Shadowrun Legends: 2XS: ▾ ▾ ▾ by Nigel Findley

Author:Nigel Findley [Findley, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs

I didn’t call ahead this time—I just showed up. For one thing, I wanted to do it now, while I had my courage up. Then other thing was that if Buddy decided not to let me in, I’d have an excuse to bag out. I gave my name to the guard at the door, and suffered seriously mixed feelings as he nodded me through.

I rode the elevator to the fortieth floor, walked down the hall and pounded on Buddy’s door. Then I shifted uncomfortably for about a minute, trying to decide whether to knock again, wait longer, or just bug out. I was leaning more and more toward option three when the multiple locks snapped free and the door swung open.

Buddy was apparently going through a particularly quiet phase of her cycle. The rhythm synthesizer was still churning out its frenetic licks, but the volume was way down—somewhere just below the sound-pressure level of an idling Harley. She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, and looked me up and down, the movements of her head quick and bird-like. Then she flashed a momentary smile and stepped back to let me in. “Hoi, Dirk,” she said, for once actually giving me enough time to step inside before slamming the door behind me.

“Hoi, Buddy.” I intended to go right into my spiel, but my dry mouth seemed to seize up on me.

She examined me again. “You’re wound,” she remarked. “Wound tight.”

If my level of stress was such that even Buddy could sense it, I was definitely wound tight. “I need your help, Buddy.”

She shot me another smile. “I figured. Come through.” I followed her into the living room, watched in surprise as she pulled a remote from the folds of her ballistic-cloth sarong and cut back the percussion effects by a few decibels. Then she sank down into full lotus, and stared up at me. “What?”

I looked around, saw that the inductance headset still seemed to be connected to her cyberdeck. Part of my brain cursed: another excuse shot to hell. I pulled out the 2XS chip—I’d turfed the garish packaging on the way over—and held it out to her. “It’s like a simsense chip,” I said. In my nervousness, I found myself slipping into her own curt speech pattern. “I want to slot it.”

She looked at the chip but didn’t take it. “Why?”

I didn’t want to get into that. I’d asked myself the question too many times already. “I want to use the headset. Can you do it?”

“Simsense, sure.” She stared into my eyes. “It’s more than simsense, isn’t it? BTL?”

“More than BTL,” I told her. “It’s important, Buddy. Can you do it?”

“Course I can do it.”

“Will you?”

She thought about it a long time. Two, maybe three seconds. Then she shrugged and pointed to the chair. “Sit down.”

I sat. She took the chip, turned it over and over in her fingers. Then she met my gaze again. “More than BTL?”

I nodded, swallowing a fist-sized lump that had inexplicably lodged itself in my throat.

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