11 - Striper Assassin

by Nyx Smith - (ebook by Undead)

  Rats, a flight of birds, an alley cat—another hour of this and he’ll succumb to terminal boredom.

  “Anything?” Hammer asks.

  The voice jogs his brain in odd ways. For just an instant, he loses touch with the jacked-in analog of his drone senses and he’s back in the van, behind the steering wheel. He must be bored. A quick image, more a memory than anything else, flashes through his mind. He sees the inside of the van. Hammer in the passenger-side front seat, Mickey and Dog Bite and Dana sitting in the rear. They dumped Angel, the decker, at Dana’s old place a few hours ago.

  “Axle!” Hammer growls.

  But for the lights of the glaring sign on the roof and a few spotlights illuminating doors and the loading dock in the rear, the warehouse is dark. Deserted, too. “Nothing’s moving.”

  Hammer grunts.

  Axle won’t be surprised if tonight’s surveillance turns out to be a waste of time. The biker biff that led them here claimed that Striper had a doss on the upper floor of the warehouse. There’s an apartment there all right, but no Striper. Dana’s inspected the whole building astrally, not once but twice already. All she found was an empty apartment and a lot of packing crates and cartons. The only unusual thing she reported was an “ambiance of violence”. What that means is anyone’s guess. Axle supposes that the warehouse may have once been the scene of violence in the past, but how that applies to their situation now, if it applies at all, he hasn’t got a clue. Neither does Dana, apparently.

  Abruptly, a warning bleep sounds in his ears. A targeting sight zips across his field of vision. He zooms in automatically. Way down below, in the deep shadows between the buildings, something’s moving toward the warehouse.

  “Contact,” he says tersely.

  Hammer demands more data, but for the moment Axle ignores that. His thermographic enhancement is showing him the reddish silhouette of a bipedal figure, slim enough to be a woman, climbing onto the lid of a garbage dumpster and then vaulting over the top of a chain-link fence. In another moment, he’s got a radar lock-on and brings his light-intensifying lens to bear. That makes the alley look dusty and gray, like in the early evening, and the silhouette becomes a woman, tall and slim, in red-and black-striped facepaint and synthleather to match. She yanks on a door at the rear of the warehouse and disappears inside.

  “It’s her,” Axle says. “Striper. She’s here.”

  Dana feels a churning in her stomach even as Axle makes his announcement. Their target has arrived. Just went in the back door. What they’re supposed to do now is go into the warehouse, find Striper, and kill her.

  Just dust ’er.

  “Okay,” Hammer says. “Slot and run.”

  “No. No way.” Dana closes her eyes, shakes her head. It’s hard for her to believe that she’s actually said it, but she can’t hold back anymore. Running the shadows didn’t used to be like this. Somewhere things got skewed. In Hammer’s quest to make a name for himself and the group, he’s gone over the edge. She’s believed for a good while that he’s been pushing the limits, but she can no longer avoid seeing that Hammer’s making them as bad as the people they’re supposed to be fighting.

  The kind of jobs they used to run… People got hurt and sometimes even killed, but it was always in a good cause. Stealing back data that some corp had hijacked, busting some salaryman out of a corporate contract that was the moral equivalent of a prison sentence—things like that. The kind of runs where no matter what kind of laws they might be breaking, any rational person could see that they were really just putting things right.

  She opens her eyes, finds the rest of the team staring at her. “I’m out. Outta this.”

  They go off on her at once, Mickey and Dog Bite. “Dammit, you!” Dog Bite growls. “This is the run that’ll make our reps!” Meanwhile Mickey is laughing. “You gotta be fragged! Are you fraggin’ kidding?�

  Hammer snarls, “You want your share?”

  “Keep it.” Dana doesn’t care, doesn’t care about the money. Now that the decision’s finally made, she doesn’t care about anything but getting out. She struggles with the latch on the van’s side door, yanks her arm free of the hand that snares her elbow, shoves her way out, out through the door and into the alley, then walks rapidly into the dark, heading for the next street.

