by Nyx Smith
L Kahn's expression seemed to harden. "That is impossible. As you well know."
"That's what the slag wants."
"At our first meeting, you accused me of playing dangerous games. I now say the same to you. The price for the run is fixed. If you bargain any further, you're bargaining for your life. And you will lose the negotiations. That is a promise."
This was going nowhere. Rico saw that clearly. L. Kahn had as much as told him that Surikov was bound for Fuchi Multitronics. But that was as much as he'd get. No one would provide proof. That might serve as incriminating evidence should anything go wrong.
This was the Sixth World. Image was everything.
"The other problem is time," Rico said. "The heat's on. I got the man in a safe place. I don't wanna move him till the sec forces're off the street."
"You find corporate posturing, intimidating."
"Maybe you want me to spit on you again."
Ravage tensed visibly.
L. Kahn lifted a hand, as if to hold her in check. To Rico, he said, "I'm prepared to accord you a degree of latitude on the basis of your connections and your reputation. You're now pushing at the limits of my patience. I will admit that the safety of the package is paramount. If you want time, I will grant it.
Twelve hours. By the end of that period, the streets should be clear of corporate forces. That is when we will conclude our business. There will be no further delays. Do you understand?"
"I got it, amigo."
"Very good."
L. Kahn got back inside the limo. Rico waited, watching Ravage. The cutter shifted half a step toward him but Rico had his Predator II in hand, the red dot of a targeting sight centered on Ravage's chest before she could finish the movement.
"Be seeing you," she whispered.
Rico bared his teeth in a grin.
* * *
The atmosphere inside the Command & Control vehicle was hushed. Colonel Butler Yates stood at the head of the control section in the rear of the vehicle. He had been there almost twenty minutes, silent and glaring, rapping his swagger stick against his leg, as if to remind everyone of his presence.
Doubtless, he also stood there to remind everyone that the Executive Action Brigade could not afford another frag-up. They had lost track of their targets twice already. A third such incident would likely cost them their contract.
Bobbie Jo felt the pressure intensely. She sat facing her console with a face like stone, but no amount of will or attempt at self-control could stop the sweat from trickling under her arms or from making her hands greasy and slick. The loss of the recee drone during the runners' escape from Mott Street had cost the brigade a small fortune, and the emotional cost to her had still not been tallied. The spiraling dive of the drone had brought her back in an instant to a cloudless day over Tampico in what had then been called Mexico. A heat-seeking missile slammed through her tail. What was left of her Federated-Boeing Eagle went ballistic, spiraling down at Mach Two into an Aztlan oil refinery.
Her legs, like her ride, like the whole damn government of Mexico, were broken to bits and burned almost to ashes. She might have gotten new legs but for the damage to her spine and connecting nerves.
The price tag for complete reconstructive surgery was almost beyond comprehension.
If she could just stick with the Brigade long enough, two more years, maybe three, she might manage to get the ante together.
She jerked when a hand touched her shoulder.
"Stand by for launch," Skip said, quietly.
Bobbie Jo nodded, wiped her hands on her blue Brigade jumpsuit for the twentieth time, then lifted the wire lead from her console to the datajack in her temple.
Jacking into the sensor feed of a Gaz-Niki GNRD-101 Scorpion struck Bobbie Jo like the thought of flying an Eagle blind. It scared the drek out of her. Suddenly she saw the world from about five centimeters above the ground. She could see left and right and straight ahead, and up, but nothing to her rear unless she turned her body to look. Her body had become articulated, and long and flat, with four sets of spidery legs, two multi-functional manipulator arms that looked a lot like pincers, and a tail, a sort of stinger, with special integral devices. She could hear a Brigade operative whispering, "Ground Nine in position," from somewhere behind her, but most of all she could feel the vibrations running through the ground, the passing near and far of hundreds of vehicles and perhaps thousands and thousands of people, all moving through the South Terminal of Newark International.
Any one of these people could crush her articulated body beneath their heels. The Scorpion was not built to take punishment. It had no weapons and no armor. It was about thirty centimeters long.
