Robert N. Charrette - Secrets Of Power 2 - Choose Your Enemies Carefully

VIP免费

2024-12-19 1 0 920.11KB 682 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

WILL THE VILLAINOUS MAN OF

LIGHT HALT SAM'S QUEST FOR

POWER?

Sam rebounded.

The Man of Light blazed before him, glowing bulk

filling the tunnel. There was no way around the

Man.

Sam darted away into a side passage and almost im-

mediately pulled up short to avoid running into the

Man of Light again as the gleaming figure suddenly

flared into existence in Sam's path. Sam spun to re-

trace his path, but, again, the Man confronted him.

He twisted his head to look over his shoulder.

It was dark. By the time he had turned around, the

Man was there, in front of him. Sam raised a hand

to shield his eyes from the brilliance.

The Man of Light laughed at him.

SHADOWRUN: CHOOSE YOUR

ENEMIES CAREFULLY

---------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------

SECRETS Of POWER

VOLUME 2

SHADOWRUN:

CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES CAREFULLY

ROBERT N. CHARRETTE

A ROC BOOK

---------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------

PART 1

We All Wear

Masks

---------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------

Three days ago, the pain had seemed unbearable.

But as time passed, the constant discomfort

lessened

• the burden by dulling her senses. As late as this

morn-

ling, she thought that she had grown used to it.

Then

cramps had started. The crippling agony had

racked her with increasingly frequent spasms all

day.

Now, it was almost dark.

She didn't dare cry out.

A new spasm tore at her intestines and clawed its

way up her torso, firing her insides with blazing

agony.

Despite her best intentions, she screamed as her

mus-

knotted in the brutal grip of the convulsion.

As the wave of pain ebbed, she lay panting, certain

that she had betrayed herself. Slowly, painfully, she

dragged herself deeper into the gloom of her chosen

shelter. The inhabitants of this rundown building, if

there were any, remained hidden. Her only

company

was her misery. Moaning at the pain accompanying

her every movement, she forced her legs to carry her

up the stairs. If she could get far enough away, they

might not find her tonight. The ravening fire in her

belly threatened to overwhelm her, but she hugged

one

arm across her stomach and continued, bracing

herself

against the stairwell wall with the other. c

---------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------

4 Robert N. Charrette

She only made it up two flights before she collapsed,

whimpering. Silently she cursed her waning

strength.

Orks were supposed to be tough. The physical power

she had known for the last year had been the only

compensation for her change, and now that strength

had abandoned her. Just like Hugh. And Ken before

him. Even her brother had left her to be disposed of

with the rest of the unsightly trash.

They could all rot in hell.

The blaze inside her had died to coals, a hot pain

but bearable. In the recession of the pain, she

became

aware of a bone-numbing ache in her limbs. Her

mus-

cles, exhausted from her climb, trembled. Her skin

was clammy with sweat and itched unbearably. She

wanted to puke.

Her position on the landing offered her a view into

one of the derelict apartments. The darkening sky

was

framed in the room's window. Outside, the lights of

Hong

Kong sparkled awake, forming constellations of

sub-

lime and taunting beauty. The thin, seesaw wail of a

police siren drifted in through the open aperture. It

offered no hope of rescue. None of the corporate po-

lice ever came to the Walled City. Not even the En-

clave Police Agency, money-grubbing hirelings that

they were, could be easily bribed to appear in the

Walled City after dark. Gangs ruled the Walled City,

and many of them hunted the changed for fun,

A scuffing sound came from the bottom of the stair-

well and she froze. Her physical torment vanished

a rush of fear. Praying all the while, she strained to

hear anything further. The noise began again, and

she

recognized the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

She pushed off with her arms, forcing herself up-

right. The world spun around, but she managed to

stay

on her feet and stagger up another flight. This

landing

was as littered with trash as the last, but several of

the

rooms on this floor still had doors. That meant

some-

CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES CAREFULLY 5

one still lived here. Hoping the hunters wouldn't

press

the search into occupied areas, she chose an open

doorway and headed for it. As she attempted to pass

through the doorway, her head slammed against the

lintel. The shock forced an involuntary grunt of

pain.

