DEATH'S LEGACY
by Dru Pagliassotti

"Wake up," Potemkin said briefly, kicking my cot.  I groaned and pulled myself up to a sitting position.  Jyre shifted, gyros humming as the Panther cannon moved to include me in the line of fire.  It was her own special gear, a computerized sleeve that encased her prosthesis and supported a gun far too large to fit into any cyberarm.  The others were already around the table.

Macabre was the only one who could jack in; Potemkin rode shotgun using manual interfaces and motion trackers.  He finished an operations check and gave a thumbs-up. 

"I trust you slept well, Jade?"

I shuddered and met Aspirant's eyes, drawn despite myself.  He was beautiful — sculpted, brilliant blue eyes, milk-white skin, pale gold hair.  Face smooth-shaven and radiating benign concern.  A datavangelist, a Zeitmeister, a man born to rule.  I was as scared as hell of him.

"What's going on?" I asked, voice considerably less steady than I might have wished.

"A security breach."  Aspirant smiled complacently as he turned his attention back to the array of monitors and readouts in front of him.  No datajack marred his perfect flesh, but his fingers flew over laser-read displays.

I glanced at Jyre, who remained impassive behind bulletproof eyeshields.  She was a heller and a damn good one.  Our paths had crossed once or twice, but we worked on fundamentally different levels.  I worked acquisitions and trade, and she did wetwork.  I'd played fence for her once in awhile, but that was all.  I hadn't been on my guard when she'd passed by me outside the club, hadn't reacted quickly enough to avoid a broken leg and an illegal-dosage tranq patch.

I still didn't know why they needed a small-time fixer and sometimes smuggler. 

"Inspecting breach," Potemkin said shortly, watching Macabre through his headgear.  The decker was oblivious to us, attention monopolized by Matrix-ghosts.  "Releasing Warewolf."

I leaned back against the wall and watched data stream by over the monitoring screen.  I could follow some of it, but most of it was particular to Macabre's programming code, and looked like gibberish.  Warewolf was a scout program, I knew that.  Shaman used it sometimes.  It would tell a decker what programs were being deployed against the unit's Matrix security net.

Suddenly the data caught my eye again, and Sacrifice shifted, the zipper on his jacket sleeve scraping against the plastic tabletop.  The code was repeating.  I wished Shaman were here to tell me what the hell it meant.  With him around, I'd never bothered to learn any computer more complex than the vid guide.

"Macabre?" Aspirant asked.  I turned and saw the dark-haired programmer's hands moving swiftly, tracing hacker patterns in the air that had real meaning in the Matrix.  He moved more than Shaman ever did.  But Shaman prided himself on keeping the best equipment he could afford, and Macabre's looked mostly built from scratch, or heavily modified.

"Loop," he said briefly.  The screen flickered with readouts as he retrofitted the program to meet the new challenge.  The code flickered a change, then began repeating again.

"Damn!"  Two more programs flickered up on the screen, tracked in whatever virtual form they held by his eyes and hands.  He subvocalized commands to their Matrix forms as Sacrifice pulled off the headset.

"It's a junkload," he said tersely, fingers flying over the trackboard.  "They're trying to crash our deck."

"Abort Warewolf," Aspirant snapped.  I felt a chill go down my spine as the numbers streamed in an endless scroll down the monitor screen, mercilessly destroying the system.  I wondered if this had anything to do with why I was being kept prisoner.  The tension in the room made me sweat.  If Jyre got spooked....  "It's a conduit!"

"I'm trying!" Sacrifice snarled.  Beside him, Macabre turned his head to respond to one of his program's messages, datajack cord glittering in the screen's glow.

"The diversion codes are working," Sacrifice muttered at last.  I watched columns of data flicker off as he shunted them to some other network line; but the memory counter on the deck was still running closer to max.

"Got it!"  Macabre hissed triumphantly.  The number stream stopped and the cursor reappeared, blinking mutely.  Warewolf was gone.  The other two programs began to run, re-partitioning the overloaded deck drives and analyzing what had happened.

"They're good," Macabre said with a trace of admiration in his voice as he watched the analysis run.  His fingers twitched to save the information.  "Next time I'll make sure that can't happen."

"Trace it back." Aspirant commanded, shoving his chair back with a bone-grating scrape.  "Anyone we know?"

