No further use for the duster. She kicks it into the dark space beneath the final flight of stairs descending to ground level. No basement access here, but that’s no problem, either. She pulls on a black ski mask that covers her whole head, but with openings for ears, nose, and mouth, and a wide gash for her eyes that allows for full peripheral vision. Even though Tikki often relies heavily on her ears and nose and even her mouth for data about her surroundings, vision is her primary perception, just as it is for humans. Sometimes she wonders if that might be all she has in common with the breeders.
To the left of the fire door, set into an inside wall, is a large metal panel marked Danger High Voltage. She knew it would be here because she’s consulted the building plans. The panel was pivotal in her planning. Now, she pulls the panel open and hooks a small diagnostic comp over the lower flange, then draws out a section of white- and orange-striped wire. Using an Armalite multitool, she strips a short section of its insulated plastic coating, connects two leads from the Telex comp to the stripped section of wire, then cuts the wire between the two leads. This effectively disables the motion detectors monitoring each of the stairway landings above her.
The Ardmore complex relies on strategic placement of security elements, rather than blanket coverage. Security cams watch all external entrances and selected internal locations. Tikki has to worry about only three, those located on the second-, fourth-, and sixth-floor landings directly above her. She connects a second device to three colored wires from the panel. This device, purchased locally, is called a line-looper. She’s tested it to make sure it works. What it does is record what a security cam sees over the course of, say, a millisecond, then feeds that recording endlessly to the central monitoring station. That effectively blinds the cams to what’s really passing by.
Tikki knows that a decker could have been of help in this operation, but she avoids using them unless absolutely necessary. Deckers rank among the class of things she considers to be perverse. Projecting one’s consciousness into the electronic realm of the global computer net is perverse. Animals have meat bodies because they were meant to live in a world of meat bodies. Abandoning one’s flesh and blood like a tool no longer needed strikes her as grotesque. She mistrusts anyone who would do that, all deckers, nearly as much as she mistrusts all mages.
She mistrusts computers too, just generally.
There is also the fact that a decker would demand a minimum of several thousand nuyen to do electronically what she has accomplished with just a few simple tools in just a few seconds. At this stage in her operation, she can spare both the time and the effort.
She heads up the stairs.
The unexpected occurs as she nears the third-floor landing. The stairway door suddenly bursts open with a thump, letting a skinny male adolescent in a tee and shatjeans onto the landing. He doesn’t seem to notice Tikki until he’s reaching for the handrail and starting down the steps, coming right at her. He merely glances at her, his face showing no expression. Hurrying on, he goes right past her.
None of that fools Tikki. The boy’s physical reaction to the sight of her is immediate and telling. The scent that floods the air shouts of surprise and chilling fear. The young one knows that something is wrong. From her black ski mask and the gear on her belt, he’s got to know she means trouble. That compels her to respond.
Adama would be very displeased if she let this young animal live, placing her mission in jeopardy. Her mission is maximum destruction, and only her own survival rates higher than that. She puts the duffel bag on the steps, then leaps to the landing immediately below. The youth turns and looks up, wide-eyed, filling the air with terror, even as she descends.
It’s over quickly. She slams him back bodily against the stairwell wall, jams her left forearm across his throat. At a precise movement of her right fist, a supple black spike snaps out of the mount on her right forearm. The prey realizes what’s coming and floods the air with the stink of excrement. Tikki bares her teeth, suppresses a growl, and drives the spike into the juncture of throat and jaw, right up into the brain.
Death is instantaneous.
Tikki retrieves her duffel bag and continues up the stairs. Going up twelve flights or even fifty or a hundred with only occasional pauses to listen or test the air is no problem. She’s in excellent condition, always has been. Tikki can push herself to the point of collapse before exhaustion finally sets in. Her mother could do that, too.
As she nears the fifteenth-floor landing, the air takes on an aroma like cigarette smoke and a subtler scent suggestive of soykaf. She pauses and wonders about that, but when nothing untoward occurs, she continues up onto the landing.