  She wouldn’t be surprised if Mickey or Dog Bite came after her and grabbed her by the arm again and started arguing with her, but that wouldn’t change anything. She’s had too much of killing. That last run taking out the BTL lab was what did it. Dana has regretted it every day and night since. The guilt she feels is almost overwhelming, the thought that she’s become a killer is unbearable. She isn’t going to be a party to murder ever again.

  Maybe she’ll give herself up to the cops. She hasn’t thought that far ahead. For the moment, it’s enough just to be getting out. She’ll deal with tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

  * * *

  Mickey suppresses a grin long enough to light a smoke. Watching Hammer and Dana go at it, however briefly, makes him want to laugh. Hammer’s ex-corporate mercenary approach just doesn’t work in the streets. Down in the streets, you gotta chill, stroke people’s egos. Trying to hammer people into line only gets their backsides into a huff and drives them out. And when the person you’re hammering is not only your bedmate but a mage besides, you’re just jerking your own chain. The mages Mickey has met up till now have all been twisted fraggers and Dana’s no exception. She’s so hosed up over spit she can’t tell her money from her mouth.

  Mickey isn’t the least bit surprised to see her get out of the van and hike away. He’s been expecting it for weeks.

  “What now, commander?” he says with a grin.

  Hammer glares at him over that one, but only for a moment. Dog Bite is cursing Dana, cursing her for the biff she is, till Mickey can’t help laughing out loud. Hammer, of course, gets bent. Hammer’s biggest problem, in Mickey’s view, is having no sense of humor. None whatsoever. “Shut your effin’ mouth,” Hammer growls at Dog Bite. “We got a problem.”

  “You noticed,” Mickey agrees, smiling.

  “So what we gonna do about it?” Dog Bite snaps.

  Hammer puffs his smoke for a moment, then slaps at Axle’s shoulder. “Bring the drone down. We need another gunner on the inside. You’re it.”

  Mickey laughs out loud again.

  Hammer glares at him. “You got a better idea?”

  “You’re strokin’ us, right?” Mickey can’t help grinning, chuckling some more. Tapping a rigger like Axle for extra muscle on a job like this is enough of a bad idea to be just plain stupid. Coordinated movement and fire could make all the difference in deciding who walks out of the warehouse alive, especially going up against first-rate talent like Striper. Axle just doesn’t know the moves.

  Mickey is saved the trouble of answering Hammer when Axle says, “I’m just the delivery boy, chummer.”

  Hammer glares some more. “You want your share?”

  “Get me a gunship or a robo-drone. I’ll play fire support, no problemo. But I ain’t going in mano-a-mano.”

  “Our fraggin’ fire support just walked out, dammit!”

  “I ain’t no muscleguy, Hammer.”

  “Then you’re out!”

  “Fine. I’m out.”

  And they’re better off that way, as far as Mickey’s concerned. Nobody to get in their way. Mickey pulls on his Nightfighter goggles and headset, loops the strap of his AK-97 over his shoulder. “If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it.”

  Hammer grunts agreement.

  They leave Axle to recover his airborne surveillance drone and head across the street to the alley running up the east side of the warehouse. Hammer and Dog Bite don their goggles and headsets. The goggles turn even the darkest shadows into shades of gray. The moon is high up in the sky and almost a perfect orb, making for plenty of ambient light.

  Halfway up the alley. Hammer says, “How does a one-third share of forty-kay sound?”

&n
bsp; Forty thousand nuyen is the price of hunting down Striper and taking her out. Until tonight, Mickey could look forward to only a one-fifth share of that. Eight fine is good pay for a few days work, but thirteen is better, no question about it. He pauses to look at Hammer, whose faint smile is just visible.

  “You skanky bastard,” Mickey says, laughing softly. “You pushed ’em out of the game.”

  “Yeah?” Hammer says.

  Dog Bite grins, catching on.

