Shadowrun 43 - Fallen Angels Read online

  Just as she turned the corner, a dwarf in a dark blue uniform stepped into the hall. Kellan started, panicking-—until she remembered she was as invisible to the security guard as she'd been to the cameras outside. He wore his dark brown hair in a long braid and had a full beard, a fashion popular among dwarfs. An almost invisible throat mic extended from over one pointed ear, and the butt of a pistol jutted away from his hip. As he pulled the door closed behind him, he turned to scan the hallway. He was . . .

  He was looking right at her.

  Drek! Kellan thought as the dwarf reached for his weapon, at the same time calling out, "Intruder at the east entrance!"

  As he grabbed his gun, Kellan snatched a short metal rod from her belt. With a flick of her wrist, it extended to almost a full meter in length, its tip crackling with blue sparks. She slammed it into the dwarf's arm as he brought up his pistol. There was a crackle and a yelp of pain as nerveless fingers dropped the gun. The dwarf stumbled back, clutching his arm where the stun baton had touched it.

  Kellan pressed her advantage, slamming the tip of the baton into the dwarf's chest. There was another crack and the smell of ozone as the security guard pitched backward onto the floor, muscles twitching. At the same moment, alarms began to sound throughout the building.

  Kellan left the dwarf where he lay and took off back down the hall from which she came. She barreled into the door at full speed, but only ended up bruising her shoulder as she bounced off it.

  "Ow!" she swore. The building was on alert, so now the door was locked down. Quickly, she slotted her passkey and punched the override button. It scrambled the maglock; the time for stealth was over. The security door released, and Kellan kicked it open, bolting back across the compound toward her hole in the fence.

  She'd made it about halfway when a burst of automatic gunfire ricocheted off the pavement nearby, sending up sparks. Several uniformed security guards were headed her way.

  "Stop!" one of them yelled, and Kellan could see two were wearing infrared goggles. The third either had implanted thermal optics or was relying on the other two to tell him where their target stood. Still, if she could reach cover beyond the fence, she might be able to escape. She kept going.

  "Stop!" the guard shouted again, punctuating the order with additional bursts of gunfire. Kellan was gathering herself to dive through the fence when she felt a sharp pain in her lower back that knocked her to the ground and made her cry out. Dammit!

  Kellan ripped the electrode net from her head and tossed it aside. The pain in her back immediately began to fade as the simsense signal was cut off, her surroundings shifting from a corporate office compound at night to the living room of her small apartment. She looked at the woman sitting in the chair to the left of her couch.

  "Congratulations," she said dryly. "You're dead."

  "I shouldn't be," Kellan retorted, frustration making her voice sharp. She picked up a plastic squeeze bottle from the floor next to her and took a long drink of filtered water, rinsing the dryness out of her mouth before she swallowed. "My invisibility spell—"

  "Isn't effective against a metahuman with thermographic vision, like a dwarf," the other woman interjected.

  "Right," Kellan said. "I didn't think of that. Sorry, Midnight. Let me give it another try." She reached for the trode net.

  "I think that's enough for now," Midnight said. "Plus, we've got more to go over." She tapped the slim datapad resting across her knees.

  Kellan sighed. Training sessions with Midnight were difficult, maybe even more so than lessons with Lo-than. Whereas the old troll mage had an ego the size of an arcology and loved nothing more than to hear himself talk, Midnight was a woman of few words but penetrating insight. She didn't sugarcoat things, and always told her exactly what she thought Kellan was doing wrong. She was always right, too.

  However, unlike Lothan, Midnight didn't consider it to be a character-building exercise to let Kellan figure out for herself the right way of doing things. She was as free with advice and suggestions as she was with criticism, and when Kellan did something right, she was quick to praise. Her analysis of Kellan's performance in the latest simulation was typical: blunt and honest, sparing neither praise nor criticism where they were due.

