11 - Striper Assassin

by Nyx Smith - (ebook by Undead)

  The man sprawls, bleeding. People cheer and shout and applaud. A female in little more than studded black straps lets out a shriek and comes at Tikki like a cat, talons uplifted as if to strike. Tikki swings her foot, knocking the female’s legs out from under her. Gravity and the hard floor do the rest.

  Prey should respect the hunter or be prepared to suffer the consequences. That is Nature’s way.

  The cheers get louder.

  Tikki continues down the ramps.

  The Abyss glows with a fiery haze. Adama sits at a table in his black suit, smiling and fingering his walking stick. No fewer than seven women are keeping him company, fawning over him, kissing him, laughing and smiling, whispering in his ears. Any one of the seven could have stepped out of a body shop advert. In the fiery haze of the Abyss, all appear to be redheads. As Tikki approaches, Adama briefly gestures. The seven females coo and smile, lean in to hug and kiss him about the head and neck, then turn to leave.

  “Don’t be long,” Adama says.

  The seven all turn back to assure him they won’t, then smile and wave and walk off. Tikki wonders how they could even hear him against the background of thundering music.

  Adama gives Tikki a smile. With a brief motion of his hand he directs her gaze to certain items on his table, a pack of Dannemann Lonja cigarros and a mug of something that smells like cider. The cigarros are no surprise. Adama’s been supplying those in abundance since her first job for him. She wonders where he got the cider. Her favorite beverage is not too common. She slips the cigarros into her jacket pocket, sips the cider, then puts the mug down.

  “Any problems?” Adama asks.

  Problems? Tikki shakes her head. The assassination of Tomita Haruso and his yakuza comrades at the Ardmore Royal Residence Plaza went exactly as planned. No problems at all.

  “Good. Very good.” Adama smiles, sips his drink. “We’ll have to discuss my next target.”

  “Now?”

  “Well…” Adama pauses to freshen his smile. “Later, perhaps. I have other business just now. You understand.”

  “Sure.”

  “My Leandra,” he adds, smiling at Tikki. Then he waves one hand as if to fan away a lingering cloud of cigarette smoke. “Or did you have something in mind?”

  Tikki nods. There is one thing that should be mentioned. Considering its importance.

  “Such as?”

  “Competition.”

  “Really.” Adama smiles as if pleased. “Someone’s preparing to move against me?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You mean they’ve targeted my principal weapon.”

  Tikki nods. The “weapon” he refers to is her, of course. Adama doesn’t seem surprised by the news, and rightly so. He shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised—Tikki isn’t. She expected reprisals from the moment she first contracted to work for Adama. It’s an occupational hazard. Humans never seem to grasp the essential truth of their own existence, that the majority of them are prey, and that they are born to breed and die, and little else. Even the most innocuous of humans seems to imagine that he or she possesses the rights and power of a hunter. The few predators among the human race, such as the yakuza, seem to imagine themselves indomitable, and so should be expected to turn against the hunter.

  Tikki knows how to handle that. First, she’ll play bodyguard so Adama can enjoy his night of fun; then, she’ll hunt. Track down this stupid prey that turns to face her and do what must be done. It shouldn’t be too difficult. No more than in the past.

  “What will you do?” Adama asks.

  Tikki gazes at him for a moment, wondering why he asks, then gives him a faint look of amusement. “Maybe I’ll go on vacation,” she says.

  Adama smiles, then laughs out loud.

  Uproariously.

  26

  Eighteen hours gone and he returns to the loft to find Axle and Dana just sitting around. The black girl, the so-called decker, is lying on the sofa like a lump of meat. It’s enough to sour his mood. Hammer lights a Millennium Red, takes a deep drag, then walks over to the kitchen area for a bottle of Coors Extra Dry. If he or Dog Bite or Mickey don’t turn up something soon, they’ll be skanked. “Well?”

  “We’re not really sure what happened, Hammer,” Dana answers quietly. “She crashed. I guess about two hours ago.”

