At fifty nuyen a pin, Mia was working on pretty close to a thousand nuyen for this set, but Rachel knew, no matter what painkillers Mia was dosing, she wouldn’t make it more than another set or two. Not to mention if some customer wanted a little more intimate lap dance. However, that seldom happened to Mia, because she charged five hundred for a table dance. All for the customer to have the privilege of actually drinking any of the blood they shed from her body.
Before tonight, Rachel had found the blood-drinking thing a bit disturbing, but now it made her shiver, imagining what de Vries could do to Mia with those sharp teeth of his. She turned back to the bar and walked down toward the end as the music came to an ear-rending crescendo, barely drowning out Mia’s screams.
Suddenly, Rachel felt two small hands slip under her shirt and cup her breasts. She turned and saw Celone standing there, a wide grin on her sensuous mouth. Celone was the tallest of the night girls, with brown hair just past her shoulder blades and incredibly long legs. She was also the nastiest dancer.
“Hey, you working a double?” Celone yelled.
Rachel shook her head, still in a fog.
Celone’s grin turned to a frown. “Devon and I got a guy who wants a three-girl shower show. He asked for you.”
Rachel’s eyes tracked to the back of the bar where the shower slash hot tub set-up rested. Devon, a tiny girl with muscular thighs, over-sized breasts, and long, dirty-blonde hair, was already in the shower, letting jets of neon-colored body paint spatter her body.
The customer was just getting undressed, smiling at Rachel and trying to suck in his hairy gut.
Rachel shook her head. “You know I don’t do the live sex thing.”
Celone smiled. “He promised no touching, so it would just be you, me, and Devon. Sex with girls isn’t the same thing.”
Rachel frowned. “Sex is sex, no matter who you do it with, and I don’t do it for nuyen.”
Celone frowned, “Hey, that’s not fair to Devon and me. Besides, when was the last time you made five hundred nuyen in under ten minutes?”
Rachel shook her head again. “Sorry, I’ve got to find Flak. You seen him?”
Celone’s frown turned into a full-fledged pout. “Come on, Rachel. I’d do it for you.”
Rachel doubted that, but she just smiled. “Why don’t you ask him if he wants Jessica? Everybody says we look like sisters.”
Celone’s big brown eyes widened. “Rocket. He probably won’t even know the diff.” Then she started to turn around as the music began to wind its way back upward.
Rachel grabbed her arm. “Have you seen Flak? I’ve gotta talk to him.” Her frustration bled through into her voice.
Celone turned, and pointed behind the bar. “In the office, with Lucus.” Then she was gone into the smoky depths of the bar.
Rachel turned back to the bar, and saw who she was looking for.
Flak, the bartender-doorman, steped from the gloom at the rear of the club, and walked toward her with a smile on his face. That smile had been known to make norms weep with fear. Flak stood over two meters, small for a troll, but there was no mistaking the sheer power in the ripcord twist of his muscles. His massive head was shaved, and his knobby left arm was covered with a huge tattoo that he’d once told Rachel was a Special Forces tat.
“Rachel!” he bellowed over the music. “What’re you doin’ here?”
Rachel gestured toward the back, behind the bar, and screamed, “I need to talk to you!”
With a nod, Flak led her back through the tiny kitchen area, and past a storeroom to the cramped office.
Lucus, the owner was just getting up. He was an older man, turning heavy, but with the most gorgeous mane of salt and pepper hair Rachel had ever seen.
“Boss,” said Flak. “can I use the office for a minute?” Lucus looked at Flak, then at Rachel, and for just a moment, his eyes narrowed. Then he looked more closely at Rachel and grunted. “Yeah, but make it fast.”
After he was gone, Rachel sat down in front of the desk, while Flak tried to fit his bulk up onto the side of the desk itself.
“What’s on your mind, Rach?” Flak’s voice was soft, gentle, and completely out of place coming from that mouth full of tusks.
