Who Hunts the Hunter

by Nyx Smith

  Can Harman trust her? That seems to be what he’s asking for, without actually putting the question to her in so many words."It might be better if you say nothing,” Amy replies."But if you’re telling me something in confidence, it goes no further. It’s your decision, Harman.”

  “Yes, I know,” Harman says."Of course I trust you. It’s just that .. well, you’re aware of the risks we both face.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know if this means something or nothing, but I know what you’ve told me about recent events at your corp. That makes it seem possibly of significance.”

  Amy says nothing, waits. It’s his choice. If he wants to tell her .. .

  “A Mr. Enoshi Ken of Kono-Furata-Ko International dropped by the tower this morning. He was in conference with Bobinek and El-Gabri for about three hours. One of our senior attorneys attended as well.”

  Bobinek is exec VP of Mitsuhama UCAS."Who’s El-Gabri?” Amy blurts.

  “He’s the exec VP for the Biotech division.”

  “Oh, my god.”

  That’s all Harman knows, but it’s enough. Amy tries to keep her expression neutral till she and Harman are off the phone. There’s no point in upsetting him, too.

  His information brings back everything Enoshi Ken said at dinner, about meat being lean or fatty, and the need to avoid redundancies, and her own thoughts about Hurley-Cooper’s rival subsidiary over on Staten Island. The obvious implication is that KFK International is considering or possibly already arranging for the sale of Hurley-Cooper Laboratories.

  It can’t be.

  If KFK divests Hurley-Cooper ... if MCT buys ... If anything like that happens, Amy’s career is as good as over. Any career that she cares about is finished. She’d rather spend the rest of her life cleaning toilets than find herself thrust into a brutal environment like MCT. Unfortunately, she might not have even that option. Hurley-Cooper owns her contract just as surely as any other asset. MCT would have every legal right to insist that every last employee of Hurley-Cooper be part of the buy-out agreement. She could be compelled tomorrow to work for MCT in whatever capacity the predators might want.

  But ... thoughts like that won’t help.

  What does it mean? What should she do? If her guesses are correct and a sale really is in the works, maybe she should blow the lid on the discrepancies she’s discovered in hopes that MCT will take one look and say, “Thanks for the offer, but forget it.”

  No, that’s crazy. She really would end up cleaning toilets if she blows a sale desired by KFK’s Tokyo office. She’d regret that for the rest of her life. All she can do is hope, hope that her guesses are wrong. But, no—that’s no good. She can’t just sit and wait and hope for the best. She’s got to do something and do it now. Somehow, she must get to the bottom of the mysteries she’s uncovered and find a way to cast Hurley-Cooper in a positive light. She must see to it that in the end Tokyo will be too content with its little research subsidiary in downstate New York to consider divesting it. Maybe it’s time she tried something a little extreme. Everything’s on the line.

  36

  The warehouse stands in the shadow of the elevated Cross Bronx Expressway, not far from the Throgs Neck Bridge. The warehouse loading bay is large and strewn with the garbage of uncounted squatters, no longer present.

  Across the broad ceiling run the rails of a small crane. From this crane dangle several loops of thick cable that run through a large pulley. At the bottom of the pulley is a hook. Hanging from that hook by her wrists is the elf razorgirl Tikki fought and captured inside O’Keefe’s brownstone. In addition to being bloody and bruised, the elf is now nude, and her tattooed hide bears several small burns from the head of a slim Sumatran cigarro. The tips of her toes brush the gritty concrete floor.

  Tikki walks around to her rear.

  The elf has a shapely rear end for a ganger: full and round. Pear-shaped. This is good. Such behinds are full of fatty tissue and tissue like that is mostly water. Salty water. That sort of water is an especially good conductor of electric energy.

  Tikki places the head of a Defiance AZ-S shock baton against the elf’s body, touches the key marked 7, and pulls the trigger. The baton’s lithium capacitors deliver a jolt that makes the elf jerk as if kicked by a horse. For a moment, she is rigid—then, she screams. The scream is loud and raw and, combined with scents in the air, bears witness to her pain. It is intense. She goes on grunting and gasping for minutes."What is your name?” Tikki asks.

