Preying for keeps s-29

by Mel Odom

  Skater listened intently as the aroma of fresh soykaf filled the small room.

  "Ready?" Trey asked. Before him, an arrangement of charms, bracelets, and rings lay on piece of silk embroidered with what Skater assumed to be some kind of arcane symbols. The mage touched them as he watched the screens, then began placing them on his person.

  "Ready." Skater turned away from the trid and poured himself a cup from the kaf-maker tucked neatly into the corner under three shelves of mechanical reference manuals.

  "She hasn't contacted you?" Trey asked.

  Skater shook his head. There was only one she the mage could have been referring to.

  Trey finished the last of his preparations. "I really thought she'd be here to see this thing through."

  "She's got her reasons for not wanting to go."

  "True. But we're operating under a death sentence here. Could it really be any worse?"

  Skater remembered the fear he'd seen in Archangel's eyes. "Yeah, I think maybe it could." He checked the time. "It's almost eight. Let's button up here."

  Less than ten minutes later, he and Trey had shut down the office, leaving up the bare-bones security systems. Wheeler was already in the cockpit warming the engine, and Elvis and Duran stood beside the door.

  They loaded into the plane with no attempt at small talk. They'd all been tense since making the decision to hit NuGene, but the various tasks each one had assumed to prepare for the operation had kept them from taking it out on each other. A few hours of rest had helped, too.

  Skater had heard snatches from Kestrel overnight and throughout the day that everyone looking for them- McKenzie, the elves, and the yakuza-was heated up to almost a fever pitch. The net was drawing tighter around Seattle.

  Skater cast the mooring line loose and pulled himself up into the co-pilot's seat, adjusting to the rocking movement of the amphibian on the water. "Get us out of here," he told Wheeler.

  The dwarf nodded. He sealed himself off in the plastic rigger's cocoon to totally immerse himself in the plane's operations. From now on, Skater knew, all communication with Wheeler would have to be through the aircraft's radio headsets. Sluggish at first, the plane gained speed, pushing toward the double doors. A press of a button on the control panel to bounce an IR signal off a servo mounted at the front of the warehouse made the doors slide sideways.

  The waterway cut through fifty meters of plascrete and led directly into Puget Sound. Night lay like a cloak over the sprawl.

  As the Fiat-Fokker passed the double doors. Skater spotted the figure standing there. "Hold it," he told Wheeler over the amphibian's com.

  The dwarf cut the engine immediately, but the plane continued on across the water surface a few meters more.

  Even without his low-light enhancement, Skater recognized Archangel in the dark.

  She wore black synthdenim jeans and a black turtleneck under a gray trench coat. She held the straps of a heavy backpack tight in one white-knuckled fist. Tense anger darkened her features.

  Skater popped the door and threw it back. He stood up so she could clearly see him.

  "You're going through with this then?" she demanded.

  "No choice," Skater said. Her hesitation probably lasted only an instant, but he felt the weight of it and knew she did too.

  "Damn you. Jack, if we get caught." Her voice was hard and fierce, and he knew she meant every word of it. She stepped forward and offered her hand.

  Skater took it and pulled her aboard. Even before she could get to her seat. Wheeler had pushed the throttle forward. In seconds, the Fiat-Fokker powered out onto the lake, then rose quickly into the black sky, cutting through the heavy cloud cover.

  How much time before we make the border?" Archangel asked.

  Skater checked the time. They'd been in the air-in silence-for almost twenty minutes, getting up to altitude and speed. "Couple hours, give or take ten minutes. We're going in slow, looping back in from the Pacific. If everything works out, we'll meet up with an approaching storm front and should be able to use that for cover part of the way in."

  "And after that?" she asked.

  Skater looked at her. "After that, we're black-market arms dealers making a border run. We meet up with resistance, and we take the fall."

  "Losing the plane?"

