Fuelled by anaesthetics, adrenaline, blood loss or just agonising pain, I drifted in and out of consciousness, bombarded by psychedelic nightmares. A bright light in the centre of my vision became an unblinking eye glaring down at me, with tendrils of pure brilliance reaching out to envelop me in their web-like grasp. The rocking of the ambulance’s suspension became the lapping of the waves as I floated in the waters of the Bay, buffeted by the wake of an immense, slab-sided vessel.
I saw an afterimage Lisa’s face looking down at me, a false grin of reassurance on her features undermined by the worry clear in her eyes. I began to wake, once, my body flailing as I spasmed. Everything except for my right arm, which lay still and inert by my side. I was outside again, hearing rain falling on an awning a few feet above my head before I whited out to the sound of doors sliding open.
There were more flashes of sensation; hurried voices talking in professional tones, armoured silhouettes being replaced by slighter figures in scrubs, someone leaning in close, their gaze flicking to a tablet in their hand. The corridor was replaced by a room, the mask connected to something else. The tang of a different anaesthetic flooded into my chest as I felt something being pricked into my left arm.
That time, they hit me with something stronger. I didn’t drift away or even black out; I blinked and suddenly I was alone in a half-lit room with all that had come before left as murky memories. There was something wrapped around my upper arm – the one I could feel – and a bank of monitoring equipment on a stand next to me, tuned into a plethora of AR programs that circulated the data rather than sending it elsewhere.
The thing around my arm was contracting, acting according to a routine set to go off every fifteen minutes. I could see it recording my blood pressure, pulse and half a dozen different readings, even if I didn’t yet have enough hold on my digital senses to actually make out what the numbers were.
Falteringly, I expanded my digital awareness, taking in an inert trideo set mounted in the corner of the room, the limited sensors of a smoke detector, the air conditioning and radiator’s link into the broader climate control network for the whole complex. That gave me a snapshot of the building I was in; large, with most of the space on the floors above and below me given to long rooms without any partitions that affected the airflow.
Has to be a hospital, I thought. I was still groggy, but I had half expected to wake up in a cell in some corp’s basement. Instead, from the look of things, I was on the third floor of a twelve-storey building, tucked away in a hall of private rooms, only some of which were being actively maintained by the climate controls – which I took to mean that only some were occupied.
Private rooms, I realised, far later than I should; I didn’t even have health insurance.
Even though it still felt like I was trying to push my mind through a sieve, I stretched out my senses to encompass more of the devices around me, picking up a cluster of them just outside the door to my room. A smartwatch, commlink, headset radio, biomonitor, IFF tag, cybereyes, smartlinked submachine gun.
A chill went down my spine. The cluster of devices wasn’t moving, but I didn’t know if the guard was there to keep the world out or to keep me in.
The stab of fear was enough to draw my attention to the biological sensations I’d been deliberately avoiding. The ones that came from my body, rather than my brain. I was sore, my limbs stiff from top to bottom, but I couldn’t feel my right arm. I couldn’t move it, either.
I tried to sit up, only to slump over as my right arm failed to move with my left. On the second attempt, I was able to shuffle back, pressing myself against the backboard of what was clearly a troll-sized hospital bed, with buttons and disability-friendly holographic controls to adjust its height and elevation. There were multiple joints below me, meant to tilt in different places depending on the vastly divergent size of the metahuman who lay in it. Looking at the door, I could see that the entire room had been designed the same way; the door was tall enough for me to fit through without ducking, and instead of a handle there was a motion sensor panel running down the right hand side where it could be triggered by anyone, of any height.
I hated this. Hated not knowing, not having any information about what had just happened, what was happening, what was going to happen.
Had I been wheeled into a long-distant nightmare? Was I logged in the corp’s systems as a Technomancer, about to be whisked off to some secret lab like Labyrinth had been? If not, what did we do to be worth sending armed ambulance crews to retrieve? To have an armed guard posted just outside my door? Why was I here, alone? Where were the others?
I wanted to leave, but I didn’t know if the guard would let me. I might not have been handcuffed to the bed, but it was clear that someone wanted me here, and that they wouldn’t be happy if I were to go somewhere else. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to hack my way out of the situation; my brain was still raw with dumpshock, and the thought of diving beyond the surface level of the matrix was enough to make my head ache.
