Burnout stood, alert and focused, scanning the darkened room of the rundown restaurant where Ryan Mercury had been tortured. Musty blue wall-to-wall shag carpeting, patterned with gray diamond patches. Old curtains the same color, hanging from threads. Tables and chairs of rotting wood scattered like defunct cyberware. Bone-dry aquarium, filled with spider webs.
Burnout concentrated hard to keep his attention on what the people around him were saying. There were three others close by, talking and planning. They weren't speaking to him directly. In fact, they spoke about him as though he weren't there.
He was used to that, and he didn't care. Because much of the time, he wasn't aware of them anyway.
Two others stood inside the room's perimeter. Burnout had catalogued them by their heat signatures, had isolated their weaknesses and was ready to destroy them if it became necessary. They held weapons and therefore they might need to be neutralized.
"Burnout! Pay attention!"
The voice of Slaver came as if from a great distance, like a cry from outside, even though the man stood right next to him. Burnout turned his head, feeling the nagging itch in his neck again. Psychosomatic, he'd been told. None of his original neck muscles or nerves remained, all of it replaced with synthetic tissue and microhydraulics. He nodded to Slaver to indicate that he was listening.
Slaver was his commander, someone he knew he had to protect. Someone he had to obey. Slaver was a mage and short for a human. Much shorter than Burnout, who no
longer thought of himself as human. Burnout was easily the size of a large ork and weighed more than a troll.
Slaver's head was bald, covered only by an elaborate tattoo of a coiled snake that began at the apex of his scalp and spiraled out in greens and blacks and blues. He wore a loose-fitting jumpsuit of tan silk, ridiculous clothing that offered no protection against ballistics but let him move freely, which Slaver insisted was important for his spell-casting. There was a Jaguar Guard shoulder patch on the jumpsuit, and for a moment Burnout lost himself in the filigree detail of the jaguar design on the patch.
Burnout had been a powerful mage like Slaver. In a past so distant, so alternate and removed from his current state that Burnout remembered it not as part of himself, but as a history of someone he knew well. It was like channeling the spirit of another person, or a past life. Burnout had loved the mojo, had lived for astral conduit, the electric thrill of pumping all that juice through a tiny circuit to blow the living drek out through some poor slot's nostrils.
Then one day, his edge had dulled. He was a step too slow.
He'd gotten some cyberware installed to compensate. Mistake. Slowed his magic even more. The after-spell drain started taking its toll, and soon he found himself spending a week recovering from a two-hour run. That wasn't for him; he never took a back seat. He'd always been the best of the best, and so he got more and more cyber. He got training, learned how to kill people. He became a street samurai, one of the best. Until the Azzies gladly accepted his indentured servitude in exchange for state-of-the-art cyberware and top-of-the-line training. A career in killing in exchange for his soul. And finally, ultimately, that's what they took. His soul.
He couldn't remember when his past died and he became this incarnation. Two months earlier? Two years? His internal calendar would show it, but he didn't care. Now he was more machine than man; he was like a rigger for his own body. It was a thing of terrifying beauty.
He couldn't stand to see his own reflection. And the awful thing was that he still loved the magic, and he could sense it when it was near, like the smell of good food-subtle and alluring. He was drawn to it instinctively.
That was why he put up with the heaps of drek Slaver
piled on him. He hated Slaver, and one day the human mage would push him too far. One day Slaver would go the way of all Burnout's opponents-straight to Hell.
Burnout finally managed to snap his concentration back to the conversation. The human with the black hair and beard spoke to Slaver in a commanding tone. "Mercury is alive," he said. "My sources in Lake Louise report that he's there. You will find him and destroy him. Is that perfectly clear?"
Slaver bowed obsequiously. "Of course, Senor Oscuro."
"I have provided a rigger and a diplomatic Aztechnology rotorcraft to use as you need."
"Thank you, Senor."
The other being, which stood next to Slaver on the opposite side from Burnout, was not metahuman even though it looked vaguely like an elf. It had skin the color of dried blood, covered with large black pock marks that moved across the surface. Its head was bald, and the cartilage of its nostrils had been flayed into strips and peeled back where Slaver drew blood from it for some of his spells. Very gory, though Burnout was not affected by that. Its name was La Sangre, and it was a blood spirit. Bound and allied to Slaver. Like Burnout, the spirit was not allowed to speak.
Then the conversation was over and Burnout had missed most of it. Not that he cared one way or the other. He'd recorded it on his cybercamera so he could replay or search any section of it if necessary.
"Let's go," Slaver said, then muttered silently, "Imbecile."
Slaver must have thought that Burnout couldn't hear his fragmented whisper. Or maybe he didn't care. But Burnout cared; he was no imbecile. He was merely distracted. It was a condition that went along with the fragging territory. If Slaver couldn yt handle it, then Slaver could…
Burnout let the thought trail off as a rush of warmth filled him as an injection of his happy drug hit him. The chemical substance that kept him in line. Hatred was a good thing. The docs said it helped keep him alive, helped to keep his willpower up. But they didn't want him to overdo it. Thus they put the drug on an automatic injector. Measured his adrenaline or some such drek, and if he wasn't in a combat situation, it kept him from going off and massacring innocents.
Took some of the fun out of being such an awesome killing machine, but the rush was pretty nice.
Burnout moved to join Slaver and La Sangre as they walked outside to stand on the shore of the lake. The excavation was in full swing. Burnout could see that they'd almost completely unearthed the huge black stone.
Burnout knew the rock was magical, and the arcane glow of it was like a beacon to him, drawing him in like a cybernetic moth to a blow torch. He couldn't move; he must have it. Frag everything else. The rock held his future. It could restore his magic with its power.
The hypnotic rippling of the black surface drew him in, until he realized that he'd left the other two standing on the shore. He was chest-deep in water, walking further in.
A memory came to him then. They always came when he lost control. They wanted him to stay anchored in his new body, this horrid amalgamation of wires and fibers and metal. He thought of his mother, her face bright, smiling as she patted his head. He was eight years old, or maybe nine. She turned to him and said, "I'm so proud of you. Highest score again. You're always the best at whatever you do…"
The warm rush he felt in his memory was barely discernible from the drug in his system. Getting high on praise.
"Get back here, you idiot!" Slaver yelled. "We've got to go."
And by the time Burnout had come back to the present, there was a magic barrier of some kind between him and the stone. The allure of it was lessened by the barrier, but the stone's power was immense and the barrier couldn't completely mask it. Still, Burnout tried to focus, tried to ignore it and join the others.
A half-hour later, when they were in the helicopter, flying north toward Canadian American States territory, Burnout asked what they were going to do.
"You'll like this mission," Slaver told him. "We get to kill someone. Someone named Ryan Mercury."
14 August 2057