Run Hard, Die Fast

by Mel Odom

  Three members of Ironaxe's sec forces stood at the doorway to the warehouse, all wearing the dark blue light military armor his troops favored on the op. Still at a dead run, coming out of the shadows and drawing their attention now, I extended the Ingrains and gave myself over to the smartlink capabilities and move-by-wire systems.

  There could be no hesitation now, no false moves. And if I couldn't fight for Andi in quite the way I thought I'd be able to, I could still fight for the way I saw myself.

  My fingers caressed the triggers of the Ingrams as Ironaxe's sec guards brought their weapons up.

  UPLOAD TO CONTINUE

  54

  [Chip file: Argent

  Security access: ******—22:59:57/10-14-60]

  UPLOAD CONTINUED Location: Seattle Safehouse (recorded at a later date) Hardwired into the move-by-wire and smartlink systems, time slowed and I became a gunsight. The initial bursts from the Ingrams slammed into the three men guarding the door to the warehouse and dropped them meters from where they'd been standing.

  I raced by the falling sec guards, aware that they hadn't even gotten a shot off. But I also didn't doubt that they'd been in contact with their commanding officers, announcing the attack.

  "Back." I yelled to Archangel as I slapped a Kleen-tac coated chunk of Compound 12 boomjelly to the locked doors. I set the two-second timer with a flick of my forefinger, then turned away.

  The shaped charge took out the doors, blowing them inward.

  Wheeling, I darted in after the smoke, the Ingrams in my hands again. The warehouse had a wide open pit area at the center of it. Memory of the schematic dropped into my head as I vaulted over the torn and buckled sheet plastimetal of the door.

  Bullets cut a swath around me, ricocheting from the floor and walls. Tracer-fire gleamed at the periphery of my vision.

  I leaped, going into an immediate tuck and roll, firing the whole time because the cybersystems I had allowed me to do so. Most of my rounds found their targets, knocking down men wherever they touched them, punching small holes in the walls when they didn't.

  I came up on my feet, finishing the clip in the left Ingram by taking out two men entering the room from a door on the ground level. I emptied the clip in the right Ingram by taking out the track lighting overhead, plunging the room into darkness. I had my cybereyes and I knew as an elf, Archangel would be able to see well in the darkness even if she hadn't been cybered. But Ironaxe's men were dependent on the night-lenses most of them weren't wearing.

  Dropping the Ingrams to hang from their Whipit slings, I drew the Savalette Guardian and flicked the safety off. The sounds of the gunshots, muted though they were because of the selectivity permitted from my cyber-ears, seemed to echo forever in the cavern of the empty warehouse.

  A man appeared at the railing on the stairway above me. He raised a hand and started to gesture.

  Magic takes time to use, and that's where a street sam has the edge on a mage. I lifted the Guardian, feeling the pistol's smartlink programming rushing through my palm and up my arm, replacing the Ingrams' programming. By the time I had the Guardian extended, it was as much a part of me as one of my cyberarms.

  I shot the mage through his hand, interrupting whatever spell he was about to cast, then I placed two rounds through his head. I was moving as he fell and broke through the frail railing.

  Hitting the bottom step of the stairway, I legged it up the stairs, pushing off on every third or fourth one. I knew it was twenty-three hundred hours and the sat-link Peg had set up was suddenly working because her voice filled my head.

  "Argent!" she called out.

  "Here, Peg." I said. And there was more pure emotion, rich and deep, in having her back than there was in seeing Andi again.

  "Are you all right?"

  I pulled up short against the edge of the doorway and tucked the Guardian in close. I listened, adjusting the perception of my cyberears, and ferreted out the sound of a man's frightened breathing inside the room.

  I tightened my grip and waited just a little longer, realizing the breathing was actually coming from two men.

  "I'm fine." I told Peg.

  Then I turned, dropping and bringing the Guardian up. The smartlink lit up both targets, painting one of them red to mark him as primary, and ghosting the other in orange to mark him as secondary.

