3

Goddamn it, it was The Dream again-"lucid dreaming," I think that's the right term, where you actually know you're dreaming, but still can't do squat about it.

I thought I'd finally left The Dream behind me; I thought I'd finally moved on enough that my subconscious didn't feel the need to dredge up old fears and pains anymore. Fat chance. Granted, The Dream had become much less frequent than it had been in the Bad Old Days. During the first few months after I'd gotten my cyberarm, The Dream was a regular visitor to my nighttime landscape. Every fragging night, it came back like a ghost to haunt me.

Maybe it would have been easier to deal with if it had always been the same-if repetition had numbed my responses-but it wasn't. The overall flow was the same every night, the general shape of events. The details changed, though-largely superficial things, like the order in which people were killed, or exactly when certain events occurred-so that I never knew what to expect

Over time, as the level of chronic stress in my system started to fade, The Dream grew less and less frequent: once every three nights, once a week, a couple rimes a month… Then even longer periods between incidents. Tonight, it had been nearly three months since The Dream had put in an appearance, and I'd started to hope that my shattered psyche had finally healed itself. Like I said, fat chance.

The setting was just as it always was: the secret lab complex underneath building E of Yamatetsu's Integrated Systems Products facility in Fort Lewis. Hawk had driven off the two hellhounds guarding the site, Toshi had dealt with the maglock on the main door, and Rodney was beside me as we made our slow way along the wide, helical rampway leading down into the bowels of the facility. The sadness was a dull ache in my chest and throat as I looked at the silent figures moving through the dreamscape. Dead, all of them: Hawk the shaman, Toshi the samurai, Rodney Grey-briar the mage… Dead because I'd dragged them into something I didn't understand, something that was way too big for me. I'd hired "irregular assets," I'd become the Johnson to a team of shadowrunners. I'd thought I had it all chipped, I thought I knew what we'd be up against. My overconfidence cost me my left arm, but it cost Hawk, Toshi, and Rodney much more.

Silent as the ghosts they were, the figures around me descended the spiral ramp. I could smell that strange, vaguely biological smell-something like yeast, but not quite-that would become so familiar later. We moved on through the soft, sourceless light-about the intensity of dusk, but redder than sunlight.

I knew what was waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp, I knew it… That was what made The Dream into a nightmare. I knew, but I couldn't tell anyone of my knowledge. Hawk, Toshi, and Greybriar had agreed to join me on this job, thinking they'd find a connection between Yamatetsu's Integrated Systems Products division and the new dreamchip scourge on the street 2XS. At worst, they expected to face corporate sec-guards and sarariman chipmeisters. I knew better.

We reached the bottom of the ramp, saw before us the door that I knew had to be there. I knew all too well what we'd find on the other side of that door, and I couldn't face it again. I tried to speak, to warn Hawk and the others away, but I couldn't force the words out. As Toshi started to hotwire the maglock, all 1 could do was run away.

I couldn't go through it again. Even after all this time- even after seeing my sister, Theresa, alive, clean and sober-I couldn't face it. It would rip me apart, tear open all the emotional wounds that had almost healed in my psyche. I couldn't look into that curved-walled room and see Theresa lying there, a sickly yellow umbilicus connecting her comatose body with the wall of the chamber…

The Dream hit me with a jump cut, and with no sense of transition I found myself walking point along the familiar curving tunnel that would lead Toshi and the others to their deaths. Again, no matter how I tried, I couldn't croak out a warning. And, even worse, 1 couldn't control my own body. I knew what was waiting for me around one of these corners, but like a passenger in my own skull, I couldn't stop myself from walking on. 1 felt my hands cradling my Remington Roomsweeper almost as if it were a baby. A lot of good it would do me.

Around the corner we went, and there she was as I knew she would be: the Wasp spirit Queen. The insect spirit summoned by the insane shaman, Adrian Skyhill. She lay there in the darkness ahead of us, a massive, distorted shape the unclean white of a maggot. Her huge lower body was segmented, her upper body the emaciated torso of the human woman she'd once been. Her long blond hair was missing in patches; her skin was bloated and blistered. Thin lips drew back from yellowed teeth in what could almost have been a smile.

I tried to throw myself aside as the magical bolt arced from her hand, but I was too late as I always was. The blue-white fire lashed over the left side of my body, engulfing my arm, and I screamed. Even in The Dream, the pain was overwhelming, all-encompassing. I collapsed to the soft, yeast-smelling ground, as Hawk and the others rushed at the Queen, weapons spitting.

Hawk was the first to go this time, turned into a flaming, twitching firebrand. Then Toshi, transfixed by a torrent of fire, and dancing in death like a dervish. I beard a scream from behind me, a shrill, piercing shriek that went on and on…

And suddenly I was awake, my pulse pounding an insane tattoo in my ears, my chest laboring like a bellows. My body tingled, from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head, as though someone had tried using me as a resistor in a low-voltage electric circuit. I rolled my eyes wildly for a moment as reality reassembled itself around me.

Yes. I was lying on the bed in my Randall Avenue doss, staring at the shifting patterns that the lights of passing cars painted across my ceiling. I was still fully dressed, and my clothes were wringing wet with chill sweat. Very comfortable indeed. I tried to slow my breathing as I let comforting normality seep into my body and flush out the fear poisons.

It took me a moment to realize that the high-pitched shriek was still in my ears, as if the scream had followed me out of sleep. I blinked and shook my head, and-almost like a digital sound effect-the sound morphed from a semihuman squeal into a more familiar electronic tone.

With a muffled curse, I swung into a sitting position and glared at my telecom.

An incoming call, that's all it was. The alert tone had penetrated my sleep, and my unconscious had gleefully taken it and woven it into the fabric of my dream. Just what I needed.

The tone cut off as the telecom software decided I wasn't going to pick up the call myself, and went into auto-answer mode. According to the data display in the corner of the screen, the call was directed to my default, rather than my private, mailbox, so I had little incentive to shake myself out of the rack to answer it in the meat. While the ancient telecom was chugging through the initial handshaking, I checked my finger watch. Nigh on oh three thirty. Looked like I'd overslept on my intended one-hour nap. Idly, I won¬dered if Naomi the smartframe had made it back with the correlations already, or whether she'd been waylaid by some electronic diversions along her path.

The telecom screen blinked and an image appeared… and my thoughts were suddenly anything but idle. I recognized the face at once. A middle-aged man: a strong face, a commanding, aquiline nose, and cold eyes. His hair was still cut short, subtly spiked, showing the chrome-lipped datajack in his right temple. When I'd last seen him, that hair had been salt-and-pepper, with the pepper predominant. Now it was almost pure gray-white, with only a few streaks of black left near the crown. His face looked older than it had only four years ago, too-a good decade older. The skin looked sallow and slightly loose, and there were dark bags under his eyes. I remembered the last time we'd spoken. He'd been working his guts out on an Ultra-Gym machine, running the computerized system at a setting of eighteen on a scale of twenty. Yet he'd still been able to carry on a conversation without gasping or yarfing up his lunch. Would he be able to handle even level one these days? I doubted it.