  By that, of course, she means the decker biff fragged up somehow and got blown out of the Matrix. Hammer isn’t too surprised. This is what he gets for skimping, for hiring unknown talent from out of town. This is what he gets for not personally supervising things. He snaps open his bottle of Coors and turns to face them, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “She dead?”

  “No,” Dana says, pushing back her long black hair. “I think she’s just dazed. Out of it.”

  “Did she get anything?”

  Dana looks to Axle, who’s sitting with the decker’s Fuchi-6 across his lap. Axle shrugs. What does a rigger know about cyberdecks? What does anyone know about anything?

  “I think the deck’s kind of scrambled,” Axle says. “I managed to get some stuff on the screen, but that’s it.”

  Hammer takes a drag off his Millennium Red. “What stuff?”

  “Well…” Axle glances down at the deck, taps a key. “It looks like Striper’s using the name Fallon Sontag. I don’t know where Angel got that data, but there’s some notes here, not much. Apparently, Striper used the name Sontag to go to L.A. and Chicago, possibly as a media snoop.”

  Hammer has a sip of his Coors. Knowing Striper’s working alias might help. He’ll have to get a decker, someone he can trust, to do a sweep of the city’s data bases. A pro like Striper might use more than one alias, but at least it’s a definite lead. Everything else they’ve turned up so far, everything he and Mickey and Dog Bite have found out, comes under the heading of maybes and maybe-nots. Striper’s been seen all over the place, on both sides of the Delaware, in everything from classy yakuza hangouts to parking garages to the most scurvy dives in the city. People say she’s rabid, vicious. Smart, too. She doesn’t seem to make a habit of frequenting any one club or bar. She’s always on the move. That makes her a more difficult target.

  She also doesn’t hesitate to hurt people, human or otherwise. Supposedly, she scragged some ork and then stole his cycle. That’s something to keep in mind. Hammer tried his contacts in the ork underground, but they could add nothing.

  It’s going to be a bitch of a job.

  “I don’t guess either of you know if our decker friend got herself traced.”

  “Traced?” Dana gasps. “Traced here?”

  Axle turns his face toward the ceiling.

  Hammer downs the rest of his beer, tosses the bottle toward the sink. “Right. Let’s the get the frag out.”

  “What?” Dana says. “Out where?”

  “Do we take the deck?” Axle says.

  “Wait a sec!” Dana exclaims. “What about Angel?”

  Hammer pauses long enough to crush his smoke under the toe of his shoe. “Take the deck. Leave the biff.”

  “We can’t just leave her, Hammer.”

  Hammer watches Dana for a moment, then heads down the hall to his room. Dana is becoming a problem. When did she get so sensitive? She won’t kill anybody, she won’t hurt anybody—what’s next? Next, she won’t do anything that isn’t nice. Mage or not, if she gets any worse than she already is, she’s out. Hammer’s got enough trouble just trying to keep the team together, keep them all from getting smoked, to deal with any more unnecessary baggage.

  There isn’t much in his room that he needs. Most of his gear is downstairs in the van. He tosses what he absolutely cannot leave behind into a duffel and slings the bag from his shoulder.

  The danger is that the fragging biff decker, Angel, hosed up on a run against some really major corporate data base. The megacorps are all multinational. Some have offices and/or subsidiaries right here in Philly. Those that don’t have their own in-house security services have security
on contract, and one thing those outfits do is hunt down deckers who violate corporate datasystems. Sometimes it takes a few hours, or even a couple of days. The point is that some of the outfits, like the Renraku Red Samurai guards or the First Force mercenaries, have been known to reconnoiter by fire, shooting first and asking questions later—if anyone’s still alive to question. Hammer isn’t going to hang around here till he hears the thumping of a Northrup gunship, or worse, a Hughes Stallion delivering a strike team to the roof.

  As Hammer steps back into the hall. Axle hustles back into the bedroom opposite and starts banging things around, rushing to pack up and move out. Hammer returns to the main room. Dana is leaning over the decker, Angel. The mage’s hands are glowing green, and Angel is moaning.

  “Two minutes,” he says.

  “Hammer, please!” Dana shoots a frantic look back over her shoulder. “I can’t rush this.”

