"There is a mage nearby."
The certainty in Scatter's voice gave troublesome weight to the rat shaman's announcement. Kham looked around the sea of desks and workstations that surrounded him and his crew. He saw nothing; no sign that anyone had entered the room. The Weeze shook her head, signifying that she had spotted no one in the corridor. Over by the window, Neko was giving a sim- i ilar all-clear. The Tacoma facility of Andalusian Light Industries wasn't all that big, but the tangle of buildings, garages, sheds, and warehouses offered more than enough places for even a mundane to hide, as they had proven in penetrating to this office structure.
"Anybody wit him?" Kham asked, but the rat shaman ignored this question as she ignored most of his questions. Kham had to be philosophical about it; even if she answered, he wasn't sure he could trust her estimate. She had her own ideas about how to run things, as he had learned in their quarrelsome planning sessions for this run. Perhaps she was trying to force him into certain actions by playing information control, trusting that she could handle any problems. That would be trouble. Scatter had a lot more faith in her abilities, both as a magician and as a strategist, than Kham did, but he knew he could count on her to do her best, however little that was, as long as she needed their mundane firepower to save her hide.
Walking over to the workstation where their decker
Chigger was jacked in, Kham looked at the screen. The display of whirling geometries and shifting computer images meant nothing to him. For all he knew, Chigger could be playing some kind of arcade game. Damn, he hated depending on deckers. They were less reliable than magicians, which was saying quite a bit, and none of it in their favor. He spent a brief moment wishing he had Dodger for the Matrix work; he knew Sally Tsung thought the elven decker was wiz. Then he remembered that the elf would probably be even less predictable than usual in this context.
He punched Chigger lightly in the shoulder. "Come on, get inta da files."
Chigger just rolled his head back and sighed. "Hurry, Chigger!" urged Ryan, the new kid. Rat-stomper and The Weeze had recommended him, saying he might be green but he was good with locks. They had already used him to get into the building, but the kid wasn't going to be any use to them if he panicked. From the look of him, Ryan was on the edge of letting his fear take control. Kham hoped he'd calm down; they didn't need a panicker. Ryan continued to urge the decker to greater efforts, while nervously fingering the snarl of amulets and talismans around his neck.
It was bad enough they were doing this run with a first-timer kid. They didn't need one who had also lost his grip on reality. Ryan was dripping with the rat shaman's hoodoos, which in itself wasn't bad. Most of the kids in the Underground had them, though maybe not quite so many as Ryan. Those gewgaws would be worthless to him, magically anyway; Ryan was mundane. But whatever they did or didn't do, the kid believed they worked. Maybe the trinkets would keep him calm.
What did worry Kham was the amulets his guys had taken up. Like Ryan, Ratstomper and The Weeze were wearing the silvered rat skulls and tangled bits of bone that were Scatter's tokens. Even Rabo had one of the skulls. Kham had noticed the way Ratstomper had fawned on Scatter, back when the Green Band's scuz-boys were working Neko over. Now, The Weeze had taken to backing Scatter's suggestions. Even Rabo had agreed with one or two of the shaman's ideas. Bad signs, all. Scatter was gaining influence with his guys, and she was the only available magician for this run. What was the next step?
He checked on Scatter, thinking maybe she was doing something about the mage she claimed was nearby, but she was just sitting where she'd plopped herself down when they'd entered the room. Her legs crossed underneath her, she swayed slightly, occasionally humming to herself. Her eyes were rolled back in her head and the eyelids twitched irregularly, giving her a disturbingly uncanny look. She might be doing magic. Or she might just be wigged out on drugs.
You just never knew with shamans.
Ryan's exhortations were growing more frantic. So much for his faith in Scatter's magical protection. Kham hissed at him and told him to keep the noise down, but it was only a minute or two before the kid was back at it again. Despite Ryan's agitation, the only reply Chigger gave to all his urging was an occasional grunt.
Frowning, Kham turned to Rabo. "Ya said dis guy was good, Rabo."
"He is, Kham, he is. Must be a lot of ice."
"Well we're gonna get iced if he ain't outta dere soon wit what we need."
"He'll make it," Rabo insisted. "Trust me."
"It's yer butt, too."
Rabo thought about that for a second. "Come on, Chigger. Move your virtual butt."
Silence descended on the room, save for the intermittent flurries of tapping from Chigger's fingers flying across the keyboard of his cyberdeck. The seconds dragged into minutes; long, sweat-producing minutes. Kham nearly jumped when Scatter announced, "The mage has moved on." They all breathed a collective sigh. "We were lucky," Neko commented. Scatter turned eyes of deep, dark mud on the catboy. "Nothing of the sort. My spirits protected us. They shielded us from the Andalusian wage mage, blinding her eyes and ears to our presence."
"Way to go, Scatter," Ryan said, giving her a double thumbs-up.
On the other hand, Kham thought, it could be that the mage just decided to go to the can. They had no way of knowing if Scatter had done anything at all. They still hadn't really gotten anywhere.
Then Chigger gave a moaning chuckle, the same queer victory signal he'd uttered when he'd secured copies of the IDs used by the company that serviced Andalusian's phone system. The decker dropped into the real world and said, "Got a loc."
"Don't keep it ta yourself. Pop it over ta Rabo's screen and get back ta grabbing anyting dey got on da crystal."
The decker mumbled something and resumed his tapping on the cyberdeck. His screen still churned with agitated shapes, but the monitor on which Rabo had been following his progress blanked for a second. The new image that appeared was a diagram of the facility. Kham recognized the layout of the buildings, so he knew that the red dot identified their current position. A red line zigzagged across the compound to a flashing pip that should be the area where the crystal was stored. It was two buildings over. Kham didn't like it; too many of the areas on the diagram were dark.
"What's dis drek? How come so much is blacked out."
"Must be a partitioned system," Rabo said. "Different parts of the facility are under different security protocols."
"Why didn't Chigger cut into the main program?"
"There may not be one. Depends on how paranoid the security chief is."
"We got anyting on how secure dat area is?"
Rabo ran the keyboard, causing a series of windows to pop up and vanish in rapid succession. The stuff went by too fast for Kham to make sense of the data. At last Rabo hit the Enter key with a flourish and said, "There. That's what we got."
Yellow dots appeared at scattered locations of the diagram, some brighter than others. The clusters at the gates and in the security headquarters building Kham took to represent guards. Surprisingly, there were only a few along the route Chigger had shown them; the decker had done his job right.
"Alarms?"
"Chigger'll ride cover."
"Good enough." It had better be. If the decker couldn't override the alarms as the rest of the team proceeded, they'd bring all of Andalusian's security down on their heads. "Now just where is dis place we're headed?"
"Main assembly building. Ground floor's mostly open space and automated assembly lines. They'll still be running, which means supervisors, but we'll miss all that if we follow Chigger's route. We'll be coming in along an access tunnel into Basement Level One. The rock's three levels down on Number Four."