  "We have to in order to make it look good. We'll go down near the Willamette River north of the city and just over the Wall, well beyond the river lock. Once in the river, we've got two undersea sleds and scuba gear. With all the action we'll stir up in the area, both land and sea, we should be clear before the first shock troops arrive. It's about five kilometers into Portland."

  "They're going to be looking for bodies," Archangel said.

  "Yepper," Duran said. He held up two thick fingers. "And they'll find them. Me and Elvis did a little recruiting while these guys were putting together the ordnance packages. We were gonna find us a street doc to sell us a coupla bodies, but then we tripped over a pair of Halloweeners all nice and geeked in some turf action." He twitched his lips back to show his fangs.

  "Do they have believable histories if the Border Patrol does a check on them?" Archangel reached into her backpack and brought out her deck and a portable telecom. She handed the ork the datacord to jack the deck into the plane's computer.

  Skater watched her as she worked. The tension was still with her, and her face was paler than usual. He felt guilty that she'd come almost in spite of herself and was having to face old fears she'd obviously left in the Tir. But the guilt wasn't professional and it wasn't going to do anyone a fragging bit of good, so he shelved it.

  "They're going to explode," Duran said. "Probably won't be any pieces big enough to identify."

  Archangel powered up her deck and started tapping at the keys. "But if there are, the Border Patrol's going to be suspicious about why two thrill-gangers suddenly went into the arms business. FitzWallace is no babe in the woods."

  Skater knew the name from his scan on Portland. Colonel Jacob FitzWallace was the head of the Border Patrol. And Archangel was right; the guy was savvy. "Did you get a SIN on either of them?" she asked.

  "There wasn't exactly time."

  Archangel dug through her backpack and pulled out a surface scanner/reader. She carried it for times the team needed to check fingerprints or steal them for future reference. She passed it back to Trey. "Get me their prints."

  "They're dead." Trey didn't look at all happy about the assignment.

  Archangel gave him a hard look. "Chummer, we're hours behind on the setup for this run. Part of it's my fault, but I can't play catch-up if you're dragging your hoop."

  "Right." The mage made his way to the back, pulling a handkerchief from a shirt pocket.

  "I can loop into the harbor patrol's crime files and set up records and SINs for both these guys. It's a lot easier than trying to crack Lone Star's systems. If FitzWallace asks Lone Star to do a background check on those bodies, the Star will do a search of all its precincts, triggering a general info dump from all the law-enforcement agencies in the area. The files I set up will feed right into Lone Star's resources and they'll accept them as good. All we have to do is make sure the Halloweener SINs turn up for the Border Patrol to find."

  "But don't you need to get into the Matrix to do all that?" Skater asked.

  "If we had a satellite uplink, there'd be no prob. But we don't, so I'll just create the files, compress them for a faster delivery, and tag a friend who's got access to a satlink through a black BBS. I can manage all that very nicely over this portaphone." Archangel looked up. "Buying time on the satlink's going to be expensive, but it's worth it." She hooked the telecom up to her deck as Skater watched.

  The amphibian's registration could be altered," Skater said.

  "Who's it registered to now?" Archangel asked.

  "A joker named Kennedy who's been dead for seventeen months." Wheeler replied. "Skater and I met him during a run that fell through. He was a hawker for a line of antiques
and elf talismans coming out of some of the best little backdoor art factories you'd ever want to see. But none of them had ever seen the Old Country, whichever Old Country he was referring to at the time. He was a fragging artist. Had to be to support the gambling jones he had.

  "The last time we went to see him, someone got to him before we did. Put a couple fletchettes through his wetware and left him at an outside table at the Renton Hole in the Wall. Nobody saw anything or even knew he was dead. We didn't know it either till we walked up on him. We'd already been noticed, so we had a drink each, then grabbed Kennedy and got the hell out of there. We arranged for the body to disappear, then when the time came to register the amphibian, we used his name."

  Archangel nodded. "I can show that he sold our gangers the plane yesterday, log it in through licensing. Their SINs will pop up and should leave us clear. For awhile. When someone looks really close, those SINs are going to crumble and fall away."