  Bullets slammed into the door frame and cut the air beside my head. The second man had an external smartlink. I put a pair of rounds through the first man's chest, blowing him through the boarded over window behind him. He flailed weakly as he fell, letting me know the kill hadn't been instant.

  I shot the second man through his smartlink goggles. There was no doubt about when he flat-lined. He was DOA before his shattered face hit the floor.

  The room had been an office at one time. The comm-link gear occupied a scarred plastimetal desk that was covered with rust spots. Empty filing cabinets, their function going back decades, were over-turned in one corner.

  Bookshelves filled with spiderwebs covered one wall.

  "I've got it." Archangel said from behind me. She came into the room with her pistol naked in her fist and carrying the cyberdeck in her other arm.

  "Count it down." I rapped into the comm-link. "Team leader is One."

  "Two." Peg called.

  "Three." Archangel said as she placed the cyberdeck on the desk next to Ironaxe's back-up comm-link systems. Her hands moved fast and sure, feeling the coaxial cables between the two decks.

  "Four." Harrison Dane called, "and I'm in position, ready to jam my primary target."

  "Five." Jesse Travers said.

  "Six." Jason Travers said almost immediately.

  "Seven." Laveau continued.

  I watched as Archangel slid the deck cable into the datajack in her skull. An instant later, her whole body relaxed as she entered the Matrix.

  "Eight." Summertrees finished.

  Crossing to the broken window one of my targets had dropped through, I glanced out across the warehouse district. Ironaxe's people were in motion, getting their response together. In seconds they'd be breathing down the secondary comm-link station. Turning to the east, I pinpointed Dante's position. "Dane."

  "Yo." he answered laconically.

  This was the elven master assassin I remembered. Cool and competent, not full of himself. Even Toshi had acknowledged Dane as being better with the long gun. I reloaded my weapons, knowing we were all about to be in the fight for our lives. "Light up your first target."

  UPLOAD TO CONTINUE

  55

  Harrison Dane lay prone across the rooftop of the building twelve hundred eighteen meters from his primary target. He breathed smoothly and easily, and focused on his target through the thermographic sights of the Barrett Model 121.

  The thermographic sniperscope reduced the three men inside the sat-link command center to garish red, yellow, and orange simulacrums of human beings. Dane didn't see them that way. To the elf assassin, the three men were objectives and dangers. But they were dangers only if they were allowed to live. For the moment, they were objectives.

  Dane took his finger from the trigger guard and placed it carefully over the trigger. He breathed easily, smoothly, focusing on the man seated at the desk next to the sat-link deck. Then he pulled the trigger through.

  The Barrett jerked slightly against the shooting pad he'd Kleen-tacked to his right shoulder. The bullpup design of the sniper rifle, putting the ejector behind the trigger, also aided in recoil reduction. Still, the round was massive. Since he was using caseless ammo, all the ejector expelled was non-traceable smoke as the next bullet jacked into place.

  The APDS round streaked through the plasticrete side of the building without a problem, then struck the decker in the back of the head. He had the second round in the air before the first one hit, and had locked onto the third man just as the first round struck home. The third man didn't even have time to move as he watched the other two men flatline in front of him. Then he w
as dead as well.

  Dane put two rounds into the deck, making sure it was taken out of commission, then locked onto the sat-dish bolted onto the side of the building. His sixth shot sheared the plastimetal support strut and the power cord in two, dropping the sat-dish to the ground.

  "Argent, your primary targets are down." he said quietly. Spirits, he thought, tracking onto the first of the vehicles open to his field of fire, the trid show's success notwithstanding, there was nothing like being on this end of a rifle.

  "Message received." Argent replied. "Move onto your secondary targets."

  "Locking on." Dane put the thermographic cross hairs over the driver's side of the Landrover streaking toward Argent's position. He squeezed off another round, putting a bullet into the man's chest.

  The Landrover went out of control immediately, smashing into the side of a building. Before the men riding inside it could clear, Dane put a follow-up round through the gas tank, turning it into a burning pyre that killed at least four men.