"Here."  Macabre called up Aspirant's screen and interfaced.  Aspirant leaned back, watching as the lank programmer began running passwords through the directory, functions playing over the screen as if by magic.

Five minutes later, Macabre chuckled softly as new data flashed up on the monitor.

"The bastard," he said happily.  "That phone code's been disconnected for over two years!"  He read further, smile widening into a wolfish grin on his gaunt face.  "It's got a hold on it, though."

"Whose?" Aspirant asked eagerly, leaning forward.

"It's a shunt code.  00974663827855.sku."  Macabre looked up, dark eyes glittering.  "Now we're on to something."

Potemkin's fingers were already moving.

00974663827855.sku:  Access denied.

"Macabre?"

I —" Macabre's words froze on his lips as his head turned and he focused on something we couldn't see.  Before our eyes, the words on the screen vanished, and his watchdog program began flashing.

Someone was running a tracer on us.

Sacrifice and Macabre both leaned forward, madly trying to divert it.  Datachaff, line shunts, disengagement attempts.  The watchdog called up a line count tracing Macabre's Matrix labyrinth.  One by one, the lines began vanishing as the tracer found and obliterated them.

"Security breach at the front door," Sacrifice reported coldly.  "Looks like our man is here."

I looked to Jyre for clarification, and froze.  Aspirant had stood.  Blued steel shone darkly in his hand, barrel aimed for my heart.

"They've got us!" Sacrifice swore, slamming a hand down on the table and standing.  "Armaments!"

Jyre smoothly swung to her feet, ignoring Aspirant as she walked to a metal chest beside the cheap plastic kitchen table that supported the deck and gear.

"Hell!"  Macabre's voice was beginning to sound panicked.  "There's two of them!"

Aspirant stared at me, a psychopathic angel with an automatic.  I didn't dare move, my mind frozen.

"It's a UCAS signature," the decker reported tensely.

Jyre glancing over her shoulder at the screen as she unlocked the armoury.  "Who's the other one, Macabre?"

"I don't know!"  He worked madly, eyes wild.  "I'm querying!"

"Kill him or kiss him, Aspirant, but don't stand there all day!"  Jyre pulled out a weapons and body armour, methodically laying them out for the others to pick up.  "This is it.  We've got to move!"

Macabre cursed and entered another querystring.

"What the fuc—" he stopped suddenly, leaning forward intently.

"He's more useful to me alive, as you well know," Aspirant said coldly.

This time we could all hear the explosion.

"Blew the front door.  Front cameras taken out."  Sacrifice slid his chair over and picked up a light machine gun, laying it in his lap as he moved to take Aspirant's place.

Three crumping explosions shook the building's foundations.

"Aspirant!"  Jyre shouted as she pulled on a one-armed kevlar jacket.  LEDs flashed warningly over her metal-encased arm as she swung it up, fighting to seal the body armor one-handed.  "We're running out of time!"

"Look, I don't know what's going on," I pleaded, watching Aspirant carefully as his eyes flickered up to glance at Jyre, then quickly fastened on me again.  "I really don't."

Macabre unjacked and stood.  "I'm wiping the files, Aspirant," he said calmly, switching off the tracking modules.

"No!"  Aspirant turned, eyes widening.  "You can't!  We need that code!"

"It's up here."  Macabre jerked his head, reaching across the table and pulling his jacket and gun across.

"That's no good to us if you get killed!" Aspirant said tightly, face beginning to whiten with rage.  Jyre slapped a jacket and gun into my lap, snapping me out of my daze.  I gave her a startled look, but she was already moving, turning to cover Aspirant and Macabre both.

"Well, I suppose you'll have to tell Lone Star to watch who they're shooting," Macabre said quietly, sealing the body armor and sliding the safety off the firearm.  Aspirant jerked slightly, startled, then narrowed his eyes.

"I can kill you before you lift that gun," he spat, angelic face darkened with anger.  Macabre smiled slightly.

"Then you'll destroy the only database that code's saved on right now," he pointed out.  He stared unflinchingly at Aspirant, dark eyes gleaming in his thin face.  "The Lone Star tracer answered when I used your query code.  How long have you been working for them, anyway?"

"You bastard!" Jyre hissed.  Mirroreyes reflected the LEDs on her arm as she lifted it.  "You set us all up!"

Aspirant's gaze leaped back and forth between Jyre and Macabre, finger still pressed close against the automatic's trigger.  I cautiously squirmed down flat on the cot, sealing my own kevlar coat and jamming the gun and holster into one of the oversized pockets.