  Hammer conned Dana and Axle into quitting before show time. Exactly how he conned Dana, Mickey can only guess. Hammer must’ve been working on her in private. Mickey chuckles again. This isn’t the first time Hammer’s rewritten the game. He’s so short on humor, so deadly serious all the time, that people make the mistake of thinking he’s a straight suit in urban camo. The only reason Mickey still trusts him, after seeing all the skag he’s pulled, is that Hammer always takes care of his original partners. Mickey and Dog Bite have been with Hammer a long time. The three of them are the real team in any situation, regardless of who’s in or out of the game.

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” Hammer says.

  Dog Bite growls agreement.

  Going around the rear of the warehouse, they find the loading dock and the door where Striper entered. Dog Bite stays on ground level to train his AK over the front edge of the loading dock and dead-on at the door. Mickey and Hammer flank the door. Hammer grabs the handle and tugs the door wide open.

  “Clear,” Dog Bite grunts.

  Mickey darts inside. Hammer and Dog Bite follow.

  The interior of the warehouse is huge. The ground floor is two stories tall and piled to the ceiling with boxes, cardboard cartons, plastic containers, and wooden crates. Fire exit lights add a reddish tint to the ambient light gathered by Mickey’s Nightfighter goggles. A red and white sign leads him to a stairwell. He waits for Hammer to pull the door and Dog Bite to signal clear before slipping inside.

  They head up the stairs in bounding over-watch style, Mickey and Hammer taking turns covering each other while Dog Bite handles rear guard. Reaching the top floor, six stories up, they come to two doors at the top of the stairs. One is marked Warehouse, the other Private. The Private door leads into a narrow corridor about ten meters long—a fact Dana neglected to mention in describing the warehouse interior.

  The corridor would make a great place for killing, Mickey sees at a glance. There’s absolutely no cover. Naturally, there’s no other way into the apartment.

  That they should find the Private door unlocked, even a little ajar, only adds certain titillating spice to the moment, as far as Mickey’s concerned. If he had any fears about his own mortality he wouldn’t be running the shadows. He’d be sucking up to his mother, wearing suits, diddling desktop keyboards. He’d rather live like a suicide, the young, than face a life in the steel and glass coffins downtown. Now, he advances into the corridor, crouching, putting his back to the wall and pointing his AK at the wide-open doorway at the end of the corridor.

  No need to check his pulse to make sure he’s still alive. He can feel it pounding. The feeling brings a grin to his lips.

  Somewhere beyond the end of the corridor, a trid is roaring with the laugh track of a sitcom that Mickey’s seen before. It sounds like OTQ’s “Sans Reproche”, a funny show about a real bone of a loser who never figures out what’s going on. The noise should help conceal any sounds Mickey might make while moving down the corridor. He feels his grin widen. This is gonna be easy.

  The doorway at the end of the hall leads into a smallish room with no windows. A mattress lies on the floor beside one wall. A trideo faces it. A lamp sits within an arm’s length of the mattress. The lamp and the trid are both on. Mickey moves across the room into a hallway that leads past a claustrophobic kitchenette, a closet, a bathroom, and then ends at another room with another mattress and a pair of lamps. Both lamps are on. The glaring neon of some advert on an adjacent building shines in through a window at the end of the room.

  Mickey glances around and sneers. The good news is that he’s gotten this far and is still alive, as are Hammer and Dog Bite. The bad news is that Striper isn’t where they expected, anywhere in this apartment, and it’s beginning to look like either the biff knows they’re here or knew they were coming.

  “Double back,” Hammer says from the doorway. “Back to ground.”

  “Right.”

  Mickey turns toward the door, but before he can take another step his headset fills with a loud, piercing scream that rises suddenly, and just as abruptly ends.

  For an instant, he and Hammer just stare at each other. Then they break toward the front room of the apartment.

  Hammer stops on the threshold, sweeping the front room with his smartgun, the red triangle of an optical targeting sight flying across the room even as he looks down. Dog Bite lays sprawled face-down on the floor. What’s left of the back of his studded synthleather jacket is in tatters, shredded. There’s almost nothing left of his back. Four vicious gouges descend from the base of his neck to just below the shoulder blades, melding there into a single gory wound that reaches to the base of his spine. Blood and gore from the wounds are still oozing down his sides, spreading across the floor.