  Kellan listened carefully. Midnight knew the ins and outs of breaking and entering better than anyone she knew. She had been in the business . . . well, Kellan didn't really know how long. Midnight didn't talk much about her past—not a lot of people working in the shadows did. Still, she had the kind of reputation you didn't get overnight, and Lothan, himself a very veteran shadowrunner, seemed to have known Midnight for a long time. Since Midnight was an elf, it was difficult to tell how old she was. She could pass for only a few years older than Kellan, but she could be as old as Lothan, maybe older.

  "It's important to know your limitations," Midnight was saying. "Magic is a useful tool, but it's no substitute for preparation, or old-fashioned stealth and discretion. You may not always be able to rely on it to accomplish your goals."

  Kellan nodded. "Maybe there's a variant invisibility spell that works against thermographics. I could ask Lothan—"

  "You're not getting my point, Kellan," Midnight interrupted. "The solution isn't more magic, it's more awareness of your situation, and planning for every contingency. Being discovered in the facility was a distinct possibility from the start, but when it happened, you weren't prepared. You let your magic make you overconfident." At Kellan's sheepish look, Midnight shrugged and smiled.

  "Don't worry about it. You did a lot of things right. You've come a long way since we started working together. I think your mother would be proud of you."

  Kellan beamed momentarily at the mention of her mother, then her expression became wistful.

  "Do you think so?" she asked, and Midnight nodded.

  "I do," she replied firmly. "You really do take after her, and I like to think of what we're doing as my way of paying her back for everything she helped teach me."

  "I wish she was around," Kellan said, "or at least that I knew what happened to her."

  "I know," Midnight said sympathetically. "I know."

  Kellan thought about the mother she hardly knew, who had placed her in the care of an alcoholic aunt, showing up only occasionally and always leaving too soon. Kellan now knew it was because her mother had been a shadowrunner, too, working outside the law. She couldn't settle down for too long in one place, or take care of a young child. Still, she sent money when she could, and messages for Kellan.

  Then one day the money, the messages and the visits just stopped. Her mother sent no explanation, and Kellan's aunt offered none. She grew even more resentful of the burden she felt Kellan represented, and had made her feelings clear to Kellan at every opportunity.

  When Kellan discovered that Midnight had worked with her mother—had, in fact, learned the ropes of shadowrunning from her—Kellan felt like she'd finally found a real connection to her mother, apart from the few possessions she'd inherited. Kellan had hoped that Midnight knew what became of her mother, but Midnight had lost contact with Mustang over the years.

  "All right," Kellan sighed, "let me try this again."

  After Midnight left, Kellan gratefully crawled into bed to get a few hours' sleep. In her dreams, she made her way through the test again: approaching the perimeter fence, carefully cutting a way in, slipping invisibly into the compound. She crouched alongside the security door, the passkey working through the combinations.

  The door clicked and a bright, shining light poured out around its edges, flooding into the dimness outside. Kellan felt the amulet she wore at her throat become warm, tingling against her skin. She thought she heard someone calling her name from the other side of the door.

  "Kellan . . . Kellan . . ."

  As if in a trance, she swung the door open, then threw her arm up to shield her eyes from the blazing light; it was like looking directly into the sun. She squinted into the glare, trying to make out the shadow
y figure she thought was standing there.

  "Kellan . . ." the voice called again. It sounded like a man's voice, but Kellan couldn't make it out clearly, didn't recognize it.

  "Come to me . . ." the voice said sweetly.

  "Kellan . . ." another voice spoke from behind her and Kellan spun, turning away from the light, framed by it in the doorway.

  Someone stood behind her, raising a slim pistol level with Kellan's midsection.

  "Congratulations," she said dryly. "You're dead."

  The gun went off with a bang, and Kellan woke with a start.

  2

  Lothan, what do you know about dreams?" Kellan asked, keeping her gaze on the symbols she was chalking on the freshly cleaned floor of Lothan's basement ritual space. Lothan, what do you know about dreams?" Kellan asked, keeping her gaze on the symbols she was chalking on the freshly cleaned floor of Lothan's basement ritual space.