Rachel looked up into the huge man’s eyes, and she realized for the first time that they were black, with absolutely no delineation between where the pupil ended and the iris began. It had never occurred to her before, even in their workout and training sessions, but now she wondered if they were natural or augmented in some way.
“How did the run go?” she asked.
Flak grimaced. “We had some minor frag-ups,” he said. “Pretty standard really.”
“Did you convince Carlos to stop beating Corinna?” Flak gave a harsh laugh. “You could say that. Carlos won’t be beating anyone anymore. For the rest of forever.”
“Oh.” was all Rachel could say. She had no sympathy for Carlos, and if anyone deserved to die, he was her number one candidate.
“Why?” Flak asked. “You got another job for us?” He started to smile, but it faded the moment he saw the look on her face.
Rachel felt the laugh bubble up in her throat and it came out dry and brittle, the laughter of someone who’s seen too much and gone quietly insane. The sound of it scared her.
Flak’s expression didn’t change, but his voice took on a hard tone Rachel had never heard in it before. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Rachel laughed again, trying to bold back the tide of emotion running through her. “What do you know about vampires, Flak?”
Flak’s eyebrow arched, but he didn’t laugh at her, and for that Rachel was grateful. “Not as much as some people, but more than you might think. Why do you ask?”
Rachel took a deep breath as Flak reached his mammoth paw into the desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of Petron tequila and two shot glasses. “You look like you could use one.” He poured the drinks, and handed one to her.
Without a word, they slammed the liquor at the same time. Rachel let the smooth, bitter liquor slide down her throat like a tiny bit of molten lava. It was real tequila, not the synth stuff, and started a small warm glow as it hit her stomach.
Flak smiled as he took the glass from her. “Better?”
She nodded. “You remember my man, Warren?”
Flak’s small eyes narrowed. “He do something to you?”
Rachel laughed again, and was relieved to hear it come out sounding normal. “No. No, I think something’s happened to him.”
“Go on.”
Rachel pulled a smoke from her small purse, and before it I was even to her lips, Flak had magically produced a small golden lighter.
She took a deep drag. “I got off work tonight and headed over to his place. We always get together on Wednesdays. Just before I got there, I met this guy. He told me Warren was gone, and that the people who had taken him away were going to do horrible things to him if we didn’t get some help.”
Flak leaned forward. “You know this guy?”
Rachel shook her head. “No. He said his name was DeVreece, or de Vriss, something like that.”
Flak rocked back on the desk. “Martin de Vries?”
Rachel started. “You know him?”
Flak shook his head, and let out along breath that sounded like a balloon being slowly deflated. “Know him? No. I know of him, though, provided this slag really is de Vries. The guy’s a fragging legend.”
Rachel’s voice turned bitter. “He’s a fragging vampire.”
Flak chuckled. “I’ve heard that. But what he’s famous for is hunting other vampires.”
Rachel took another drag from her cigarette. “Well, this de Vries says he knows where Warren is, and can get to him, but can’t pull him out without help. When I told him I knew some people, he said that was one of the reasons he was telling me any of this.”
Flak nodded thoughtfully, and reached out to lay one of his huge hands on Rachel’s shoulder. “Where’s this de V
ries now?”
“He’s still at Warren’s place. He said he’d wait there for your answer.”
Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door, and Lucus’ voice yelling, “Flak? We got a situation here!”
Flak moved so fast that to Rachel, he suddenly blurred out of sight. The door banged open, and the sounds of shouting invaded the office.
Rachel leapt to her feet and ran out of the office, through the kitchen and into the bar, just in time to see Flak, over by the shower area, pulling the naked customer out of the hot tub by his hair.
Flak dragged the dripping man grimly toward the door, while Devon, also naked and trailing splatterings of neon body paints behind her, followed after the two, pausing every couple of steps to kick the customer as hard as she could. With every kick, the man let out a short, high-pitched scream.
As he passed Rachel, Flak yelled, “I get off in an hour. I’ll talk to some people and meet you at Warren’s in an hour and a half.”
