Alpha Blue was sitting at her usual Saturday night table at Dante’s. The only person sitting with her was a youngish Orc. The Orc was fairly clean-cut and good looking despite his Orcish features. He was dressed in a combination of military fatigues and what had come to be called slum fashion. Combat boots, fatigues pants, an old Metal band t-shirt, a couple of scattered bandanas, a pistol belt and a well-worn leather jacket. Alpha looked her usual calm and unshakable self, but couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable with the Orc’s presence and constant chatter. Tonight she seemed more bothered with the Orc’s rambling tonight then usual.
Despite the distraction, she immediately noticed the group that was coming up the stairs when they finally come into view. They were young. They were even younger then the Orc at the table with her, and she could she how green they were by the way they scanned the room. She could see how green they were by the things that caught their attention and by the things that didn’t.
“They get younger every year don’t they Lady Blue?” The Orc beside her had stopped talking for a moment when the group had reached the top of the stairs.
The sound of the Orc’s voice was suddenly more annoying then usual and Alpha had to resist the urge to snap at him. Sometimes it seemed like he was reading her mind.
“Gees, they’re a bunch of fraggin’ kids.” She didn’t add that one of the younger of the new arrivals was the spitting image of his father and the cause of her irritation tonight. It had only been a few years since the boy’s father had died, and the thought of sending his son down the same road was causing a knot in her stomach.
The group finally noticed her and after a few nudges began to make their way over to Alpha’s table. They walked with a feigned confidence that bordered on arrogance, and she couldn’t help but wonder how long that would last. She wondered if any of them had ever killed or even seen a dead body. She couldn’t help but wonder how long their innocence would last here in the shadows. She wondered if they would end up bodies in some back alley or corporate lab. She wondered if someday she would see his son’s body on a slab in some shadow clinic.
“Lord knows I’ve seen too many.”
“You’re talking to yourself again Alpha.” The Orc’s comment was whispered as quietly as her unintentional slip.
“I wasn’t talking to myself. I was just talking to an old friend.”
The small knot of would-be-legends had just reached the table. “Are you Alpha Blue?” The question was almost rhetorical. There couldn’t be two women in Seattle that matched Alpha Blue’s description. Alpha was tall, well built and was wearing one of her favorite Saturday night outfits. The suit was sleeveless to show off the muscles in her shoulders and cut snug to show off her gracious figure. The suit was made of Alpha’s signature electric blue and silver that showed off her soft skin, blue eyes and short white hair, and even with just over four decades behind her, Alpha never failed to turn more then a few heads. The regulars at the club called her Dante’s Angel. With the tasteful and expensive but obvious cyber-ware, the young group in front of her couldn’t help but think that she looked more the part of a modern day Valkyrie.
She didn’t flinch under their appraising gaze. “Sit down. You’re drawing attention to yourselves.” They pulled up extra chairs and clustered around her table. Alpha watched them as they settled in.
The kid looked just like his father, but somehow stronger. Even at this age, he had a confidence that his father had lacked.
“Weasel, take a hike.” She was ready to talk business and still didn’t know the Orc well enough to trust him with the details of this kind of business.
The Orc finished his drink and stood up. “Sure thing Lady Blue. I gotta go anyway. Our next set starts in a few minutes.” He looked over the nervous group gathered around the table, and his gaze lingered for a brief moment on the face of the son of a man he wasn’t supposed to know. A face he had seen once before, but a long time ago and in another life. “If you kids get finished up with Alpha early enough, stop by on the floor below and check out the band. You too, Lady Blue. Tonight’s set is dedicated to an old friend.”
Alpha gave a slight start, but didn’t respond as Weasel turned and headed for the stairs. She did watch him walk away, however. She wondered at the irony of his last words, and she wondered at his casual grace as he reached the stairs and disappeared down them. He had walked with a nonchalance that made him seem more dangerous then the swagger of the people at her table now.
She turned back to her guests… her new clients.
“Never mind him. Weasel has been hanging around here for years, and getting on my nerves. He’s a good kid, though. You should definitely check out his band when we are finished. They’re not as loud as some of the younger crowd prefer, but they’re getting pretty popular here in the shadows.” A few of the people at the table looked around uncomfortably as realizing for the first time what they were getting into.
Alpha suddenly realized that she was stalling.
“I’m sorry, my friend.” She said quietly to herself, and out loud to the table she continued. “Let’s start you off with something easy to see what you kids are made of.”