  Trey returned and handed the scanner over. Archangel jacked it into her deck and downloaded the images.

  "How do you plan to get into NuGene?" she asked as she worked.

  Skater shifted in his seat. "It's going to be tough. The place is maxxed out on security right now." Kestrel had turned up quite a bit of information on the current situation. "At least the perimeter stations are. Knight Errant is handling the account. But they're not being let inside. NuGene is taking care of its own internal security."

  "Meaning Ellard Dragonftetcher."

  "Yeah. The only option we've got is kidnapping one of NuGene's researchers and using him or her to get through the outer defenses."

  "That's risky."

  "Depends on how much the person we get wants to live," Duran said, "I'm pretty good at convincing someone their life is on the line."

  "I've got another idea. When Torin Silverstaff was first building up the company, he constructed as cheaply as possible." Archangel tapped a key and transferred an image to the plane's large vidscreen so the team could see. A datapic of the NuGene building formed, all hard lines and angles. "He knocked down pre-existing buildings, scraped the rubble out of the way, and built on top of them. But he had to use the existing foundations and utility hookups."

  The building image became translucent and remained sitting at the side of the street. Below it, a schematic of the foundation formed with grids in red lines and in yellow.

  "The red lines are the current architecture," Archangel said, "and the yellow is where the previous buildings were." Skater studied the schematic. "They've put up some false walls and floors."

  Archangel tapped more keys. "The construction crews who rebuilt NuGene weren't able to completely incorporate the pre-existing foundations. They had to sink some new support columns."

  "But there may be some pockets inside the foundation that aren't covered by Knight Errant or the internal sec-systems." Skater peered at the gridded sections of the building's two foundations, excitement flaring to life inside him. Using one of the R amp;D people as a means of getting into the building hadn't been his preference, but it had seemed executable. "If we can get into those lower levels-"

  "We might be able to tap the computer lines without them ever knowing we were there," Archangel said. "Next best thing to a zipless frag," Duran said. "They could have filled in the holes," Skater said, playing the devil's advocate.

  Archangel shook her head. "I went over the blueprints I raided from the Portland City Commissioner's Office. Putting that much concrete in the ground near the river for a purely cosmetic reason would have cost serious nuyen in environmental taxes."

  "The elves were already pushing for a back-to-nature movement then." Duran commented. "I guess they worry about other contaminants corps might want to hide in something built along the lines of a tomb."

  "With good reason," Trey said. "Toxic waste is expensive to get rid of through legitimate means."

  "There were letters from Silverstaff requesting that the Commissioner's office waive the tax," Archangel said, "but they turned him down. Silverstaff didn't invest the capital because the pouring was expensive as well."

  "Is there a way to get to the foundation?" Skater asked.

  “The city's been honeycombed with drainage systems to help prevent flooding." Archangel hit more keys and more lines took shape on the screen. "I found two likely prospects. Both of them come in from the river."

  On the screen, the NuGene building reduced in size as the rest of the city came into view around it. An eyeblink later, two green tubes raced in from different positions along the curvature of the Willamette River, coming together at a juncture almost at NuGene's doorstep.

  "From here," Archangel said, "we should be able to cut through the drainage tunnel into one of those pockets under the building. The other tunnel I found here"-a yellow tube formed on the screen almost touching the green joint and extended under NuGene-"has been abandoned."

  "You don't know if it's clear?"

  "No." Archangel looked at Skater. "We won't know that till we're there."

  "How big are the tunnels?"

  "The ones coming from the river, we can walk through. Even Elvis."

  The troll stroked his silver-capped tusk. "That's good news."

  "The downside is that they'll be patrolled by maintenance drones that could alert security. But I think I've got a utility that'll get us by them." Archangel touched the yellow line on the screen. "This tunnel, though, is less than a meter across."

  "Crawlspace," Skater said.

