Who Hunts the Hunter

by Nyx Smith

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So, meanwhile, your resource group is limping along and now you’re personally in a hole.”

  Amy looks at him and nods.

  “Is it worth it?”

  That’s a question Amy’s asked herself at least a few million times. Somehow, she always comes up with the same answer. She forces herself to say it now with conviction."If I’m not prepared to back up my beliefs, then I shouldn’t be in the game.”

  “I admire your pertinacity.”

  “You’d do the same thing.”

  “In your position? I like to think so. I hope I’d have your courage. There are changes I’d like to make right now, only I’m surrounded by sharks.”

  “Harman, you don’t have to apologize.”

  “I want you to understand.”

  “I do understand. I do.”

  Harman’s situation is really quite different from hers. People don’t matter at Mitsuhama, not in Harman’s division. The only issue there is “product” or “sales.” Harman seems to spend most of his time fighting defensive battles against superiors who want to kick him down a few notches, or subordinates who want to cut his legs out from under him, preferably with as much gore as possible. Harman can’t take the time to address human issues. He’d be a fool to even try. It’s that brutal an environment.

  “Have you thought any more about getting out?”

  “I’m thinking about it very seriously,” Harman says, definitely."I really envy your position. That’s what gets to me, you know. Here you are, a vice president for a little group of labs, but your work makes you feel like you’re contributing something to the world. I’ve got people all over hell’s creation and I feel like I’m swimming through a pool of piranha, and accomplishing nothing.”

  “Do you want my opinion?”

  “I already know it.” He smiles, reaches over and takes her hand. Their fingers intertwine."You know, I wanted to talk about us tonight.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right. We’re both having an off day, I think. Maybe we can try this again next week, when you get those auditors out of your hair. In the meantime, I’d like you to think about us, and what you want. You know what I’m talking about.”

  Amy nods."I love you.”

  “And I love you, darling.” Harman stops and smiles, and says, softly, “Should we leave it at that?”

  Amy nods, smiles."Yes. Let’s.”

  The drive home begins with the ride uptown. Traffic slows to a stop-and-go crawl at the entrance to the Triborough Bridge. Amy gazes out the side window at the night. Her concerns about Hurley-Cooper and KFK and, above all, Kurushima Jussai come seeping back into her mind.

  By late this afternoon, the chief auditor’s list of unaccounted-for resources—materials, equipment, arcane supplies—had grown very long, to crisis proportions, for all practical purposes. On the one hand, Amy can’t believe that more than a hundred separate items could have slipped through the cracks; on the other, her worst expectations about the arrival of the Tokyo staff seem to be coming true.

  “Amy. Hon?”

  Harman touches her shoulder. She finds him gazing at her expectantly. So is the uniformed Port Authority officer looking in through Harman’s window.

  “Sometime tonight, lady,” the officer says tartly.

  Abruptly, Amy realizes what’s happening. It’s one of the more charming aspects of a visit to Manhattan. One must have the proper pass to get in or out, or expect a great big hassle from the police. Amy got her pass through Hurley-Cooper, along with the other senior execs, one result of HC taking office space on New Bronx Plaza. She digs the gray card out of her purse. Before she so much as looks up, card in hand, the Port Authority officer is waving them ahead.

  Harman takes them across the bridge to the Bruckner Expressway, then on toward Scarsdale, the corporate side of town. Amy has her resident pass already in hand as they slow before the gatehouse to her highrise condoplex.

  “Have a better tomorrow,” the guard says cheerfully.

  Harman replies, drolly, “Echo that.”

  16

  The van’s tires scream as they round the corner, nearly rising onto two wheels. Monk grabs at the door and puts a hand out to the dash and manages to stay mostly upright in his seat. Flashing signs, traffic lights, the lights of other vehicles and crowds of people on crosswalks, sidewalks, and other kinds of walks all zip by in a blur.

  Minx shoots him a glance and grins."Hang on, you booty!” she cries. And the tires scream again.

  Monk sways across the center console, and sways back the other way. He takes a final deep drag on his cigarette, then drops the butt out the window. Just an ordinary Millennium Red, but it’s made him feel like he’s flying, flying high, right into orbit.