  The troll wizard raised one shaggy white eyebrow, glancing up from the book he was reading. The fabric-bound volume looked comically small cradled in his big hands.

  "Dreams?" he asked. "What about them?"

  "Well, do they . . . mean anything?"

  "That depends on what you mean by meaning, so to speak," Lothan rumbled. He set the book down on a workbench crowded with crystals, plastic bags containing colored powder, and other books and bric-a-brac, giving the subject his full attention. "There are many different levels of meaning." Kellan could sense Lothan shifting into what their mutual associate Jackie called "pontificate mode," an attitude he often adopted when expounding on one subject or another.

  "Dreams can certainly have psychological meanings— the expression of the deep archetypes of the psyche— and those symbols and archetypes in turn often have magical meaning—"

  "Like visions?"

  Lothan harrumphed at the interruption, his broad mouth pursing into an expression of disapproval. "Hardly," he said. "I mean the symbolism from dreams is often quite similar to that of the astral plane, particularly the metaplanes, and an understanding of that imagery can be useful to the practitioner in understanding the experience of metaplanar journeys and the like."

  "So dreams can't predict the future—even, you know, our dreams?"

  "There's no indication the dreams of the Awakened are any more powerful or meaningful than those of mundanes," Lothan said with a shake of his horned head. "Despite considerable folklore and urban myth supporting the theory, no study to date has turned up a truly reliable magical means of predicting the future—in or out of dreams, at least for more than a few seconds—with any real degree of reliability. It has to do with the field of probability, which expands as you go further out . . ." Lothan trailed off.

  "I'm sorry, am I boring you?" her teacher asked. Kellan didn't think he'd seen her roll her eyes. She quickly shook her head.

  "No, it's just . . ."

  "Kellan, have you been having some unusual dreams lately?"

  "What? No. No, I was just wondering. I've been doing some reading, and I'd heard some things, you know, about dreams."

  Lothan raised an eyebrow, and then waved his hand dismissively. "Well, you shouldn't believe everything you read—or hear, for that matter."

  "Unless it comes from you, of course," Kellan interjected slyly, and the troll smiled, showing off the short lusks jutting up over his upper lip.

  "Of course. I am, after all, the definitive authority on . . . well, most everything."

  "Of course," Kellan said, bending over the chalk diagram again. Lothan stood up from the broad stool where he was sitting, and looked over her shoulder.

  "Nearly finished?"

  "Almost," she said, as Lothan moved around the edges of what she had drawn on the floor.

  It was a circle three meters across, consisting of an inner and outer ring with a space between them as wide as the length of Kellan's hand. Into that space Kellan was chalking magical symbols oriented toward the four cardinal directions. Inside the inner circle was a five-pointed star, the points just touching the inner line. In each of the star's points was another magical symbol. Outside the circle, in the east, was a smaller triangle, about half a meter on a side. Symbols were drawn at each point and along each side of the triangle as well. Kellan had been working on the diagram for most of the afternoon, knowing it would soon be washed away, and all of her work with it.

  She'd asked Lothan once why mages went through all the trouble of drawing ritual circles by hand. Why didn't they just have them embroidered onto rugs, or digitized and printed out on paper for use when they were needed? Lothan's answer had been typical.

  "Because it's not the symbols that really matter," he said. "It's the intent that goes into creating them. It's the act of creating the circle that makes it a circle of power, not chalk marks on stone, or ink on paper. It's the difference between drawing or painting a landscape and printing out a picture you downloaded off the Net: the digital file you print out is just a file, but the artwork contains a part of you. It's connected to you, unique, alive in a magical sense. The same is true of the circle. Some soulless printout is of no more use magically than simply throwing paint on the floor and calling it a pattern. Less even, since at least the thrown paint has some amount of intention behind it."

  "It's just a lot of work," was Kellan's only response.

  "Naturally," Lothan said with a tusky smile, "which is one of the reasons why mages have apprentices."