So, inevitably, I fell back on the age-old pastime of those with nothing to do but wait; I switched on the trideo.
The last person in the room had tuned it to a financial news channel that I’d never even heard of. It was mid-programme, but the news was global; focusing on the largest markets in the world and only touching on the smaller stuff when things went catastrophically dull. No use to me.
Skimming through channels, I was quickly reminded just why the trideo set at home had sat unused for the last two years. The only real way to distinguish the channels from each other was the little logo in the bottom right corner, differentiating more financial news, global news, entertainment, so-called ‘documentary’ channels, children’s entertainment, pay-per-view porn and finally the section of the matrix set aside for local channels. What was actually being broadcast was, without fail, an endless deluge of advertisements.
Out on the street, advertising was omnipresent to the point of being unremarkable. In some areas, it felt like every single flat surface had been given over to screens, posters and holographic displays. In the metro, advertisements were plastered along the ceiling and above the windows, with holographic projectors mounted to display a line of gaudy images down the middle of the carriage whenever it got empty enough to make the space available.
The same was true in the matrix, but magnified by a factor of a thousand. Unshackled by the physical limitations of screens and projectors, AR advertising crowded every area of the matrix that was even remotely populated, layered on top of or even within other adverts as they constantly competed for bandwidth, while roaming advirals carried automatically-generated slogans throughout the grid, ever-changing in response to minute trends in social memes, the oldest little more than nonsensical slogans that had long since diverged from the product they were supposed to be pushing.
I never really saw any of them; my matrix was a place of raw code and datastreams linked together by the ephemeral force of the resonance. I knew the adverts were there, could even see what they were advertising if I peered at the code, but they were just another piece of metahumanity’s intrusion into the resonance.
For those without my gifts, a matrix-capable device’s value came partly from how effectively it was able to filter that advertising out, using its own algorithm’s to juggle its firewall capacity based on the few ads its owner might actually want to see. I could see that the trideo set was trying to do the same to me, checking my biometrics against the hospital data, but since I didn’t have a policy it didn’t have anything to latch onto. Which was probably why it was showing me an advert for men’s deodorant.
Fortunately, that was the last advert before the local news channel returned to its previous story.
The city as a whole had clearly gone from bad to worse since I’d gone under; the broadcast showed a reporter on the scene of a Medhall compound in the North End that had been stormed by the Chosen, making off with large amounts of medical-grade pharmaceuticals. It was a blatant cover-up – not that almost anyone watching the broadcast would realise that – but that didn’t surprise me. What was surprising was that they’d spent lives on it.
Eight Medhall employees had died in the raid, along with four employees of a contracted security company. Most of the Mehall workers were from the warehouse team, while two were custodians. As their pictures came up on screen, alongside a corporate spokesman vowing retribution, I saw that all but two of them weren’t human.
It said something about what I’d been through over the last few weeks that the thought of Medhall throwing its less-than-human staff members into the line of fire in order to save face didn’t shock me. I didn’t even wonder how their spokesman could stand in front of a press conference and talk about the families of those who’d died – how the company would be supporting them in what he termed ‘this difficult time.’
As to why they resorted to allowing the Chosen to rob them, the answer to that – beyond the Chosen’s need for the drugs – could be seen on the tickertape of rolling news stories crawling along the bottom of the screen, interspersed with the matrix URLs of sponsored messages. “AAO headquarters raided by police over drug charges” sent a pretty clear message, as did the one that followed it; “Policlub leader Justin Hammond evades capture.”
Inevitably, the next scrawl concerned the cancelation of a concert in the south of the city, while the meaningless celebrity divorce afterwards was juxtaposed wonderfully by the interview with a tearful widow happening above the tickertape. Then it was back to a particularly violent street battle near Japantown – close enough to Midtown to draw the eye of the news – before a final message about a celebrity death. Diane Anders, the sister of Medhall’s current CEO, had died of an overdose in the rehab clinic where she’d evidently spent the last six years losing a battle with addiction.
It seemed pointless; there was a gang war going on, dozens – perhaps hundreds – of people were dying every hour, yet all the news cared about was which corp had been hit, which notable had been hurt. I shouldn’t have been surprised; Medhall was sponsoring the station, after all.
