The Lucifer desk

4

“Hey, mister!” Pita held out her hand. “Spare me something for a burger?”

She stood in the shelter of an awning on Broadway Street, watching the people hurrying past. With the light drizzle of rain falling, there was little foot traffic on the sidewalks. On a sunny afternoon, this trendy street would be packed with shoppers. But today the sidewalk soykaf stands were empty, their plastic chairs and tables beaded with water. Rather than venturing out into the elements, the shoppers were sticking to the connecting network of tunnels and skywalks that laced the city’s downtown shopping core.

Normally, Pita would have been panhandling there. But after her run-in with Lone Star, she didn’t want to face anyone in uniform. Even the mallplex security guards gave her the shivers.

Rain pattered on the awning overhead as Pita tried to catch the eye of the few people venturing out onto the sidewalks. Most stared straight ahead, doing their best to act like they didn’t see her. A few pretended to be consulting their watches or electronic address pads. Others-particularly the humans-glared at her with open contempt, freezing the words in her mouth.

After nearly an hour of this, Pita was about to give up. The cashier in the trendy clothing shop whose awning Pita was sheltering under was beginning to get more serious in her efforts to wave her away. But just as Pita was turning to leave, an elderly woman in a shabby coat, her fingers curled with arthritis, pressed a crumpled bill into her hand.

“Jesus loves you,” the woman said, her eyes bright. “Are you ready to accept Him into your heart?”

Pita glanced at the paper money. It was an old UCAS dollar bill. Not even enough for a basic burger at McHugh’s, “At the moment I’m more interested in accepting some food into my stomach,” she answered. “But thanks for the…”

Pita’s eye fell on a man across the street. He was a dark-skinned elf with copper-colored dreadlocks that had flexible glo-tubes braided into them. A baggy jumpsuit, patterned with rainbow slashes, hung loosely on his gaunt frame. In one hand he held what looked like a small glass sphere. The fingers of his other hand brushed over it lightly, as if feeling its smooth texture. He seemed completely focused on the sphere, oblivious to the falling rain. Then he looked up and his eyes locked on Pita.

The elderly woman stepped closer to Pita, cutting off her view of the elf. “Do you believe in God?’ she asked. “Have you heard-”

A faint yellow glow washed about the woman’s head like a halo. For a moment, Pita almost thought she was witnessing some sort of religious miracle. But then the woman staggered, blinking heavily. With a sigh, she collapsed onto the sidewalk.

Pita could see the elf again. He stood rigid, one hand extended. Then his other hand shoved the sphere into his pocket in a gesture of frustration. With a heart-wrenching shock, Pita realized that the elf was a mage, and that the spell he had just cast had been intended for her. She saw movement up the street. Two burly humans in suits had broken into a rapid jog and were heading her way.

The mage touched his fingers to his eyelids in what Pita guessed was some new spellcasting gesture. She didn’t wait to see what would come next, but plunged headlong through the front door of the nearest shop.

She could see her two pursuers through the windows, on the sidewalk outside. One was heavyset, the other slender. Both were Asian. As the shop clerks shouted protests, Pita hauled herself back to her feet, tipping over a rack of expensive jackets. She didn’t think she’d been hit by a spell, but there was no time to wonder about either that or why people were suddenly after her. The two men were at the door.

Bolting for the back of the shop, Pita swept her arms right and left, knocking over other racks of clothing. One of the men chasing her tripped, landing in a tangle of dresses and hangers. The other leaped the rack like a hurdle, pulling something from his suit jacket. A bright spark crackled just above Pita’s shoulder and she smelled the tang of ozone. The taser wire had just missed her.

As Pita skidded around the corner of the counter that separated the front of the store from its stock room, one of the clerks hit a PANICBUUON near the credstick scanner. A shrill siren filled the air. Pita bolted through the stock room toward its back door. It was held open with a wedge of plastic. Through the crack, Pita could see a store clerk, cigarette in hand. He was just reaching for the door, a puzzled expression on his face.

Pita slammed into the door, kicking away the plastic wedge. Before the startled clerk could react, she spun and pushed the door shut behind her. Electronic locks clicked into place. Until the siren was deactivated, the door would be sealed. But there was no time to heave a sigh of relief. The two men were temporarily stalled, but sooner or later the dreadlocked mage would figure out she was in the alley at the back of the store. From inside the stock room, someone pounded on the door Pita had just run through.