She puts the duffel bag down and steps to the hallway door. Set into the door at about eye-level is a small reinforced transparex window. She puts her back to the door to the right of the window, then lifts a small smoked mirror up to the lower-left corner. Once she gets the angle right, the mirror provides a view of the hallway leading directly away from the door. The smoky pane minimizes the chance of the mirror catching the light. Her view of the corridor elaborates on her scent-impressions. At the end of the hall, which extends perhaps thirty meters, are a pair of over-size males in suits. One on the left, one on the right. They are standing guard, Tikki supposes. At least that seems to be the idea. One guard holds a disposable cup. The other holds a cigarette in one hand and an ashtray in the other.
It’s amateur hour.
Never compromise your hands.
Tikki pulls the Walther XP-700 from her duffel bag, puts the passkey to the door lock, then turns her back to the door again, lifting the smoky mirror.
The door buzzes and clicks. Maglocks generally give a person ten, maybe fifteen seconds, before the lock automatically resets. The passkey will keep the door open till it’s disengaged.
Through the mirror, Tikki sees one of the guards look in her direction, then look back to his partner. They converse. One shrugs. Tikki drops the mirror, yanks the door wide open and braces her left forearm against the inside of the doorway, aiming the XP-700 straight up the hall. The weapon’s laser targeting system and optical sight have been zeroed in for two hundred meters exactly. She’s now taking aim at close to one-eighth that range, which changes the geometry. Tikki’s no mathematician, but she knows certain bits of math through long experience. She worked out the degree of error in point-of-aim a few days before. It’s a matter of several centimeters. She’s got the number in the back of her mind, but what she thinks right now is almost subconscious, intuitive, instinctive: aim low. She knows how much lower is right by how it looks, how it feels.
The guard on the right notices her.
“Yo!” he says, turning toward her, providing a broader target. Just so things should be clear, he shoots a look at his partner and blurts, “Contact!”
If you have to be told…
Stupid.
Tikki puts the red dot of the targeting laser just under his sternum, and squeezes the trigger. The Walther thumps and a red blotch appears almost dead center between where she guesses the guard’s pecs should be. He staggers back, the cup of soykaf falls. Tikki immediately shifts her point of aim. By then, the guard on the left has thrown down his cigarette and ashtray and is thrusting one hand under his jacket. A pro caught so badly off-guard would simply have moved his or her hands as the situation required without wasting the time to throw anything anywhere. When the game is for real, milliseconds count. Tikki puts the red dot on his chest and fires again. The Walther thumps and a red blotch appears right over where the guard’s heart should be. The man spins back and sprawls, his heavy automatic clattering to the floor.
Both guards down.
Tikki retrieves the passkey and grabs the duffel bag, then hustles up the corridor, taking long strides, but not running. Not quite. She has two shells remaining in the Walther. She puts one each into the heads of the fallen guards, just to be sure neither comes up on her rear.
No longer needing the Walther, she drops it onto the body
of one of the dead guards and reaches into the duffel bag. From it she takes a Fabrique National MAG-5, a medium machine gun that resembles an ordinary assault rifle but is more heavily constructed. Its one-hundred-round disintegrating-link ammo belt is already locked and loaded. She braces the butt of the FN’s shoulder stock against her right hip and drapes the belt over her shoulders.
Just a step away is the door to apartment 1510. Tikki puts the passkey to the door’s maglock. The passkey winks. The door slides open. Tikki steps inside.
The foyer is flanked by sliding closet doors and expensive-looking antique furniture. Two large males in suits sit in dark red armchairs. One looks up at Tikki with an expression of surprise. Two quick bursts from the FN slam both men from their seats.
Beyond the foyer is a large, open room finished mostly in hues of gold and outfitted with an extensive entertainment system that includes a huge, wall-mounted trideo screen. About a dozen humans in flashy Neo-Monochrome and various non-reflective fashions decorate the plush sofa units and chairs scattered about the room. Two of them scream and several more exclaim and shout as the FN machine gun fires and the two males in the foyer fall.
