Who Hunts the Hunter

by Nyx Smith

  Tang is O’Keefe.

  Tikki draws the Viper automag from under her jacket and moves into position near the top of the stairs. Footsteps sound, still on the ground floor, moving around, but Tikki hears only one set of feet. The elf female grunts again, and says, “Fuchi, of course. Piece a squat.”

  Is she talking to herself?

  Beeps follow, like beeps from telecom keys; then several bleepings, like the far end of a telecom line bleeping. A voice that sounds computer-generated says, “We’re sorry ... the number you dialed is out of service ...”

  The elf grunts.

  More beeps, more bleepings.

  “Answer the freaking phone!” the elf snarls.

  The line clicks, a male answers. The male’s voice is middle-pitched and sounds odd, oddly inflected. He speaks his English like he learned it in Britain."Ah, it’s you,” he says."Any sign of our quarry yet?”

  “Of course not! It’s too fragging soon!”

  Brief silence."I warned you about the danger of underrating this individual.”

  “We haven’t been in town a fraggin’ day, Tang,” the female elf growls."No way this slitch is gonna come on this fast! I don’t care what she is. Or who!”

  “Nonetheless, stay alert. We’re about to make delivery. We’ll be with you shortly.”

  The elf female grunts."By the way,” she says, “the telecom at NewMan is out of service.”

  “What? You dialed that number—!”

  A loud thump interrupts. The telecom screen bursts into a shower of sparking fragments. The elf whirls. Tikki’s standing on the threshold of the living room with the Viper automag pointed right at her."Hands up,” Tikki says.

  The elf is a piece of work, tall and dark, all black synthleather and tats, with a long black curling mane of hair. As she turns, her eyes are so huge they seem round. She smells of a shocked surprise bordering on terror, but that lasts only an instant, just long enough for her to look and see Tikki and the Viper.

  “Shick!” the elf snarls.

  In the next instant, she’s diving for the sofa and the Ingram smartgun lying there in a hip holster. Tikki lunges. The elf’s not the type to be impressed by guns pointed at her. She’s made that clear. So, it’s shoot or get physical and Tikki wants this one alive.

  They collide. The elf is very fast. She gets a hand on the smartgun. Tikki swings the Viper like a club. The elf falls onto her back on the sofa, bleeding from the head. She nearly seems out of the fight, but then she twitches strangely, up at the waist. Tikki feels something plunge into her belly. She staggers back from the sofa, looking down at the raw red wound streaming blood from just under her waist. She looks up to find the elf sneering, rising, standing up. The bloody blade protruding from the elf’s midsection abruptly vanishes. A belly blade. Tikki should have expected that, something like it. The elf smells of metal.

  “Come on, slitch!” the elf snarls. She flings the smartgun away and opens her arms in arrogant invitation. Cyberspurs appear at the ends of her fingers, from the backs of her hands, and from her forearms, too."Let’s dance!"

  Tikki burns with fury.

  A low rumbling growl rises into the back of her throat. Fur rushes up over her arms and face. Her upper body swells. Her clothes strain and split. Her hands become paws and the Viper automag drops to the floor, and then she’s roaring, lunging ahead on two legs and hurling herself bodily into the elf.

  Metal slices and tears, claws rend and rake. The cyberblades move too quickly to be avoided. Tikki doesn’t try. The elf has the advantage of speed; Tikki has power. She uses her paws like mallets, then rams the elf into a wall and drives her down to the floor. The belly blade stabs again. Tikki staggers back, wounded in a dozen places, and then the elf staggers up onto her feet.

  “You’re good,” the elf snarls."Like a road train. Now you’re good-frye!”

  The elf is a whirlwind rushing in with flashing, slashing razors. Tikki sees her arm laid open to the bone before she glimpses the spur that does it. But the pain hardly touches her. The water washing through her eyes blurs her vision, but that affects nothing. She pounds the elf in the face. The elf staggers back. Tikki seizes her about the body and hurls her across the room. The elf goes crashing over a table and tumbling to the floor.

  Now, they’re both hurting, drenched in blood, clothes shredded, but one of them has already healed and is ready for more.

  Tikki roars and charges.

