by Nyx Smith
She even made it sound sincere.
Rico backed away, then turned quickly and climbed into the van. Shank followed and slammed the side door.
The van rumbled and rolled ahead, accelerating quickly.
Surikov and Moffit and the pair of white limos disappeared into the gathering fog.
Then, the van rounded a corner, and Bandit said, "Trouble."
There was no distinguishing fog from clouds. The van slid into a sea of whirling, billowing white.
Thorvin shouted curses.
Abruptly, something came straight at them. Rico had just enough time to see it was a helo flying right on the deck, barely two meters above the pavement. It seemed almost near enough to touch. The only detail he noticed was the black annis logo on the forward slope of the helo's nose.
Something exploded. Maybe a rocket. Rico saw fire. The world roared and crashed and tumbled and when it finally came to a halt, he could barely see anything for all the smoke. Blood was running into his mouth, he felt a tightness in his left side, and if he breathed too deeply it hurt like hell. The van seemed to be lying on its roof, windows cracked and smashed. Rico struggled to stand, but something hanging above him kept getting in his way, and then he realized Piper was right beside him, gasping, grunting with pain, suddenly coughing.
He found her shoulders. Her grunts rose into shrill cries as he pulled her up. Smoke filled his eyes. It was turning from gray to black. Where the hell was the door? any door ...
Something crashed. Shank shouted. They stumbled out onto the street. Smoke mixed with fog. Burning debris littered the roadway for as far around as Rico would see.
The shooting started, a full company's worth of weapons blasting away on autofire.
"WHERE'S THORVIN?" Shank hollered.
The ground roared at their backs with the fury of another explosion. The shock wave all but knocked Rico off his feet. Rico staggered and caught himself, but Piper stumbled and fell to her knees. Rico tugged her back up, but she wouldn't stand, wouldn't stay on her feet. That was when he saw the bloody mass of hair at the side of her head and the dark stains on the back of her jacket.
"She's FINISHED!" Shank bellowed.
Shank yanked Rico forward, and Piper slipped out of his hands, falling like a sack, a sack of meat.
Rico tried to stop, but Shank kept pulling him and then half a dozen rounds slammed into his shoulders and back and he nearly passed out.
This was it, he realized. The end. There was no cover anywhere. It seemed like a thousand machine guns were stammering from all around. He tried to pull the Predator 2 from the holster on his hip, but he couldn't get a firm enough grip to tug the weapon free.
He stumbled over chunks of debris, piles of trash, with Shank shoving him forward and shouting,
"Keep MOVING!"
When finally Rico stopped and looked around, he stood in an alley and Shank wasn't around. The alleyway was deserted. He staggered forward a few steps, then turned and started back. All he could think of was leaving Piper sprawled like a bag of meat on some street in no-man's land without anyone to mourn her passing.
What the frag ...
What the frag was wrong with him?
His legs gave out. He hit the ground hard. He felt so tired, so weak. He couldn't keep his eyes open.
He laid his head against the cool, gritty concrete and exhaled deeply.
Fade to black.
39
Minx hesitated and looked away, a faint smile curving the corner of her lips. When she did that, Monk now knew, she was listening to radio calls or maybe getting a telecom call over her implanted headware.
She had once been a sort of messenger. Now, she mostly took calls from friends.
The change didn't affect that, the implants. After the change you couldn't get stuff like that put in, for various reasons that Minx hadn't yet explained, but anything you had before the change went on working just like before.
Which was good, Monk thought.
Now, Minx looked at him and smiled.
"It's time," she said.
"Uh-huh."
They ran-ran and ran-down stairs, down a long tunnel, more stairs, through a door, then onto the elevated walkway beside the lanes of a transitway. They had to run because they had what Minx called "only a small window of opportunity." That meant they had to be fast. They had to be "on time."
The red-hued darkness didn't slow them down. Monk could see just fine. Better than in full daylight, in fact.