  The elf moans."Shaver ...”

  Finally, an answer, a streetname, essentially meaningless, but a place to start. Instinct urges Tikki to threaten the elf with immediate death or dismemberment, but she knows better. Interrogations cannot be rushed. They must be carefully executed.

  “Who is your leader?”

  Shaver shakes her head and snarls something vicious. Tikki triggers the baton. The elf’s scream rises high and shrill and goes on longer than before. The pain is more intense. Shaver’s resistance appears to be wearing thin.

  “Who is your leader?”

  Shaver grunts."Tang.”

  Tang is O’Keefe by another name. The former mercenary. The bounty hunter. The elf with many names and many dummy corporations."Who is the other elf female?” Shaver mutters, “Frag you.”

  Tikki applies the stun baton again, this time to Shaver’s front, to her groin. When the screaming finally ends, Shaver is pale and shuddering. Weakly, she murmurs, “Whistle ...” Another streetname."Why does Tang want my cub?"

  "Bounty ...”

  “Who offered bounty?”

  “Don’t know ... Tang’s client ...”

  “Why was the bounty offered?”

  Shaver sneers."Ask Tang ...”

  Tikki applies the stun baton to each of Shaver’s thighs, with the power level set to 9. This time, when the screaming ends, Shaver’s eyes seem about to roll back into her head. Her head lolls.

  “Why was the bounty offered?”

  “Ree ... research ...”

  Tikki frowns.

  Research? Shaver does not smell like she’s lying and yet her answer is one that Tikki had not anticipated. Research? What possible use could her cub be for that? What kind of elf scheme could O’Keefe be involved with? Tikki abruptly realizes it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. It’s irrelevant.

  She has a cub to retrieve or a cub to avenge and scores waiting to be settled. Get to the point.

  “Where is my cub?”

  Shaver mutters, “Frag ...”

  Another jolt of the shock baton. More screams. More time wasted."Answer. Where is my cub?”

  “Tang ...”

  “Address.”

  The address is not long in coming. It takes the form of a street name and a building description, right here in the Bronx. Tikki sheaths the stun baton and walks to the rear of the warehouse.

  There wait two dark blue synthleather-clad members of the Kong Destroyers: Baka and Dogmeat. They are here because the Kong gangleader owes favors to certain individuals who command his respect. Baka and Dogmeat are each well over two meters tall and as massive as mountains. One is hairy; the other bald. Both have horns and huge fangs and great quantities of spikes and studs distributed about their clothing. Both wear smartguns.

  “I’m leaving the weedeater here,” Tikki tells them."Make sure she’s alive when I come back.”

  Dogmeat grins."No shick, chummer.”

  “We’ll be real gentle,” says Baka.

  Tikki lights a slim Dannemann Lonja cigarro, takes a drag, then walks out. Even if she hadn’t understood what the trolls meant by their words and leering grins, she would have guessed it by their smell.

  She should have warned them about the elf’s belly knife.

  37

  The living room is in ruins. A table is overturned. Several plants are smashed right out of their pots. Lamps and pictures lay scattered about, some in pieces. There are dents, gashes, and holes in the walls and smears of blood on the wa
lls, furniture, and carpet. By all that he sees, a pair of trolls might have done battle here.

  “Shaver?” Whistle blurts.

  “Wait.”

  But too late. Whistle is already darting ahead, down the hallway toward the kitchen and dining room. O’Keefe waits, listening, his Luger SPv3 in hand. He turns to open the panel beside the front door and check the household security system. Whistle comes running back up the hallway and dashes up the stairs to the second floor, shouting Shaver’s name. O’Keefe wonders why she goes through this exercise. It would be far more efficient and cautious of her to simply use her mage’s ability and survey the house from the astral.

  The security system informs him that only two live bodies are present.