"They've breached stairwell security.  Cameras out.  Remote sentry devices down."

"You might as well surrender," declared Aspirant at last, the barrel of the automatic unwavering.  "Lone Star knows exactly where we are.  There's no way out."

"Sounds like an epitaph to me," Jyre muttered.  The sleeve roared and blood sprayed over the table, the monitors and me.  Wide-eyed, I rolled off the cot and braced myself on the back of Jyre's chair, pain shooting up my broken leg.

"Let's go!" Jyre shouted, throwing open the window over the fire ladder and firing blindly through it to clear the way.  Macabre stepped over Aspirant's sprawled legs with a mirthless smile.  A sudden sharp rap against the door made him look up.

The wall erupted inward.

Thrown to the floor, I pressed my face into a puddle of Aspirant's blood while gunfire crackled overhead.  Through squinting eyes I could see Jyre crouched by the back window, firing at something behind me, something coming in through the twisted and blackened place where wall and door had once been.

"Go!" Potemkin shouted in my ear, grabbing my jacket collar and violently shaking me out of my momentary fugue.  I turned my head, surprised, and then nearly lost my last meal.

A shard of metal from the wall had sheared off half his face.  Blackened, oozing flesh cracked and flaked off his hands and face as he pointed to Jyre.  For a shocked moment I thought he was walking dead, a flatliner who didn't know enough to lie down and die.

Then I saw the steel and fiberplas under his peeling face.

I moved, crawling on my stomach through puddles of blood and worse, as much to escape the gruesome thing next to me as anything else.  My hand hit something soft that closed around it and I nearly screamed.  Sirens began to wail outside.

Macabre's hand weakly pulled mine toward him.  Swallowing hard, I squirmed up to him.  Jagged metal from one of the chairs had pierced his side, and dark blood bubbled from a rip as long as my forearm.  I looked away from the wound and fixed my gaze on his face, trying to forget the sight of punctured organs weakly pulsing their last.

"The code," he grated urgently, clutching my jacket front.  "Oh ... five nines ... oh ten.  He wanted it!"

"I hear you," I said, trying to offer him what poor reassurance I could.  "I'll remember."

"Good."  He smiled slightly, letting his head fall back to the floor, and raised his hand.  I bit my lip, then turned my face away as the gun barrel touched his forehead.  The shot was almost inaudible under the cacophony around us.

I reached Jyre in a mindless daze, just barely escaping being shot to death before she recognized me.  She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward her, listening intently.  I stifled a groan as bone grated.  She opened a pouch suspended from her belt and slapped a patch on my neck.  Painkillers began to seep through my system, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"What's going on?" I asked, focusing on the scene around us.  The hallway fluorescents dimly filtered through the ripped-out front wall and the gunsmoke haze, revealing a gutted charnelhouse before us.

"They're shooting at someone else," she said softly.

"Someone else?"  My mind blanked a moment, then my eyes widened as I remembered something.  "There were two tracers on us!"

"And one of them doesn't seem any fonder of Lone Star than us," she agreed, then turned.  I saw myself reflected in her mirroreyes, all bloodstained and wild-eyed.  "They work fast.  We should, too.  Watch my back."

I nodded and kept guard while she slid out the window and onto the steel stairwell.  She fired once, a short burst, then returned.

"Looks like I got most of them the first time," she said with grim satisfaction.  "Let's go while they're distracted."

I nodded, following her lead.  She hoisted me up over the window sill, and covered me as I went down behind her, gripping the metal rails for balance.  Gyros in the sleeve whined as she kept looking from rooftop to street, sight enhanced by the machinery under her protective mirrorlenses.  I stepped where she did as best as I could, trying not to think too much about the objects that crunched or oozed under my boots.

The stairs ended in an alleyway.  Jyre cleared it first with a burst from the humming sleeve, then dropped and looked around.  A few corpses in Lone Star uniforms.  She turned and lifted me down with cybered ease.  Despite the painkillers, I winced as my foot hit the cement.

Gunfire made her swing around, sleeve whipping up toward the window, but before she could return fire there was another whump, and something inside the room we'd just abandoned exploded.  A body erupted out the window and hit the concrete on the other side of the alley, head slamming against the side of the opposite building.  Jyre slid in front of me and covered it with her sleeve.