A huge stepvan with flaring strobes and flashing lights came screaming around the corner of the transitway and screeched to a halt right in front of them. The passenger door banged open. Minx tugged on Monk's hand and they scrambled inside.
The truck roared and raced ahead. The slag at the wheel in the Omni Police Services uniform looked at them and grinned. His eyes glared a fiery red. He laughed. Minx covered her mouth and swayed with silent laughter. Monk couldn't resist a grin, though he wasn't exactly sure just what he was grinning about.
Minx had this sort of private joke between her and her friends that wasn't entirely clear. Monk guessed it had something to do with what they were, or what they had become, or the change, or something, but he hadn't quite figured it out.
Minx didn't seem to mind.
"You're so booty," she told him. "You'll scan it. Just give it time."
The stepvan roared out onto some ground-level street, and everything got hazy and foggy. The haze and denser patches of fog all looked kind of reddish. Everything did.
Abruptly, they came to a halt in what looked like the middle of a war zone. Police cruisers everywhere, flashing strobes, slags in uniforms, slags with guns. Minx grabbed Monk's hand and pulled him from the stepvan. There was a body on the pavement just a few meters away. The body of an Asian woman.
Minx smiled and nodded, urging him with her eyes, her whole expression, to go ahead.
Monk knelt down. The Asian woman might have looked dead, just at a glance, 'cause there was a lot of blood, but she wasn't really dead, not quite yet. The subtle radiance of the living lingered about her body.
It was hard to see, and Monk had only just recently begun to notice this kind of thing, but now that he knew what to look for, now that Minx had pointed it out, he could see it and see it clearly, as long as he took a moment to look.
He leaned down and put his mouth over the woman's mouth, then slowly inhaled. He kept inhaling till he felt a tingling suffuse his whole body. With that tingling came a pleasure even better than sex, at least in his limited experience. It was more than just physical pleasure. It made him feel full, strong, powerful, almost indomitable. If he let his imagination run wild, a danger Minx had warned him about, he could almost see himself possessing such great power that almost anything ...
Minx squeezed his shoulder, and bent to kiss him. They exchanged breaths, exhaling into each other's mouths, then inhaling that sweet, sweet breath.
"Now it's my turn," she said softly, smiling.
Monk nodded. "Sure."
There were other bodies waiting.
* * *
They were at Chimpira when the call came in L. Kahn took it via the telecom at his booth. Ravage, sitting beside him, heard the entire exchange. An informant reported that the runners who had been hired to bust Ansell Surikov out of Maas Intertech had just been ambushed up in Sector 9. Police were at the scene, but the informant believed the runners to be dead.
L. Kahn broke the connection, sat still for a moment, then softly cursed. "I hired backup in depth and what happens? Daisaka Security gets them with a gunship. There's no justice. No justice at all."
Ravage agreed, and reached over and picked up L. Kahn's drink, drew it to her mouth and had a sip.
L. Kahn frowned and looked at her. It was his unhappy frown. Intolerant
"I've had enough problems lately," he said. "Don't test my patience."
"I get these impulses," Ravage replied.
"You'll have to learn-"
If he had more to say, he didn't get it out. Ravage splashed the drink into his face. As he began reacting to that, she slashed her hand across his throat. The razors protruding from under her synthimplanted nails tore through flesh like a knife through air. No significant resistance.
As the first blood came pumping, pulsing, spraying out through the wounds, she reversed direction, making a fist and slamming it back into L. Kahn's face, shattering bone and gristle and driving his head against the back of the booth. The man bled, banged backward, and slumped in little more than an instant.
Then Ravage hopped up and away, before any of the blood and gore could stain her clinging silver-hued bodysuit.
The pair of orks L. Kahn had hired as extra guards turned to look, then just looked at her and waited.
These particular orks had no illusions about their place in the Newark underworld. They understood that when orders came from above, the good soldier simply nodded and obeyed. In this case, they had accepted nuyen from her, from her new employer, before nodding and pledging obedience. With a quick gesture she indicated that they should take charge of the body.