In the distant lower darkness, there was a sudden

lence.

She listened, but there was no sound. The hunters

would be listening, too.

Minutes crawled by.

Her eyes were good in the dark. If she stood by the

railing and looked down, she might be able to see

who

was on the stairs. She didn't dare try. Even if she

man-

aged to suppress the vertigo, she would be exposing

herself. There were others who could see in the dark

: even better than she.

Her legs began to tremble again, and she felt her

tfear-induced strength fading. She wouldn't be able

fremain standing for long. Ducking her head, she

, slipped through the doorway. She stretched out an

arm

[and gripped the door, swinging it slowly closed. It

Lmade no sound that she could detect. That was

good.

|If she couldn't hear it, they probably couldn't

either.

The locks on the door were gone\a151only

splintered

|wood marked their former presence. Not that it

mat-

ftered; if the hunters tracked her here, a locked door

I wouldn't stop them. Her only hope was that they

would

[pass by.

The room was a sty, a haven for drifters and the

ameless. From the discarded chip casings scattered

about she knew that it had seen its share of Better-

fThan-Life parties. It would take a simsense world

I make this dump vaguely resemble a place to spend

any

{time at all. Any time at all? She might be spending

rest of her life here.

She could see nothing that might conceivably be

3d as a weapon. That really didn't matter\a151she

barely

---------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------

6 Robert N. Charrette

had the strength to stand; she would be useless in a

fight. She staggered across the debris-strewn floor,

barely reaching the far wall before her limbs failed

her. She found herself on the floor, not knowing

whether she had made any noise in falling. There

was

no sound of eager ork-bashers rushing up the stairs.

Maybe her collapse had been silent. Maybe they

would

not think to look in this room. Maybe she could go

back to her old life.

This squat was an awful place to die. Huddled and

heartsick, she waited. If she had had the strength,

she

would have cried.

From the other side of the door she heard the soft

scuff of a cloth sole. Someone had found her hiding

place. Faintly, she heard the sound of the lurker

sniff-

ing the air. It was an animal sound, like that of a

hound on a scent. After a moment the noise

stopped,

then she heard a brief scrape of clawlike fingernails

scratching the wood near the top of the door. There

was a brief return of the sniffing sound, then all was

quiet again.

There was no reason to believe that the lurker had

left. Perhaps he was patiently listening at the door,

waiting for her to make the movement that would

be-

tray her. If she'd had the strength, she would have

crawled out the window and taken her chances on

the

crumbling facade. A week ago she would have been

strong enough to scale the wall to safety. Now, her

muscles were too weak. Only her fear was strong.

She knew she had not fooled them when she saw

the

doorknob begin to move. It turned slowly, as if the

lurker himself was afraid. Afraid of sudden

movement

that might frighten his prey. Predators moved that

way;

slowly and with deliberate care.

She began to think that she had guessed wrong

about

the nature of her hunters. Gangs made a show of

their

kills. This sneaking caution wasn't their style. They

CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES CAREFULLY 7

wouldn't be worried about disturbing any squatters

the building. They would just barge in and, if they

had

picked the wrong apartment, barge right out again.

This stealthy approach argued a hunter who did not

wish to disturb any residents. Deciding that she was

not being stalked by ork-bashers gave her no relief;

there were worse, far worse, hunters that stalked the

night in the Awakened World.

The catch disengaged, the door swung open. Mov-

ing languidly, it yawned wider, until she could see

the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

WILLTHEVILLAINOUSMANOFLIGHTHALTSAM'SQUESTFORPOWER?Samrebounded.TheManofLightblazedbeforehim,glowingbulkfillingthetunnel.TherewasnowayaroundtheMan.Samdartedawayintoasidepassageandalmostim-mediatelypulledupshorttoavoidrunningintotheManofLightagainasthegleamingfiguresuddenlyflaredintoexistenceinSam'spa...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert N. Charrette - Secrets Of Power 2 - Choose Your Enemies Carefully.pdf

共682页,预览137页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert N. Charrette - Secrets Of Power 2 - Choose Your Enemies Carefully

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: