The Lucifer Deck by Lisa Smedman Read Free Book Online Page B

last.
    Carla smiled sweetly at him. "Ovaries, actually." Behind her, Masaki honked the horn twice more. "Remember," she told the other kids as she turned to go, "if you see Pita, tell her Carla Harris of KKRU Trideo is looking for her." She handed the kid her business card.
    Carla strode across the parking lot and wrenched open the car door. She and Masaki had been trying all that afternoon and evening to find Pita, but none of the street kids would admit to seeing the girl. She’d disappeared into thin air—and taken the Mitsuhama data-chip with her. Their producer had given Carla and Masaki one day to dig up some proof that there really was a story. So far, all they had were dead ends. And now Masaki was acting like an idiot, honking the horn like a frightened kid. He even had the engine running, as if fearing that a fast getaway would be imminent.
    "What the hell are you doing?" Carla asked Masaki angrily. "Trying to wake up all of Seattle? If you weren’t such a timid—"
    Masaki didn’t wait for the insult. "Look at this!" he said, pointing urgently to the compact trid built into the dash of his car. "I was channel surfing and stumbled across this pirate broadcast. Looks like they’ve found Pita for us."
    Carla climbed hurriedly into the car, thumbing the volume key beside the tiny trideo screen. Pita’s voice crackled from the speaker and her image wavered. At first Carla thought it was just the trideo unit acting up, but then she saw the channel display. The broadcast was coming in on Channel 115—a channel that should have been carrying nothing but a blank blue field. This was clearly a pirate broadcast, fed illegally through a cable booster into a "dead" channel. The pirates were probably transmitting via remote feed to avoid getting caught, should their input be traced. The resulting distortion had caused the color to shift; Pita’s face was distinctly green. But her voice was coming through, loud and clear, despite the occasional pop of static.
    "This is where it happened." she said in a quavering voice. "This is where my friends were killed."
    The camera pulled back from Pita, revealing the wall behind her. The words that had been painted in the orks’ blood were faint but still legible, thanks to an overhang that protected them from the rain that had been falling steadily throughout the day: "Human Power!", "Goblin Scum Must Die!" and "Keep Our Human Family Pure!"
    Carla jabbed a finger at the screen. "That’s
Rainier Avenue South
, the spot where those three orks were killed by Humanis Policlub. I shot trid there a couple of days ago. If this is a live broadcast, that’s where Pita is right now."
    "It’s live all right." Masaki said, wheezing with excitement. "But the pirate would be a fool to broadcast from an identifiable location. Lone Star would be all over him before he’d even finished his intro.
    "See this faint blue line?" He traced Pita’s outline with a finger. "The kid’s image has been inserted over a shot of the corner where the kids were killed. The pirate is shooting with two portacams, one slaved to the other. He’s using a mixer to paste the two images together."
    "So how do we find him?" Carla asked.
    "The portacams can’t be more than a few hundred meters apart." he said. "He’s got to be within a block or two of that corner or else the signal would suffer too much distortion and the images wouldn’t match up. And he must be shooting outside to capture traffic noise. We’ll find him." Masaki put the car into gear and punched the accelerator. "Now what was that name you wanted to call me? A timid what?"
    "Shh!" Carla hissed. "I’m trying to listen to this. Has the kid said anything about the dead mage?"
    "Not yet." Masaki rounded a corner, tires squealing. "It’s been nothing but intro so far. After introducing Pita, the reporter went into this rambling spiel about the coming revolution and injustice against the metaraces. Usual bulldrek. About what you’d expect from