Pandemonium breaks out as Tikki enters the main room, the living room. Everyone is screaming and shouting, standing up, sitting down, throwing themselves flat to the wall, the sofas, the floor, turning as if to run every which way, run and run. Terror fills the air. Tikki bares her teeth and squeezes the trigger, swinging the machine gun’s muzzle back and forth. The FN roars like thunder. Armor-piercing shells chew everything in the room between the gun muzzle and the walls, including the furniture, the decor, and especially the humans present. Two of the males draw guns and shoot in the instants before they themselves are cut down. One shot goes wide and the other merely punches at Tikki’s Kevlar V-insulated shoulder. The FN stammers. People spin and fall and bleed. Tikki grins. It’s just what Adama ordered. An outright massacre. She can almost hear him laughing.
Her primary target is Tomita Haruso, a portly Japanese with a penchant for wearing white suits. Haruso is shatei, a “younger brother” of the ranking oyabun, a kind of senior yakuza underboss. Joining him at tonight’s casual meeting, according to Tikki’s info, are several wakashira-hosa and kambu atsukai, lower-ranked leaders and executives of the Honjowara-gumi.
Tikki finds Tomita Haruso sprawled on the floor by the mirrored bar. Big, bloody stains stand out starkly against the man’s white suit, but she realizes the he is still struggling to move. Several holes in him and he’s still not dead? Unusual. This demands her immediate attention.
She lowers the muzzle of the FN and rips at the man with burst after burst until the body is no more than a torn-open bag of jiggling, splashing gore. The man dies then, like he should. That ends her need for the FN—she drops it. From the right side of her belt, she takes a DM-105 demo pack, sets the timer, and drops that too. She could drop a DM-105 from orbit and it wouldn’t go off unless she set it to go off that way.
She draws her Kang automatic pistol from the holster at the left of her waist and looks around. The walls are splashed with red. The floor is strewn with bodies and shattered bits of ceramic, plastic, glass, and more red. None of the bodies seem to be moving. That’s good.
Very good.
* * *
Tikki walks through the apartment to the master bedroom. The window overlooking the bed is about three meters across. At fifteen stories above the ground, the pane is probably impact-resistant plastic. Tikki holsters the Kang, takes a small packet from her belt. In it is a two-meter-long strip of zip tape, which she smoothes across the lower half of the window. An ordinary butane lighter is sufficient to ignite it. Holding a hand across her eyes, Tikki applies the flame, then turns her back as the tape flares. She hears a hissing sound, like high-voltage electricity, followed by a bright flash of light. At the same time, an alarm bell begins to clang. Probably keyed to the window.
Tikki turns back to the window to find a two-meter-long gash melted right through the lower half of the pane. She picks up a chair, gives it a really good heave. The weakened pane fractures, breaks into shards, and falls away. The chair goes with it.
Now comes the exciting part. She steps up onto the bed, puts one leg out the window, sits on the empty still. Attaches a steel hook to the climber’s winch at the front of her harness. Seats the hook securely over the windowsill. Slips outside.
The windowsill is all steel and set into a reinforced concrete wall, so the hook should hold.
She thinks about that as she falls.
Abruptly, the winch cuts her speed, nine or ten stories down. The straps of her harness grab her hard about the hips. She could get bruises if she did this often enough. The ground is suddenly there, smacking into her feet, her body, the side of her head, but nothing breaks, so the winch must have done its work. She pops the belt and harness, draws the Kang, and rises to a crouch. She can still hear that clanging bell far above, but otherwise the night is quiet. No sirens, no security cars, no cops.
Not yet anyway.
She steps across a meter of grassy turf, a sidewalk, and then down to a Nissan Jackrabbit, the multifuel IC model, which she parked here earlier in the day.
She keys the lock, gets in. The engine starts right up.
21
The terror, the thunderous hammering, and the pain are overwhelming. He feels himself being torn from his body, ripped from his own flesh and sent hurtling down a black passage at a speed too great to comprehend. Everything he’s ever known, all that he was, all he might have been, is shredded away in an instant.