  First aid, as Hammer is well aware, isn’t Dana’s strong suit. There was a time, back when she and Hammer first met, when she hardly seemed to care about people at all. Forget about first aid. Arcane knowledge was all that mattered. Manipulating power, the elements. Discovering secrets. Lately, it seems, all she does is jammer and moan. She’s losing it, losing her grip, her edge. Maybe she isn’t good enough to do the magic she wants. Who knows? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. She can be replaced.

  “Two minutes.”

  Dana groans softly, and so does her patient. Hammer crosses the room and enters the freight elevator. Axle comes hurrying up the hall and into the main room carrying a pair of suitcases. At a cry from Dana, he turns. Hammer clenches his teeth and jabs at the elevator controls. The doors close. The elevator descends. One thing Hammer won’t miss about this building. The elevator’s too fragging slow.

  The van waits by the loading dock behind the building. Hammer tugs the side door open and climbs in. He stows the duffel bag with the rest of his gear, then gets in behind the wheel.

  A little more than two minutes later, the door on the loading dock swings open and out come Dana and Axle. Each is carrying one of Axle’s suitcases, and, between them, the decker biff. Angel looks mostly unconscious, eyes like slits, head lolling. She stumbles and the three of them almost fall right off the loading dock. Hammer curses. It’s another thirty seconds before the three are finally into the van and sliding the side door closed. Hammer keys the engine and drives around the side of the building to the alley leading to the street.

  Coming up the middle of the alley is some partygirl or street ho Hammer hasn’t seen around before.

  One thing about her, the biff, ho, whatever she is—she’s got big hair, a huge curly mass of black. Hammer likes that. She’s wearing black visorshades, a black fringed jacket with gold flash, and some wispy kind of black blouse that covers her chest, some of it. Her skirt is barely long enough to cover her crotch, and she’s riding ten-story heels. Overall, not half-bad.

  The alley’s narrow. Run the biff down or stop, that’s the choice. Hammer’s tempted, but then the biff waves at him like an old chummer and comes toward his side of the van.

  Hammer puts the smartgun to the sill of the open window.

  “Oooh, baby,” the biff says, husky-voiced, smiling, and waving a hand very casually at the smartgun’s muzzle. “Keep the piece to yourself. You know someone name ’a Hammer?”

  Hammer frowns. “What?”

  “Hammer,” the biff says. “Got a doss around here?”

  “What if he does?”

  The biff takes a moment answering that, looking at him like maybe she already knows who he is. “I got some stuff to sell. Paydata. Very hot.”

  Sure. “What about it?” Hammer growls.

  “Well, do you know the slag or what?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I’ll talk to Hammer, thanks.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The biff smiles wryly. “I hear you’re looking for some mainliner called Striper.”

  “Don’t waste my time.”

  “You want Striper? I’ll take you to her.”

  How does the biff know where Striper is? Anyone’s guess. How does she know what Hammer wants? That much is obvious. Word travels. When it’s worth money, word travels fast. Hammer steals a glance toward the rooftops, attentive to anything that sounds like approaching rotorcraft, then he looks back at the biff. “What’s it gonna cost?”

  “Two fine.”

  Hammer grunts. Two thousand nuyen? A lot of coin to spend on some raunchy slot who might be stroking his chain. “Maybe I’ll just beat it out of you.”

  The biff smiles. “I don’t think so, lover.”

  “No?”

  The biff puts two fingers into her mouth, and blows, whistling like Hammer has rarely heard. The sound is loud and shrill and slices through the alley, faintly echoing. A sputtery rumbling arises. Out beyond the end of the alley, over on the other side of the street, five cycles glide into view, coming to an easy halt. The riders wear black synthleather and at least one of them has a submachine gun slung from the shoulder.

  Hammer tenses, but hesitates to pull the trigger. The biff smiles and says, “Don’t get excited, hon. They’re just friends, you ka? Just watching out for a girl.”

  “I don’t like surprises,” Hammer growls.

  “Me neither. That’s why I come with my friends. You interested in transacting, baby?”

  “One fine.”

