked out the assault plan, logistics, and contingencies, based on the assets Lynne’s willing to commit to the op. Damn fragging good thing too, say I. I’m not military, I’m not a merc, and I’m not fragging competent at this kind of drek. Leave it to me and I’d probably hose it up big-time, get everybody killed, and not do a speck of damage to the lab complex. No, priyatel, this is one for the pros. I’ll play figurehead if that’s what the elf-slitch wants, but nothing more.

There are some advantages to being figurehead, of course. It was the reason Argent and his “advisors” actually explained the overall plan to me, rather than keeping me in the dark along with the individual mercs on the various assault teams. (Maybe he’d have told me anyway, figurehead or not, but at least this way I don’t have to sweat about it.) The plan’s a wiz combination of pure brass and deception, using some capabilities I’d never heard of before in the tech we got from Lynne.

The basics come down to a modified Trojan horse ... or some drek like that. Two Riverines with transponders identifying them as Nova Vita supply vessels and arriving at the time the NVC facility is expecting supplies. A small but well-armed ground-assault force. And the cavalry ready to come over the hill—a detachment of Yellowjacket rotorcraft, currently sitting on the ground at the staging area, all systems shut down, invisible to the target’s radar and other sensors. Cruising five hundred meters overhead, fragging near visible to view and to radar, two Aerodesign Systems “Condor” stealth drones, relaying realtime surveillance to the various forces. And, ready to be committed at the appropriate moment, three Wandjina RPV combat drones, currently loitering a couple of klicks back of us, less than a meter above the river’s surface, packing some nasty surprises tasked to take out the specific defenses we’ve spotted through earlier recon. Biggest damn op I’ve ever been on ... or ever want to be on. Everybody else just seems to take it in stride.

We’re a klick out, and I feel the Riverine’s motion change as the helmsman gooses the throttles. The Baker craft kicks up onto the step as well. Yeah, we’re attracting attention to ourselves, but the time for stealth’s almost past anyway. Any moment now, some radio operator at the NVC facility’s going to be calling for a password or recognition signal we’re not going to be able to give, and then the drek hits the pot. When that moment comes, the closer we are to the shore— and the faster we’re going—the better all around. That’s the plan, at least.

And the moment’s now. A blinking text message on my HUD tells me to listen in to a particular short-range comm channel. Clumsily, I punch in the requested frequency with my left hand.

I come in on the middle of the conversation. “... escorts coming out. Identify, please.” I don’t recognize the voice, but it’s easy to guess it’s the NVC facility’s radio operator.