As he went to join the rest of his band, Weasel thought about the group he was leaving on the ninth level of Dante’s Inferno. Alpha’s uneasiness tonight suddenly made sense. The sight of the boy with his friends coming to see Alpha had startled him, too. He looked like his father in every way except for the fierceness in his eyes that his father had lacked. His slight German accent had been the final clue, and Alpha’s ill mood this evening was proof that she had known he was coming.
As he joined the band on the stage below the ill-fated meeting, Weasel was thinking about days long past, and about the days to come. Moments later when the lights above the stage came on Weasel was softly crying as he began to play his guitar.
The band's set ended with a song that was long and mournful. It was a startling contrast to the mayhem of the floors below. It was a song about the friend that didn’t make it. It was about being left behind alive and alone by the ones that had died.
Weasel was long since drained of anything other then the painful realization that this day had come too soon. His body was shaking and weak. His clothes were soaked in sweat. His fingers ached from playing the guitar with rather more intensity then was required. His eyes burned from the long streams of tears. No work out in the gym had ever been this exhausting. No botched midnight run had ever been so rough.
The watching crowd had responded in kind and the applause and cheers as the final cords faded away were deafening; though many in the crowd could only stare in dazed silence. The band had developed a strong following in the recent months. Their music was moving, haunting and had a way of touching some place deep inside the listener. Weasel could only smile at the whispers that his guitar work was magical. That it was unworldly. That he read minds and revealed the darkest secrets of the listeners.
Nobody's secrets but his own were revealed through the music.
Weasel still preferred the quieter, smaller venues along the edges of the Barrens. Places frequented by simple people who loved the music for it's ability to make them feel less then ordinary, and not as something that might be unnatural. Weasel had certainly become the driving force in their recent success, if only by his musical talent alone.
Soon it would be time to move along. He didn’t know why he had allowed this to go so far, but it made him sad to think about crawling back into obscurity.
Weasel wondered briefly about the meaning of life. Life was full of pain. The pain of losing lovers. The pain of losing friends. Pain that might live in your breast for ages. Pain like seeing a young man's face that reminded him of all the things that had been lost over the years.
The boy and his friends had passed by and watched him play for a few minutes. Maybe more, but Weasel had screwed his eyes shut to block out their faces. When he opened his eyes again later in the set they were gone. He could still see the boy’s face though. He couldn’t forget it. Would never forget it. It was burned into his mind, and it was a carbon copy of his father’s.
Weasel felt a twinge of shame that he had kept his gaze averted. Any of the energy he might have gleaned from the crowd's appreciation of the show soured, and suddenly, Weasel felt very alone. It was a feeling that had manifested itself in his music tonight. It was a feeling that was mirrored in some of the eyes of the audience as they broke up and went their own way to continue a Saturday night’s revelry.
Weasel had even caught a glimpse of electric blue on the stairs as Alpha slipped away. He probably wasn’t meant to know that she had been watching the set. Blue was always business these days. She was always the professional. Weasel had been in love with her for longer then she had even known who he was. It worried him sometimes that she hadn’t always like this. She had always been tough. When the boy’s father had been around she had laughed more, though. She still always returned a favor and would gladly stick her neck out for a friend. However, she had been different when the boy's father was around. She had changed soon after he had died. Now, she was distant… hard and sometimes cold.
In fact, a lot of people had changed when the boy’s father had died.
Weasel was still moved by the number of people who had been affected by his death.
The funeral had been small and simple. The people in attendance were an unusual crowd. There had been a rowdy mix of squatters, martial artists and runners in the procession. There had also been a discrete sprinkling of representatives from several major Seattle corporations at the funeral. It had been meant as a sign of respect for a man that didn’t officially exist or work for those companies.
It was also noticed by some that none of his closest friends were seen at the funeral.
It was in the months afterwards that people he had known had started to change. It was as if his death was a harbinger of everyone else’s mortality. Alpha had changed and become more cynical. Karl was already dead by then, of course. Price had vanished before the actual funeral and all of his possessions auctioned off in the following weeks. A few of the others that they had run with had wound up dead or in jail within a few short months of his death.
That’s when Weasel had arrived on the scene. At the end when everything had started to fall apart. Even Teke had changed…
Teke.
He thought about the man that the boy thought of as his uncle. Weasel knew that the boy would never have found his own way to Alpha’s table while so green without some help. Weasel could only think of one person that would do this kind of thing. No one else knew who the boy really was.
That only left Teke.
Weasel slowly packed away his gear without paying attention to what he was doing. His mind thinking about the implications of the boy’s being here in Dante’s. Teke seemed the logical culprit, but why tonight. Weasel wasn’t a regular at Dante’s. Teke would know that, but why would he care. If Deus was still looking for him…
Weasel’s hands stop in the middle of rolling up a cable. It’s possible that Deus would know that, too, if Deus had found him.