Rachel turned, catching the fierce light in Flak’s eyes. “You know where it is?”
Flak smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll find it.”
Then he was gone, still dragging the man toward the front door.
Rachel used the ensuing confusion to slip quietly out the back.
9
I’ve been monitoring some closed-door proceedings here at UniOmni. and there is a certain research scientist who night be of interest. He fits our profile, and his expertise is unparalleled. I think we may have struck orichalcum.
–Email transmission, J. B. Darl, Communications Support Team, Universal Omnitech, New York City, to blind account. London, England, 19 September 2051
Dr. Oslo Wake walked through the decon unit on level 7, beta wing. The decon area had been shut down ever since he and Pakow had converted beta into the stasis floor.
Passing row after row of long, rectangular canisters, Wake checked the status of each vampire stockpiled there. It had been Pakow’s idea to store the vampires when they weren’t needed. It was a brilliant idea and easy to implement. Depriving vampires of air put them into a coma state, shutting down their physiological functions. That meant all he and Pakow had to do was keep them comatose, which let them house as many as two hundred at virtually no cost.
As Wake checked their status, he also double-checked the datajacks inserted into each unit. When Pakow had suggested the stasis chambers, a light had come on in Wake’s mind. In the early days of the Terminus Experiment, he’d been plagued with the problem of how to keep independent and very powerful creatures from taking matters into their own hands once they’d served their purpose as test subjects. Several of those first vampires had managed to escape their holding cells, and had to be killed.
Now, Wake had each subject implanted with both a datajack and a chipjack before undertaking any other procedure. The chip Wake had decided to use was strictly psychotropic in nature, and guaranteed that the compound’s experimental vampires looked on Wake and Pakow with a kind of blind love and adoration. They would do anything either man commanded. The datajack simplified how the vampires would be controlled. Depending on what tasks the comatose vampires were required to do upon waking, the datajack allowed Wake to instantly download instructions to scores of them without any effort.
The plan had worked perfectly.
Wake paused for a moment, feeling the exhaustion deep in the backs of his legs and in his shoulders. He concentrated for a moment, willing his muscles to relax. As he did, his mind drifted to the path he’d taken in the last six years. He turned his head to the left and the right, looking down the line of long canisters, and he let a small smile touch his lips. They should have known, he thought. Those fools at UniOmni should have known nothing could stop me. that every obstacle only sharpened my resolve. They should have realized they couldn’t deny me my destiny.
Wake’s tall frame was wrapped in the second skin of his envirohazard suit, and he refitted his face mask. The suit was merely a precaution, because without the special chemical bath, the contaminants in the room couldn’t find purchase on the human form. Still, better safe than sorry.
Wake yawned, suddenly finding himself exhausted. He bent to check the computer readouts again, satisfying himself that all was as it should be. Then he went over to the large stainless steel tank that dominated the far end of the large room.
The subject, one Warren D’imato, seemed to be taking the first step of the procedure well, his vitals strong, his brain patterns registering as normal.
Behind him, he heard Pakow shift in his chair and call out the reading. “One-oh-one… one-oh-two…”
Wake ignored him. it wasn’t that be didn’t appreciate Pakow’s attention to detail, it was more that he was so tired that the other man was beginning to become distracting.
Finally, when the body temperature was close enough for them to begin pumping the first of the chemical compounds into the tank, Wake let himself relax.
“I know him,” Pakow said abruptly.
For a moment Wake wasn’t sure if Pakow had actually spoken, or if his tired imagination was playing tricks on him. The words were uttered so softly, and Pakow wasn’t one to make idle conversation. He turned to his assistant. “Did you say something?”
Pakow didn’t look up from his work, but spoke again. “I know him.”
Wake was confused for just a moment then he understood. “You mean the subject?”
Pakow nodded.
