"Fortunately," she said, "something happened at the dig site. The professor in charge apparently suffered some sort of breakdown, killed one of his own students, and stole the artifact. We believe he plans to sell it, or that he may be working for someone else with an interest."
"The Danaan Families, perhaps?" Speren offered. "Or another of the dragons?"
"Perhaps." Jenna said. "We cannot be sure."
"Then I am to retrieve this artifact?" he said.
Jenna offered him one of her radiant smiles. "Quite so. Our intelligence reports that the professor has likely made contact with the underworld in Germany, in the Rhine-Ruhr megaplex."
"Right in the midst of Lofwyr's domain."
"Yes, so you can see why this matter could not be
put to the Council, and why discretion is required.
You will leave for Germany at once and secure the artifact. When you have done so, you will return it to me. I've had all the necessary files and information prepared for you. You can review them on the way to the German Alliance. The travel arrangements are already made."
Nothing further needed to be said. Speren crossed his right arm over his chest and executed a precise bow.
"I will go at once, my Prince, and I will return when I am successful." He turned on his heel and walked to the door.
Jenna's voice called after him. "Speren?"
"Yes, my Prince?"
"Be careful."
"I am always careful, my Prince."
When he came out into the corridor again, he found Jenna's assistant waiting to give him the mission briefing and other information. Speren wondered about Lofwyr's interest in this lost piece of elven history. Anything that drew the attention of a great dragon had to be far more than a mere historical curiosity. Speren knew the legends and tales of elven might and power in ages past as well as anyone. Whatever this artifact was, it was enough to draw the attention of the most powerful being on Earth.
It was early evening when Talon pulled up in front of the Avalon on
Talon took the concrete steps up to the side door two at a time and went inside. The bouncers and other employees recognized him and gave him no more than a passing glance as he continued on past, up the stairs to the second-floor office. As he came to the landing, Aracos spoke in his mind.
"All clear, boss. Everyone's waiting."
the spirit said.
Talon was glad to hear it, but felt a slight twinge at having Aracos check up on his chummers. It wasn't that he didn't trust them, but shadowrunning was a dangerous business, and Talon hadn't lived this long by not being careful. He went to the office door and knocked twice.
"It's me." he said, opening the door.
"About bloody time." Boom grumbled in his deep bass.
Inside the office sat the rest of his team: Boom, Trouble, Val, and Hammer. They looked up expectantly as he entered.
"So what's up, Tal?" Boom asked. "Everything go all right with the Johnson?" The troll was wearing an amazingly loud Hawai'ian shirt that barely covered his huge frame. He sat behind a wide desk that looked like a child's compared to Boom's nearly three meters in height. Boom owned the Avalon, one of the hottest nightclubs in Boston, thanks to a bequest from Dunkelzahn's will. He was also one of the most skilled fixers in the plex and an old friend of Talon's. Ever since Talon had returned to Boston, Boom had become active as a shadowrunner again, in addition to handling the team's financial affairs.
"Everything went fine." Talon said. He took the credstick from his jacket pocket and tossed it onto the desk. "As a matter of fact, Mr. Brackhaus was so impressed with our work that he offered us another job. And this one pays a hundred grand."
Boom let out a low whistle and picked up the credstick, slotting it into a hand-held reader to check the balance.
"A hundred thousand?" Trouble said. "That's not bad. Who does he want killed?" She was a decker, the team's Matrix specialist, a ghost in the machine, able to work wonders with computers and communications.
"Nobody." Talon said. "That's the good part. All he wants is to get back some artifact from an archeological dig."
"If that's the good part, what's the bad part?" Hammer asked. The ork had been to a lot of places and gotten himself out of a lot of close scrapes. He tended to look on the bad side of things, a habit that had saved his hide more than once.
Talon took a seat next to Trouble on a leather couch. Boom was seated behind his desk, while Val and Hammer occupied the two chairs to either side.
"The bad parts are: One, the target who has the artifact is in the German Alliance, somewhere in the Rhine-Ruhr plex, one of the biggest sprawls in the world. Two, he's a professor of archeology at the
"That means Lofwyr's involved." Boom said, setting the credstick aside for the moment.
Talon shrugged. "There's not a whole lot going on with S-K that Lofwyr's
not
involved with, chummer."
"Still," Trouble said, "that leaves a whole lot of unanswered questions about the run."
Talon nodded. "I know. I've been thinking about those for a while. The main ones I can see are: why do Brackhaus and Saeder-Krupp want to hire out-of-town talent for this run when there are plenty of shadowrunners in Germany who'd gladly take it on, and what is it about this artifact that it's such a big deal for Saeder-Krupp to get it back? They sure as hell aren't worried about its historical value or putting it in some museum."
"Look at the last one first." Boom said. "What is this 'artifact' Brackhaus is talking about?"
"That's just it, he doesn't know, or at least he claims not to know. The artifact they dug up was some kind of clay tablet. Apparently, Dr. Goronay smashed it and took something that was hidden inside. Since the only other guy who saw what was inside is dead, nobody knows what Goronay found."
"Hmmm, that makes things more difficult." Boom said, rubbing his chin. "Could it be magical?"
"Maybe. I've run into drek people have dug up from gods know where that had some serious mojo to it. I ran into plenty of things like that working for the Draco Foundation, and even that key Brackhaus hired us to find is pretty old, not like a conventional magical item at all. Maybe Lofwyr's collecting a set of them or something."
