Whatever, she had killed Snapshot and hurt Fuego and she was going down for both crimes. She was going in through the roof and Night Shift was not equipped to get up there fast enough. The building he was on was close, but a good two storeys shorter than the Zhu Holdings building. But he did have the power-suit…
Backing up across the roof, Night Shift prepared himself and then began sprinting toward the Zhu Holdings building. At the edge of the roof, he jumped, throwing himself at one of the large windows…
~~~
‘Okay,’ Mink said, ‘that’s the security circumvented. Pretty good system. Just the lock to go.’
‘We’re in no hurry,’ Twilight commented. ‘The guy on the front desk is sitting there with his feet up. If we wait ten minutes, he might fall asleep.’
‘We don’t want to make this too easy, do we?’
‘I wouldn’t say no to easy. It’ll probably get harder when– He just woke up. What was that noise?’
Cygnus was turning toward the eastern side of the building. ‘I heard it too. Sounded like breaking glass.’
‘Well, the security guy has just gone frantic. He’s on the phone and pulling at his hair.’
‘Go look,’ Mink said. ‘I’ll have this open…’ There was a click and she smiled. ‘About now. If I need to pull out, let me know.’ She swung the door open, checked the stairwell quickly, and then vanished inside.
Frowning, Cygnus turned and lifted off from the roof, sweeping around the side of the building and circling. She found the shattered window after a few seconds and hovered outside it, looking in. ‘Something crashed in through one of the windows on the eighth floor,’ she said. ‘Definitely in, and something fairly big. Maybe a human. I can’t see anything moving from here.’
‘Well, it set off some sort of alarm,’ Twilight said. ‘We’ve got two more guys in the lobby and they look like they’ve got weapons on them. I’m guessing at sub-machine guns or machine pistols. You think we’ve got someone else hitting this place at the same time?’
‘Maybe. I–’
There was a burst of noise on the channel followed by Mink’s voice. ‘There’s someone else here,’ she said, ‘and I know who it is.’
~~~
Night Shift rolled out of his rather abrupt entry into the building and started running for the core. There would be a staircase there. If he was lucky, he could find the rooftop access and get there before Mink was through. Undoubtedly, the woman would try to pick the lock; if she was going to kill Zhu, who lived on the top floor, she would want secrecy. Well, if the building’s security was up to scratch, she had just lost the element of surprise.
Grinning inside his helmet, he pushed through the door into the emergency stairwell beside the elevators and ran up the stairs. He was getting no higher than the tenth floor this way, the roof access had to be elsewhere, but he could locate that when he was at the top. He considered warning Zhu specifically, but that was probably not required and certainly not a priority. Mink was the priority here and he was going to get her, no matter what.
On the other hand, as he burst through the door on the tenth floor and spotted a pair of men in suits standing in front of a fairly impressive pair of doors, he figured a little extra protection for the potential victim could not hurt…
‘You there! You’ve got an intruder. Mink will–’
The guards glanced at each other, pulled sub-guns from beneath their jackets, and fired. The lightweight weapons were not especially accurate and full-automatic fire was a notoriously inefficient use of ammunition: bullets peppered the wall around Night Shift, only a couple of them hitting home and flattening against his armour.
‘Hey! I’m on your damn side!’ More bullets whined off Night Shift’s armour as the men continued firing. ‘Idiots.’ Ignoring the gunmen, Night Shift spotted a door on his left, slightly ajar, and headed for it. More bullets hammered into his back as he walked calmly to the door and pushed it open.
~~~
‘Night Shift!’ June exclaimed. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Guess,’ Mink replied. She was backtracking down the corridor at a run: running into the armoured detective was not part of the plan.
‘He must have seen me flying around here at some point,’ Cygnus said. ‘But he would have to know about Zhu Holdings and care more about bringing in Mink than stopping an organised crime organisation.’
‘He’s a fixated asshole,’ Twilight supplied. ‘Easy to ignore the evidence if you’re determined enough.’
‘So… plan’s fucked?’ June asked. ‘I mean, do we drop it?’
‘No,’ Mink replied. ‘I’m heading for the records room now. All he’s done is provide the distraction we planned to create anyway. Maybe a better one. He doesn’t know where I’m going.’ She checked the corridor which ran along the back of Zhu’s private rooms. ‘Yeah, one of the guards on the records room has gone to find out what’s going on.’
‘All right,’ Cygnus said, ‘we move on.’
‘Yes,’ Twilight agreed, ‘we keep going. As soon as I have word that the girl has moved from downstairs, I’m going in.’
‘Right,’ Mink said, and she moved out, closing the distance on the guard as rapidly as she could. His head turned and his eyes widened, and his hand went for his gun. Mink waited for the pistol to appear before she acted, snapping her dart out with a swift, underhand throw. The metal spike punched into the man’s gun hand and he let out a yelp. Mink pulled the dart back, swept it around to orbit her as she turned, and sent it back in an arc which cracked into the top of the guard’s skull. He went down like a sack of potatoes.
‘I’m past the guard,’ Mink said. She pulled her toolkit from its hiding place under her left breast and moved quickly to the key panel beside the door. ‘Working on the lock now.’
