Hunting Shadows
By
Fade
Chapter 7
Ox had woken Silk up just before Hammer and the rest of the boys had arrived at the warehouse. The mage hadn’t been happy to be pulled out of such a deep sleep, and had been threatening to throw the big gillette through a wall, but once she realized that one of the boys must have been injured, she quickly apologized, while rushing towards the door.
Mages who knew the spells required to heal someone with extensive cyberware modifications were relatively rare, but Silk had learned Doc Wagon’s version of the spell while working for the corp, and consequently was probably the troll’s best bet for getting his leg fixed without having to go to a ultra-secret delta-grade clinic where they were accustomed to working on people with top of the line mods.
When Hammer finally hobbled through the door, Silk had pulled him to the ground gently and set about gathering the energies required for the spell. As the elf began sending healing energies into the knee, she was able to determine exactly how badly injured the razor was, and she had winced to think of how much pain he would have been if his pain editor hadn’t been blocking selective nervous impulses before they could reach his brain.
It turned out that Hammer had completely torn his anterior cruciate ligament, as well as straining and tearing the muscles and tendons around the knee. The fact that the troll had been forced to keep walking after sustaining such an injury, all without being able to feel any sensations from the surrounding tissue meant that he had very badly chipped the special coating that he had paid to have inserted in place of his cartilage, the same coating that gave him the unearthly grace that Silk had never seen in anyone else as big as Hammer.
The elf pulled the mana into her hands, and sent it pouring into Hammer’s leg. Everything that existed, whether living or not retained a kind of magical memory of the different things that it had belonged to. Silk started with the living tissue, finding how it had existed just before the accident, and gave it enough energy to reshape itself back to that state. The cyberware enhancements were much harder, the material making them up had been many things in the course of it’s life, only recently coming to take up residence in the troll’s body. Also, non-living things didn’t retain the memory as well as living things did, so Silk had to spend more time trying to get Hammer’s mods back the way they were. After three or four tense minutes of work the mage did it, the ACL re-knit itself, the bones melted back to their original condition, complete with the special coating that allowed Hammer to move so gracefully. As stars started swimming in front of Silk’s eyes, she felt the spell run out of power. “Everything but the muscles,” murmured the mage before she passed out, with blood running from her nose and ears.
Hammer felt a part of himself relax as his pain editor shut down. Not having to worry about excruciating pain distracting you at a key time was great, but the troll had never liked the curiously dead way he felt when that particular piece of bioware was running. To remove pain, the bioware had to eliminate nearly all feedback from the body. The corresponding decrease in tactile sensation took some getting used to, especially for someone used to receiving such a huge amount of information from his enhanced senses.
Hammer caught Silk before she fell over, and slowly got to his feet, testing how stable his knee was, before carrying the mage to one of the cots that Ox pointed out to him.
As the troll placed Silk on the blue cot, he heard the door open back up, and turned to see another troll walk in with a pair of humans that appeared to be shamans, one of whom was carrying a little girl. Hammer looked at the massive shotgun, and the greying hair and immediately knew he must be looking at Chatter, quite possibly the most respected independent in the city.
The trolls exchanged cautious greetings, and then the runners took the still sobbing little girl to the tiny set of unfinished rooms where the shamans had constructed a second, more-powerful magical ward. Shiver and Shadow were already there, having administered tranquilizers to the mother and older daughter in a effort to make sure that they didn’t try and escape.
There was a obvious tension between the elf and the shape shifter now, but Hammer didn’t know how to handle Shiver’s near murder of the guard. The troll shook his head in sadness, and then left to check the defenses of the warehouse.
***
The next day was spent in waiting. Peter felt that the fact that there hadn’t been an attack on the warehouse in the first few hours after the women had been extracted meant that neither group of yakuza had been able to trail the runners after the job. Consequently, to try and cut his expenses, he had allowed most of the runners to leave, leaving only Hammer’s team, Ox, Vixen, Mercury and a drone rigger to make sure that the noncombatants were safe.
Hammer had been reluctant to continue drugging the three females, especially the little girl, but Mercury had been very insistent. The mage had pointed out that the last thing any of them really wanted was to worry about their captives somehow getting outside of the wards where they could magically be found, and promptly, killed. Especially since it was highly likely that a number of the runners would be joining them in the afterlife. In the end, Hammer and the rest agreed with Mercury, and they continued to administer enough tranquilizer to keep the three listless and manageable.
Once they had the appropriate security precautions set up, things had been pretty quiet until about three the next afternoon. Silk had been quietly trying to get Shadow to explain the lingering tension between him and Shiver, when suddenly the mage had looked at the corrugated-metal wall, gone white, and closed her eyes as she went astral.
Shadow hadn’t been sure what was going on, but he knew Silk wouldn’t do something like that as a joke, so he immediately called for Hammer, quickly putting everyone on high alert. Mercury had also gone astral, and then popped back to her body to give everyone a status update.
