Freezing Shadows, Chapter 32

Chapter 32: A Favor

Hades Club Seattle was the biggest dance club in the sprawl, and operated 24/7/365. More importantly, it was actually busy during the majority of that time. Part of that was just due to the fact that modern business operated globally, so there were always people in Seattle who were operating on New York, Paris, or Neo-Tokyo time. Another part, though, was due to how Hades Club Seattle was connected to its sister clubs in Hong Kong and Paris.

Hades Club Seattle was the first, technically, but the other two were only a few days younger than the original, and they’d always been planned as a set. An ambitious plan, especially since each of the clubs was a staggering nine floors of dancing, drinking, and debauchery! But what really tied the clubs together was the fact that each club was themed around a different vision of the underworld, and each was connected to the others by augmented reality, so you could see holograms of the different ‘hells’ touching each other, and the people partying, all around the world.

Hades Club Hong Kong was themed around the nine circles of hell pictured in Dante’s Inferno. The Paris club, on the other hand, featured different levels of hell from Chinese mythology, as described in Journey to the West, with two of the eighteen hells being featured on each level. And Seattle? Seattle was fashioned after the Greek underworld, hence the name.

To enter Hades club, you first had to take Charon’s Elevator up to the ninth floor. Going up cost two credits, a reference to the coins needed to pay the ferryman in the myth. Stepping off the elevator, you stepped onto the far shore of Oceanus, the river that marked the border of the land of the living and the dead. This floor was the most sedate of the nine, serving primarily as a restaurant and lounge, with a stage for live acts.

From there, you would take the stairs, or a glass elevator, down to the level of your choice. Styx was your normal dance club. Loud music, flashing lights, and people just enjoying themselves to the fullest. From there, you continued down, through Asphodel Meadows, Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe, and Elysium, where the rich and powerful had their fun. However, it was an open secret that the ninth level, Tartarus, was where the shadows were thickest, and where the real fun was.

Tartarus was the only floor that didn’t share what happened there with the other clubs, and the other clubs didn’t let outsiders view what happened on their versions of that floor, either. To get into Tartarus, you either needed to be a member, a member’s date, or have a single-use invitation from a member. Fortunately, a club membership was something that could be rolled into certain levels of lifestyle, and I’d made sure to include it when I picked ‘high’ for the Entertainment section of my marina lifestyle.

The reason for the secrecy was because Tartarus was split into two sections. On the one hand, you had what was basically a high-end sex club with all kinds of fetishes on display, ranging from your typical bondage fare to more hardcore kinks. During the beta, I’d been there for a ‘special event’ when they’d brought in a Naga, one of the sapient snake critters that popped up in India when magic turned on, and watched as two women started having sex with each other, and the snake. Except it was a contest, where the first girl to cum found herself being swallowed, head-first, by the naga, literally getting eaten as the second girl ate her out. And then, the ‘winner’ rode the snake until he was completely satisfied.

The other side of Tartarus was why we were here, though. The club offered a series of meeting rooms that were swept for bugs before and after every meeting, and where the soundproofing was so good that a bomb could go off outside and you’d only know it because of some vibration in the floor. If you wanted to have a meet, and needed to be absolutely sure that you couldn’t be overheard, this was one of the best places in the sprawl for it.

It was also costly as hell. You got what you paid for, but renting one of the meeting rooms in Tartarus for a few hours cost the same as a bike or small car. Setting a meet in Tartarus meant that this was important, dangerous, or both.

Our ‘Ferryman’ guided us to the door of the meeting room. No ‘getting lost’ and wandering around down here. You got escorted to your door, and back up again. Even if you weren’t going to the sex club section. Especially if you weren’t going to that section.

The meeting room was basically like something you might expect to see in a corporate office anywhere in the world. Only difference was that the table was handmade, out of real wood, and the chairs were all extremely comfortable, and had price tags to match. Everything here was the highest quality, because that is what you paid for.

Alicia Cooper (formerly known as Pixie, or Trixie Pixie, back when she was a hacker), was waiting for us. The elf looked like she was in her mid-twenties, from a human perspective, but I knew that she was at least sixty. After puberty, elves just aged really freaking slowly. She was dressed in the kind of business wear that included low-profile body armor, and I knew she had her signature chrome-finished Mars Predator IV on her, somewhere. Only obvious cyberware she had was a datajack on her temple and her cybereyes, but I knew she was wired up, as well.

“Alicia,” I nodded, once the Ferryman closed the door behind us. “Good to see you in the meat again. I’m pretty sure you know most of the girls, but Berzerker, here, is the gunhand I told you about, few months back.”

“Icy,” she nodded back, her voice tense. Whatever she was calling us for, it had her on edge. “Glad to hear you’re all still in one piece, especially with that dragon business. Sit down, and let’s talk.”