  The elf is slow to respond, only halfway to her feet when Tikki impacts. The elf spits and something like a string lashes out from under her tongue, but it misses. Tikla smashes the elf back off her feet, into a glass-faced cabinet, a pair of walls, then down again to the floor on her belly. The elf struggles to rise, but Tikki pounds the elf’s head till she slumps, unconscious. She is fast and tough for an elf, but metal, cyberware, can accomplish only so much.

  By the time the elf wakes, she is manacled at wrists and ankles and lying in the rear of Tikki’s stolen Eurovan. Tikki touches a handful of claws to the elf’s cheek."Soon, we talk,” Tikki growls."I ask questions. You answer. Or you die.”

  The elf groans feebly, then curses.

  Curses will not help her.

  34

  It’s well past the usual quitting time when Max Chemick puts a hand to the wall to find the old sensor pad that switches on the lights. Not very high-tech, but then a corp like Hurley-Cooper usually puts its money where it matters. Stock rooms don’t have much need for fancy automated lighting. Max glances around at the shelving, the bins, the stacks of macroplast crates, the refrigerated cabinets, and slips his hands into his sweater pockets.

  Things are pretty quiet right now. A lot of the Metascience Group’s scientists have closed up shop and headed home. A few of them work odd hours, monitoring experiments, taking advantage of resources they’d have to wait to use during the day, but most are gone somewhere around sundown. Max would be gone too, except this evening he’s got a special coming in.

  Since it’s after normal hours and he’s got the stock room to himself, he decides to indulge. He pulls his old briar pipe from his sweater pocket, strikes a match, and lights up. Technically, there’s no smoking anywhere in the building, or near any of the building exits, but no one’ll mind as long as he doesn’t start blowing clouds that threaten to asphyxiate people.

  Abruptly, the door behind him rattles.

  Max turns to find Ms. Suhree coming in, stepping briskly along in her blue guard uniform."How late we are working, Mr. Max,” she says in a voice that lilts up and down melodically. She has a brother that talks the same way, she says. Works at some condoplex."You must be having a late delivery tonight, I should be guessing.”

  Max nods."That’s a fact.”

  Suhree goes straight on to the black box by the freight doors. That’s where she keys in her security code to prove he came through here on her rounds."Would it be that you are receiving something of specialty interest this evening, Mr. Max?”

  “Can’t say for sure,” Max replies."Have to check the receiving schedule. I imagine it’s some arcane thing. Mystic substance. Probably coming on some special courier service.”

  “That is sounding like business as usually.”

  Max nods."That’s a fact.”

  “Be having a good night for yourself, Mr. Max.”

  “You too, Suhree.”

  Suhree goes out and Max steps over to his counter by the freight doors. He keys his desktop comp and brings up the receiving schedule. Before he can more than glance at that, the exterior alarm dings. The monitors ranged across the rear of his counter show a streamlined van pulling onto the apron behind the building, then turning, preparing to back up to the loading dock. Max taps a few keys to get a close-up view, but the van’s got no exterior markings. He’d be suspicious if it did. Special couriers don’t advertise except in the Corporate Pages.

  Max accesses his desktop intercom to call upstairs. That cranky ork girl Germaine answers Dr. Hill’s line."What do you want?”r />
  “Looks like the doc’s delivery just pulled up.”

  “No squat.”

  Germaine breaks the connection. Max shakes his head, wondering what it is that makes young women want to talk like gangers and gutterpunks. Seems like they’re always demanding respect and yet the words they use show no respect for anyone, including themselves. Talk like a beebo, expect to be treated like one.

  The exterior alarm dings again. The side doors of the van are open. Two people get out. The monitors zoom in close. It’s two elves, a man and a woman, dressed in dark clothes, armed. They’ve been here before. Max recalls their faces. These two use aliases on account of the business they’re in. Apparently, transporting expensive, arcane merchandise can be a dangerous occupation.

  The alarm dings again as the two elves come up onto the loading dock and slot their IDs into the exterior checker. The one comes up as Roger Thorstin; the other, the woman, as Aphrodite Zolde. Both employed by NewMan Management Systems.

  Max grins, restrains a chuckle, then keys the exterior intercom, and says, “Be right with you.”