The shop clerk, a moon-faced boy in his teens, watched Pita fearfully. “I don’t have any credit on me” he said, backing slowly away into the rain. “My credstick’s inside the shop.”

Pita ignored him. Her heart was pounding. Which way to run? She stood in a narrow service lane between two buildings. At either end of the block it opened onto wider streets. Cars slid along these, their tires making hissing sounds on the wet pavement. At one end, traffic stopped for a light. Pita saw the distinctive markings of a Lone Star cruiser. That decided her. She turned and sprinted for the other end of the alley.

Pita ran easily now, in long, loping strides. Fear sharpened her senses and gave her a burst of speed. Soon she’d put several blocks between herself and the store. She slowed to a rapid walk, glancing nervously behind her.

Who was chasing her, and why? Were the two men in suits off-duty cops, coming back to button up the only witness to their crime? Neither of them looked anything like the male Star who’d confronted Chen, Shaz, and Mohan the night they’d been caught patching in to the apartment’s trideo feed. But it could have been a different pair of cops who’d gunned her friends down. The dark, uniformed shapes Pita had seen bending over the bodies of her friends had their backs to her. All she could tell was that they were human. She had no idea what they looked like.

And who was that dark-skinned elf with his magic globes and who knew what else trying to hit her with spells? Why would he do that? Was he with the Star? From the way that woman had gone down she knew he had to be a mage. Pita hoped his aim wasn’t any better next time.

She glanced again over her shoulder, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. Her eyes were stinging, but she told herself it was rain on her face, not tears. Why couldn’t the cops just leave her alone? Were they so afraid she’d tell someone what really happened that night? Fat chance of anyone believing her. The reporter at KKRU hadn’t. Nobody else would, either. Except…

Except Chen’s brother Yao. His crew would broadcast the story in a millisecond. They would give a lot of air time to a story about Lone Star Security trying to disguise the killing of an ork as the work of Humanis Policlub. Yao would see to it that his brother’s murderers were put in the spotlight.

But only if Pita could find him. Yao and his friends were pirate broadcasters, always on the move. It was hard enough for Chen to find his brother on trideo, let alone in person. The pirates used a different frequency each time, hopping from one unused channel to another or cutting in on a regular station while it was off the air, ghosting over its test pattern. The few times they’d broadcast live from a recognizable location, they’d only stayed on the air for a minute or two. By the time Chen and Pita hopped the monorail across town in an effort to track Yao down, he was long gone. But that only made sense. The Orks First! broadcasts were an intense scan, literally slinging drek at the windows of corporations that refused to implement affirmative-action hiring programs, or cutting into legitimate station’s newscasts and using graphics to distort the images of anyone who made a disparaging comment about the Underground. They slotted the networks off, and more than one had probably sent out its corporate security goons to deal with the problem. If the professionals couldn’t track Yao down, what chance did a lone Street kid have? Still, she had to try. The best place to start would be the Ork Underground.

Reaching Madison Street, Pita turned right and headed down the hill, toward the overpass that crossed the highway. Seattle’s downtown lay on the other side of the freeway. There, in the shadow of the Renraku Arcology, was one of the many entrances to the Underground.

The orks had claimed the Underground years ago. gradually renovating and expanding the network of tunnels that crisscrossed the city’s waterfront. They’d tossed out the dwarfs in the early 2020s, and had turned the Underground into a city within a city, with its own shopping malls, city ball, and security force. Lone Star Security occasionally entered the Underground to make a bust, but almost never patrolled there.

Pita gave herself a mental kick for not thinking of going to the Underground sooner. Not only was it the most likely place to find Yao; it was also the least likely place for Lone Star to find her. She shrugged and blamed it on the Mindease. She’d been doing entirely too much of the stuff since Chen died. This was the first time in two days that she’d been completely straight.

Pita kept watching for Lone Star cruisers, mindful of the possibility that the mage might still be on her trail. He could be following her in an unmarked cruiser, even now. The thought made her quicken her steps. She turned up the collar of her jacket and ducked her head down into it, hoping that it hid her face from the passing cars.

She crossed the highway and angled down Madison. The Renraku Arcology loomed at the base of the street, a towering pyramid seven blocks wide and more than two hundred stories high. Its silver-green windows shimmered with light; the rain sliding off them filtered it into soft ripples. Behind that tinted glass, thousands of people lived and worked in a climate-controlled atmosphere. Seattle could be experiencing gale-force winds or chilling hail, but inside Renraku, everyone would be wearing shorts and sunglasses.