“The bad guys have another sample. It looks like they’ve started some heavy duty mojo in an effort to find our guests. I thought the team that Peter put together was hot, but this is something else. This team is pumping out mana so fast that we only have about two hours before they’ll breach the wards, and know exactly where their targets are at.”
Silk looked at the steadily-bowing wards surrounding the building from astral space. She’d seen Mercury pop in and back out, so she knew that Hammer was updated on what was happening, which left her free to decide how bad their situation was. The ceremony was rapidly building up power that wanted to ground out to one of the ladies inside the wards. The wards of course were acting like giant resisters wired in series, stopping the energy from finding it’s target, but eventually with enough power any ward would go down. Silk watched the wards for another few seconds trying to judge how quickly the power was building and how much stress was being placed on the wards.
The barely-opaque outer ward was relatively low in strength. The shaman had wanted to encompass the entire warehouse, and consequently hadn’t wanted to use up too much of their strength creating a powerful ward that covered an enormous amount of ground. Additionally, a ward this weak was unlikely to draw too much attention, the fact that it was so big would probably get a couple of raised eyebrows from some of the local magical talent, but with all the changes that were always happening in the magical landscape of Seattle, nobody would really pursue the issue. Inside the weak ward, around the suite of offices where the women were kept, there was a much smaller ward that was many times the strength of the first ward.
Silk wished that they had realized that they could just keep everyone drugged, they could have just warded one room in the suite, and saved all kinds of effort. Unfortunately, what was done was done and they would have to deal with the situation they now found themselves in.
Judging by the rate at which the strain on the wards was growing, the mage arrived at the same estimate that Mercury had. From all appearances, they had about two hours before both wards came down, and people would know where the captives were being held.
Silk popped back into her body as quickly as possible, hardly even pausing to relish the curious sense of wholeness she always felt upon returning to her body. Kind of like how I always imagined having a dislocated shoulder put back in would feel.
Hammer was on his audio only wrist phone talking to Peter. As the troll saw his mage get up from where Shadow had carefully placed her, he gave her a raised eyebrow. “We have about two hours before they know exactly where we are.”
Hammer nodded his thanks and continued. “Silk confirms it, Peter, we have two hours before the wards come down. After that, we are going to have all kinds of unwelcome company.”
There was a brief pause before Silk heard the voice on the other end of the line respond. “Peter understands, let Peter make a couple of calls and see what can be put together. Expect a call in fifteen minutes.”
The next fifteen minutes were some of the most tense that Silk had ever experienced. Hammer had ordered everyone to get ready for possible conflict, but the preparations had done little to distract Silk from the fact that in a very short time armed yakuza goons could be pouring into the warehouse with guns blazing.
By the time Hammer’s wrist phone finally chimed to indicate an incoming call, Silk was starting to feel her composure crack a little. The mage thought about trying to find a way to subtly overhear the troll’s conversation with their fixer, but after a couple of seconds she decided that what she was trying to do would be obvious to everyone, so she just shrugged her shoulders nervously and walked back over to where Hammer was calmly standing.
“Peter has sent additional assets your way. Expect company in about forty-five minutes. There still won’t be enough of you to stop a truly determined effort, but they should help against the first couple of probes if they underestimate you at all.”
Hammer nodded, waiting for Peter to continue.
“There is additional information that you need to know, but this channel isn’t secure enough, so Peter has sent the information with the additional assets.”
There was a pause, and then the tiny fixer continued. “Please trust Peter on this one. Things will make more sense once your backup arrives.”
Hammer appeared to consider how to respond for a moment before nodding. “Hammer out.”
Shiver, with his more sensitive hearing had been able to eavesdrop from across the warehouse, and now seemed about to protest Hammer’s decision.
Hammer looked up and turned to his student, some of his frustration with the elf’s earlier actions bleeding through to the troll’s expression. “The reasons that we accepted this job in the first place haven’t changed. You had your chance to refuse the job originally. Now we are here, and if we were to bail out three innocents would die. We’ve operated on trust with Peter before. He has always come through in the past. We’ll just have to rely on him to come through for us again.”
Turning slightly and raising his voice to ensure that everyone could hear him, the troll continued. “For now, everyone needs to go back over the defensive plan we came up with this morning. If there is a problem with it, we need to find it before the bad guys get here. Check your weapons, and stash a couple of extras somewhere in case something unexpected happens. Peter wasn’t stingy in setting this place up, so lets use this extra equipment to our advantage.”
The next forty-five minutes seemed to evaporate in a whirlwind of activity. Silk was tasked with keeping an astral eye on any developments in the area. The mage quickly realized that she wasn’t going to be able to do an adequate job by herself, so she started summoning low-grade watcher spirits to help her out. The spirits weren’t particularly intelligent, and they were only going to be around for about four hours, but they were able to learn that the runners were supposed to be in the warehouse, and that anyone else approaching the building was ‘bad’ and therefore needed to be reported to their master, Silk.
