Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome Read Free Page A

whose newly implanted scalp hairs did not yet conceal the fact that he was balding.
    “No, no, I think it will grow in fine,” Lochinvar was saying. “But it’s unnecessary, really. Your eyes are—well, forgive me for this, but your eyes are simply extraordinary. I’m not sure anyone could look beyond those eyes and notice anything about your scalp.”
    The pigeon—his name was Carruthers, if Vitriol remembered correctly—was walking beneath one of the cameras, giving Vitriol a good look at the stubble on top of his head. The skin underneath was turning red.
    “Okay, let’s move,” Vitriol said. He took his focus away from the security footage but made sure he still paid attention to the audio link from below.
    Harpy stood, picked up the crowbar she had tucked behind her, and wrenched the rooftop door open with a screech.
    Alarms went off throughout the building, but there wasn’t any sound. Prometheus Engineering apparently did not feel any need to let any of its neighbors know about break-ins on its property. The people who needed to know about it, though, now knew.
    “Oh dear,” Vitriol heard Carruthers say through the security feed. “I’m afraid we have to leave.”
    “Why?” Lochinvar said. “What’s happened?”
    “It’s—I can’t really say,” Carruthers said. “But we need to leave.”
    “How disappointing.”
    Harpy and Vitriol were plunging ahead, going in and out of range of several security cameras and being captured by all of them. Thanks to Harpy’s spell, though, the only thing they’d show is two dark, ghostly, faceless images drifting past.
    They found the entrance to one of the building’s corner staircases and ran into it. The walls here were plain and gray, and while the AR overlay wasn’t much prettier, it sure was interesting. Security access points were all over the place, glowing bright red so they couldn’t be missed. And security personnel were in the staircase too, a few floors lower, chasing the ghosts their cameras had seen.
    “Oh—oh dear,” Carruthers said inside Vitriol’s head. “The doors are sealed now. I’m afraid we can’t leave.”
    “That’s entirely my fault, I’m afraid. Emergencies and crises and such things just aren’t my forte. I find I want to talk about what’s going on instead of doing anything about it, and that leads to a sort of paralysis that is not helpful in this kind of situation. Which I suppose it’s what happening now, as I’m blathering on and not helping the situation.”
    “It’s all right,” Carruthers said. “There’s somewhere we can go.”
    “Really? Where?”
    “Follow me.”
    Lochinvar’s part was proceeding smoothly, so Vitriol decided to watch his own ass for a bit. Since the staircase was becoming a bit crowded for his tastes, Vitriol pushed a door open and ran into a hallway on the building’s fourteenth floor. It was freeing to be able to intrude into a corp building without worrying about setting off an alarm. It’s quite possible that he set of three or four additional alarms as he ran across the burgundy-and-green carpeting in the long hallway, but the thing was, none of them after the first one mattered.
    Ahead of him, doors opened and guards came out, weapons lowered and ready. There were two of them, and they’d be shooting to kill.
    Harpy was ready, though, and she was faster than them. Vitriol didn’t see what got them, he didn’t feel it, but he saw what happened. One of the guards went down immediately, falling like his spinal cord had been abruptly severed. The other staggered, wobbling and weaving on rubbery legs, his gun firing but not until he had dropped his arm so that all the rounds went into the floor in front of him.
    Vitriol was on him quickly, laying the small blackjack he always kept with him alongside the guard’s jaw, dropping him like a punch-drunk boxer.
    He waved to Harpy, who was lagging a little after casting her spell.
    “Come on,” he said. “We can stay on this