Pita hung a right and headed down First Avenue, turning her back on the arcology. The buildings along First were modern, but at street level they’d been designed to look like the historic structures they had replaced. The shopfront glass was bullet-proof. but was hand-lettered and framed in dark-grained plastic that was indistinguishable from real wood. The street was lined with brass-trimmed street lights and paved with cobblestones. Cars passing over them made a rumbling sound. This was an area of taverns, restaurants, and shops that sold tourist trideos and T-shirts.

One of the largest of the area’s restaurants served as an entrance to the Underground. Pita pushed through the doors of the Seattle Utilities Building and caught an escalator to the basement. As she descended into the Big Rhino Restaurant, the noise level grew. This was a huge eatery, filled with long dining-hall tables crowded with patrons. The vast majority were orks, although a sprinkling of humans and dwarfs were squashed in among the larger patrons. Waitresses hurried back and forth with stems of draft beer or plates heaped with RealMeat and fries. Blue smoke curled around the ceiling fixtures in flagrant disregard of Seattle’s no-smoking bylaw.

The rich smell of the gravy-smothered RealMeat made Pita’s stomach growl. She wound her way between the tables, inhaling the savory smell. At the same time, her lip curled with disgust. The restaurant was filled with orks of every size and description, all of them chewing noisily and shouting at one another. They stuffed too much into their gaping mouths at once, they picked their teeth with splinters of bone, they slurped their beer noisily and then belched when the stein was empty. Pita knew that some of the behavior was natural, some of it exaggerated. It was bad enough they were orks. Why did they have to flaunt it?

She winced. That was her father talking. He’d never liked metahumans. Any of them. The elves were “pointy-eared pricks,” dwarfs were “foot stools,” and trolls were “horn heads” with the intelligence of a brick. Orks…

Orks were what Pita was now. But she didn’t have to like it.

She hurried through a second hall where most of the patrons were male. She tried not to look at the half-clothed woman who leered at the customers from behind a tall brass pole. The stripper had huge breasts, but it was hard to tell where they stopped and her bulging chest muscles began. Her face was painted in a horrible parody of a human woman; the dark eyeshadow gave her face even more of a greenish tinge, and the jutting canines ruined the effect of her lipstick. Even so, the men hooted and whistled, bellying up to the stage to wave in the hope of catching the stripper’s eye.

Someone pinched Pita as she went by. Still hyped up from the encounter with the off-duty cops, she yelped and spun around, one fist raised. The pinching fingers belonged to a troll, so huge that his eyes were level with Pita’s even though he was sitting down.

“You got a nice ass, girl,” he said. “How about you sit it down here, on my lap.”

“Frag off,” Pita snapped back. She was trying to sound tough, hut her voice was close to cracking.

“Ooh,” said a man next to the troll. “I don’t think she likes you, Ralph. But don’t worry if this one gets away. She’s not much to look at anyhow.”

Pita hurried away, her cheeks burning. She found the door at the back of the restaurant that led into an underground passage. It was about half as wide as a city street, and was fronted by shops and offices on either side. The walls were cobbled together from a mix of brick, concrete, and plastiform, while rusted metal pillars held up the ceiling. A grid of overhead lights, pocked with burned-out tubes, cast a pattern of shadows. The floor underfoot was heavy-duty linoleum, scuffed by the passage of many feet and littered with drifts of plastic cups and paper wrappers that smelled of day-old food. Orks of every description walked back and forth along it, pausing to look into barred windows or bustling in and out of doorways. A handful wore double-breasted business suits or dresses and pumps, but most were wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes that had been intended for human proportions. Mothers dragged complaining children along by the hand, while teens in baggy stretch pants and MetalMesh shirts lounged against pillars or rattled past on gym boards. Some of the orks rode scooters or electric bicycles, weaving their way between those on foot. The effect was a strange cross between an enclosed shopping mall and a rundown city street.

Pita walked slowly along the corridor, wondering which way to go. Unlike a megamall or an arcology, the Underground had no directory, no color-coded strip lights in the floor to follow. The narrow streets didn’t even run in straight lines. They zigzagged this way and that around the support pillars, disappearing around corners and then reappearing again. The shops seemed to be wedged in wherever they would fit.

Two orks wearing gray jumpsuits and leather holsters with oversize pistols walked boldly down the center of the corridor, scanning the people who streamed past. Occasionally one grabbed someone by the shoulder, dragging the pedestrian over to him. Crumpled dollar bills would change hands, and then the pedestrian would be given a rough shove and sent on his way.