  So Kellan learned to draw and paint the ritual diagrams by hand, consulting books for the right symbols, putting her intention behind placing each one precisely and in the right order. She filled in the last symbol in the west and drew a solid line, connecting the inner and outer lines of the circle, tapping the chalk against the floor like a punctuation mark ending a sentence.

  "There," she said, standing up and stretching her cramped legs.

  Lothan paced slowly around the perimeter of the circle, careful not to scuff any of the chalk marks, his hands clasped behind his back, bending down occasionally to examine Kellan's work.

  "Hmmm," he murmured, glancing first one way and then the other. "Hmmm."

  Kellan waited patiently. Lothan's inspections used to unnerve her, until she figured out that that was what they were supposed to do. Lothan paid close enough attention to know already if she'd made any major mistakes. He just liked to take his time and make her sweat. So Kellan waited, standing quietly until he was done.

  "It will do," he pronounced finally. "Yes, I think it will do well enough. You have prepared the ritual?" he asked.

  "Wouldn't have done all of this work if I hadn't," Kellan replied, retrieving the datapad leaning next to her bag.

  "Oh, but you would have," Lothan muttered, loud enough for Kellan to hear. He would have made her draw out the circle whether she was ready to use it or not, and she knew it.

  "Very well, then," Lothan said. "Begin." The troll wizard settled back down on the broad stool in the corner of the room, perched like a massive gargoyle in the shadows, to watch Kellan work.

  She dimmed the lights in the room and placed a candle in each quarter of the circle. With the barest effort of will, she ignited the wicks, shedding a golden glow over the chalk marks. The flickering shadows seemed to make the symbols come alive and stand out in stark relief against the gray floor, faintly shimmering with power. It could have been dismissed as a trick of the light, but Kellan took it as a positive sign that everything was in place.

  She made sure the small basement window was open just a crack to admit the evening air, and took quick inventory of her supplies: charcoal burner, parchment paper and a jar of granular incense she'd ground and mixed herself. Once she stepped into the circle, she couldn't step back out again to get something she forgot without interrupting the ritual. If that happened, she'd have to start all over again.

  Kellan stepped over the outer and inner lines of the circle, careful not to disturb them. She crouched down in the center of the circle, putting everything into place, then stood,
took a deep breath and centered herself. She let the breath out with a slow sigh and drew in another, then another, before she turned to face the eastern quarter of the circle.

  "Hail, O powers of the east," she intoned. "I call upon the element of air to be present here within my circle, for air is the power I summon tonight. Be present here, and truly do my will." The candles flickered for a moment as a breeze coming from the open window stirred their flames, but none of them went out. Kellan turned toward the south, raising her arms, hands open, palms up.

  "Hail, O powers of the south," she said. "I call upon the element of fire to be present here within my circle. Air is the power I summon tonight; give your passion to my effort. Be present here, and truly do my will." The candle flames grew brighter and taller for a moment, filling the circle with their glow, then shrank back to their former size. Kellan turned toward the west, arms spread wide, palms facing out.

  "Hail, O powers of the west. I call upon the element of water to be present here within my circle. Air is the power I summon tonight; give your depth to my effort. Be present here, and truly do my will." The shadows swam and flickered, like reflections off a shimmering pool at night, before passing and returning the circle to its steady glow.

  Finally, Kellan turned to the north, intoning, "Hail, O powers of the north. I call upon the element of earth to be present here within my circle. Air is the power I summon tonight; give your strength to my effort. Be present here, and truly do my will."

  The circle cast, Kellan felt rather than saw a looming presence all around her, the protective power of the wards she invoked to focus the energies she would raise, contain them, and protect her from any outside influence.

  Kellan lit the charcoal at the bottom of the burner with a pass of her hand, quickly setting it to glowing. Then she shook a small amount of incense onto it from her hand, sending a steady stream of sweet, pungent smoke rising into the air like a curling serpent.