“A friend of yours?” Wake could not imagine that Pakow would have refrained from speaking up before this, but they were still in the first stages of the process, and no damage had yet been done to the subject. In fact, it would be another twenty hours before Warren D’imato would be prepped enough for the actual transition to take place.
Pakow shook his head. “No, but I’m a big fan of his work.” He looked up and met Wake’s eyes, and for just a moment Wake caught something in the other man’s gaze, something vaguely disturbing, but then it was gone, and Wake wasn’t sure if he’d seen it at all.
“A fan?” Wake laughed. “You don’t strike me as the fan type, Dr. Pakow.”
Pakow frowned. “That’s because you’ve never seen this man’s sculptures.”
Despite his exhaustion, Wake found himself interested. It wasn’t that he cared about getting to know Pakow on a personal level. In fact, Wake could foresee a time when he would have to eliminate Pakow to cover his own tracks. Still, this display of emotion was so uncharacteristic that Wake couldn’t help but be intrigued.
“So he’s good?”
Pakow looked back down at his console. “I wasn’t completely sure it was him, because I only met him once at a show of his work a couple of years ago. And the name he was using then was Warren Storey. But the work was unforgettable. I even bought one of his pieces.”
Wake walked over to the smaller man. “An appreciation of the finer things in life is commendable, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.”
Pakow fidgeted. “The piece I bought is an African tribal warrior killing a lion. The craftsmanship is so fine and detailed that it took my breath away, but that wasn’t why bought it.”
Wake continued to stare, but said nothing.
“The reason I bought it was because of what I seemed to see inside it.”
Wake kept his voice soft, almost a whisper. “And what was that?”
Pakow looked up, and there was a quiet pleading in his eyes. “When you look at the piece, it’s obviously a marvelous stone sculpture, but if you stare at it long enough, the marble almost seems to come to life.”
Wake smiled. “Really?”
Pakow nodded vigorously. “All his things are like that, all exquisite, but when you begin to watch them, they seem to literally live and breathe. You can almost see the lion preparing to leap, and you can feel the deep fear of the hunter.”
Wake placed a long forefinger to the side of his mouth. “Sounds amazing, though I’m still not sure why you’re telling me all this.”
/> Pakow looked back down, and squirmed for another moment, “I know you’re planning to use HMHVV-Charlie on him, and I worry.”
Suddenly it alt made sense to Wake. “You’re concerned about the anomalies we’ve discovered when using Charlie on magically potent creatures?”
Pakow nodded. “I know we’ve taken steps to reduce the risk, but I… I think it would be a mistake to allow any risk to his talent, it would be a shame if this man lost his ability.”
Wake thought about it for a moment. “And what do you suggest we do instead? You know what the Beta strain would do to him.”
Pakow shuddered visibly, then swallowed. “I guess I just don’t understand why we have to do this at all.”
Wake frowned. “We are at a very delicate juncture. If something were to interrupt the work, we could lose valuable time trying to back-track Marco D’imato’s our most successful subject so far, and I’m not ready to lose him. We may need to study him further. All we’ve got to do is keep him placated a little while longer. After that, D’imato’s inevitable deterioration will no longer make him a problem for us.”
Pakow’s shoulders sagged just a bit, but his face remained defiant. “Then I suggest we use the Delta strain.”
Wake laughed, throwing back his head. “By the gods, Dr. Pakow, those are words I never thought to hear coming out of your mouth, especially with Delta being virtually untested.”
Pakow leaned forward, his forehead covered with a sheen of sweat. “We know that Delta should have no adverse affects on his talent, and if Delta proves out, then he would be the first to be unaffected by bloodlust, the first to be able to eat normal food. If this man is the kind of person I think he is, I know he would rather have his life endangered than to risk losing his art.”
Wake’s smile widened, “That is, of course, if strain Delta proves out.”
Pakow nodded. “I understand the possible ramifications, as well as the potential for something unforeseen happening. God knows we don’t want another Marco on our hands, but I think he would rather-”
Terminus Experiment Page 8