  It’s still early evening, but for Shaver it’s obviously too late. Shaver arrived per O’Keefe’s instructions to watch for Striper, but Striper was perhaps already here and lying in ambush. Obviously, they fought. Obviously, Shaver was not the victor or the pair would still be present. That presumption adds to O’Keefe’s awareness that he has made the serious error of underestimating his quarry, the time Striper would need to track him down. He will not make that mistake again. Next time it could mean his life.

  Of course, in this case he has every reason to suspect that Shaver played a vital role contributing to Striper’s early arrival."The phone at NewMan is out of service,” Shaver said. O’Keefe can hardly believe that Shaver could have been so incredibly lax as to call the NewMan number from here in this very house. His house. How many times, he wonders, has Shaver committed similar breaches of security?

  Why not simply put up a sign: Here I am. Kill me.

  O’Keefe had expected Striper to follow the trail leading from Maine, from a certain Amerind with a certain ACV and a certain credstick, from that to Boston and a slag named Clutch, and then to New York and Sabot. And thence into O’Keefe’s carefully prepared trap. Shaver seems to have helped shorten the trail.

  Striper must have found a path leading to the NewMan Management office. That would explain the telecom there suddenly going out of service. It would be a relatively simple matter to download the telecom’s onboard record of incoming calls. That record would likely provide sufficient data, thanks to Shaver, to lead Striper straight to this house.

  Just what is the full extent of the damage? O’Keefe goes down the hall to the stairs and descends to his basement workshop. His plan had not called for Striper to enter the house, but rather to pick up his trail here and follow him elsewhere. Now he sees another result of his miscalculation. A quick survey of the workshop reveals that his SPAS-22 combat gun and a Colt Cobra SMG are both missing, along with several smoke and concussion grenades and a sizable quantity of ammunition. Perhaps most significant of all is the disappearance of his Dragunov Drake-1 heavy-caliber sniping rifle. This is one of the few rifles in the world designed specifically for sniping, and, hence, the trade of the professional assassin. Much as the name suggests, a single shot from the Dragunov can knock down a metahuman as easily as the paw of a western dragon, and an angry western dragon at that.

  O’Keefe finds these thefts rather curious. Certainly, Striper would have the resources to obtain weapons on her own. Unless ... Perhaps she has been so intent on moving swiftly that she has been forced to pick up weapons where and when they become available. O’Keefe hopes that means Striper is tracking him with the same reckless spontaneity with which she charged into his guns at the cabin in Maine. It would make his task all the easier. He will not rely on that, however.

  “Tang!” Whistle cries."Tang!”

  O‘Keefe climbs the stairs to the ground-floor hallway. Whistle meets him there, all in a frenzy about her missing Sister Sinister. So much for the temperament that seemed as solid as granite. Solid until something happens to her chummer.

  “Shaver’s gone! We have to find her!”

  “Of course,” O’Keefe agrees.

  Aside from any questions regarding loyalty or ethics, O’Keefe wants very much to find out what Shaver has told Striper of his plans. She’ll certainly have told Striper something, possibly everything. Striper has experience with interrogations, O’Keefe assumes, and in her current frame of mind she will probably be quite brutal, not unlike an animal. The only real question is whether or not Striper will leave Shaver alive. O’Keefe has doubts in that regard.

  He takes his SecLink from a vest pocket. This small device is utilitarian in appearance, about the size of a pack of cigs. Push a key and it warns him when a person, such as Shaver, comes near. Push another key and it indicates with near ComSat precision where someone, such as Shaver, happens to be.

  Whistle looks at him sharply."What the frag’s that?”

  “I took the precaution of bugging Shaver before she came here,” O’Keefe explains."Just on the chance that something like the current situation might arise.”

  “Bugged her when?”

  “You recall our discussion of Asahi beer?”

  “You dropped a bug in her beer?”

  “A very small and sophisticated device designed to lodge temporarily in the intestines.”

  “You don’t trust either of us.”

  O’Keefe restrains a wry smile. In his book, trust is earned over the course of many years and he has not been working with Shaver and Whistle for anywhere near that amount of time. In his view, they are both very much on probation."Former gangers are not known for their loyalty, and you will admit that your friend is not the type to let a little treachery stand in the way of an easy profit.”

