Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun Read Free Page B

Full Moon Slashings?"
    The mention of that series of killings tore Val away from her deck. "A half-dozen years ago? That was the first anyone had heard of Dr. Raven, wasn't it?"
    "Yeah." I let that one-word answer hang there long enough for all three of them to realize I wasn't going to say anything specific about that outing. "After that I've carried silver bullets. Never want to be without them if you need them."
    Val shivered. "Viper too?"
    "Amen." I forced myself to smile and break the mood. "You got that Hibatchi chip encoder prepped yet?"
    Val scolded me. "Hitachi, Wolf, and you know it."
    I accepted a trode coronet from her slender fingers and pulled it onto my head. I adjusted it so the electrodes pressed against my temples and ran back over the midline of my skull. Val reached over and tightened the band to improve the contact, then she clipped the dangling lead into a splice cable. She slid that jack into the slot behind her left ear, then flipped a switch on the deck.
    I winked at her. "Let's do it."
    She winked back and hit a button on the keyboard. "Play ball."
    Doc Raven had warned me that Valerie Valkyrie was special, but until we plunged through that electric aurora wall of static and into the Matrix, I had no idea how special. I'd jacked into the Matrix before—who hasn't—but it had always been on a public deck where I ended up inside an entertainment system. Moving from game program to game program, I caught glimpses of the Matrix through the neat little windows the programmers had built into their systems, but I'd never had any desire to go out Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    adventuring on my own. Before, the form and shape of the Matrix had always been decided by the local network controllers. Here in Seattle the RTG resembled a vector graphic of the urban sprawl it encompassed. Well-fortified nodes were surrounded by fences and walls, and Matrix security teams patrolled the electronic streets like cops cruising a beat. I'd heard it had been designed that way because it made the casual user feel like he was in familiar surroundings and thus easier to find his way around.
    As things got strange and the world shifted, so did the Matrix. When a user entered the Chinatown area here in Seattle, for example, the buildings melted away and the nodes took the form of mah jong tiles.
    Deckers claimed that made it easier to pick out unprotected nodes, but I don't know about that. I've heard it said, and can believe, that no one goes near the nodes represented by dragons.
    But that's the way of the world. Steer as clear as possible from dragons—words to live by and advice it'll kill you to ignore.
    I've heard decker tales that if a decker got good enough he could impose his own sense of order on the Matrix. With enough skill he could make the Matrix appear the way he wanted it—free of extraneous data. Another urban legend born in the Matrix.
    Valerie Valkyrie was a legendary decker.
    After only two seconds, the landscape construct shifted. Gone were the clean lines of glowing, lime-green streets and shining white buildings. Suddenly I found myself standing beside the pitcher's mound in a monstrous baseball stadium. Val, outlined in a neon-blue that matched her eyes, pulled on a baseball cap that materialized from thin air and gave me a broad grin. The cap had a Raven patch on it.
    "Sorry if you aren't used to this, Wolf." The shrug of her shoulders told me she wasn't sorry at all and that my surprised reaction made her day. "Warping the Matrix to my conception of it gives me a home-field advantage." Within the solar yellow of the glove on her right hand, she twitched a ball around and got the grip she wanted on it. From a dugout over on the third-base side of the field a smallish man walked up toward the plate. Behind and above him a Scoreboard flashed to life and spewed out all sorts of information in hexidecimal.
    I pointed up at the display. "Can you