  Swiveling his attention to a Leyland-Rover Transport van, he put two rounds through the front seat area, then targeted the gas tank there as well.

  Movement in the dark sky above drew his attention. Gazing over the top of the thermographic sniperscope, he spotted the Hughes WK-2 Stallion helicopter coming toward him. The Vanquisher heavy machine guns opened up, scattering scarlet fire from their barrels. The bullets ripped into the rooftop to Dane's left, closing in and letting him know the pilot must have been chipped to the max for weapons proficiencies.

  Coolly, Dane ignored the line of fire tearing across the gravel and tar surface. He put the cross hairs over his target. Shooting straight wasn't a problem as long as a chummer had the right equipment. And making a great shot was usually a matter of standing ground and taking that shot.

  He squeezed the trigger when the Vanquisher was laying down a spray of bullets less than a meter from him. The bullet hit the plastiglass nosepiece of the helo and cored through, striking the pilot in the head and doing its best to blow the man's head through the helmet in all directions.

  The Hughes went down in a skewed path, crashing into a warehouse and erupting into a red and orange explosion that lit up the battlefield.

  Dane didn't watch it burn; he was already moving on to other targets.

  56

  Miles Lanier watched the vid feed coming in from the sat-link over Pueblo in disbelief. Explosions rocked the warehouse district where he knew Andi Sencio was holed up. At first, he'd thought Sencio had finally gotten desperate enough to attempt to break free on her own.

  Lanier wouldn't have blamed her. Ironaxe and his people were practically breathing down her neck.

  Even though they had the vid, there'd been no way to get aud from any of Ironaxe's sec teams. He pressed one digit on his desktop telecom to connect him to Villiers.

  "I see it, Miles." Villiers replied calmly. "I'm watching it now."

  Lanier watched as one of the helicopters suddenly slid sideways and smashed into a fireball against a warehouse. "At first, I thought this might be Sencio's doing, that maybe the Underground Awakened had gotten cornered by Ironaxe's people and struck back. But as I look at it now, I see it's too deliberate." He glanced at Villiers on the telecom screen.

  "If it's Argent, he's running a higher profile on this than I'm comfortable with." Villiers admitted.

  "We still have the teams in Pueblo." Lanier reminded. "They could be there in five minutes, probably take Sencio and her team five minutes after that. But at the moment, I'd prefer to keep them there. As long as we know what's going on, let's keep our distance. Nakatomi has teams in the area as well, and that could still work to our advantage."

  Villiers's eyes cut away from the telecom screen. "Hold on a minute. I've got a call coming in on my other line."

  Lanier continued watching the destruction on the screen, amazed at how surgical it appeared. As a military specialist himself, he appreciated the action. Two men, possibly three, armed with armor-piercing rounds, he guessed. But he didn't think there were many in the Underground Awakened who had that kind of skill. And Sencio's people, the ones she had left, weren't capable of that kind of long-distance killing.

  That meant that the efforts he was watching had to be a result of Argent. But what was the shadowrunner trying to do? Any attempt he made to get Sencio out of the area would be a covert one at best.

  "Miles." Villiers called from the telecom.

  Lanier regarded his employer and friend, mentally prying around the dangerous edges of what he saw transpiring, trying to guess at the depths of the biz Argent must have put into action. "Yes?"

  "Clay Ironaxe is on another line." Villiers said. "He wants to use whatever satellite access we have over Pueblo. Somebody took his sat-link off-line. He's wanting to patch through our vid-feeds to coordinate his defense."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to let him. Under the present circumstances, I can't see how I can refuse him."

  "If you turn him down, tell him you don't have a sat-link over the area—"

  "He's going to know I'm lying." Villiers said. "If I tell him no, he's going to take that as a breach of faith."

  "And adding him to the sat-link feeds is going to jeopardize the integrity you have over that area." Lanier finished.

  Villiers nodded. "He's going on-line in forty-seven seconds."

  "Make sure those vid-feeds from that sat-link are separated from everything else we've got running through the Matrix." As security chief for NovaTech, the situation was incredibly anxiety-rife for Lanier.