  It reminds Hammer of what a grappling hook can do when used as a weapon. Only this is worse. Much worse.

  Mickey curses, standing at Hammer’s left shoulder. For once, Mickey’s lost his sarcastic smirk. “What the frag happened?”

  Hammer shakes his head.

  “You didn’t see anything?”

  “Slot it!” The question brings Hammer a sudden rush of anger. Of course he didn’t see what happened. He’d been doing his job as part of the fire team, backing up Mickey, supporting the advance into presumably hostile territory. If Dog Bite had been doing what he was supposed to be doing, which was watching their rear, he’d probably still be alive. Obviously, he turned his back to the corridor leading in from the stairs. Either that… Either that or whatever killed him materialized out of thin air.

  “What kinda sword could do damage like that?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions.” No sword could’ve gouged Dog Bite’s back like that. The wounds look more like something an animal might inflict, something big and powerful and equipped with massive claws. Hammer adjusts the settings on his Nightfighter goggles and finds a tide of orangey-red flowing up and out from around the center of the room, slowly fading into the ambient temperatures. As he steps across the room, he sees that the heat trace leads right up the corridor to the stairs. He also spots bloody patches on the floor, leading toward the stairs. Something big, bigger than man-sized, passed through the room and the corridor within just the last few instants. It couldn’t have been a troll because a troll would be lucky to fit into the corridor, never mind get through it at speed. Trolls also come on two legs and whatever went up the hall left smears, tracks, paw prints, like something on four legs.

  “Some kinda animal,” Hammer mutters.

  Mickey chuckles, but it’s not his usual chuckle. It sounds nervous. “Don’t frag with my brain, Hammer.”

  “Look at those tracks.”

  “You’re saying an animal did this?”

  “Maybe a talis cat.”

  “Oh, crap! Come on!”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  It would fit, and fit real good in Hammer’s view. The data they got on Striper says she uses magic, that she does vicious damage. Maybe she’s really a mage, a mage with a vicious pet. A mage could probably teleport her pet talis cat wherever she wants, behind someone’s back, make it kill and then run. A talis cat could do that, tear open Dog Bite’s back, then dash up the corridor and out of sight. What noise it made would have been covered by the blaring trid.

  If Hammer’s memory serves correctly, talis cats stand just under a meter at the shoulder, making them about as big as the average tiger. Big and powerful enough to tear a man wide open.

  “This is crazy.” A nervous laugh bubbles ou
t of Mickey’s mouth. “Fraggin’ slot. Now what?”

  “We do what we came to do.”

  Mage or not, it’s killing time. They owe it to Dog Bite and to themselves, if they’re gonna earn the rest of their pay. Striper obviously knows they’re here. They’ll just have to be careful. Hammer motions Mickey toward the hall, and follows, a step at a time, up the hall to the stairs. The infrared trace is gone, faded into the air, but the reddish blotches on the floor show that the cat, or whatever it was, went through the door marked Warehouse, which now stands wide open. Mickey crosses to the far side of the doorway. Hammer sets himself to provide covering fire, then motions Mickey inside.

  The third floor of the warehouse is like each of the floors below, two stories tall and piled high with crates and shipping containers, arranged into aisles. The bloody paw prints, growing faint now, lead off to the right. Hammer decides to ignore them, to play the game by the book. He and Mickey will do a methodical sweep, take no more chances. Run the witch and her cat to earth.

  They’re halfway through the grid of aisles when they hear a bang somewhere off to one end of the warehouse. A deep-pitched humming arises. Hammer recognizes the sound.

  “Freight elevator.”

  Mickey curses. “Frag! She must be heading down! The slot’s getting away!”

  Not this time. “Head for ground.”

  They double back to the door and hustle onto the stairs. They’ve gotta move fast if they’re gonna reach the ground floor in time to make their target. The third floor is six stories up and that means six flights of stairs to get down.

  They’re down three flights when a loud bang echoes through the stairwell. Hammer catches himself abruptly before the top of the next flight down. The bang came from above and sounded suspiciously like the bang of a door slamming shut. Mickey stops and looks up at him from the landing below.