  Zoom! zoom! and away he goes!

  And here they are, he and Minx, flying through the streets of Sector 10, the cramped, dingy, crud-encrusted commercial part of the Newark plex called the Stacks. Warehouses and factories rush by. Big rigs roar, air horns blatting. Corners swerve past. Null sheen, no persp. No chance of him wetting his shorts. The van veers through a slalom course of cars and cycles stopped all over the street, up on the sidewalks, some lying on their roofs, and comes to a sudden halt. No problemo, omae.

  “Let’s go, you booty!” Minx exclaims.

  They hop out, wearing their face masks and gloves, their dark gray coveralls marked CORONER’S ASST., and their big black ooze-proof boots. A cop in battle dress complete with face shield, heavy armor, and submachine gun motions at the street, and says, in a metallic remodulated voice, “There’s the beef. Take your pick.”

  “Wiz,” Minx replies."Six two and even.”

  “Over and out,” Monk adds.

  Minx jabs his ribs and giggles.

  Monk grins.

  The street looks like a combat zone. Aside from the cars and cycles all over the place, and the various tow trucks, meat trucks, fire trucks, and cop-mobiles, there are three buildings with smashed-out windows and one smaller structure, a simsense parlor, that’s now missing most of its second floor, said floor having fallen into the pile of crud spreading halfway across the street. Bodies are everywhere, sprawled in the gutters, hanging out of burnt, turned-over cars, lying beneath various chunks of rumble.

  So which stiffs do they want? Monk wonders. It’s obvious. The best ones.

  The best can be hard to spot. They don’t look all that different from the ones that are really dead—just as dead as they could get. All bloody and gory, with bones sticking out, and eyes drooling out of sockets, and squat like that. Maximum slimy and definitely yarfland. The best ones might be just as mashed and mutilated, but there’s a difference. What Minx calls the “subtle radiance of life” still lingers. Like an aura. Very subtle. Seeing that faint radiance against the bright reddish haze of daylight isn’t easy. Fortunately, they work the night shift. The faint reddish glow of life stands out pretty plainly against the dull, brooding, reddish haze of night.

  “That one,” Minx says, pointing."And that one.”

  Minx has had lots of practice.

  The cop shrugs."Move ’em out.”

  They grab the gurney from the rear of the van and hustle to the corpses. The first one looks like a ganger in synthleather, spikes and lots of body color and tats. The second one looks like a regular citizen, some suit. Cause of death isn’t exactly obvious and Monk for one doesn’t much care. After you’ve seen your first hundred bodies—munched and crunched and smashed, shot up, chopped up, shredded like for a meal—it gets to be pretty routine. They slam one gurney, then the other into the van, then fling the doors shut.

  On impulse, Monk waves to the cop, and says, simply, “Bye.”

  “Next time,” the cop replies.

  Minx giggles.

  Five blocks away, Minx parks the van in front of a Voodoo Chili and cuts the engine. They go into the rear of the van. The corpses lie there on the gurneys, lie there like the dead. The lingering
traces of life are getting fainter by the minute, but that’s all right because now everything’s set. Nobody’ll interrupt them because the sides, front, and rear of the van are marked: City of Newark. Coroner. Most people know that means “icky flatlines inside.” And nobody likes icky flatlines.

  Well ... Almost.

  “I want the suit,” Minx says.

  Minx pulls out her Sony Budcam and snaps pictures of the corpses for her collection. Monk lifts the ganger’s limp arms and waves them at Minx’s face."I’m coming to get you, Jessica,” Monk groans.

  “Eeek!” Minx squeals."Okay, let’s do it, booty!"

  Monk leans down and puts his mouth over the ganger’s mouth, then slowly inhales. It’s kind of like giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only in reverse. The breath of life? Getting it just right is tricky. It’s easy to give life instead of just taking it, and doing that can have really weird results. This time it goes good, though. The rush that fills his lungs spreads a tingling throughout his body and rises up into his head, till he’s swaying, dizzy, with a bliss better than sex.