Defenseless. Impotent.
"Go, Bobbie Jo," Skip was murmuring into her ears. "Do it."
She scuttled forward, pushing the Scorpion to max. The wheel of a Mitsubishi Runabout seemed to loom up ten stories higher than her head. The chassis of the car, now passing over her, looked like the ceiling of some immense chamber, criss-crossed by massive supports and gigantic conduits and pipes.
The red winking blip of a target indicator kept drawing her ahead, from one car to the next, one row of parked cars to another. She wrenched herself aside when an enormous pair of human feet suddenly slammed to the ground directly ahead of her. She raced back into the shelter beneath a car when a turbocharged Westwind 2000 came bearing down on her at lightning speed. She hesitated only an instant when a gleaming red schematic overlay flashed in front of her sensor view, outlining the mottled black and dull green Landrover van before her.
Two meters more and she was under the runners' van-fast as a devil rat. Her audio pickup snatched voices out of the air, first, the runner's leader, then the fixer L. Kahn, saying,"... the streets should be clear of corporate forces. That is when we will conclude our business. There will be no further delays. Do you understand?"
"I got it, amigo."
A beeping sounded rapidly in her ears. Her target indicator soared to the underside of the van. She flicked her segmented tail upward, thrusting up high on her hind legs. The tip of her tail twitched, just once.
The dab of cyanoacrylate glue that spat from her tail stuck to the chassis of the van and hardened instantaneously. The micro-miniaturized transponder injected into the glue would be virtually undetectable until commanded to awaken.
Then, with a single burst, it would transmit the van's location to within a centimeter or two.
The sleeper planted, Bobbie Jo scuttled quickly away.
18
"Two, come with me please."
Shank looked up. "Huh?"
"We're taking a ride."
The small group gathered in the bolthole's living room-Shank, Dok, Bandit, and Ansell Surikov-looked at her as if puzzled, but Piper didn't wait for anyone to ask more questions. She had her kevlar-insulated jacket, her deck, and an Ares Model 70 Lite Fire automatic should she need it, and she wasn't going to give herself a moment to back out. She took the stairs to the sublevel garage. A battered Volkswagen Superkombi waited there, die backup vehicle. Taking it out and leaving Dok and Bandit stranded here with Surikov would light Rico's short fuse, but that was too bad. Sometimes Piper also had to do what she had to do. She got into the van and waited. Shank came along in a couple of moments.
"What's tox?" he asked gruffly, cramming himself in behind the wheel.
"We're going to the jackzone."
"Not the fragging Stacks."
Piper nodded.
"Rico ain't gonna like this."
As if she needed to be reminded ... "Please do not argue with me, Shank."
"You're making a datarun, right?"
"I have no choice."
Programs degraded, code was unraveled, secrets revealed. Fuchi I.E. had a corps of deckers who did little else but scan their cluster of mainframes for intruders, security flaws, and other weaknesses. System integrity specialists, they were called. By this time tomorrow night, the code Piper had gotten from Azrael mig
ht be useless. She had to use it now, and she couldn't risk making the run on Fuchi from their bolthole here in Rahway, Sector 13.
Technically, she shouldn't have probed the Fuchi cluster like she had earlier this evening. If she'd been traced, it would have been very bad. She had taken a calculated risk.
Shank started the van and got them through the fog and the dark and the swirling dust storms to Edgar Road. That took them straight into Sector 10, a place people called "the Stacks" because it was the heaviest commercial and industrial concentration in the Newark plex. There were also more telecom lines planted here than anywhere else in the plex, and traffic was intense. For deckers, this was the "jackzone" of choice.
A crowded local telecommunications grid might confuse a pursuing corporate decker or some trace and burn IC just long enough for a datarunner to get clear. It also provided multiple opportunities for illegal taps.
The few people who actually lived in the Stacks occupied small rooms crammed into the rear of commercial plants or in factory lofts.