~~~
In the shadows outside the building, Twilight watched as the guards fidgeted in the lobby. They were nervous and a little annoyed. She figured they were worried that they might actually have to face an Ultra, and also annoyed that all the fun seemed to be going on upstairs and they were missing it. She was not planning to give them anything to liven up their night, at least not any time soon, so they would have to stay annoyed.
An imp scurried across to her, gibbering urgently as it emerged from the sidewalk. ‘The Yin Xian’s on the move,’ Twilight reported. ‘I’m going in now.’
‘Okay,’ Cygnus replied. ‘I guess I’ll use the big hole Night Shift supplied and head down the stairwell.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’ Twilight stepped back into darkness, emerging a second later at the back of the lobby, behind the guards. Maybe if they had been looking her way they might have spotted the thickening of the shadows there, but as it was, they remained entirely oblivious as she slipped back to find the staircase down.
She was still working on the lock on the security door in the third basement level when Cygnus arrived beside her. ‘How’s it coming?’ Cygnus asked.
‘Slowly. Shut up.’
‘You know, Mink had the lock on the records room open in under a minute.’
‘I did know that. Thank you for pointing it out.’
‘I’ve got a hacking unit working on the computer,’ Mink supplied from far above them. ‘I’m checking filing cabinets. There’s a lot of stuff here to work through.’
‘Maybe the computer has an index,’ June said. ‘We had a database of paper records to make finding them easier, and Leighton and Thorpe was smaller than Zhu Holdings.’
‘Yeah,’ Cygnus said, a little sourly, ‘I got that working. It was a mess before I got there.’
‘Hey, I know you practically held that place together. I think Mister Leighton knew it too.’
‘Damn, I think they actually randomise the files to make it hard for someone to find things,’ Mink grumbled.
‘More likely it’s computer-indexed then,’ June said.
‘I’ll know in a minute or two.’
There was a click in the stairwell a
nd Twilight straightened up, grinning as she pushed the door open. ‘Okay, we’re through the security door. No sign of zombies or guards as yet.’
‘So glad you added the “as yet,”’ Cygnus said, stepping through the doorway ahead of her partner. The stairwell went down another three storeys, starting off with a single flight of stairs with another door at the bottom. ‘What’s on the floor below Blutadler’s lab?’
‘Generators and some fairly heavy air-conditioning systems, I think. They definitely looked like generators anyway.’
‘Operating?’
‘On standby, from what the imps saw. Lights, but little noise. Backups for the mains would be my guess.’
‘And guards on this upper floor?’
‘Uh-huh. I say we go straight for Blutadler and worry about them later. I’ll station a demon here. If they come out, it can chase them back in.’
Cygnus started down the stairs. ‘Sounds good to me.’
~~~
Night Shift glowered at the open door to the roof. He had not met Mink on the stairs and she was obviously already inside. He was going to have to backtrack–
A sound from below made him stop and look down. The stairs here seemed to run the entire way from the roof to the car park levels below the building and someone was coming up. The footfall had not been hard, but it had echoed. He heard another, higher up, and he was moving. He took the first flight of stairs in one leap, grabbed the handrail to swing himself around, and dropped onto the tenth-floor landing. Grabbing the door, he pulled it open, checking the corridor beyond: no sign of Mink there. He turned to look down the stairs…
A metal spike came out of the darkness, trailing a silken cord, and stopped against his faceplate. The hardened material deflected the dart easily and the multispectral imaging system in Night Shift’s armour showed him the person who had launched the weapon. It… was not Mink. He saw a woman, certainly, but an Asian woman dressed in some sort of bikini and flat-soled boots. A huge length of black hair whipped around behind her back as she continued up the steps toward him. For a brief instant, Night Shift was stunned. There really was another woman in San Francisco who used a rope dart, and that other woman did look like a Chinese assassin…
Well, he would take them both in and let the courts sort it out. Raising his fist, Night Shift swung at the woman who seemed to just flow around his fist, her hands encircling his wrist and arm as she turned, pushing her hip into his and pulling. There was a moment of confusion, and then the great Night Shift, detective and hunter of rogue Ultrahumans, found himself falling.
~~~
Diao Hua watched the armoured idiot fall for the first couple of seconds and then turned to the door. She was unsure of the capabilities of the suit he was wearing and there was some possibility that he could arrest his fall and return. From the way he had been going, she doubted it, but it was a possibility she could not ignore. The armour had been effective and he would be a problem if he returned, and she had not been briefed on any Ultra in a power-armour suit. A slip in the client’s research, no doubt.
She headed for the back corridor, toward Zhu’s personal quarters. In passing, she noted that both of the guards on the locked room she was not allowed access to were missing, probably gone to defend their master. A foolish lapse in security if the room was really that important, but not her concern. It was simply further evidence that Zhu’s people were ineffective, inefficient, and a good match for their master.
Zhu was not in his bedroom or office, which was a mark on his side: he was not avoiding a fight. The dining room where he held many of his meetings was also empty. Diao Hua found the ‘great man’ in his lounge, flanked by six of his boo how doy with guns and knives. They were all staring at the double doors into the room as though they might burst open at any second. Zhu was tense, his hands fisted. Green fire boiled around his clenched fists. Of Mink, or anyone else, there was no sign.