Silk had just finished summoning the watchers, when a muscular elf followed by four or five other people, who looked like runners doing a poor job of pretending to be normal people, strolled up to the warehouse. Silk’s watchers of course went ballistic, reminding her of a pack of little puppies, in their eagerness to make sure that she knew that the bad people were trying to get into the building.
Once they had established that the newcomers were some of Peter’s bodyguards, Hammer signaled everyone to go back to their regular posts, and the big troll let the runners in. Hammer had a whispered conversation with the leader of the bodyguards, nodded a couple of times, and then sent everyone to new guard positions.
Silk was dying to know what had passed between Hammer and the new guy, but knew that questioning her team leader would be bad form, as well as distracting him and pulling her away from her post. Consequently, the mage instead went back to her cot, laid down and continued to run astral overwatch.
As time started to run down, Silk found her distant meat body starting to sweat from the tenseness that was being transmitted from her astral form. Amazingly, none of the runners were threatening to flee the gigantic hammer that was scheduled to come down on them at any time. Instead, everyone but Silk seemed to be made out of solid ice. Silk assumed that the fact that nobody was running in situation that smelled like they were being left out to dry, was a great testament to the trust that everyone had in Peter and Hammer.
The pressure on the wards continued to increase. As they began to bow significantly, Silk noticed that even Mercury’s composure was beginning to wear thin around the edges. Suddenly, the wads snapped back into their original shape. Silk did a double take, sure that they had come down, but they were still there. From all indications, whoever had been conducting the ritual had abruptly stopped, instantly eliminating the pressure that had been building on the wards for the last couple of hours.
As soon as she was sure that the wards had not fallen, Silk shot back to her body. Opening her eyes, and finding Hammer, she gestured him over frantically. “The wards are no longer under any stress. Whoever was looking for those three just suddenly stopped. It looks like we are safe at least for the next little while.”
Hammer nodded gravely, seeming to be resisting the urge to smile, and called Peter. Twenty minutes later, the whole story started to come out. Asako had gone back to the his master’s house about the time that Hammer and the boys had left with the targets. Mr. Yoshimo had been unhappy with the manner that his family had been abducted, as well as being very displeased with the injuries his men had sustained, but since the events had already played themselves out, the head of the Seattle Yakuza had taken advantage of the situation in which he found himself.
Yoshimo had decided that the first order of business was to clean his metaphorical house, and consequently had paid quite handsomely to bring in some high caliber mages. The mages had quickly case truth spells on the yakuza mages, to establish their trustworthiness. Then, Yoshimo had subjected each and every member of his organization to the same set of spells in an effort to find the leaks and traitors that were feeding information back to the Las Angeles yakuza.
The mages had started passing out from heavy drain after about an hour and a half, but Yoshimo had kept bringing in new magic users until he’d finished what he’d set out to do. The newly discovered traitors had been quietly executed, and the now-unified yakuza members prepared for the retaliatory strike that they knew was coming from the criminals that were trying to take over Seattle.
When Hammer had called and told Peter that someone was trying to run a magical trace on the Yoshimo women, Peter had called Asako and informed him of the new developments. The old servant had run to his master, with the news that his wife and daughter were in danger, and the yak boss had immediately began searching for the team that was conducting the tracing ritual.
The information gathering systems of the various organized crime syndicates rivaled those of most of the smaller corporations, or governments. It had taken less than an hour for Yoshimo’s operatives to locate the team conducting the ritual to trace the three women. Thirty minutes later, just as everyone in the warehouse was starting to figure that they weren’t going to walk away from the run alive, the yakuza hit squad stormed the site where the ritual magic was being cast, and killed all eight mages.
According to Peter, at least four other operations had gone off at about the same time, clearing the city of the rest of the operatives sent to make life tough for Yoshimo. Hammer indicated that he thought there would be further retaliation on both sides. People involved as deeply in organized crime as the yakuza bosses were couldn’t afford to let an obvious challenge go unpunished, but for now all threats to the safety of the three women and the runners had been eliminated.
Peter sent a car to pick up the girls, as well as a new escort to see them home. Part of Silk wanted to be there when the Yoshimo women were returned, but she agreed with Peter and Hammer that it would be best for a truly neutral party to be at the meet. Despite Peter’s attempts to have his people limit the death and destruction on the run, enough people had been hurt or even killed that there was a chance that an ‘accident’ would befall the runners who had presumed to violate the yak boss’s home.
As Silk and her team headed back to their temporary home, the mage was relieved to think that the whole thing was over, and they could go back to relaxing for a little while. Of course after the confrontation between Shadow and Shiver that Hammer had described earlier things weren’t going to be back to normal for quite some time.
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