Pita ducked behind one of the supporting pillars and kept it between herself and the two uniformed men until they had passed. These were the ‘security guards’ who served as the semi-official police force for the Underground. They were little more than goons who shook down the inhabitants of the Underground for protection fees. They were also the reason why Pita and her Street chummers never ventured into the Underground much. If you couldn’t pay the fee for the “protection” offered by the uniformed guards, you could always work off your fee as a press-ganged member of one of the maintenance crews who did all of the hard, dirty, and dangerous work of expanding and repairing the Underground’s ever-growing maze of tunnels. It didn’t sound like much fun.

An electronics shop seemed the most likely place to start her search for Yao. The first three Pita tried didn’t produce any results. None of them had heard of Yao-or was willing to admit that they’d sold equipment to Orks First! Exhausted and hungry, Pita was about to give up. She had decided to find a fast food outlet and do some scrap snacking-eating the soggy fries and burger crusts that patrons had left behind-when she spotted an electronics shop. It was tucked into the bend of a street, its merchandise displayed behind barred windows. A flickering holo of a trideo camera floated above the door, slowly rotating. A closed-circuit trideo set in the window broadcast the passing shoppers. The view panned back and forth, as if the holo-camera was doing the recording. It would have been a neat trick if the trideo set’s tracking hadn’t been so bad. The picture was smeared with static.

Pita rapped on the door of the shop, then waited for the clerk to buzz her in. It was a tiny store, just a couple of meters wide and deep. The shelves on either side were lined with home entertainment equipment, most of it second-hand. Large yellow price tags hung from each item. The center of the store was taken up with bins of off-the-rack electronics: fiber-optic cables, datachips, mini-amps, and interface plugs. Glass counters held cheap knock-offs of designer watches and electronic toys, made in some Third World sweat-shop.

The shopkeeper was a female dwarf who sat on a tall stool behind one of the counters. She was hunched over a cyberdeck, her short legs dangling. Half of her head was shaved, revealing multiple datajacks. A cable stretched from one of the jacks to the deck. On the other side of her head, her hair hung down in a thick braid. Her fingernails were covered in a thin layer of polished metal, making light clicking noises as she drummed them against the counter. Her eyes were unfocused at first, but then she blinked and looked up at Pita.

“Can I help you?” she asked, gently tugging the jack from the slot above her ear.

Pita started to shake her head. What would a dwarf clerk from a crummy little shop like this know about ork trideo pirates? But she’d come this far, Might as well ask.

“I’m looking for someone,” Pita said. “Yao Wah. Yao is the first name. He’s a pirate who shoots trideo for Orks First! I thought you might know him. He’s my friend’s brother and I need to tell him someth-”

The dwarf’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think I know this Yao?”

Pita shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought maybe he came in here to buy equipment.”

The dwarf stared at her impassively.

“Guess I was wrong,” Pita said, reaching for the door.

“I know him.”

“You do?” Pita turned around quickly.

“Yeah. He’s a class-A slot,” the dwarf said, wrinkling her nose. “Stifled me for a signal booster. Owes me five thousand nuyen. But is the fragger going to pay me? I doubt it. He’d rather deal with his own kind.”

Pita waited, sizing up the dwarf. “Do you know where I can find Yao?”

“You could try posting a message on the Matrix. Orks First! runs a bulletin hoard on the Seattle network.”

“I don’t even have enough nuyen to use the public telecom,” Pita said. “Besides, I need to see him in person.”

“You need to meet the meat,” the dwarf said. “Why?”

“Something’s happened to his brother. I need to tell Yao about it, face to face.”

“This brother’s important to him? You think Yao would answer if I posted something about the kid?”

Pita nodded. “Tell him it’s a message about Little Pork Dumpling. Then he’ll know it’s for real. He used to call his brother that because he was so fat when he was little.”

“Right. Wait one.” The dwarf slotted the jack back into her head and closed her eyes. After a second or two she opened them again. “It’s done. A friend of his is passing the message along.”

“That’s great!” Pita said. “When can I meet him? And where?”

“Right here,” the dwarf answered. “But not until he pays his bill, plus interest for the three months it’s overdue. And don’t get any ideas about going off to find him yourself. The door’s locked and armed. If Yao wants the meet, he’ll come. We’ll see if his ‘little pork dumpling’ is worth five thousand nuyen to him.”