A new device came into my painfully small radius of awareness, immediately drawing my attention away from the trideo set. It was an RFID tag broadcasting the wearer’s corporate SIN and clearances, and it was sufficient for the guard to take one step to the side, letting a nurse slide open the door to my room.
She was dressed in green scrubs, with her brown hair worn in a green-highlighted braid. Physically, she seemed to be in her mid-twenties, but for some reason I couldn’t explain I felt like she was younger than me. That she was a troll was another indicator of where I was, but her corporate SIN cinched it; she worked for CrashCart, which meant the extraction had been genuine. It wasn’t like a Medhall hospital would employ a troll nurse.
That confirms the who, I thought, but not the why.
I was too shocked to speak at first, but then I noticed that she was very deliberately avoiding looking at me, walking right over to the monitoring equipment next to the bed, her mouth moving silently as she copied down information onto a tablet.
“Hi,” I said, awkwardly. My throat was sore; the word came out scratchy, almost like a cough.
She ignored me, her eyes fixed on the monitor with even more determination.
“Not allowed to talk?” I asked, all while a mantra crept into my mind; what would Tattletale do?
“Please talk to me?” I tried. “I have no idea what’s going on, and I feel like I’m losing my mind, here.”
It didn’t sound right, but I felt like my best option was to build sympathy.
“Please? I know this has to be scary, but I’m a person too. Can you at least tell me if my… my friend is alright? He was shot right in front of me, I saw them taking him away in an ambulance.”
“We aren’t supposed to talk to the patients,” the nurse blurted out. It wasn’t working, I could see that. I couldn’t feign that sort of emotion, so I changed tactics.
“According to who? Why have you air-gapped that equipment? It’s not on the network. Any other patient, you could just read all that data from the nurse’s station. Instead they send you to go read it manually. In here. With me.”
She flinched, hesitating just a little. I could tell I almost had her; she just needed another push.
“What’s going on, Hazel?”
She froze. It wasn’t what I was expecting; I wanted to create a personal connection, and her name was clear to see in the signal of her RFID badge. But she was finally, actually looking at me.
“Please?” I tried again, with less of the false waver. “Nobody will even know. We’re air-gapped. No camera, no microphone. Smoke detector will see if you light up, but that’s all.”
Her mouth opened slightly, her eyes darting to the door as the arm that had been holding the tablet close to her chest dropped a little. The other arm drifted up to her head, scratching automatically at the point where her horn pushed out of her skin.
“I don’t know,” she answered, in a low voice. “Management’s been keeping this hall offline, and I got pulled off renal to staff it.”
“This happen before?” I asked.
“Not that I know of. Even other… shadowrunners” – she whispered the word – “get logged in the system. Your friend’s two doors down.”
Relief hit me like a sledgehammer, but I pressed on.
“Anyone waiting to see us?”
“Nobody from the hospital. They don’t know you’re awake yet. There is a visitor from outside, waiting near the nurse’s station.”
“Who?” I asked, a brief burst of panic flooding my system.
“A blonde, about your age. Didn’t give her name.”
An involuntary sigh left my mouth, as I sagged back with my mouth involuntarily curling into a smile. Either Lisa was on top of the situation, or she’d somehow set this whole thing up – saving my life in the process.
“I-” She hesitated. “I can’t tell her you’re awake.”
“Don’t worry,” I chuckled. “She’ll figure it out. Thanks.”
The nurse hurried out of the room, her shoulders hunched and her face frozen in a worried expression that she hastily tried to force back into neutrality as the door slid open. Tattletale would definitely pick up on it the moment she saw her.
I didn’t want her to see me lying down. I trusted her, had even opened up to her, but I didn’t want to appear vulnerable in front of her. I had to capture some of the ceaseless social confidence she always managed to project, which meant pushing myself up in spite of all my aches and pains and swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
That was when I noticed I was wearing a hospital gown, my bare feet making contact with a floor far cooler than I was expecting. I winced, and for a moment I considered standing, but I didn’t feel quite ready yet.
It took Tattletale two minutes to come through the door. I didn’t know how she’d managed to get past the guard, but I never doubted that she’d be able to. I wasn’t expecting the unnerved look on her face, but it was quickly washed away by genuine relief as she caught sight of me.