Weasel paused again in mid-thought as a sudden chill ran down his spine. It would be like Deus to arrange for Weasel’s band to play here tonight. It was subtle. It was one of those coincidences that Deus loved to manufacture.
If Deus had found him he was in more trouble then he realized, and so was the boy. There was no way that Deus could know about Weasel or the boy. Was there? How could he? He would had to have cracked Cross’s highest securities. Deus might be able to do that if anyone could.
Weasel fought hard against the urge to scan the crowd to see if anyone was watching him. He was suddenly scared. Scared in a way that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
He needed to find out whether or not it was Teke that had sent the boy here without revealing himself.
He also felt very alone.
Always alone.
Weasel entered the temple gate, and nodded to the gatekeeper. The old man quietly watched without any emotion as Weasel hung his pistol and jacket on one of the free pegs in the gatehouse. Weasel bowed to the gatekeeper and entered into the garden. As he made his way along the path he thought about his lack of progress in learning anything about the boy and his friends.
He had already spent two days trying to find the boy, but Weasel had left every sprawl bar and flop house that he visited feeling discouraged. It seems being green had its advantages after all. Weasel didn’t even know what name the boy was going by these days.
Weasel was struggling to stay optimistic. In fact, Weasel was even struggling not to be angry at himself. He was frustrated that he had let time and distance make him lax in his promise to the boy’s father. The boy’s father had never asked him to make this promise, of course, but anyone who had known the man knew how he felt about the prospect of his son following in his footsteps. So, Weasel had made a promise to himself to keep an eye on the boy. He had promised to make sure that he stayed safe. Now the boy was here in Seattle and Weasel couldn’t find him. He hadn’t even known he was here in Seattle until he saw him and his friends walk up to Alpha’s table at Dante’s Inferno. The last time he had checked on the boy he was supposed to be safe and sound in Germany, but Weasel had to admit that had been awhile ago… several months at least.
Weasel occasionally watched the news on the trid, though, and Seattle was probably as safe as anywhere else was. It was the father’s line of work that made Seattle unsafe for the boy, and not Seattle itself.
Why was he even here? Just to follow in his father’s footsteps?
Weasel thought about his own father for a moment. He’d be damned if he ever followed in his old man’s footsteps. He had long since grown out of hating his father, but he could still feel the constant sense of rejection that he had grown up with under his roof. Last he had heard the old man was still alive, and probably would be for years. The bastard was too stubborn to die anytime soon. Weasel wondered what he would do if his father died. He wondered if he would even want to go to the funeral. Weasel ran a callused hand over his unsmooth face and felt the tusks that pressed against the outsides of upper lips.
Frag him and what he thought of his only son.
Weasel paused on the bridge to look at the dark stream that traversed the garden. This place, for all its peace and beauty always made him think about things like this. He wondered why he still came, glancing around him at the rest of the garden and the temple proper he knew.
He came for the peace and beauty.
Weasel hoped his father never died… even if only to keep him from having to make that kind of decision.
He glanced down at his dark reflection in the moon lit pool.
There were other options that he could choose from to locate the boy. He could confront Alpha, or even Teke for the answers. However, he didn’t know if he was ready to let Alpha know how much he knew, and he didn’t know if he was ready to face Teke at all.
What would Alpha even say if she knew? They had met one night when Weasel had walked into Dante’s like he owned the place and made himself at home at Alpha’s table. He knew that she had his background checked, but Weasel was a nobody. All he had was a small time criminal sin with some basic schooling on his record. He was officially labeled as a nuisance and dissident. He knew she had come to like him over the years, but she had only barely tolerated him for a long time. If he hadn’t been so brazen and bold with her form the beginning, she might never have even given him a second look. He had just told her that he liked her attitude, and wanted people to think he was cooler then he really was. However, she had eventually warmed to him and Weasel thought she sometimes even looked forward to his visits at Dante’s.
Weasel was certainly the most talkative of the pair. He knew he sometimes annoyed the drek out of her, and she still refused to talk business in front of him. Alpha had told him he was an idiot, but she hadn’t chased him off.
Well, maybe once or twice.
Alpha didn’t even know that there was any other connection between them. She didn’t know that he knew the boy and his father. It was hard for him to have pretended he didn’t know more about her all this time. If she knew the truth about him, though, that would change. She might even hate him. Curse him, or call him a coward…
Weasel wondered if she would be right.