  “You don’t know her,” Whistle says adamantly."She’s not as savage as you think.”

  “I think she is as heavily chromed as anyone I would care to meet, and chrome exacts a price that goes beyond nuyen.” O’Keefe knows for a fact that Shaver has a number of implanted weapons, replacement muscle tissue providing heightened strength, augmented reflexes, and other cybernetic enhancements. She is about as close to becoming the magnum vatjob warrior as one can get without losing every last trace of metahuman sentiment. She is walking the razor-fine monowire of sanity. That makes her extremely dangerous, potentially unstable. Precautions are therefore essential."What did you put in my drink?”

  “Bug a mage? You must think me mad.”

  “If I had a truth spell—”

  “It would bear me out.” O’Keefe checks his SecLink."Shaver is within range. Shall we go?”

  They take O’Keefe’s Isuzu Metrovan down to the southeast tip of the Bronx, beneath the Cross Bronx Expressway, nearly as far as Locust Point. O’Keefe’s SecLink points them down streets lined with ancient brownstones and then through blocks of commercial-zoned properties, many large brick and concrete structures. At length, they come to a warehouse bearing the sign: Edgewater Shipping. The place is dark, no lights showing inside or out. O’Keefe drives past and parks just up the block at curbside. A passing semi sounds its airhorns.

  “Survey the building.”

  Whistle nods."Don’t move me.”

  “No, of course not.”

  Mages traveling in the astral plane are quite vulnerable. They apparently have no intrinsic sense for where their meat body might be located. If the body is moved, they might never find it, which would mean death. A gradual fading away into the neverland of the astral. Whistle’s body slumps, but only for moments. As her eyes snap open, she curses and blurts, “They’re jacking her!”

  “Who?”

  “Two trolls!” Whistle grabs at the passenger door handle. O’Keefe seizes her elbow and tugs her back to face him.

  “I lead.”

  “Well, come on!”

  “How many in the building?”

  “Just her and the trolls!”

  O’Keefe readies his Luger, exchanging a twelve-round clip for a fifty-round drum, then adding the laser sight and wire-frame shoulder stock. Whistle is frantic to get moving. An unfortunate result of her relationship with Shaver, which is rather close. O’Keefe keeps a hand on her elbow till they’ve rounded to the r
ear of the warehouse and he steps firmly into the lead.

  The door there is unlocked. A narrow hallway leads to a large dusty area occupied by only a few scattered macroplas crates. A large freight door, standing open, provides access to a truck loading bay.

  And there they are, near the center of the bay. Shaver is hung from the hook of a ceiling crane. She looks unconscious. The two trolls with her both look like gangers. Kong Destroyers by their colors. One holds Shaver’s legs bent back and is jamming her from behind. His tool is quite large. The other one stands and watches, grinning ferociously. He appears to have taken some minor wound in the stomach region.

  Whistle brushes past, darting through the doorway and into the loading bay, shrieking with banshee abandon. The bluish light swirling around her hands abruptly jumps across fifteen meters of open air and erupts into a coruscating haze that surrounds the troll at Shaver’s back and crackles like roaring flames.

  This leaves O’Keefe little choice.

  As the troll enveloped by Whistle’s magic staggers back screaming, O’Keefe steps into the open doorway and points his Luger at the troll’s partner."Stop!” O’Keefe barks.

  But this troll does not stop. Barely glancing at O’Keefe, he tugs a smartgun from a side-draw holster and lifts it toward Whistle. He is obviously about to fire and O’Keefe cannot permit that. Despite his best efforts, Whistle remains the one essential variable in the whole of his equation, so he absolutely must defend her.

  The Luger rattles, spitting explosive slugs at a rather stately fourteen rounds per second. O’Keefe grits his teeth and struggles to keep the burst on target. The troll’s size aids in that regard.

  The troll’s smartgun stammers, but the burst goes high, toward the ceiling, and the troll joins his partner on the floor. O’Keefe joins Whistle in freeing Shaver, who is in fact unconscious, and a bloody mess besides.

  “Wake her.”