"Toss it in the Ditch."
Sanitation would cart it away.
On her way out of the club, Ravage stopped at a telecom and dialed the number her new boss had given her. The boss' helper answered, a dark-skinned elf. He looked a question at her.
"It's done," she told him.
"Muy bien," the elf replied.
That finished her biz for the night.
The sunlight seeping through the dark, grime-smeared window swelled and faded away. Days were passing, but Rico hardly noticed. He lay on a bare mattress on the floor of a squalid room in an abandoned building. He had a bottle by his side and some food. He had bandages wrapped around his chest and covering more cuts and gouges than he had interest in counting. Some fleeting instinct for survival had compelled him to find a street doc and go to the safest refuge he knew.
When he finally woke up in that alley, he'd gone back for Piper, but by then the streets were deserted, the bodies gone. Even the wreck of the van had been removed. It took the heart out of him. Maybe it had cost him his soul.
Little things came to mind now, how. Piper used to smile or laugh, the way she cast her eyes down when something embarrassed her. For all the razor-edged skill she'd had as a decker, she had been and would always be in his memory a reticent Japanese, a soft-spoken, loving, and loyal woman, more beautiful than any he had ever known. It occurred to him that this crumbling building wasn't far from where they had first met. This very apartment was where they had first made love. The place hadn't been such a wreck those few years ago. It had been tired and worn, but safe. Quiet.
How many months had they lived here? He couldn't remember. He'd been surprised to find the building still standing.
It was all he had left. He hadn't been smart enough to save anyone. He'd let them be used by the megacorps. Sure, they got Farrah Moffit together with the real Surikov-and had turned the pair over to Maas Intertech, but so what?
What did that matter now?
In the night he smashed the bottle and brought the jagged end to his neck, and held it there a couple of minutes. He felt the jagged knife-edge of glass grazing his skin, but he knew that this was futile. He didn't have the strength to do it. He didn't care enough to end it. He lowered his arm and let the broken bottle roll away. It was over. He was already dead. He would just lie here till the final fragments faded into the night.
Hours passed. He became aware of some soft sounds, faraway creaks and squeaks. He thought of rats and devil rats and the other creatures that inhabited the darker corners of the plex, and then the door to the room slowly swung inward.
A pair of dark figures appeared in the doorway, silhouetted by the deeper black of the hall. One looked small and seemed curved like a female. The other one had the heavy build of a big male, big enough even for an ork. "I knew I would find you here."
What the frag ... The voice was Piper's. Slowly, Rico sat up, shifting his Jikku eyes to low-light to better scan the doorway. To his astonishment, he saw Piper standing there, and Shank. They looked battered and bloody, but they were standing there alive. Rico struggled to speak He couldn't manage anything coherent He couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"One short sleep past and we recycle endlessly, jefe," Piper said softly. "And I'm going to prove it to you, my love, but first you must let me kiss you."
She shifted closer, smiling warmly.
Her eyes glowed a fiery red.
40
The chopper settled lightly onto the aeropad atop Fuchi Tower Five. By then, Gordon Ito was up, out of his seat and waiting at the front of the passenger compartment. His deputy director, executive aid, and exec sec all scurried to shut down notebook comps and close briefcases. His personal bodyguard simply rose and moved to stand beside him.
The moment the hatch was open, the steps lowered, Gordon strode down to the aeropad and across to the rooftop lounge. He moved briskly, but did not rush. He had something he wanted to attend to immediately, but that did not call for haste. Nothing could, in Gordon's view. Haste made waste, and in his position, hasty decisions and actions most often promised to result in disaster.
The elevator delivered him twenty stories down to his office suite. Moments later, he stepped into his private office. The tea lady delivered tea. Gordon lit a Platinum Select cigarette, then took up his tea and spent three minutes staring out the wall of windows behind his desk, considering how to proceed.
