"your number is one
your mind has decided
your number is one
you are undivided
for you there is but one direction
your number is one"
"Your Number Is One", by the Rollins Band
Hoho looked back at me from the front of the van. "You don't have to come along, you know." The streetlights reflected off the fetishes adorning his vest, and the green glow from the data display in the van cast a pallor on his big round face. "Seriously Casey, I had no idea…"
"I'm going on this run." I looked at Hoho. "Don't even try—"
"No, really. We'll drop you off at your place and you won't have to worry about it." He had an almost pleading look on his face. "Your Granddad would never forgive me if anything happened to you."
"I have a feeling that if anything happened to me, it'd be because you died before I did." I sat back in the van and looked up at the roof with a deep sigh. "So you won't have to worry about Granddad."
"Argent." Mauer said it calmly. I swear, the man showed almost no emotion. "If we're going up against the bugs then we'll need to see her before we leave town. She'll have stuff that Zak won't be able to get for us."
I nodded. Acid Queen started the van back up and pulled away from the curb. I didn't say anything as we drove to Granddad and Nana's neighborhood—Hoho gave all the directions. All I did was stick my head out the driver's side window and get us into the gate. Nana was already there waiting for us. She sighed deeply when she saw who was with me and Hoho.
"Argent." Mauer nodded in Nana's direction. "It's been a while."
"If you and Firestorm are here to see me that can only mean one thing." She sighed deeply and looked at me with glistening eyes. "Come in. I'll see what I can do for you."
Not much was said as we quietly went into the house. Granddad was already in bed, so hopefully there wouldn't be a repeat of the drama from earlier in the evening. We brought several boxes and crates up from the basement of the house, and loaded them in the back of the van. The last of them had been loaded when I heard the front door of the house open again.
I didn't even have to ask. I looked up after closing the back of the van to see Granddad leaning up against one of the pillars on the porch in his pajama bottoms, watching us. Nana went up onto the porch, and they spoke to each other quietly for a moment. There was no apparent tension between them, thankfully. "Let's go." Mauer's voice was slightly raspy in my left ear. I went around to the passenger side of the van and started to climb in when I felt a hand on my shoulder. "No," Mauer said. "We have somebody to talk to before we leave."
Mauer, Firestorm, and I walked up to the porch and stood there quietly. I looked down at my shoes for a moment, and then looked up into Granddad's eyes. He had an arm around Nana, holding her protectively. They both came down off the porch and stood before me.
"So, I hear they're calling you Casey Jones now." Granddad sounded a little amused by my new street name.
I nodded. "Yeah, yeah they are." Casey Jones was a character from an old kids' trid. He was a hockey player too.
There was an awkward silence before Granddad put a hand on my shoulder and said, "I still don't approve of this, Neal. You realize that." There was no anger in his voice—only sadness.
I nodded slightly as I looked down at my feet. "I understand."
Nana hugged me tightly and kissed me on both cheeks. "Mauer and Firestorm will brief you on the way down. Listen to them," she said softly. "They got me out of Chicago alive, and if you listen to them they'll get you out too."
"What about Papa?"
Nana held my face in her hands and smiled sadly. "Don't worry about Papa. Worry about Neal." Then she hugged me again and stepped back. Granddad and I didn't say anything—we hugged, and he stepped back and put an arm around Nana again. I turned and looked at the dynamic duo.
"Let's go." I turned back briefly to see Granddad and Nana watching us. For a brief moment, I wanted to stay—but I knew that I couldn't do that.
As we left, I found myself praying that we'd all come back alive and in one piece.
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Let me tell you a little story. It's true, all of it. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Back in the 40s, a group called the Universal Brotherhood sprang up—first in the California Free State and Seattle, then eventually worldwide. They preached love and togetherness and compassion and all that shiny happy drek that people need in this chaotic day and age. They helped the sick and ran clinics for people addicted to 2XS, this bleeding-edge simsense that really better than the standard Better-Than-Life stuff. You want to talk about getting truly lost in a fantasy, 2XS was it.
The UB, it turned out, was a front for the bugs. The poor slags that came to the Brotherhood for help wound up becoming hosts for insect spirits in the giant hives hidden behind the UB storefronts, and nobody bothered to check it out until missing persons reports started coming in a regular avalanche across North America. That was when the FBI started to act, shutting down UB installations and clearing out the hives quicker than you can say "Dunkelzahn".
Chicago had the largest of the hives—we are talking fraggin' huge, a giant hive with dozens of sub-hives. The feds walled off much of Chicago in about '57 or so (after some idiots from Knight Errant botched a bug-hunt and loosed a ton of bug spirits across the city) and called it the Containment Zone, claiming that there was a possible VITAS outbreak. There were rumors floating around that a shadowrunning team sent in by Ares Macrotechnology was trapped inside the Zone while fighting the bugs and had detonated a subtactical nuke inside the main hive under Cermak Street. The rumors were all true—but people didn't find that out until later.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on who you ask—the blast was pretty contained. But that didn't help the people of Chicago, who were terrorized for the next three years and change by roving swarms of insect spirits and petty self-crowned warlords that decided to carve up Chicago for themselves. The wall around the Containment Zone finally came down after Ares sent dozens of teams (both corp-slaves and shadowrunners) in to clear out the hives in Chicago. The problem was pronounced solved, and everybody lived happily ever after.