"Going to be difficult to find something when we don't even know what it looks like." Boom muttered.
"We don't have to." Trouble said. "Sounds like we just have to find Goronay. Find him, and we find whatever he took."
"The question is: do we want to do it?" Talon looked around the room at the rest of the team.
"Not me." Val said, speaking for the first time since Talon entered the room. "I'm out." She stood up from her chair, snatched her leather jacket from the back, and headed out the door.
"Val, wait a—" Talon started as the door slammed shut behind her. He turned to Hammer. "What the hell was that about?" The ork had worked with Valkyrie longer than any of them, so he knew her best.
"Not sure," he said, "but Val's from Germany, you know."
"No," Talon said, "I didn't." But then, he knew very little about the team's mysterious rigger. Val was an expert in piloting or driving just about anything, but she kept pretty quiet about her past.
"Yeah," Hammer said, "I got the impression that she had some pretty bad drek happen there, that she was just glad to be out of it. I dunno what happened, though. She didn't offer, and I didn't ask. Want me to talk to her?"
"No." Talon said. "I'll do it." He was supposed to be in charge of this team, that made it his job. He nodded in Boom's direction. "Start talking about what we're going to need for this job so we can tell Brackhaus—assuming you chummers are still interested." Everyone in the room nodded as Talon headed out the door.
He found Val standing on a balcony overlooking one of the Avalon's dance floors. Employees were cleaning up, stocking the bar, and getting the place ready for the customers who would begin packing the joint in a few more hours. Her jacket was thrown over the railing on which she leaned as she looked down at the darkened floor below.
"Val—" Talon began, but she cut him off.
"How do you handle it, Talon?"
"What?" Talon was taken aback by the question.
"The magic. How do you handle it?"
"You mean doing magic or being a mage?"
"Both." she said.
Talon shrugged. "I dunno. I just do. I learned to deal with it a long time ago, and I learned to use magic from a very good teacher. After that, I learned stuff in college and on the streets."
"Did you always want it?" Val asked.
Talon took a couple steps closer and stood next to her at the railing.
"No." he said. "I mean, every kid at one time or another wants to be Awakened, I guess, to find out they have the Talent. But when mine first showed up, I thought I was going crazy. I was just a kid at the time, fifteen, sixteen. I'd spent most of my life in a Catholic-run orphanage and my head was full of weird ideas about what magic was. When I started seeing things, feeling things, I figured I was losing it, or maybe even that there was something really wrong with me."
"But you figured out how to deal with it." Val said, not looking at him. "You're a mage now."
"With some time, and a lot of help."
"I never figured out how to handle it." she said quietly.
"You . . . you have the Talent?" Talon asked, stunned. He'd never gotten any hint of magical ability from Val.
She shook her head. "Had, not have. I did have it, though, once." She took a shuddering breath and let it out slowly, leaning more heavily against the railing. "You were raised Catholic. Well, I can tell you, that's nothing compared to where I grew up. Ever heard of Westphalia?"
Talon nodded. "Theocracy, isn't it? In the German Alliance?"
"Right in one." Val said glumly. "Though most of the traditional religions managed to deal with the Awakening sooner or later, the church in Westphalia became a refuge for all the true die-hards who were convinced that the Awakened were the spawn of Satan, that magic was evil. They broke off from the rest of Germany to protect themselves from the corruption they saw in the rest of the world. Total religious fanatics. I grew up there."
Talon kept his mouth shut and just let Val talk.
"When I was about fifteen, I started seeing things. Little things at first, then more and more. I could tell what people were feeling, just by looking at them, and I didn't always like what I saw. If I'd just kept my mouth shut . . . but I couldn't. I didn't know what was happening to me. I didn't know any better. I told my father and he took me to the parish priest, who told him that I had the devil in me, that I was possessed. They performed exorcisms, and prayed, and carried on, but they couldn't make the visions stop. I could sense how much they feared me, even my own family.
"I just couldn't take it. So I left. I ran away. I managed to get out of Westphalia and into the German Alliance. I went to the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex and met up with some people there. Ever been?"
Talon shook his head. Val smiled slightly and looked down again at the dance floor, lost in memory.
"It's quite a place, one of the biggest cities there is. Makes Boston look like a town. You can get just about anything you want, provided you've got the cred and you can protect yourself from the other predators who might try to take it away from you.
"I wasn't so lucky." she said. "I ended up in some bad scenes. You know: chips, hustling, doing whatever you've got to do to stay alive." Her slim fingers caressed the chrome-lipped jack behind her ear. "I don't remember a lot of it. Sometimes I had trouble telling what was real and what was just a sim I was jacking. I probably would have died if somebody hadn't helped me out, kind of like how Jase helped you, Talon.
"Her name was Estelle, and she was amazing. She was a witch. A lot of people went to her for advice, for card-readings, herbal remedies, drek like that. She saw that I had a touch of the Talent. She helped get me off the streets and off the chips. It was hard, really hard, kicking the chips. I was so afraid of dealing with reality, but she helped me through it. Eventually, I managed to get clean.
"Estelle had some friends, people who worked in the underground: neo-anarchists, shadowrunners, witches, that sort. They helped to smuggle food, medicine, and tech to different places in the Alliance, especially
girls should get their hands dirty. I loved working
on those old crates. They were held together with spit and bailing wire, but we kept them running.