The elder shamans rose and formed a circle around Sam and the sprouting tree. The larger circle of the dancers stamped and swayed around them. Howling Coyote nodded to Sam, and he began to sing faster.
The shamans echoed his new cadence as they joined hands. Howling Coyote lifted his left foot and plunged it down and forward. The inner ring began to dance, turning within the greater circle in a tighter focus of power.
The preliminaries were drawing to a close.
Janice looked down the hill at the small group of people gathered there. Four norms and three orks. All save Ghost were strangers. She knew their names and some of their general abilities because Ghost had told her, but that made them no less strangers. She wondered if they could be trusted.
She wondered if she could be trusted.
For more than a week now, the only norm she had seen was Ghost. She had fought back the hunger because he was a follower of Wolf, and in some obscure way she didn’t fully understand, a member of her pack. She had come to recognize his strong spirit during their companionship in the wilderness. As much as a norm could be a friend to one of her kind, he was one. Of course, he was also cyber-enhanced, a deadly shot, and a vicious fighter who might have a chance at seriously injuring her, but she didn’t think that was the real reason she hadn’t made a meal of him yet. She prayed it wasn’t.
These others were different. Norm or ork, they were not part of the pack. All were experienced shadowrunners and therefore theoretically dangerous. But if one were to straggle behind, and let attention wane, then she might…
Might what?
Her stomach growled an answer. She turned away and snatched up Ghost’s last offering. Her fangs sank deeply into the deer haunch, but the juices that flowed did little to quiet the insistence of her need. She spat the tasteless meat onto the ground.
She didn’t know how much longer she could stave off the hunger. Here in this land so alive with life and so near to concentrations of people, it got harder every day. Distress warred with longing when she gazed across the sound to the lights of Seattle. The feelings were only amplified by the nearness of the people below. Why was she so disturbed? Dan Shiroi had shown no discomfort at what he was. He had taught her that the hateful norms were proper prey for her kind, rabbits to their wolves. And she was just like him, wasn’t she?
Something inside her shouted no, its voice barely overcoming the joyous shouting that fired her blood at the thought of meat. Sam had said that after this one run, he could do the magic that would transform her back to a norm. Could she believe? Did she dare hope?
Did she want to?
Whatever she believed or desired, she had given her word. In that, at least, she was still like her brother. She would do as she had said, and help these runners to do their part in Sam’s scheme. After that? Well, after that, things would be as things would be.
She rose and walked softly down the slope toward the gathered runners. She knew that Ghost would hear her, but she wanted to see how alert the others were. The information might be useful later.
One of the chromed norms, Ghost’s tribesman Long Run, was the first to react. As if on cue, Ghost whispered in the ear of the woman—Sally Tsung, he had said she was—and she turned to look. The others followed suit.
She kept her moves slow and was careful not to show her fangs. She knew her size was intimidating. She overtopped the tallest of the runners by almost a meter and was easily half again as massive as the biggest ork—Kham was his name. For all her precautions, she sensed she had awakened their fear. They tried to hide it and were successful for the most part, but she could smell it on them. The big ork was especially rank.
He straightened up, trying to make himself look as big as possible. Early evening starlight glinted from the chrome hand he flexed nervously. Ghost had told her that Kham’s cybernetic hand was a legacy from an earlier involvement in Sam’s business, during which the ork was nearly killed. Was he having second thoughts?
Kham cocked his head and stared at her with narrowed eyes. “You ain’t no sasquatch.”
There was no use denying that, but she didn’t see what business he had knowing her metatype. So she just said, “No, I’m not.”
“What are ya den?”
He was a nosy trog. “You don’t want to know.”
“Too bad ya didn’t go ork.” He sounded halfway sincere. “We orks is tough, and good-looking, too. If ya was one of us, ya wouldn’t have ta hide in de woods alone.”
And an annoying one. She snapped, “I was an ork once. Didn’t like it much, so I changed.”
Flinching back at her anger, he quietly eyed her for few moments. The others found nothing to say in the silence that fell. Kham fingered his broken tusk and his brow furrowed as if thinking were hard for him. Then, having reached some kind of conclusion, his face relaxed. “Ya must be his sister, den. Heard dey got a lot of bad dings over on Yomi island. Dat’s where ya were, right? Heard dey got de virus dere. Youse what happens when an ork gets de virus?”
Hugh Glass’s face flashed before her eyes, smiling. “A present for you before I leave,” he said, showing his perfect teeth. He touched her leg and she collapsed in pain, shattered bone tearing through flesh. Hugh faded from her sight, then the sounds began, the sounds of the searching hunters. She swallowed her scream and held in her terror. Unable to run, she would be caught and taken back to Yomi. The hunters came closer. Fear clogged her throat. Closer. She had heard stories about what they did to runaways. She whimpered in her pain and immediately stifled it with redoubled terror. “Delicious,” Hugh said, and sucked her dry. To her drifting, barely conscious mind, he said, “Someday you may thank me, but more likely you’ll hate me for all time. I’d prefer it that way, it tastes better.” Then he was gone, and she had only herself and the darkness and the pain. And the hunger.
She shrugged off the nightmare memory. She didn’t want to think about that anymore. “Don’t know anything about a virus.”
“We’re not here to be idle,” Ghost said, stepping between her and the ork.
She relaxed muscles she hadn’t realized were tensed and lowered her lips to hide her fangs. “All right. Let’s get this over with.”