This drek never would have happen if Karl were still around. He never would have let things go this far. He would have put a stop to all this nonsense from the beginning. Then again, if Karl were still alive, Weasel probably wouldn’t be here and the boy’s father might still be alive. Maybe.
Everything seemed to be connected somehow.
Everyone in the shadows knew the boy’s father and his friends by their rep if not by name. They were big time. They worked for corps. They hit corps. They were almost unstoppable. The boy’s father certainly wouldn’t have gone bug hunting with a bunch of frag-ups down in Glow City if Karl had still been calling the shots.
The same could be said of Price and Teke, though.
Price had bought himself a new ID and gone legit. He was teaching Magic Theory and applied Sorcery at Seattle University when the boy’s father had come back to Seattle after a yearlong absence. Price wasn’t there when he died because he had student midterms that week.
Teke went the other direction. He had become a hard core drug addict after Karl died, and sold most of his gear. He even lost his deck. He said he it got stolen, but everyone knew he sold it for narcotics. Teke doesn’t even remember the week the boy’s father died, but still swears he was the one who brought the body back out and to the doc’s. It was months before what happened really sunk in.
Rumor was that the next night, the old industrial complex where it happened burned to the ground. Street shamans still avoid the place. They say it stinks of bad magic.
Weasel thought about the pranks and practical jokes that the boy’s father used to play with his friends on each other. Karl, Price and Teke were constantly teaming up on each other. The boy’s father never seemed to get the jokes, though. He would always laugh, but he never really got it. Weasel could remember that much about the group.
Funny thing about having a rep in the shadows is that people know when you’ve done good. They just know. They may not know what you’ve done, but they you’ve on the razor’s edge. Those guys had pulled dozens of runs and never left a trace. Only in the shadows can you be anonymous and famous at the some time.
Those guys might have had a clubhouse, but while they were together they hard core.
Not like those morons that the boy’s father went out with that night, though. Weasel had heard about how it all happened. He had faced three bug spirits with no back up. The men that were with him hid in an armored van and watched while the bugs took him down. If anyone could have survived something like that it was him, however, they ripped him apart. Someone had managed to recover his body and his personal effects, but Weasel didn’t know who had really done that part. The doc said he actually lived for awhile after he was brought in.
The funeral was closed casket.
Weasel finally continued on through the garden while he thought about what he had to do next. Even though it was the middle of the night, the temple grounds felt warm and safe. Most of the residents were sleeping, but the shrine room would still be open.
When he reached the veranda, Weasel kicked off his shoes and left them at the door beside a few others. He quietly slipped inside and chose a cushion near the shrine. The room always took his breath away for a moment when he first entered. It was almost impossible to remain discursive when you first entered the main shrine room. As he eased into a comfortable posture and began to relax, Weasel was stuck, as always, how the small room seemed so expansive when he came here at this time of night. A monk was quietly chanting as he kept time near the shrine and a half dozen people were already sitting in the room, but he still felt almost isolated and alone in the dark and deceptively spacious hall.
Slowly Weasel slowed his breathing and began to focus on one of the candles on the shrine.
Slowly Weasel relaxed his body and his mind.
Slowly Weasel let his eyes close.
Almost three hours later, Weasel opened his eyes to find little had changed in the shrine room. A few of the other practitioners had left or been replaced, but everything still remained more or less the same.
He felt a twinge of guilt having used these means to find the answers that he needed. He wasn’t really breaking any other promises, but it still felt like cheating. What made a promise a promise, anyway? His gaze focused on the images and icons on the shrine.
It was all about intent.
Weasel sighed deeply in resignation.
He knew now without a doubt that Alpha had gotten the call from Teke.
Now all he had to do was to find Teke and find out whom he had gotten the call from. He also needed to get that information from him without him knowing he was there, or why he needed it.
This would not be easy.
Teke may have stopped running, but he was still a technojunkie. He still had the money. More in fact now that he had supposedly broken his drug habits. Security would be tight.
Weasel had to find him first, and didn’t really know where his hangouts were these days. He had seen him at Dante’s a few times in the past year or so. He had taken to wearing expensive suits these days instead of dressing like a frat boy on spring break. Weasel didn’t exactly run with the same crowds that Teke did. Never had. Come to think of it, Weasel had never seen Teke with anyone else. He always showed up alone and left alone. Weasel didn’t even know Teke’s real name. The only thing he knew was that his father had been a low-level corp somewhere. That was the rumor anyway.
Weasel didn’t even know where to begin.