An ocean of searing white envelops him, burning, crushing, flaying, utterly devastating. The agony is unbearable, unending. The screams of a hundred million souls writhing in torment equal to his own reverberate through his tortured being. Every nerve, every iota of his consciousness, quivers like wires alive with a savage electric current, arcing, dancing, jerking and shaking with pain.
Through it all, he senses a presence, malignant, malevolent. Drawing him deeper into the horror. Taking pleasure in his agony. Reveling in every excruciating, rending, piercing, pounding, burning pain he suffers. A monstrous evil delighting in every little twinge of anguish vibrating through his being. A diabolical horror he will never escape, though he suffers unendurable agony throughout all eternity.
And it just goes on and on…
22
06-16-54/17:36:04
Roll cam.
The datajacked Sony CB-5000 in the steady-mount atop his helmet comes on-line with a minimum of fooling around. His Seretech Evening Shade cybereyes with FlareGuard and thermographic enhancement seem to be working okay, for once, damn frag it, interfacing with the Eyecrafter opticam implanted inside his skull. It’s another monkey-drek sumfabulous miracle. He keys the tridlink controller on his right forearm to overlay his direct-view vision with a full data readout, just to be sure.
“Skeeter…?”
J.B. looks back and forth like she can’t see him. Skeeter’s standing there on the sidewalk in a cloud of the Asian biff’s own elf-mage golden fairy dust, so of course now the fraggin’ biff can’t see him. The stump-skanking dust works so well he’s invisible even to her! That’s great, just great. Real pro news. J.B. turns her back to him, still quietly calling his name, sounding as muck-drekking impatient as usual, Ms. High and Mighty Trid-o-Genic News snoop Poop!
“Skeeter! Where—?�
Skeeter snaps his fingers.
“Oh!” she says, then turns around, peering toward him. “Are you there?”
Skeeter clears his throat, snaps his fingers some more.
“Am I on?”
What in fragging drek does she think?
“Well… Here we go.” J.B. flips at the long black wave of hair curling down over her forehead. Skeeter shifts his feet to get a straight-on view of her face. She shifts the other way, damn dumb drekking dithead.
“This is Joi Bang for WHAM! Independent News,” she says in a hushed voice, “and we’re
here on Twenty-ninth Street in North Central Philly to take you inside the international headquarters of the Humanis Policlub, reputed arm of the Alamos 20,000 terrorist group and alleged to be responsible for the murders and assassinations of metahumans, meta-posers, and meta-sympathizers worldwide.”
Damn frag it all anyway.
“Naturally we’ll be using a hidden camera.”
No dingle-dockle kidding, dork.
* * *
06-02-54/17:49:53
Establishing shot: Humanis Policlub HQ, slow pan across brick facade, entranceway framed by white columns, guarded by two big slags in stretch tees. A faint gold cloud glinting with motes of light wafts slowly about the faces of the muscleboys.
J.B. smiles. “Isn’t it true,” she says, “that the Humanis Policlub is a faction of Alamos Twenty-thousand?”
One of the muscleboys grins. “Who?”
“Never heard of ’em,” says the other.
“Then, as members of the Humanis Policlub, you disclaim any involvement in the murders of hundreds if not thousands or millions of metapersons throughout the world?”
“We never killed anybody.”
“We just trash ’em.”
“Beat ’em to hell!”
“But we don’t kill ’em.”
“That wouldn’t be moral.”
“We’re very moral people.”
“We only give ’em what they deserve.”
“Make ’em pay.”
“For what they did.”
“What they did to the world.”
“And everything else.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
06-02-54/18:03:21
Close-focus: a blonde biff with flawless features and huge jutting milkies smiles from behind her high desk in the lobby.
“No,” she says. “In fact, as far as I’m aware, none of the members of the Humanis Policlub has any sort of criminal record whatsoever. The screening committee of the membership council would never accept such undesirables into the organization.”
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