  He sits down heavily, sighing, grinning, sated, pleased. Minx pulls her hand from the suit’s pants pocket and holds up a pair of silver credsticks.

  “Look what I found,” she says softly.

  In the dark reddish twilight in the rear of the van, Minx’s eyes blaze like Vulcan’s furnace, which was really fiery and hot, or so it’s said."Nova.”

  Monk grins.

  17

  It’s after four a.m. when Amy exhales heavily and finally gives up on the idea of getting back to sleep. She dropped off like a rock the moment her head touched the pillow, thanks to a cap, but the caplet didn’t hold. She drifted in and out of sleep for a while, but has spent the last hour just lying here, staring into the dark. It’s one of those times when she’s glad to be single. No one to disturb.

  Why can’t she sleep? She knows why. And there’s no point putting it off any longer.

  She dials Harman’s home code, breathes a sigh of relief when his recording answers. It’s early yet. She didn’t want to wake him.

  “Darling,” she says softly, “I’m going in early and I’ll be out of the office all day. Most of it, anyway. I’m not sure when I’ll be home, so I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she adds, “Why don’t we try dinner again on Friday? Maybe out on Long Island? You decide. Love you. Bye.”

  A shower washes some of the cobwebs from her brain. She dresses, swallows vitamins and juice, grabs her briefcase, and stops off at the closet by the front door, staring at jackets and coats. The obvious choice, her black Zoe trench, won’t cut it today. That’s too much like a straight suit, the good corporate girl fitting into the fashionable corporate mode. Too much like something people from Tokyo would expect her to wear.

  She let the auditors get to her yesterday, get her down and depressed, and so she ended up ruining what should have been a lovely evening on the town.

  Enough.

  Today she’s going to take the initiative and make things go right. She wants answers, she’ll get answers, or be damned trying.

  She pulls on her florescent yellow synthleather jacket, grabs the matching gloves and helmet, then exchanges her briefcase and pumps for a backpack, also florescent yellow, and low-heeled ankle boots.

  The elevator delivers her to the condoplex sublevel garage. In the space beside her Toyota Arbiter GX is a Harley Roadraider. The Toyo is silver-gray and dignified, pure executive juice. The Harley is florescent yellow, bright enough to burn, to burst into flames, and has about as much in common with a straight suit as, well ... she doesn’t know what.

  She pulls on the backpack and helmet. The Harley rumbles to life. She makes it whine, then rides up the ramp. It’s not quite five a.m. The tall silvery lamps along the curving tree-lined lanes of the condoplex cast an orangey light into the mist. Amy heads for the main condoplex entrance.

  Coming in or heading out, IDs must be shown. Amy stops, flips up her mirrored face shield, and shows her pass. The guard grins. The guard’s name is Mo—“Mo” Rasheen. Quite a name. In a voice that lilts up and down like a song, he says, “I see you are feeling in the mood for making the trouble today, Ms. Amy.”

  Amy smiles, and says, “We’ll see about that.”

  “Well, I am wishing you to having a good day!"

  "Thanks.”

  A kilometer’s worth of local roadways puts her onto the ramp and gliding swiftly onto the Hutchinson River Parkway—five lanes of pavement as smooth as glass, and, to her surprise, nearly empty of traffic. She’s no harem-scarem go-ganger, but she decides that today’s the day to let the Harley open up. She’s never seen the highway this empty. She cranks up the throttle till the engine’s starting to whine, and she’s hitting one-ten, one-twenty. Fast enough to be worth a hefty fine, though not quite fast enough to be insane.

  The Cross County Parkway brings her to the Thruway. She flies past a police car parked on the shoulder at something well above the limit, but nothing happens. Maybe it’s karma. Maybe this is her day.

  She crosses into the Bronx and cruises down onto the exit ramp to the Van Cortlandt Industrial Park, a sprawling site encompassing everything from chemical plants to office towers to little bitty companies that design subprocessor chips and servo-devices for cyberware. The end of the exit ramp is flanked by dark blue cars and vans marked for Apollo Services, a Yamatetsu corp subsidiary specializing in site security.