I didn’t know what to say to her – I couldn’t say anything to her, couldn’t make the words fit in my now-trembling mouth. She was carrying a bundle of clothes, with my boots sitting on top, but she tossed them haphazardly on the bed as she rushed over and wrapped her arms around me – something that was only possible because I was sitting down.
It was like the tension drained out of me. I hesitated only moment before resting a massive hand on her back, squeezing my eyes shut in an attempt to stop the tears that had begun to well up as my stony face collapsed beneath an outpouring of emotions. I still couldn’t move my right arm; it sat limp by my side. Dead weight.
“It’s okay, Taylor…” Lisa whispered into my ear. “You’re okay.”
“My arm…”
“I know. They wouldn’t fix it all the way, just closed up the cut and replaced the lost blood. The nerve damage is still there.”
“How do you know?” I asked, half pleading. “What happened? Why are we here?”
Lisa pulled one arm away so that she could sit down next to me, the other arm still reaching across my back. I almost leant into her, but I stopped myself; I’d knock her flat.
“I… set up a contingency plan. I didn’t like the job; there were too many things that could go wrong, and I’ve never been good in a gunfight. It’s not my nature.”
“So you signed us up to CrashCart? With what money? They don’t offer exfils like that to anyone.”
“I didn’t like our client, either. Didn’t trust him, so I went hunting for him in the astral plane. Found him working out of the eleventh floor of a CrashCart hospital. This hospital. I let him know I knew, let his mind work out the rest.”
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“That was him, over the estate,” I realised. “His drone, his eyes.”
“And his guys dressed up as CrashCart High Threat Response. Or maybe they are CrashCart HTR and bodyguarding is a side hustle.”
“You saved my life.” The words came out tonelessly, like I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. “Brian’s life too. Is he…”
I turned, looking down at Lisa’s face as something flashed across her elven features.
“Best you see for yourself,” she answered, removing her arm from my back and standing up.
She went over to stand by the door, peering through the window out into the corridor beyond. I stood up as well, swaying momentarily and clutching the bed for support, but I didn’t fall. Lisa had brought my boots and a pair of dark jeans I’d bought with her, but my t-shirt with its scarab symbol had evidently been ruined; Lisa had replaced it with one that had a surprisingly friendly cartoon spider on the front. My jacket was nowhere to be seen; I presumed it had been ruined as well.
Getting dressed was a Herculean labour. My right arm was nothing but a burden, one I had to manoeuvre into my t-shirt before I could slip the wide neck over my horns, catching it on the tip and almost tearing it open before I was able to pause, reassess and bring my head through. The pants and belt weren’t as hard as I was expecting, but I quickly found that my boots were a lost cause; I just couldn’t fix the laces, and my arm kept banging against the floor.
“Here,” Lisa said, suddenly right in front of me as she knelt down and tugged the laces tight. “Let me help.”
“We’ve got to do something about this,” I said.
“We will,” Lisa nodded. “It’ll just cost something. Now, hold it in place and I’ll wrap it in a sling.”
I found the arm a little easier to deal with when it wasn’t knocking against me with every movement. I stood again, this time clenching my fist and eyelids shut until I stopped swaying, and followed Lisa out into the corridor.
The ward was a small square space with private rooms lined up in an L opposite a circular nurse’s station from which the young troll and two other nurses were able to see into each room, provided that the doors were left open. The guard had moved over to join them. He was a dwarf, wearing a security uniform with CrashCart’s logo on it – which meant he was in-house, rather than subcontracted. He was watching us like a hawk, but there didn’t seem to be any malice in his gaze. He just looked bored.
“How’d you get him to let you in?” I whispered.
“Regent isn’t the only person on the team who can mess with people’s heads,” she answered, cryptically. “I can be persuasive. C’mon, Grue’s two doors down.”
Grue had been given a far larger room than me, judging by the amount of space between its door and the next. It took me a moment to realise why that was; he was in an operating theatre. The door was locked, but next to it was an opaque glass panel that I turned transparent with a thought, even as some subconscious process in my mind began picking at the electronic lock.