‘Why are you not guarding the German?’ Zhu snapped when he saw her.
‘The Professor does not wish me there, and the alert indicated that you are the target.’ Diao Hua regarded her client with disdain. ‘I have already engaged with one intruder. An armoured man.’
‘Night Shift. The door guards fired at him, but his armour stopped their bullets.’
‘Perhaps a fall down the rear stairwell will have more effect. You have seen no sign of Mink?’
Zhu’s eyes narrowed. ‘No…’
Diao Hua considered for a second. ‘Did you leave the locked room you will not explain to me unguarded?’
Zhu looked around at one of the men standing to his right. ‘No! No, sir, Hong was there!’ The enforcer looked terrified, and he possibly had a reason: fire was creeping up Zhu’s arms.
‘She is in that room,’ Diao Hua said flatly. ‘What would she be looking for there?’
Zhu was moving before she got her answer and she stepped aside to allow him past her. He did not look like he would stop, but would flatten her in passing. ‘Everything,’ he snapped. ‘But she’s trapped. There is no way out of that room except the way she came in. We have her.’
~~~
It took Cygnus three blows to slam through the door into the lab area. Someone had been quite determined that the room should remain locked, but it took more than steel to stop someone with Cygnus’s physical power.
The room was large, concrete walls dull with age and lack of care. As Twilight’s imps had reported, it was full of machinery, some of which seemed to be operational. The assumption they had all made on seeing the images was that Blutadler was having to get his manufacturing system operational again after the abrupt move. The Professor himself was somewhere at the back, among a lot of more complex equipment.
There were also six Blood Zombies standing in Cygnus’s way, but she did not expect them to be much more of a problem than the door had been.
‘Cygnus.’ Blutadler’s voice sounded through the room: he had to have speakers mounted at various points to eliminate the possibility of localising where he was speaking from. ‘I am so glad you decided to come. Take her! Bring her down. And find Twilight.’ The zombies stepped forward, raising their arms as though they meant to grab Cygnus and hold on. Well, it was a tactic.
Cygnus smashed her fist into the first zombie to come within range, knocking it off its feet. The rest of them reached for her, not striking, it seemed, just trying to grab. Only one got close and she dodged away from it, bringing her fist around for another strike. The creature was pushed back, but they were still coming, arms flailing as they tried to make contact. Three of them did and Cygnus felt a sudden shock of discomfort as something passed from the zombies to her. These were not Blutadler’s usual monsters!
‘That’s right, Cygnus,’ Blutadler said, his tone pleased. ‘I have learned from our last encounter. These zombies are tuned specifically to your cosmic energy signature. They will neutralise your powers and I will have you!’
‘Yeah,’ Cygnus said. Then she slammed her fist right through the chest of the nearest zombie. ‘Not working so far.’
~~~
Twilight watched Blutadler from the corner of the room, hidden in the shadows of his equipment. He was behind a partition wall and a door, but that was no obstacle to her. He was also behind four Blood Zombies which gave her more cause to consider. The things were unlikely to react to her terror effect: they were dead and quite possibly did not fear anything.
Still, it sounded like Cygnus might have a problem so it was time to step in. Black flame ignited along the length of Twilight’s sword and she sprang out of the darkness, bringing the blade down on the head of the nearest zombie. Dead flesh hissed in the cold fire, the bone beneath cracked, and what was left of the thing’s brain dissolved in flames.
Twilight saw the look of shock begin to form on Blutadler’s face. The zombies had not been expecting an attack from the flank and were still trying to adjust to the new situation. Twilight picked the one which looked like it was getting closest to figuring thing
s out and sliced its head off cleanly at the neck, following through with another before Blutadler stepped off to one side and smashed his hand down on a button.
Light flooded the room, bright and stinging. The fire on Twilight’s sword stuttered and then flickered out.
‘Ha!’ Blutadler barked, shading his eyes against the glare. ‘Your powers are useless in bright light, as I suspected. Kill her!’
Twilight flicked a glance at the zombie which was still trying to work out what it should be doing. ‘You’re forgetting something about my “powers,” Kopf.’ She darted forward, stabbing her sword through his stomach. ‘My sword works fine without them.’
Blutadler looked at her, eyes wide. He coughed and blood splashed Twilight’s face. Then his eyes glazed over and he began to sink to his knees. Twilight yanked her sword free and turned, slashing through the last zombie’s throat. It staggered away from her and she pressed forward, the next blow slicing off its head.
She looked around and down at Blutadler. His chest was still moving, if shallowly. Twilight raised her sword.
‘Don’t kill him,’ Andrea said. ‘He needs to stand trial and Cygnus could be in trouble.’
Twilight bit her lips together. ‘I really want to kill him. I don’t understand why you don’t.’
‘Because it’s too easy. He doesn’t deserve to get out of it that easily. He needs to suffer.’
‘Damn. That’s a good reason.’ Twilight turned and headed for the door to find Cygnus standing there, leaning against the doorframe. ‘You sorted out the zombies?’
Hunting Mink Page 31