  These were the instances Villiers paid him for, and the ones he lived to handle. His mind was already flying, figuring out angles to get around Ironaxe's presence. "We're going to lose our secured link with the teams you've got in Pueblo. Before we do, I'll contact my captain there and tell him that if he sees Nakatomi's people move in, or if Sencio is identified and captured by Ironaxe's people, or if the vid-feed is interrupted, he's to move in at once."

  "I want Sencio secured or terminated. Anything else isn't acceptable."

  Lanier agreed with a nod and punched the code into the telecom, counting down the seconds. He still had a really bad feeling about the whole situation. Going in bold as brass wasn't Argent's way. Not unless the shadow-runner was holding a hell of a hole card.

  57

  "We're not going to get the sat-link back. A scout team I ordered over there just confirmed that it's been totally fragged. We're down to the Phillips Tacticom communications system, which is going to limit us to local aud-links only because we don't have sat-link capabilities with those units."

  Seated in the air-conditioned and bulletproofed Command and Control Ares Mobmaster, Clay Ironaxe glanced at Aaron Bearstalker. "I've just placed a call to Richard Villiers." he said, controlling the anger he felt. "He's agreed to let us use the sat-links he has in the area."

  The Command and Control vehicle housed computer equipment that linked them with the individual ground and air units, leaving precious little space left over for the tech ops who marshaled those capabilities.

  Four techs worked feverishly around Ironaxe, trying to set up another in-country sat-link from his corporation, and going on-line through Villiers's systems through the secondary comm-link.

  "Villiers admitted they were there?" Bearstalker asked.

  "Yes. He told me they'd been put into place to watch Nakatomi. There's another Asian Fuchi sec team outside of Pueblo."

  Bearstalker glared at the eight small monitor screens in front of him. All of them showed different views of the action taking place outside. "So who's backing this play?" he growled. "Villiers or Nakatomi? Who's covering up ownership of these posers we've ran to ground?"

  Ironaxe shook his head. "I don't know. I've also called Nakatomi and requested access to his sat-link. In case Villiers's techs try feeding us false information, we can check the two feeds."

  "Unless they're in it together."

  "Worst case
scenario." Ironaxe said, "and I can't believe that's possible after everything that's transpired between them." He glanced at the monitors Bearstalker was watching. "Let's find the people responsible for this, and flatline them. Then we'll get all the answers we need."

  Bearstalker nodded in agreement.

  "And make sure our people know we're not working off of a secure line anymore. The world is listening in."

  58

  Archangel tripped the light fantastic inside the Matrix, flowing along the lines of data that suddenly rerouted through the direct satellite feed she'd managed through the comm-link. Once inside the Matrix, accessing from the LTG in Pueblo, she watched the cyber landscape spread out around her in all directions.

  In all those directions were strands of rainbow colored lights, threading through the black sky above her and the black firmament below her. Most of the ones streaming from the Pueblo Corporate Council appeared as southwest turquoises and blacks, shot through with reds and streams of silver. Between those strands of light that actually represented encrypted communications and data-transfers along the LTG were colorful nodes in thousands of hues and shapes.

  Concentrating on the datastream jetting out of the Pueblo LTG she' d identified, Archangel forced herself to concentrate on the job ahead of her. She was a professional, fraggit, and despite the confusion Argent had created within her during the last few days, she was going to do a professional job. She wasn't going to think about Jack or Emma or Quint or Elvis or Wheeler or Cullen.

  She reached out in front of her, imagining that the datastream coming from Ironaxe's location in Pueblo had gravity till she felt the pull of it. A private sat-link felt much different than normal LTG, and the sleazing took a whole new level of skill.

  The fact that the datastream wasn't a true exchange, but rather a vampiric relationship as the Pueblo site drank down all the incoming vid-feed from the sat-link boosting images from the drone NovaTech had over the area, made tackling it even harder. Still, Archangel was decker enough to know that Villiers's dataslaves would be trying to swipe as much data from Ironaxe's on-site decks as they could.