  Amy pauses at the park entrance to show her ID, then heads for the northeast quad. A tall hedge backed by a cyclone fence lines the curb before the Hurley-Cooper metascience installation. Amy slows to a halt at the entrance. Two red and black-uniformed guards emerge from their booth, looking at her like who’s this slitch? and where does she think she’s going?

  Their attitude changes radically when she shows her ID, the card with her holo and the big VP in bold black letters."Ms. Berman!” The sergeant grins, chuckles weakly."Didn’t know you rode a screamer.”

  “This is a Harley, Sergeant.”

  “That’s a Harley? It looks like—” The sergeant stops himself short, looks at her, and says, “I mean . . . well . . .”

  Amy nods."You’re right.”

  For some odd reason, when people think Harley, many of them seem to imagine something resembling a Honda Viking: big, clumsy, powerful enough to propel a troll. Her Roadraider looks even less like that, less a “Harley,” than the Harley Scorpion. That is simply to say that it looks like speed, like screaming down side streets at insane velocities, and taking curves that would make simsense star Holly Brighton look as straight-lined as a boy.

  It has a certain je ne sais quoi.

  Call it style.

  The gates slide open. Amy rides up the lane, past the parking lot, nearly empty, to the building’s main entrance. The building is two-story brick, parts of it cloaked in ivy. It makes up in depth what it lacks in height.

  At the reception counter in the lobby is another guard instead of the usual receptionist, who doesn’t show up till later in the morning. As Amy enters, the guard is standing like a sentry, gazing fixedly at something, security monitors, located behind the counter. He looks up as Amy’s heel first hits the lobby floor. He smiles, and says, “Welcome to Hurley-Cooper Laboratories, ma’am. May I see your identification?”

  It’s hard to resist a smile.

  “Thank you, Ms. Berman. Have a good day.”

  “Same to you ... Officer Frank-o ...”

  “That’s Frankavello, ma’am.”

  “Officer Frankavello.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Enough like Harman’s last name to catch her off-guard. Frankavello, Franck-Natali. She smiles. The guard smiles and nods, and Amy steps through the double doors and turns down the hall.

  COMP OPS says the little sign projecting out from the hallway wall. Amy’s ID opens the fireproof door. She enters a room constructed like a bank vault.

&nb
sp; Filling the wall on the left is the rack containing the mass memory modules to a Renraku System 80. To the right is the main console, about the size of an ordinary desk, and, beside it, the big green box containing processors, slaves, random access memory, and associated hardware. The woman in the pink sweats and orange sneaks, with her feet up on the main console, would be the graveyard shift sysop. She twitches, looks back, and nearly falls out of her chair as Amy enters.

  “Morning!” the sysop exclaims, catching herself, then switching off a throbbing boombox."Uh, what’s tox?”

  Amy pulls up a chair, takes out her palmtop, and passes the sysop a cable."Plug me in. And get rid of that pizza, please.”

  “Yes sir! ma’am! I mean ...”

  Right.

  The Renraku System 80 is essentially a network server, an immense bank of data archives. It provides for term-to-term interfaces between the Metascience Group’s users and network-wide operations, primarily administrative, such as Resource Consumption Control. Unfortunately, the RCC software’s glitchy. It misses things if the entries into the science databases aren’t made just so. There are protocols and formats for data entry, but they aren’t foolproof, and scientists researching blood plasma, for example, do not necessarily make good data-entry clerks. The various sections of the Metascience Group have administrative aides who should look after chores like that, but most of the aides are science-people with science-oriented aspirations, rather than people with specializations in computers or administration.

  The experts in Hurley-Cooper’s own computer unit have made any number of fixes to the RCC software, and improved things somewhat, but there are only so many experts and they can only fix so many megapulses of code at any one time. And the software’s complex enough for even minor fixes to give rise to unforeseen bugs. Amy’s looked at possible upgrades, whole new replacement packages, including some from Mitsuhama, which is how she met Harman, but so far nothing she’s seen will quite do the job in quite the way she wants.

  It’s also a fact that Renraku computers run on Renraku computer code, which is idiosyncratic and interacts best, when it interacts, with code written by Renraku and no one else.