As the room faded into view, I struggled to pick out Brian at first. There was just a mass of machinery surrounding a bed, with intravenous drips, monitoring equipment and life support systems collating on a figure who seemed so much smaller than Brian ever had, with his face hidden beneath a respirator mask.
I saw four bullets pass through Grue’s chest; burning tracers that would have immolated his flesh and internal organs. Half a century ago, it would have been a hopelessly lethal wound. Even today, it wasn’t something most people would survive. The machinery in there was more sophisticated than anything I’d seen in my life, the sort of gear CrashCart might roll out for the comatose ultra-rich, but even then it didn’t seem like it was helping him.
Like my arm, they’d brought Brian to the point where he wasn’t going to die and then just… stopped.
“How are the others?” I asked, even as I placed my palm against the window, leaning in almost close enough to knock my horns against it.
“Regent’s fine,” Lisa answered. “The bullet’s out of his leg and he’s fully recovered. Bitch’s damage was almost skin deep; all she had to do was swap out her subdermal armour. They’re both downstairs” – she smiled – “I had to persuade Bitch not to come up here with a shotgun.”
“Good,” I nodded, my horns clinking against the window before I pulled back. “This isn’t the kind of problem a shotgun can solve.”
We stood there quietly for a few moments, watching the blinking lights, the rise and fall of the machines keeping Brian alive, until Lisa broke the silence.
“Bug,” she sighed, “I’m going to need you to step up. At least until he’s back on his feet.”
I paused, turning away from Grue and leaning against the window as I looked down at Lisa.
“What do you mean?”
She hesitated – more than I’d ever seen her hesitate – for a moment, her eyes darting back to Brian.
“Grue… Look, we’re together as a team because of some very specific circumstances, and we’ve stuck together because we work well together. But if we weren’t Shadowrunners, none of us would have given any of the others the time of day. We’re all from different worlds.”
She turned back to Grue, folding her arms. I wasn’t sure if she was looking at him or her reflection in the glass.
“Grue was-” She caught herself. “Grue is a rock. He’s businesslike, literal minded, he has uncomplicated plans that he executes directly. He’s the solid base that’s held us all together. I can’t step in to fill his shoes. Bitch would never trust me, and I think I remind Regent too much of people in his world for him to take me seriously.”
I stroked my chin, frowning. She had a point; people like Lisa were never more than things in Alec’s fucked-up little cult. He’d left that life behind, but unconscious biases were hard to shake. Either that, or her methods reminded him too much of his siblings.
“You really think he’d listen to me?” I asked.
“I do. Regent’s flighty, but you’re as solid as Grue. You’ve demonstrated that with how you’ve handled Bitch – who, incidentally, would throw herself on a grenade if you asked. Tell him how it’s going to be and he’ll bitch and moan because he likes to, but he’ll do it all the same.”
I let out a long sigh, placing my hand flat on the window and leaning forwards until my horns clinked against the glass. I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked at Grue once more.
“If you think you’re undermining him, don’t,” Lisa said. “Truth is, we were heading this way already. Grue’s got a good head on his shoulders, but you’re about as determined as anyone I’ve met and just as devious as me.” She chuckled. “The things you could have done if you hadn’t been shut away… I’m so glad I let you out of your box.”
“What am I, a wind-up toy?” I shot back, grinning.
“Damn straight. I turn your screw, point you at a problem and watch you burn half the city to solve it.”
That was enough to knock me out of my morass. I stepped back from the glass, looking down at Tattletale with an eyebrow raised, before both of our attention was drawn away as someone new entered the room.
He was dressed in scrubs and his arms were high-end cybernetics, the fingers lined with seams where they could split apart into further digits capable of even greater precision. The nurses, who had been watching us warily, perked up in the way that employees only did when the boss arrived to take a problem off their hands, rather than lay a new one at their feet.
“You shouldn’t be up,” he said to me by way of introduction.
“But I am,” I replied, taking Lisa’s words to heart as I straightened up and tried to put a little bite into my tone. “You’ve stabilised us and stopped. I want to know why.”
The surgeon shrugged, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“It’s not my job to explain.” His eyes darted up to the ceiling. “But when you woke up, I was told to send you upstairs. Apparently there’s someone who wants to speak to you.”