“Don’t you care what the plan is?” Tsung asked.
“No.”
The ork with the datajacks on his temples put a hand to his ear. After a moment he said, “Matrix cover says locks are off on the compound. We got a twenty-minute window before the Gaeatronics security checks run their diagnostics. We got to be aboard the submersible by then.”
“Right on time,” Tsung said. “We don’t get paid till it’s over, so let’s get moving.”
“Ain’t like de fairy to be on time,” Kham grumbled.
“Even Dodger gets it right sometimes,” Tsung said.
The trip through the strip of forest between them and the Gaeatronics slip at the dockyards was short. They covered it quickly. Janice guessed that Ghost’s tribesmen had already cleared the route. She felt sure of it when another AmerIndian joined them at the outer fence. In moments, a hole had been clipped and the runners slipped through. The one who had joined them remained behind to seal the breach.
The dock they headed for was dark, but that didn’t bother Janice. She could see a couple of twelve-meter surface craft moored on the left, and out at far end on the right was a low-riding shape with a tall, conical hump amidships. Stenciled next to the Gaeatronics logo was the name Searaven. They reached the craft with three minutes left in their window.
The Searaven was a deep-water construction submersible converted to serve as an underwater taxi for the wave-motion power plants Gaeatronics maintained in the Sound. The sectioned forward end, with its command and power modules and their manipulator housings, antennae, and light booms, gave the vehicle a wasp-like appearance. The imagery was enhanced by the slope of the aft hull where, instead of a normal open cargo frame, the Searaven carried an enclosed and pressurized hull for passengers. The rear of the cabin narrowed down to a docking collar that could serve as a diver’s port, or after mating with another hatch, could allow the passengers to cross in relatively dry comfort from the submersible to another vessel or to an underwater station. She could imagine the connection assembly thrusting downward from the machine’s belly like an insect’s stinger.
She hadn’t liked the idea of going underwater when Sam had presented it. She hated the water. It would be dark and cold down there, like a grave. She would be in an alien environment where she would have no control. Now, faced with the imminent realization of her fears, she hesitated.
“What’s the problem?” Ghost asked as the others scrambled aboard.
She didn’t want to speak her fears aloud. “Who’s driving this thing?”
“Rabo.”
“Ya got a problem wid dat?” Kham snarled.
“Rabo’s a good rigger,” Ghost said soothingly.
“Yeah,” Rabo agreed. His voice came from the submersible’s external speaker. He had been the first aboard and was already jacked in. “Being ork don’t mean nothing in the interface.”
“Bruiser like you ain’t afraid of going down, are ya?” Kham taunted.
She lied with a shake of her head. Her voice almost cracked when she said, “I don’t like water, and I don’t like tight places.”
“Gonna get both tonight.” Kham laughed and disappeared below.
“Come on, Wolf shaman,” Ghost urged. “Only got forty seconds till security check. Got to get the hatch dogged.”
She forced her fear down and stepped aboard. Ghost waited with seemingly imperturbable patience as she squeezed her way past the coaming. As soon as she had cleared the ladder, he was in in a flash of jacked reflexes and swinging the hatch closed. He spun the wheel as soon as the lip of the hatch touched the coaming.
“How close?” Tsung asked.
“Point five,” he replied.
“Too close,” she said, giving Janice a sour look. “All right, Rabo. Soon as you get clearance from Dodger, get us going.”
“What’s your hurry? Wichita ain’t going anywhere.”
Janice was puzzled. Wichita was in Kansas. There was no way to get there by boat. “What are you talking about? We can’t get there by boat.”
“She’s worse dan her brudder,” Kham griped.
“Back off,” Ghost warned him. To Janice, he said “Wichita is a submarine, Nereid class. She put to sea just before Thunder Tyee’s boys overran the Bremerton sub base back in the teens. The warriors had already gotten a few cannon hits on her, and they put a missile into her before she cleared harbor. She went down and exploded, or so it seemed. Salish dredges still bring up bits of debris sometimes, but not much.”
“So if we’re headed after her,” Janice said, “she didn’t explode.”
“That’s what Dodger’s data says,” Ghost confirmed. “Bad guys know it, too. The Wichita didn’t sink when she went under the waves. At least not immediately. Captain Walker was running a scam, but the tech didn’t match his nerve. He wanted to run for safe territory, didn’t want the AmerIndians getting control of the missiles on board. He barely coaxed the Wichita out past Cape Flattery. The sub was in no shape to make it down the coast. Wouldn’t have had a prayer of making it to the Canal, so he scuttled her.”
That had all happened before Janice was born. It seemed incredibly ancient. “What makes anyone think that the missiles will be any good after more than thirty years under water?”
“Oh, the missiles won’t,” Tsung said. “But the bombs; that’s another matter. Missiles are cheap, but bomb production is quite restricted. There’s not so much fissionable material around anymore. What comes out of the plants is strictly monitored by an international commission, which doesn’t leave a terrorist squad much chance of getting their hands on anything.”
“And we’re going to keep it that way,” Ghost said solemnly.
The dance was well underway.
Sam rose on the power and felt himself widening, spreading through the sky. He rushed through the hole to the otherworld. He reached the guardian, no longer a Man of Light that mocked him, but something unseen, yet somehow recognizable. Tonight it had no power to limit him. He felt it bow out of his way as he approached.
Beyond the tunnel, another night sky awaited him.