Burned and broken, the corpse moved.  Inside the one side of the face that was still intact, an iris lens opened to reveal raw circuitry.

"Potemkin."  Jyre straightened.  "Shit.  I didn't realize you were fraggin' cyborged."

He shifted slightly, then slumped back.  Too much was broken inside.  Flesh was laid open to show twisted and crumpled steel and plastic, more than I would have thought was possible to fit into one man.  I licked my lips and averted my eyes.  I'd heard of experiments like him, but -

"Let's move.  His DocWagon is going off, and I don't feel like explaining this."  Jyre moved past him without a second glance, back to the alley wall as she glanced into the street.  Corpses lay scattered over the ground, looking like they'd been dropped by a frag grenade.  Three Lone Star COPs had been thrown on their sides, windows crazed, lights flashing.

"Looks like our guardian angels have been here, too," she muttered, waving me forward.  I stuck close behind her, trying to ignore Potemkin, too.  It wasn't easy.

"Easy, now," a low voice said.  She twisted and aimed, lights playing erratically over the steel surface of the sleeve at the same moment I grabbed her forearm to try to stop her.  There wasn't much I could do against her enhanced muscles, but her own modified reflexes were equal to the challenge, and she held fire.

"Shaman."  I stepped past her, oblivious to the carnage in the street.  If he felt comfortable here, it had to be secured.  Shaman had a thing about safety.

Shaman stood up from where he'd been sitting against the ruins of the front door, his dark face wearing a familiar soft smile.  His long hair had been tied back in what he used to call his "war braid," and he wore his usual khaki and leather, deck slung across his back and a small automatic dangling loosely from one hand.  As we both watched silently, he slowly lifted the gun butt-first and slid it into its holster.

"They told me where to find you," Shaman said simply.  "I was going to make it quiet, but Lone Star was crawling all over the place."  He tapped his portable's leather strap.  "When I figured out what was up, I called in some friends.  Voivode's still upstairs, and Hetter's monitoring the drones."

"You bastard," I swore, "Voivode nearly got me killed!"

Shaman lifted his hands palm-up and gave me an elaborate shrug.

"What are friends for?" he asked, white teeth flashing in a broad smile.

I stared at him a long moment, then broke down and laughed helplessly, and pulled him into an embrace.  Sometimes you've just got to hope you know who your friends are, and take the chance.  Jyre lowered the sleeve and powered it down to standby status, shaking her head.

"Who told you I was down here?"

"Well," Shaman said thoughtfully as we separated, "that's a bit strange.  Just a message waiting when I logged into the Matrix.  I tried to run a trace on it, but it was pretty well ICed."

"Lone Star," Jyre said.  "Aspirant must have been some sort of operative for the cops, if Macabre was right."

"That's right," I said slowly.  "Don't you owe me an apology?"

"Probably.  Aspirant hired me to bring you over — alive — in order to lure Shaman here.  Said he needed Shaman to do some codework for him, some code Shaman had worked with in the past and would know how to bypass.  The whole set-up was supposed to be a big Matrix run on Biodesigns.  Macabre had already checked it out, and said it looked square.  Aspirant must have gotten some real codes from BioD."

"But why us?" I asked, confused.

"I guess he figured that as long as he had the chance, he'd catch a few more fish in his net.  Arranged to have me pick you up, and then left your friend here a note.  You two have managed to annoy Lone Star in the past.  We all have.  All things considered, it would have been a nice sting if the decker here hadn't gotten paranoid and called in some friends."

"I am not paranoid," Shaman said stiffly, giving her a haughty look.  "I am cautious."

"Cautious men don't blow up Lone Star."

"Voivode has a fascination with explosives."  Shaman sounded regretful, but I wasn't fooled.  He was a decker with a taste for violence, although he hid it pretty well from strangers.

"Did you imply there was a rigger nearbye?"

"I did," Shaman nodded, one hand still resting on my sleeve.  Having him nearby again was almost as good as Jyre's painkillers. 

"Then maybe he can give us a lift out before DocWagon shows up for Potemkin."  She tapped the chronometer on her sleeve.  "ETA two minutes."

"And what of your apology to my friend?" the decker asked softly.  

"I owe you one," Jyre nodded to me.  "Call me.  I'll give you an account to pay for the leg.  Deal?"

"Deal," I agreed.  Shaman glanced at me, dark eyes weighing my expression, then nodded and tapped out a message to Hetter on his deck.