He sent a signal off through the matrix, using a mind-impulse link that was part of his all-encompassing surgical suite. His eyes were the same way, and there were hormone emitters lining his spine to keep him calm under pressure. He was using one of them now, which told me that he wasn’t as in-control as he appeared.
He wasn’t expecting me to be up, and Tattletale was a complete unknown.
“What exactly is the damage?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. I flicked a thumb over my shoulder, back towards Brian. “Him and me.”
“And your other wounded,” the surgeon clarified. “One minor cut for your colleague here, one deep wound on the thigh that was treated in A&E. Your friend back there had significant internal damage to his organic and cybernetic systems. Life support is currently substituting the functions of the damaged components.”
He gestured with a cybernetic limb at my own arm, strapped up in a sling. “Your arm is functionally dead. The circulatory system is functioning – just – but your nerves require complete removal and replacement. It would be easier to swap out the limb.”
The door behind him opened again for another CrashCart employee, this one an elf dressed in the jumpsuits worn by their ambulance crews, though without the trademark white body armour. She looked us up and down for a moment before speaking in a faintly Japanese accent.
“You come with me. Mister Johnson will speak with you. He has already waited long enough.”
“Has he now?” I asked, shooting Tattletale a wary glance and getting a subtle nod in return. “Text the others, get them up here. We’ll see him together – all of us who can.”
I was genuinely touched that Tattletale had been stalling our client until I was awake. I’d felt so alone when I woke up, and it was good to realise that I had people I could count on. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that way.
We were led out into a far busier corridor, with hospital staff moving along in a sort of practiced rush, while the occasional patient was wheeled through on gurneys in varying stages of injury. It seemed they’d put us in a private section of the hospital’s accident and emergency department, situated on the second floor so that the ambulance crews had clearer access.
Most of the patients we passed didn’t look like they’d merit a private room. They were evidently able to afford to have health insurance, but I doubt their policies were above the absolute bare minimum of service. They were severely wounded, one and all – enough that they’d even consider actually making use of their insurance policy – and they’d leave the hospital with whatever out-of-pocket costs weren’t covered by their meagre deductible.
But I supposed it was still better than bleeding out on the side of the street.
The hall ended in a T-junction, where a line of elevators of varying sizes shifted up and down behind their metal doors. As we arrived, the one in front of us slid open to reveal a team of Paramedics flanking a gurney – not quite the HTR special forces they’d sent after us, but still armed enough to dissuade anyone who might try to interfere with their rescue efforts. Their patient was an orkish woman with kanji written in glowing letters down the side of her cybernetic arms and legs, vivid red on white ceramics.
As paradoxical as it seemed, I found the sight of an obvious Yakuza lieutenant strangely soothing. It was a reminder that while we’d pissed a lot of groups off, in that moment I only had to worry about one of them. CrashCart was a double-A rated corporation, a multinational with a GDP that exceeded that of some small nations. That meant it had extraterritoriality. The Chosen wouldn’t get past the perimeter, Medhall would be kept well away and even Knight Errant wouldn’t know where we were.
The hospital was effectively sovereign territory, policed according to the laws of CrashCart’s owners in the Evo corporation and totally independent of the UCAS that surrounded it. It was why they could even count gang lieutenants among their customers, though if Knight Errant knew they were here they could always just camp outside the hospital until they left.
We were still on the public grid without a spam filter, but as our taciturn escort led us to a much smaller elevator, I relished the change to focus on one a single threat after the abject clusterfuck of the last job.
Especially when that elevator opened up to reveal Regent and Bitch, the latter’s shotgun slung on her back. Bitch didn’t smile when she saw me – she wouldn’t even if her attention hadn’t been focused on our CrashCart guide – but I hoped she felt as relieved as I did in that moment.
“Not dead, then?” Regent asked.
“Not dead,” I replied, simply, as the elevator closed behind us and began to climb. “Our client wants to see us.”
“Grue’s not here,” he observed.
“He’s not.” I kept my attention fixed on the elevator doors, though I was distantly aware of Regent’s commlink in the pocket of his silver blazer. “That going to be a problem?”
There was a tense moment of silence.
“Nah,” Regent chuckled. “You’re stone cold, Bug.”
I couldn’t help but wince at the name, schooling my expression back into something as stony as my skin just before the doors to the elevator slid open.