  Archangel leaned back in the bench seal. "At best."

  "Then that's what we'll do. Can you print out a copy of those schematics? I want to overlay them with the maps I've got."

  In seconds, she handed him the hardcopies. Briefly, their hands touched and she met his gaze. "Don't start feeling responsible for me being here," she said softly, in a voice the others couldn't hear. "I was bitchy when I caught up with you at the warehouse. That wasn't how I really feel. I'm just scared. Haven't had any sleep, and I've been running on kaf and sheer nerves. I came along for myself. Life may not be great in the sprawl, but at least it's mine and no one else's. It means a lot to me to be able to say that."

  Before Skater could respond, she turned back to her deck and immediately became absorbed in working on it. He watched her for a moment, checking the throb along her neck, then faced forward again.

  Abruptly, sheets of rain fell across the amphibian's nose and blotted out a discernible view of the sky. The roaring winds buffeted the small plane. Skater studied the maps and the hardcopy as the light in the Fiat-Fokker's cabin dimmed intermittently. Lightning blazed a ragged rip of color and heat only a few meters from the right wing, drawing a curse from Duran.

  Wheeler juked the controls to bring the amphibian back on-line. "And to think," the dwarf cracked in the silence that had filled the plane, "this is the easy part."

  Even watching the power of the storm envelop them, Skater knew it was the truth.

  "Look alive, chummers," Wheeler said over the radio two hours later. He sounded like he was far away. Jacked into the amphibian's controls, he was the plane. "We've been tagged. Portland Border Patrol has given us a knock-knock, wants to know who we are and do we know we've violated Portland airspace."

  Skater roused himself and glanced out the window, which showed him they were still enmeshed in roiling black clouds.

  They'd ridden the edge of the storm into the area, sometimes bucking hard, alternately losing altitude, then climbing frantically to regain it. All of them had stayed buckled into their seats while the cargo shifted in the hold.

  "How far out are we?" Skater asked over the headset.

  "Seven kilometers," the rigger answered.

  "How soon will we be there?"

  'Three minutes, give or take. If this drekking storm isn't shoving us forward, it's sucking us back in thermals."

  "The next time there's a good jolt of lightning," Skater said, "shed some altitude and make it look like we're having a harder time than
we are." He leaned forward in his seal, captured by the harness.

  "We catch another near one," Wheeler said with genuine feeling, "it might not be play-acting."

  The signal from the Portland Border Patrol was garbled and broken up. A glance at the altimeter showed Skater they were at something over three thousand meters. He shifted his attention to the sweep of the arm across the radar screen. Two green blips appeared and the Fiat-Fokker's navigational computer began tracking them, showing their increasing altitude in rapidly changing red numerals. 'They've got two away." Skater said over the headset. "I feel them out there. They won't hesitate."

  "Fiat-Fokker," a harsh voice barked over the radio, "be advised that you are on the verge of entering Tir Tairngire airspace. Identify yourself and your business, or be shot down." The message was repeated in Sperethiel.

  "Those are EuroFighter aircraft," Wheeler said. "They'll come fully loaded. And if they don't get us, there's always the SAM-sites."

  Skater peered through the heavy rain as the warning was repeated, broken up by the electricity swirling around them. He couldn't see anything. The amphibian was hanging there like a kid's kite, waiting for a load of buckshot to take it down. His mouth was dry.

  "Fiat-Fokker, this is your last-" The lightning knifed a blinding arc through the storm tossed clouds, cutting out the radio. Less than a heartbeat later, the peal of thunder cracked a sonic whip across the sky.

  By then Wheeler was already moving. The amphibian heeled over sideways in response to his command. "No holding back now. We hesitate, we're soup meat."

  "Go," Skater told him.

  The amphibian's motor screamed. Under other circumstances the noise trapped in the cabin would have been deafening, but it was drowned out by the storm's fury. Another heated blast of cold white lightning slashed through the bowels of the dark clouds, momentarily creating a light funnel.