We all sat at the table, and she started in, “Frankly, your call this morning was fortuitous. There’s a personal job I need done, and I was worrying over who to call. And if you survived a dragon…”

“Then we’re more likely to survive this gig, right? You mentioned it was going to take us out of the sprawl for a bit?”

“That’s right. Over to Yakima, specifically. Not far, but definitely in tribal lands, not our ‘wonderful’ bit of UNAS territory, here. I got word from my sister, in Ola Serin, that my nephew fell in with a bad crowd. Not quite religious types, but they have the same kind of fervor about them, you know?”

“Yeah, I know the type. Cult but not cult, yeah? So, you tracked his new friends to Yakima?”

Alicia took a breath, and I saw her knuckles go white as she gripped the arm of her chair. “The group he’s fallen in with, they’re calling themselves the Brotherhood of Unity. On paper, they’re all over the place, doing charity work, running youth programs, and trying to help the downtrodden. All that kind of stuff. People get swept up in it, and start preaching the values of the Unity to others. But you know what they say when something seems too good to be true?”

“It always is,” I nodded. “I’m guessing you found something?”

“No, it is more what I didn’t find. There’s no bad press on them. Anywhere. Normally, when someone starts giving the SINless a way out of poverty that doesn’t funnel them directly into the megacorps or government programs, you have someone out there bad-mouthing them, even if it is just a heavily biased hit piece. Someone does an expose, even if they have to fabricate evidence to make their argument, because there’s always money in outrage. Hell, even the UNAS Red Cross got hit with that Friends of Humanity smear campaign about giving diseased blood to Trolls few years back, remember? All designed as part of a campaign to make metahumans avoid getting treated for common diseases, which only makes them spread faster.”

Babydoll nodded. “I remember. It was just before the Crash. Covered a couple of those stories, myself, as we tried to find out what was real and what wasn’t. So, there’s no one out there trying to even do the least bit of slander on this Brotherhood of Unity?”

“That’s the thing. I’ve seen hints that people have been trying. But every time one of them gets close to publication, something happens. Accidents here, ‘gang violence’ there, and so on. Or the reporter suddenly does a complete 180 and starts praising the Unity. And any traces of what they were digging into is actively purged from the Matrix, so thoroughly that you have to do deep dives to find the trace of the deletions.”

That brought a frown to my face. Nothing good happened when things were scrubbed from the Matrix that thoroughly. It took more than just a little work to make it so there wasn’t even a hint of something being changed. “So, this not-a-cult has serious pull, both in the Matrix, and the real world. And your nephew is caught up with them? I guess the job is to extract him from their, what, compound?”

“They have a retreat in Yakima, which, on paper, is supposed to be a skills training and rehabilitation center for those who are down and out, or just need help breaking an addiction. If that was all it was, no problem. But some of the people who go to the facility come back… different, if they come back at all. New personality, barely remember anyone from their old life, and so on.”

“Which explains the cult-type feeling people get from them,” I nodded. “Anything else you can tell us?”

“Just some rumors. There’s apparently been sightings of unusual paracritters in the area. Giant bugs, if you can believe it. Things have a tough hide, so guns aren’t as great on them. But they stay away from places that have been sprayed with insecticide, so that might be a weakness?”

“Better than nothing,” I nodded. “Think capsule rounds with insecticide will work?”

“I hope so,” Alisha said. “I don’t like sending people into the unknown like this, but I haven’t even been able to find documentation on the build plan for their compound. I mean, even the building permits and tax records have been erased, with circular notes directing people to different departments if they are looking for the tax records. There are multiple shell companies involved, all of which officially have no assets, and so pay no taxes, but they all look proper on paper. The more I look into this group, the more red flags they’re giving me. But Lisa is my sister, and if her kid, Tyler is in the middle of it, I owe it to her to try and get him out.”

She took a breath. “I’m not asking you to do it for free, of course. In addition to working my contacts to try and find out about who put you up against a dragon, I can offer a supply of insecticide ammunition, with the kind of insecticide that the corpos use for those awakened locusts in the Midwest, and eighteen thousand nucred, from my own accounts. Half now, half when you bring back Tyler, or… well, if he isn’t around anymore, then when you bring me the head of whoever did it.”

I looked around at the girls, who all nodded slightly, and then back to Alicia. “You got it, Alicia. We’ll track down Tyler, and bring him home, or get confirmation on him, and whoever is responsible.”

Alicia sighed in relief, and said, “Thank you, Icy. All of you. This is a nasty bit of work, I know, but family is family. Sending you the initial payment, and a dossier on Tyler and what I could find on the Unity, and their facility. Just… be careful. I’m not sure how deep this goes.”