  Thorstin says, “No hurry.”

  He sounds English. Real polite.

  Security regulations prohibit Max from opening the freight doors after normal hours till one of the bosses shows up and says okay. That’s just a precaution. Dr. Hill comes along in a minute or so, still in his shirt and tie and white lab coat, ready as usual with a smile and a friendly greeting.

  Max asks, “What would we be receiving tonight, Doc? More of that unicorn powder?”

  “This is a special shipment, Max,” Dr. Hill says in all seriousness. Dr. Hill’s a very serious fellow, maybe too serious for a relatively young man. Serious and kind of sad."I think the records show we’re accepting several containers of snake venom.”

  Max nods. The receiving schedule refers to something like that."Can’t be too careful, I guess.”

  “No, Max. I’m afraid that’s so.”

  What the records say and what actually comes through the freight door are not necessarily the same thing, and, unfortunately, it just has to be that way. It’s like the doc explained some time ago. People can be real ignorant. Count on those who are most ignorant of all to carry their views to extremes. People like the Humane League or the eco-terrorists. As ignorant as pus, or, say, medieval peasants. Give them half an excuse and they’d be crashing through the front gates and planting bombs and God knows what else. They just have no understanding.

  The Good Book says that the beasts were put on this earth to be used as people see fit, and Max figures that covers it. Of course that doesn’t give people a right to turn furry little creatures into things as frivolous as coats, but coats aren’t the real issue.

  The kind of research Dr. Hill and the other scientists are doing here is for the betterment of people. Work that might eventually save people’s lives. Max figures that’s about the best possible use any animal could ever be put to. The life of an animal should be respected, and no animal should ever be made to suffer, but compared to the life of a person ... well, there’s just no arguing that animals are expendable, and people aren’t. Without animals for use in experiments, research comes to a halt and that’s pretty much the whole stoiy.

  Max keys in his code to open the smaller of the two freight doors. Dr. Hill adds his code; then, while the door rumbles upward, Dr. Hill makes the entry to show the delivery of “snake venom” accepted.

  “Anything I need to know?” Max asks.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Dr. Hill replies."This one should be relatively safe.”

  They’ve had a few close calls in the past. Wild animals, especially the Awakened species, can be full of surprises. They once had a sort of human-looking chimp that busted free of its cage and ran all over the place, breaking things up. Made one hell of a mess.

  Max wheels his flat-bed wagon onto the loading dock. Roger and Aphrodite, the elves, muscle a large gray case with bars along the sides out of the rear of the van. Max lends a hand getting the case onto his wagon. Fifty kilograms easy. The dark shape inside doesn’t seem happy. It growls and snarls kind of like a dog with a sore throat and bangs the sides of the case. Max catches a quick glimpse of long, dark, gleaming claws. They look real sharp.

  “Be seeing you,” Thorstin says to Dr. Hill."Part two of two?” Dr. Hill asks.

  The elf nods."Yes. Presently.”

  35

  To honor the Tokyo auditors, the usual Wednesday dinner meeting is moved to Ginza House, on New Bronx Plaza. Amy’s suffered through tatami-style dining—sitting on cushions on the floor—often enough to take it in stride.

  The private dining room could have come straight from Japan. Everything looks like genuine wood or paper or ceramics: the long low table, the lanterns, pots and cups and bowls. Flower arrangements just so, as if designed by an artist. The maitre d’ wears traditional costume and gestures with a small fan. Women in pastel-shaded kimonos hasten hither and yon, without ever seeming to rush, delivering things, removing things.

  The menu includes shrimp tempura, platters of raw fish, shabu-shabu, sukiyaki, and a northern Japanese specialty called robata, like shish-kebab. And of course Atami beer and sake, lots of sake.

  Tonight, no one sits at the head of the table. There is no head. Rather, things are concentrated at the middles, where Vernon Janasova and the executive VP sit opposite Enoshi Ken and Kurushima Jussai.

  Vernon fumbles constantly with his chopsticks and jokes about it. Amy tries not to notice.