  The biff laughs, leans toward him just like a ho, showing off her cleavage. “One point five,” she coos.

  “I said one.”

  They settle on twelve hundred nuyen.

  Of course, the slitch will regret it if it turns out she’s playing skanky games.

  Hammer will make very sure of that.

  27

  The room is dark. Twenty trideo screens gleam from the right-hand wall. Adama sits opposite the screens in his ornate wooden chair. Beside him rises the gleaming black marble stand supporting a huge gemstone, like a diamond, about the size of a man’s fist. Tikki waits in her natural form, lying on the floor nearby.

  A red-haired female hangs splayed, spread-eagled, from the metal rack in the center of the room. Her body glows with the orange and red-tinted light of the trid screens. Each time she screams, her voice becomes a chorus of shrill echoes that bounce around the room. With each new scream, Adama grins, and the radiance of that grin seems to set the giant white gemstone to sparkling brilliantly.

  None of that has anything to do with magic, Tikki knows. Adama dislikes magic just as much as she does.

  The torture goes on long. Adama gives precise instructions. The instrument of his will, a black-clad elf named Sticks, seems well-suited for the harrowing of prey. The elf turns again and again to the shiny stainless-steel instruments laid out on a nearby table, selects an instrument with care, and applies it to Adama’s chosen one.

  His Leandra.

  Blood pools on the gleaming onyx floor. The flesh of the chosen one comes to resemble the torn and bloody carrion of an animal freshly taken. Tikki’s mouth begins to water. As the moment of death approaches, the prey gasps and shudders and moans.

  “Yes!” Adama exclaims.

  His eyes gleam.

  The stink of death wafts into the air. With it comes the potent aroma of Adama’s pleasure, swelling to dominate the air. It is a pleasure beyond the ordinary. There is nothing sexual about it, yet it smells like ecstasy, an ecstasy combining elation, exhilaration, and exultation all into one. To Tikki, it is as if Adama finds some special significance in the moment of his chosen one’s death, as if it is a defining moment. This is a thing she understands well. The day she made her first kill, full in her mother’s eyes, she felt a kind of ecstasy, too. Every kill since that first reminds her of who and what she is, and the role that is hers to play. She finds it curious that Adama should kill without ever touching his prey, but she well understands his pleasure. That is why she feels such an affinity for him. Perhaps that alone makes him seem more
familiar than most other humans.

  Sticks turns away from the body, looking toward Adama. The elf’s only interest here is money. He was offered a certain sum to harrow the prey. There is something amusing in that. When prey turns against prey it has no eyes for the hunter. A human might call it denial, or acute myopia. Tikki considers it stupid.

  Very stupid.

  “She’s dead,” Stick says, unnecessarily. “That it?”

  Smiling broadly, Adama nods, just slightly, and says, “Yes. That is it. That is everything.”

  “Then I’ll take my pay.”

  “Will you?”

  “My money. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes,” Adama says. “I remember. Money. You expect me to pay you now.”

  “Look, chummer, don’t frag with me.”

  “Frag with you? Would I do that?”

  “I want my money!”

  Tikki grumbles. The sound rises from far back in her throat, deep and resonant, carrying throughout the room. Her fangs glisten, briefly bared. She gazes steadily at the elf. Sticks suddenly seems to become aware that she is something more than a fixture in black and red fur. She is three hundred fifty kilos of prime, meat-eating predator and could easily crush the head of a man, or an elf, between her jaws.

  Sticks shifts back a step, eyes widening. His scent fills with a mix of fearful emotions, uncertainty, anxiety, a subtle sort of panic.

  Adama chuckles. “Yes, your money. How would you like it? In gold? Or perhaps in chips or drugs. Or weapons. Automatic weapons. Machine guns.”

  The elf blurts angrily, “Just credsticks, dammit!”

  Tikki grumbles again, but this time the sound is more like a rumbling growl: menacing, foreboding. Sticks takes another step backward, looking at her, looking at Adama. The smell of fear rises stronger into the air. Adama smiles broadly. “Credsticks. Yes. I have many of those.”

  “Enough of the skanky games already!”