The decision made, he returned to his desk and brought up the telecom. In another moment the Fuchi logo, veiled by a black triangle, filled the screen. "Mr. Ito."
"Mr. Xiao."
"Konichiwa."
"Konichiwa."
"What brings you to my screen this evening, Gordon?"
"I've just had some intelligence handed to me. I thought you might find it interesting. I'm told that Ansell Surikov and Marena Farris have been recruited by Maas Intertech."
"Yes, I'm aware of that, Gordon."
"Were you planning to do anything about it?"
"I think not."
Gordon forced himself to pause a moment. Xiao's reaction was too complacent even for a man who demonstrated practically no emotion. Something had to be up. "You took the lead on this. You specifically ordered me to lay off Farris and Surikov. Now they're both with Intertech. That's going to improve Kuze Nihon's position in at least one or two key technological areas. And you don't want to do anything about it?"
"It is not necessary, Gordon."
"I'll remind you that Surikov is a leading light in bio-technical research."
"Maas Intertech does not have Surikov."
Gordon sat back in his chair, took a drag on his cigarette, and considered. His intelligence couldn't be wrong, it came straight from the source. That meant Xiao had to be wrong, or lying-or did it? "Then who do they have?"
"They are back to square one, Gordon."
Gordon hesitated an instant, then said, "You sonovabitch."
"Yes," Xiao replied. "I fear I've done it to them again."
Xiao had set them up-Maas Intertech, everyone. Gordon included. "How did you do it? Obviously, you fabricated another impostor. But you didn't do it the way I did it. You'd never use someone else's trick."
Two moments of silence, then the display screen blanked, the connection broken.
Bastard.
Epilogue
Raccoon was clever.
His paws were cunning hands. He could break open any trap and escape any danger, whether in forest or city, mountain or subterranean tunnel. But that did not make him perfect, not hardly. Or untouchable. Or fearless. Or certain of his own motives. Not as far as Bandit could see.
He had managed to avoid injury when the van turned over. He had managed to avoid being shot by any of the dozens of guns which had raked the street with bullets. He hadn't, however, quite managed to avoid being singed by the fiery explosion that had turned the v
an into a smoky inferno. Neither had he wasted any time removing himself from that fog-laden street of death.
His ways were Raccoon's ways, and Raccoon did not fight when so obviously outnumbered. It did not seem sensible to Bandit that anyone in such a situation would stand and fight, or do anything except run.
Or was he kidding himself?
It was not often that such troubling thoughts followed him to his medicine lodge. This was his private place, his alone place. Here, in this tenement basement, he had gathered the trinkets and fetishes and ritual materials of the ways of magic. Here, in this dark little room, he had survived the ordeal that had given him his first true taste of the deeper truths of metamagic. The problems of the outside world, the mundane world, seemed strange and alien in this place, as if they did not belong.
Now, he looked down at the flute lying in his lap, then lifted-it to his mouth and slowly, quietly, began to play. He didn't worry about playing any particular song or certain special notes. He let the music flow from within. He let something other than his rational mind decide how the song should sound.
In a while, be became aware that he was no longer alone. The Old Man had come again.
Bandit turned to find him sitting cross-legged right behind him. The Old Man looked vaguely Asian, but his thin gray hair flowed down over his shoulders and everything he wore appeared made of natural leather, brown leather, tan, like native people used to wear long before the Awakening, with necklaces and beads and bones. Bandit turned to sit facing him. They watched each other for a long time.
Was this Raccoon in some human guise or merely a spirit that had chosen to serve as his guide?
Bandit wondered. The Old Man's voice was as dry as sand and as creaky as old wooden boards. Yet there was a power, vibrant and strong, beneath the scratchy, sometimes wavering old voice.
"So," the Old Man said. "What do you want? You called me. You must want something."
"I don't know," Bandit said, frowning. "I'm troubled."
The Old Man shrugged very slightly. "I have no answers. I'm just an old man."