The eleventh floor of the hospital was far quieter than the second, but it was also far more opulent. It wasn’t anything obvious – there were no rich red carpets or gilt-framed portraits on the wall – but the materials used to construct it were of an undeniably higher quality. The floor was glossier, the walls lacking the rough texture of paint, and in place of lights embedded in the ceiling, the whole ceiling glowed with a soothing light.
It was the second-highest floor of the hospital, which meant it was the domain of clients who would never deign to ride in a road-bound ambulance. If they travelled anywhere, it was by helicopters and t-birds, ushered into a separate triage by the very best of the best High Threat Response paramedics and brought down into advanced nanosurgery suites where wounds that would kill someone with a few less zeroes in their bank balance could be treated with the simple application of ludicrously expensive resources.
But that would happen on the twelfth floor, as close to the landing pads as possible. The eleventh was home to the more routine health concerns of the super-rich. There were GPs’ offices that fronted right onto the corridor, without the need to navigate a reception and packed waiting room – and even then, only if they didn’t want the GP to go to them. Cosmetic surgery suites were set on opposite sides of the corridor; bioware organ freezers and a gamma-grade cyberware clinic laid out more like boutique stores than an actual medical facility.
We didn’t pass a single patient as we were led through the halls, though each facility was fully staffed. With the rates they charged, CrashCart could afford to have people ready to enable the slightest whim at a moment’s notice, but few of the ultra-rich would be interested in visiting a hospital that was clearly caught up in the middle of an active gang war.
Our destination was two corridors off the main arterial that ran down the length of the hospital, leading up to what I assumed was the exterior wall of the building. As we approached a nondescript set of double doors at the end of the corridor, an obvious – yet polite – AR warning popped up in front of us, declaring that section of the hospital was closed for renovations.
We walked through the warning like it wasn’t over there, our escort moving ahead as the doors slid open. Beyond was a small ward that seemed to have been gutted, with electrical cables, stacks of wall and ceiling panelling, even tools left frozen in place from when the renovations had been paused.
In and among that half-build space, a makeshift operations centre bustled with activity. There were perhaps fifteen people in all, each one of them dressed in CrashCart uniforms that didn’t necessarily match up to their role. A bank of terminals were manned by four nurses in scrubs and two high-end greeters in corporate-branded suits, the screens in front of them displaying a range of data from ambulance locations to stock market projections.
A makeshift armoury had been sectioned off from the rest of the room by transparent floor-to-ceiling plastic curtains, where a wizened ork in a building maintenance uniform was inspecting the components of a disassembled sniper rifle while a quartet of soldiers in paramedic security uniforms were stowing their own rifles on a rack. Next to it was an area that had seemingly been given over to magical rituals, with a geometrically-perfect circle on the floor and shamanic fetishes decorating the wall.
The half-assembled reception desk of the ward was manned by a slight man in the sort of neat suit that hospital management might wear, with a woman in full-body armour standing over his shoulder, a shotgun held loosely in her arms as she watched the door – and us.
As we were led through the busy chatter and hurried order, we passed two deckers dressed in slick-skinned cooler suits. Both were wired into the support systems of the chairs on which they were reclined, supporting them for hours – perhaps even days – of uninterrupted use. My expanded senses, though still healing from dumpshock, gave me a snapshot of two separate systems; one sitting at the centre of a web that encompassed both the hospital’s host and a separate, hidden network hidden within the hospital’s, while the second sat like a coiled spring atop an armoury of agent and programmes. A decker and a spider, to attack and defend.
Our client wasn’t in the middle of the operations room, but it was clear he was at its nexus. He didn’t have a desk and a chair, instead coiling himself up on a tatami mat in front of a one-way window that offered a floor to ceiling vista looking out across the neighbouring buildings towards the skyscrapers of downtown. Upon the mat, the hidden network coalesced in a circular array of screens, projectors, broadcasting equipment and motion sensor controls that linked it all together.
He was mid-conversation with a man in a nondescript taksuit out-of-keeping with the corporate uniforms worn by the rest of the room, but he paused as we approached and sent the man away with a flick of his tail. Another flick shut down the screens and projectors, the data disappearing one by one until he was surrounded by nothing more than black mirrors that reflected his own coiled form.