Only a fool would live anywhere near the matrix address from which they started a run. That would be like requesting an armed assault from an organization like Daisaka Security.
Shank turned the van down Ripley Place. That was little more than a hundred meters from the New Jersey Transit yards and Port Elizabeth. The rumbling vibrations of trains and the stench from the port were as depressing as the litter-strewn roadway and grimy, decaying buildings running down either side of the street.
Down near the corner with Second Street stood a building with a ground-floor bar called Aulisio's Backroom. Shank parked the van at the curb, then followed Piper inside.
A narrow corridor led toward the back of the building and the dingy little "Backroom," which was filled with the usual collection of scuzboys and punks sporting the usual gutterpunk fashions. The slag behind the bar wore mirrorshades and a turban and only glanced at Piper and her heavily built companion as they moved past the end of the bar and through another door.
Two flights up, Piper put a wire-lead from her deck to the electronic lock on a door. The lock was jacked into a Sony cyberdeck on the other side of the door. Breaking the Sony's encryption program and the code locking the lock would take a mainframe comp skilled in large-number theory. Her Excalibur inserted an electron key that cycled the lock open in about three milliseconds.
And that was what it was really all about: keys. Another name for information. With information came power. Ignorance brought only misery and death. That was why the world's megacorps took such pains to educate their minions properly, and in the proper corporate creeds. To retain their stranglehold on the Earth's millions, they must keep their iron grip on all the information that mattered.
Piper grunted, and pushed through the door. The room beyond was small and bare. An old recliner sat near a Fujiki telecom. A sleeping bag and pillow lay along one wall. A garbage can overflowed with waste from a dozen or more Staffer Shack meals. Piper kept nothing important here because this place was expendable, and necessarily so.
Shank secured the door. Piper took a seat in the recliner and jacked in. She hesitated only a moment before initializing the cyberprog in her deck, just long enough to say, "If anything happens... tell jefe I was thinking of him. Only of him."
Shank grunted. "You sure this is a good idea?"
"There is no option."
Then she was sluicing down the datalines, slipping quietly from grid to grid under the guise of ordinary, low-priority E-mail. Taking the long way to the Manhattan telecommunications grid might cost her a little time, but she preferred to get there discreetly, unobserved, unnoticed. The moment the Black Towers of the Fuchi icon came into sight, she turned aside and entered a small white pyramid, just one of thousands on the Manhattan LTG.
The words "Village Plumbing" flashed in front of her eyes.
Then she was standing in a small electric-white room facing a sculptured dataline. The portal into the open line resembled an enormous skull with gaping jaws. Piper initialized the prog she'd gotten from Azrael.
A chartreuse skateboard appeared on the floor before her. The board blazed with the logo: Echo Mirage Express. Her iconic self suddenly exchanged its kimono for boarder gear: helmet, gloves, elbow guards, knee guards, hi-top sneaks. A flashing red and yellow sign appeared before the skull portal to the dataline, reading, "This Way to Fuchi Hell."
She stepped on the board and shot through the skull portal. The skateboard accelerated like a jet, the dataline beyond whipped back and forth like a snake. Sheer velocity tore at her clothes and forced her to lean forward almost horizontally just to keep from being blown off the board.
Abruptly, the dataline ended, the board vanished, her kimono returned, and she was plunging into a gigantic cavern of gray metal shapes and glaring, harsh red light.
Fuchi Hell.
She ripped a cord from around her waist and hurled the weighted end up and around to her rear. The weight caught on something, a pipe. The cord stopped her fall with a jerk. She swung back and banged against a wall of metal, then just hung there, taking in her surroundings. It was like hanging over the abyss, looking into the heart of some industrial monstrosity. The air smelled of molten metal. Enormous furnaces throbbed somewhere far below. Pipes and conduits ran everywhere. Spectral lights flickered and flashed.
All the scene needed to complete the hellish image were blazing fires and the moans and cries of tormented souls. Piper could hear those cries in her mind. They were the cries of the millions that corps like Fuchi doomed to miserable lives and wretched deaths.