  The meal begins at six p.m. Enoshi Ken talks a bit about archery and kendo, then passes some idle comments about KFK International’s evolving global strategies."Diversification is the key element,” he says."We must be moving in many directions simultaneously if we are to meet the challenges of the future. We must take care to avoid redundancies, as well.”

  That last remark concerning redundancies turns Amy’s beer sour. What it brings to mind is Richmond Research Associates located over on Staten Island. Richmond is another KFK subsidiary, much larger than Hurley-Cooper and far less a pure research facility than a commercial lab. It has a largely Asian staff and a CEO straight from Japan. What little true research the corp does almost always leads to highly lucrative patents. Richmond’s bottom line usually makes Hurley-Cooper look a weak sister.

  Richmond also enjoys a reputation for absolute adherence to corporate protocol and bureaucratic procedure, whereas Hurley-Cooper has been described in trade publications and elsewhere as “informal.”

  Another word for sloppy, in executive parlance.

  When Enoshi starts talking about meat being fatty or lean, and what that may lead to, from a corporate perspective, Amy swallows an orange-flavored bit of sushi whole.

  Looking up the table, she says, “Of course, it is difficult for a scientist to accurately predict where the creative process integral to all research may eventually lead. Leonardo Da Vinci claimed that nature is full of infinite causes that have never formed part of anyone’s experience. We limit our chances of discovering these causes, these scientific unknowns, if we as executives attempt to micromanage the course of pure research.”

  Several blank looks turn her way, but the quote from Da Vinci seems to grab Enoshi Ken’s attention. Amy hopes it goes further than that. The man’s fondness for quotes is well known. Enough that Amy had her aide Laurena searching databases all afternoon for any “wise words” that might be flung at Enoshi to make a point.

  Enoshi replies, “Perhaps you are suggesting, Ms. Berman, that many details make up perfection, and perfection is no detail?”

  If perfection is seeking truth, searching for real answers, not merely commercial success, then Mr. Enoshi Ken has a point. True research is no minor detail. Trying to better the world is no trivial effort. For what it’s worth, Amy agrees.

  Dinner ends at eight. Vernon makes noises about adjourning to one of the glitzy nighthowls on the Plaza: Twelve Chrome Spikes. Tonight featuring ME-109. Amy decides to make her exit.
/>
  But before she can quite complete her escape, the executive VP touches her elbow, and says, “You asked to see me this afternoon.”

  Amy nods, admits it. She feels like she’s way out on a limb. It would probably be smart to tell the executive VP everything she’s learned about the Metascience mystery file, so if and when she gets around to making any incriminating disclosures she’s got someone firmly in her camp.

  “I’m sorry,” Amy says."Tomorrow would be better. I’m really not feeling very well tonight. Excuse me, won’t you?"

  "Certainly.”

  The Plaza monorail ferries Amy back to her office tower. Escalators carry her down to the first level of the Plaza’s underground parking garage. She gets into her sedate, silver-gray Toyota Arbiter GX, closes the door, sits back and shuts her eyes.

  It’s going on eight-thirty. She shouldn’t be wasting time. Scottie promised to visit her tonight. She keys the ignition and puts the Toyo in reverse, and then her cellphone bleeps.

  It’s Harman, reduced in size to fit on a twelve-centimeter screen, seen against a background of flaring strobes and blazing laserlight. As the Managing Director of Sales for Mitsuhama Systems Engineering, Harman has no choice but to participate in after-hours business meetings and affairs. It’s written right into his contract.

  “I have only a few moments, darling,” he says, “but something came to my attention. I felt you should know. Well, what I mean is, I feel I have to tell you ...”

  Why is he acting so ambivalent? It isn’t like him."Does this have to do with business?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “If you’re uncomfortable, don’t tell me anything.”

  “No, that’s wrong,” Harman insists."I mean, you’re correct. I do feel uncomfortable. I suppose I’m not used to trusting people like this.”

  The smile he adds only makes him seem more uncomfortable. Amy struggles to conjure up some sort of appropriate response. They usually don’t discuss business, except in general terms, simply to avoid any conflicts that their relevant corps might use against them. They know for a fact that on a few occasions Mitsuhama spies have followed them around on dates. That’s yet another reason why Harman is considering getting away from Mitsuhama.