Right.
Now, what does that mean for the five of us in the converted DocWagon van, you ask? More importantly, what does this have to do with the Stanley Cup?
I'm so glad you asked that question.
The Stanley Cup is a 16-kilo hunk of solid silver. I mean, there's a base that they fit the rings around, but that base is hollow. The rest of it—the bulk of the trophy's weight—is all silver. Acid Queen was right—there are indeed mages that would kill to get it, but for one thing: The Cup has been bombarded for well over 150 years by the raw emotion and passion of millions, especially all the people that have touched and held it. Remember what I said earlier about it being magical even when there was no magic in the world? It would make one hell of a focus, but no mage or shaman in his right mind would dare try to use it because of the spirits and astral impressions surrounding it—the "background count" is just too damn high.
Of course, it can be argued that the bugs aren't exactly in their right minds. And it's pretty clear that they weren't all cleared out of Chicago, either.
There's more to it of course, but I'll save it for later.
Our target was an abandoned sports arena in downtown, on the corner of Warren Boulevard and Madison Street. According to what Acid Queen had been able to find out (and according to what a few city spirits told Firestorm and Hoho), this was the location of a new Wasp hive—and it was big. The bugs, so it was said, had found something big to act as a focus, making them stronger and more powerful than your garden-variety insect spirits. And they had a Queen.
When a bug hive has the Queen spirit, that's bad. It means that the hive is harder to get rid of. A LOT harder.
We got in to Chicago in the wee hours of the morning. I caught some sleep on the ride down as Acid Queen drove, and dreamed of skates and ice and spiders and wolves and bears (oh my!) and then I felt Mauer shaking me awake.
"Time to get up." He'd changed into tight-fitting black BDUs and had on a headset and throat mike. "One last briefing, then we roll."
When I woke up yesterday morning, I was thinking about what I'd be doing when I got off work that night. Now I was waking up in the back of a converted DocWagon van in Chicago and getting ready to suit up so I could get ready to fight a Wasp hive for possession of the oldest trophy in professional sports.
It was all so strange and alien—but then, these are the bugs we're talking about. They're strange and alien.
The plan was simple: Break in. Firestorm, Mauer, and I would cause a distraction. Acid Queen would cause whatever havoc she figured she could cause. And Hoho would get the Cup from its hiding place with the help of whatever spirits he could scare up.
Silly us, we forgot the old combat axiom: No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
======================================
The doors opened on the side of the van, and Mauer and Neal headed around to open the back of the van and start unpacking crates. The assortment of hardware was small; spray canisters of nicotine sulfate with directional nozzles, belts of ammunition, a minigun, and a couple of long flat boxes.
Neal picked up a box and looked at it. "What's this?"
Mauer took the box from him and opened it. Inside were two dozen long brown tubes and two lighters. The street samurai took a lighter and put it in one of his pockets. Then he took several of the tubes from the box and spread them out among several other pockets. "Cigars. The smoke slows the bugs down. The nicotine is insecticide—hits their nervous system and rips it apart." He went back to loading guns and preparing blades for combat, oblivious to the elf standing before him.
Firestorm drew a ritual circle on the ground with some silver paint. When the circle was complete, she spread her arms and started chanting in the ancient language of magic.
Neal pulled his gear bag out of the back of the van and lugged it around to the side, where Acid Queen had jacked into a public-access Matrix terminal. He looked around for a moment, then started to strip. He placed his clothes to one side after he took them off, then took several slow breaths and concentrated to center himself. The young elf took a skintight black body stocking out of the bag and put it on, focusing on the feel of the breathable spandex against his skin. He cleared his mind as he continued to dress—garter belt, stockings, pads, socks, pants. Neal reached in and touched the skates in his bag, to move them to one side so he could reach his gloves. He looked down and paused for a moment, then took the skates out of the bag and set them next to his helmet.
Currents of mana started crackling inside the circle as Firestorm chanted the summoning ritual. Chunks of plascrete, junk, and trash were drawn into the circle, swirling around each other and coalescing into a vaguely humanoid shape which rose up and towered over the mage as she completed the spell that called it forth. She stood slowly, fighting off the draining effects of her summoning spell as the city spirit stood there silently.
Hoho took two spray canisters from a crate in the back of the van and set them down next to Neal. He took several cigars and the second lighter from the opened box and stashed them in various pockets and pouches on his person.
Neal reached into his bag and took out a hockey stick. Gleaming coppery filaments shone on the blade and shaft of the stick as Neal fitted a directional nozzle to the top of one of the canisters and set it aside before taking a roll of black stick tape from his bag. He sprayed some of the thick insecticide onto the blade of the stick, letting it dry and become slightly tacky before wrapping the center of the blade with the tape. He sprayed the tape with more of the stuff before handing the canister to Hoho, who started to spray a couple of combat knives.
Mauer's watch beeped as the runners completed their preparations. Acid Queen's jaw was a somewhat slack as she continued to navigate the Matrix. The rest of the team gathered around Mauer.
"Acid Queen's going to be shutting down the power to the building. We go in. Firestorm and I create the distraction. Casey and Hoho go to get the magoffin. We get out of the building, Acid Queen places one last call, and we let Lone Star come in and mop up." He looked around. "If there are no questions, let's get started."