But he had found her and offered help. She had been scared when she had accepted his offer. Scared of her surroundings. Scared of what had happened to her. Scared of trusting him. So she had taken a chance. After all, what did she have to lose?
Now, her life was taking another crazy twist. This time it was a dream instead of a nightmare. Her memories of her "luxurious" corporate life were being tattered to shabbiness. With Renraku, one had to be at least a vice-president of a regional branch to rate a private aircraft such as the one in which she travelled.
The flight was over now. The craft had taxied to a halt and the vibration from the engines had stopped. The pilot emerged from the cockpit, nodding and motioning her forward. His smiled was forced. The rest of the crew was nowhere in sight. She'd be seeing Shiroi soon. Who was he, to command such extravagance?
She rose from her seat. With three long, wobbly strides, she reached the pilot's side. Undogging the toggles, he lifted the latch and swung the cabin door wide. Brilliant sunshine flooded through the opening, forcing her to squint painfully. The cabin's climate control coughed and shuddered into high gear to fight the invasion of hot, humid air. For a moment, she was back on Yomi and she shuddered. Remembering to breathe, she sucked in air. It was thin, and she felt light-headed. Even her new, larger lungs didn't seem to have enough capacity.
The pilot stepped through the hatchway and pressed himself against the railing of the stairway. He seemed to want to give her as much room as possible. Up close, she could smell his fear. What did he think she was going to do? Eat him? Ignoring him, she looked Shidhe's law, her life was forfeit. Only Sam's death at Hart's hands might release her from that harsh judgment.
It took Hart three minutes to run through the halls to her quarters. Worry nagged at her the entire way, almost disrupting the concentration she needed to maintain her invisibility spell. She knew some of the palace's guardian creatures had marked her passage. The damned, cluttering leshy seemed to see her too, but none of the elves she passed were aware. That was good.
There were no guards at her quarters. The alarm had yet to be given. She wasted no time packing, only grabbed the working bag she had kept ready out of old habit. Before leaving the room, she used the computer to log a "do not disturb" order and a delayed order for a meal delivery with the palace household staff. It was a weak ruse, but it might buy a few minutes.
On her way to the outer precincts, she only paused once at a storeroom. The room was supposed to be secure, but she had penetrated better systems. She was in and out at the cost of only a few precious minutes, her bag stuffed with Sam's gear. There were ways to use the items as tracking links.
Just before she hit the outer, public section of the palace, she dropped her invisibility spell. There would be mages on watch at the boundary, and her concealment spell would only mark her as someone to be detained. To her relief, she found at the gate that her privileged status hadn't been revoked. The guards listened dutifully to her story about a trip to the southwest, and even offered her good wishes as she left the building.
She passed through the park surrounding the palace and entered the rail station without incident. Her good fortune held; a train was in the station. She slipped a certified credstick into the turnstile slot and dumped enough nuyen for a month's open pass. The gate opened and she made it to the platform in time to board just as the doors were closing.
By the time the train pulled into the main station in Dublin and she left the car to mingle with the city crowds, she had worked out the bones of her plan. Her first step was to contact her decker Jenny and arrange transport to England. As soon as she secured a little backup, she would intercept Samuel Verner. She was very sure she knew where he was headed.
Dodger had never felt so tired. He stared at the dataplug in his limp hand for a full minute before letting it drop to the idle cyberdeck. He was hungry and his muscles ached from hunching over the cyberdeck. His meat was failing under the strain. Running the Matrix steadily ground a decker down. Trying to do the work of a whole team of deckers changed the grinding wheel of exhaustion from carborundum to diamond grit. He was worn down.
The search for Sam and Hart had been a total bust. The Matrix offered no hints of any operation, and his checks on druid holdings gave no indication that they had anything to do with the sudden disappearance of his fellow runners. Willie had come up with zilch as well. Even Herzog's street contacts had nothing, no matter what price was offered. No avenue Dodger had explored had yielded any information on the platinumhaired lady elf or the brown-bearded American shaman. Neither should have been able to hide for so long in the London sprawl.
Dodger was frustrated. Hart he could take or leave; something about her flashed a warning mode. But Sam… Dodger had gotten him into this mess and now his friend had vanished without a trace. His feelings of guilt were uncomfortable as much for their rarity as Robert N. Charrette for their strength. Those feelings were exaggerated every time he thought about how much time he was spending on the other problem.
The hunt on that issue had turned up only negative clues, but the puzzle drew him like a siren. Driven to look, and repelled at the same time, he haunted the Matrix searching for anything that might tell him more about the Artificial Intelligence that had called itself Morgan le Fay.
Dodger had visited with some of the best deckers in the Matrix, but they knew nothing. The rumor mill at Syberspace was empty. Or rather, it had been when he checked into the virtual club. It wouldn't be now. He knew that he would have started a whirlwind of speculation with his guarded questions. The habitues of the decker club were not stupid\a151nobody stupid could deck through the ice that armored that exclusive little Matrix hideout. His fellow Matrix runners would guess what he had hinted at and begin looking for themselves. Soon someone would know.
Or would they? Was the AI too good for mortal deckers? Could it hide in the Matrix in ways beyond any decker ability to detect? He wished he knew.
All he knew was that Renraku still had not announced the Artificial Intelligence's existence to the world. That meant that something in their program had fouled up. If they were sole owners of a functioning AI, they should be media-blitzing. The technological coup was worth too much.
Unless they were using it for shadowrunning. Could the rewards of applying it subversively be greater than the killing to be made on the open market? The AI had been present in the Hidden Circle's architecture. Dodger's investigations had revealed no significant connection between Renraku and the Circle. There were the usual minor connections between some of the
druids' corporations and the megacorp, but no more than could be expected in the interconnecting world of modern business. Renraku had contracts with the British government, but Dodger had been unable to detect any unusual activity or connections there, either. Normally, he would have assumed that everything was just too well hidden. But with the AI involved, he couldn't be sure. The Hidden Circle's antics just weren't Renraku's style.
So what was the AI doing in the Circle's architecture?
His first thought had been that Renraku might be moving against the Circle, too. Such criminals might attract the attention of a civic-minded megacorp. The publicity for squashing murders and terrorists was always worth a few points on the stock exchange. But the AI hadn't done anything to the Circle's system, and Renraku operations were quiet. The fragging local Red Samurai contingent had just been withdrawn for temporary assignment on the continent. Dodger's every runner sense screamed that Renraku wasn't involved. So who was running the AI? It wasn't the renegade druids. If they had that kind of Matrix power, Dodger would be a vegetable by now. The AI was just too much Matrix muscle.