Hand-over-hand, she pulled herself up, up, up to a gangway sided by a metal railing.
There, she discovered a huge iconic figure in a black hood and long robe with long, full sleeves. The figure arose from the gangway as if from out of a pool of liquid metal. The small red window in the figure's iconic chest winked in alternating sequence, in black, "Mysterious Stranger Smartframe. Beware."
"What do you know of Fuchi Hell?" the figure said.
Very mysterious. Piper resisted a sarcastic sneer, then considered the question, warily. "It's an echo. Like a mirage." '
"Reflecting greater realities."
"Apparently."
The Mysterious Stranger Smartframe nodded, and suddenly drew forth a sword more than two meters long, styled like a scimitar, and inscribed with mystical symbols in winking gold. "Follow."
"Lead."
The Stranger turned and led along the gangway, which led to an elevator, which shot up a thousand stories or more in just milliseconds. The elevator doors opened on a gleaming yellow room filled with row upon row of dataterms and dataterm operators extending off into infinity. "The Central Communications Node," said the Stranger. The elevator shot up another thousand stories. The doors opened on another room filled with rows of dataterms and operators, all orange. "The Central Management Information Node," said the Stranger. The elevator shot up further. Another room, this one red. "The Central Security Node."
Piper frowned. "You're showing me some of the most seriously secured nodes in the Fuchi cluster."
The Mysterious Stranger nodded. "You're welcome."
19
"It was too ... easy ..." Piper said, not for the first time, emphasizing the words profusely. "I can't help feeling like we're doing exactly what someone wants us to do."
Rico took a long drag off his cheroot, then looked back to the mirror and went on shaving three days' growth of beard from around his heavy mustache. "You're right," he said. "We are doing what somebody wants. His name is Surikov."
"That isn't what I mean."
"We're doing everything we can think of to stay alive. What else can we do? We're locked in."
"This is Fuchi we're talking about."
Rico put the razor down on the sink, then slammed his fist into the mirrored face of the medicine cabinet That wasn't enough, so he hit it again. He dented the metal cabinet door, he shattered the mirror, he cut the frag out of his ha
nd. But he didn't care about any of that. Right at this moment, he didn't care much about Fuchi or Piper's instinct about her run into the Fuchi cluster. When he looked at Piper it was to see her standing in the bathroom doorway with her eyes pointed at the floor and her face a pinkish color. That he cared about. He'd finally gotten through to her. He'd stood here and listened to all her explanations and now it was his turn to talk.
"You coulda been dusted," he said. "You coulda been traced. You coulda got Shank killed, too. You both coulda been nailed by Daisaka and interrogated, and then we'd all be dead."
"Please excuse me," Piper murmured.
"This, is supposed to be a team. I'm supposed to be able to trust you." The thought that he ought to be able to trust her more than anyone else on earth burned him enough to strike another match under his temper. He punched the medicine cabinet again. Hard. Piper's face went deep red, but it wasn't anger. It was shame, embarrassment. Rico had seen the color before. He hated himself for forcing her to it, but he couldn't help it
"You're right," she said softly. "I betrayed your trust The shame is mine. All mine. I'm very sorry."
"Dammit, I care about you."
"I'm not worthy."
Rico looked at the shattered mirror, but his anger drained away to nothing. "You shouldn't 'a gone off on your own. You shoulda waited for me. We shoulda had a plan. We shoulda thought about it You ka!"
"Yes, I understand. Please forgive me."
Reality was harsh. Maybe Piper was on her own when she went into the matrix. That was irrelevant.
If they didn't work as a team, they were dead. The world was too dangerous a place for any one person to see all the angles, even those involving just the matrix. You had to stop and think. You had to get other perspectives, other input. You had to think it through all the way, not once, but twice, and all the while stay aware that there was a larger world that might, maybe just by accident, get directly between you and what you wanted.
Rico took a deep drag off his cheroot then clenched his teeth and began picking broken bits of mirror out of his hand.