His mind was distracted and racing again by the time he passed through the gatehouse and left the temple. He reached his bike and looked down the street to the old dojo that shared the block with the temple. The Buddhist temple was a new addition to the edge of the barrens and had only been built a couple of years ago, but the dojo had been here forever. The dojo had been growing steadily in the past decade. The membership, though dedicated, was still small. They had gotten a huge anonymous grant a few years back and had invested it well. They continued to use the money to expand the facilities and keep things going. They also used the money and the dedication of their members to keep the immediate neighborhood safe. Safe places like this are rare this far from the center of the Greater Seattle Metroplex.
Weasel wondered how long before the boy ended up there. If really wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, he would have to sooner or later. His father had been a soldier, a shadowrunner, and despite his denial, one of the best. He had trained at that dojo during his free time.
Weasel wondered where else that the boy would go to follow his father’s calling.
The next evening found Weasel sitting behind the scope of an ancient rifle in the Redmon Barrens while he watched the car pull up to a nondescript building with four motorcycles following close behind.
He could hardly believe his luck. When he had checked out the building from a distance this morning he could tell it was still in use, but hadn’t dared to hope that Teke was still the primary occupant or that he would be showing up so soon. Now here he was with the boy and his friends in tow.
Weasel knew that Karl had been the original owner of this building and he wondered if the deed was still in Karl’s name.
Now he was three hundred meters away inside a crumbled structure watching through the lens of a sniper rifle. He didn’t intend on taking a shot, of course, but the dusty old rifle had a wicked set of built in optics that gave him a good clear view of the faces beyond.
The men on the bikes were clearly the boy and his friends. The Indian and the Orc were pretty distinguishable, but the overly tall albino elf was the dead give away. That elf was going to get them in trouble if they weren’t careful. He was way too memorable.
The entire group quickly went inside the unimposing structure and shut the door.
Weasel had no idea what kind of security Teke might have on this building. In fact, Weasel had never set foot inside of it. He would just have to wait outside.
He wished he could afford some kind of tracking equipment to make the next trick easier.
At least Weasel had found them. Now the hard part started.
It had been late in the evening and well after dark when the Newbies stormed out of the compound and headed back into safer areas of the Metroplex. Weasel followed at a cautious distance, but they seemed unconcerned that they may be being followed.
The troupe made numerous stops and gathered together a pile of gear that they spread out in the back of a rental van.
Weasel had no idea what they were up to, but it promised to be entertaining.
The AP round of the rifle tore threw another lightly armored drone as it buzzed above the gunfight and it spiraled off and out of sight in the spring Seattle rain.
Weasel hurriedly scanned the space above the parking lot for others. From this distance he could barely here the sounds of the firefight, and only the sound of the big Indian’s shotgun was clearly discernable. The rain muffled the sounds more efficiently then they muffled his sight. He wished he could see the inside of the trailer to help the big man that had walked into the trap, but all he could do was keep it from getting worse. That and wait for the corporate strike team to come out and try to finish off the rest of the would-be-runners. The muzzle flash was intense and went on for seconds longer then it should have.
Weasel’s tension grew as the battle continued.
The boy’s entry team had been cloaked in invisibility spells upon entry, but they had been stripped one at a time as they closed in on the mobile lab. When the big Indian went in, all hell broke loose.
Weasel checked to see the boy and another of his friends still in the rental van were still out of sight. He was felt completely stuck. The battle raged on in the tight confines of the trailer while the orc fired into it from the outside.
How many were in the trailer?
Weasel saw headlights coming in the distance from the direction that the boy had been parked about the same time that the orc finally charged into the trailer and the gun fire wound to a stop. As he watched and the seconds passed, the lights in the trailer finally come on and the Indian came out covered in blood form head to toe.
The orc was talking frantically into a radio headset as he tried to keep the Indian on his feet. The big man had been brutalized in the gunfight and was obviously having trouble standing on his own. As the rental van crashed through the wrought iron gate, the orc dropped the man and rushed inside the trailer again.
The van screeched to a halt with a whine and half the iron gate wedged under the front wheels somehow. The entire group seemed to freeze as they realized their getaway vehicle was now disabled. The orc came out again and started pushing the Indian towards the now open front gate.
The boy the Weasel had come to find seemed to take charge and ushered everyone into the truck and trailer. Moments later they were tearing out down the highway.
All in all a clean escape if not a miraculous one. Weasel watched for a few moments longer to make sure that no other pursuit was in evidence and again followed them on his bike with the rifle broken down and shoved under the saddlebags.
The raging semi with its trailer riddled with bullet holes was easy to catch-up to, but Weasel still kept his distance.
He just wanted to find them, not get introduced.
It was still raining while Weasel sat and watched the warehouse from a distance...