“Miss Hebert,” he began. A pit formed in my stomach. “I am glad to see you awake. Your associate was quite insistent that I wait for you before… explaining the situation.”
“How did you-” I clamped my mouth shut, clenching my fist. He’d wrongfooted me; I’d let him wrongfoot me.
“CrashCart does not delete patient data. You do not presently hold health insurance, but you were included as a dependent under your father’s policy, which was cancelled by Mr Hebert in sixty-eight… one month after he died.”
Another stupid mistake, I thought. But I couldn’t afford it. When the payment notice came in, I had to cancel then and there.
Light flashed in the distance, illuminating the front of a building a few blocks away. The sound arrived seconds later. An explosion.
“Looks like you’ve got what you wanted,” I said, looking past his serpentine body to the city beyond. “AAO has been dismantled and the Chosen are stuck in a gang war. Medhall has been declawed in the underworld. It’s time to settle the cost.”
“Yes…” the serpent hissed, rising up on his coils. “Let us discuss costs. Tell me, Bug, do you know how much a CrashCart High Threat Response evacuation costs? Three ambulances, six paramedics, six guards? Your surgery was relatively uncomplicated, but Grue required intensive nanosurgery to separate and repair the cybernetic and biological components of his body. To say nothing of life support expenses, which stand at thirty six hours and climbing.”
Thirty six hours, I thought with a start, but my mouth was already moving.
“If you’re going to nickel and dime, be accurate. Those weren’t HTR.”
It has all fallen into place; the mismatched uniforms in this room were just a way of disguising the snake’s personnel as they commuted to and from this building each day. CrashCart was a shield he was using to support the own agenda, or the agenda of his real employers.
“Well done, Bug,” he chuckled, giving me a cold reptilian smile. “I am no ambulance chaser. My name is Thomas Calvert. I work for Evo. CrashCart is the largest Evo subsidiary in Brockton Bay, so it is here that I made my headquarters. I am telling you this not because you might have figured it out yourself with time and talent” – he glanced at Tattletale – “but because it does not matter. Because you are in my debt.”
Calvert’s eyes deliberately flicked to my arm, before returning to meet my gaze. He’d risen high enough that our eyes were completely level.
“The cost of the medical treatment you have already received is greater than the sixty thousand nuyen you agreed to take as payment. The cost of repairing your arm and returning Grue to full functionality would be considerably more.”
“Make your pitch,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t be telling us this if you didn’t have a use for us, but a half-crippled Shadowrunner team is useless to anyone.”
“I came to your city from Evo’s North American headquarters, in Seattle. I came with no resources other than those I could take with me; even my presence in this hospital is concealed from the majority of its staff for fear that it would be compromised by industrial espionage.”
He turned, his elongated body slithering over itself as he angled his head towards the window, where the distant skyscrapers of the city centre could be seen past his twinned reflection. He was looking right at one skyscraper in particular, at the red, yellow and black holographic logo near its crest that simultaneously evoked a crown, a rune and the letter M.
“I work in emergent market acquisitions. My purpose in this city is the neutralisation of Medhall Pharmaceuticals, either through its outright destruction or the reduction of its value until it can be acquired and gutted by Evo. To surpass this goal, I require local operators whose obedience is beyond doubt.”
Abruptly, he turned back to face us, his eyes flicking from person to person as if he was weighing our value.
“To that end, I will waive the remaining treatment costs for you and your teammate. I will pay you a weekly retainer not to take any work besides my own, until my goals are achieved. I will continue to fairly compensate you for each of those tasks. This is the only offer I will make.”
In the end, it wasn’t a choice at all. Brian’s life hung in the balance – as did my arm. It hurt to admit it, but we’d been outmanoeuvred at every turn. Lisa was right to worry about the policlub job; Calvert had taken advantage of the naivety of a Shadowrunner team that had only just hit the big leagues, sending us against overwhelming odds in the knowledge that we’d come back in dire need of help only he could offer. Even if Lisa hadn’t blackmailed him, he’d still have been waiting in the wings with the medical help we so desperately needed.
“Then our choice isn’t a choice at all,” I answered, conceding defeat. “We accept, of course, but I’m getting tired of ‘Bug.’ From now on, call me Spider.”
We lost control, I thought, bitterly. I won’t let it happen again.