Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  “How did the SRT guys get into the building?” Skater asked. “A chipped access card,” Duran answered. “They swiped the door and went right on inside. The Shastakovich people met them in the hallway.”

  “They can get us inside,” Skater said.

  “Yeah, but getting anywhere else in that building is only going to be fragging hard. The maglevs are passcoded to require other cards, and you know the kinds of chill systems Ares has waiting inside the funeral home if you try to force your way inside.”

  “There’s a way.” Skater put the binox in his chest pouch and melted away from the side of the building. The fear was thrumming inside him, beating against his defenses to take over. He kept it battened down, channeling the anxiety and wedding it to his instinct for survival. The run could be accomplished, with only a few variations on what they’d planned.

  “You want to clue me in?”

  “Later. Right now I want to borrow a little chat time with those SRT guys.” At the side of the building overlooking the alley separating him from the DocWagon vehicle on South Twenty-first Street, Skater grabbed the top rung of the fire escape scaling the outside of the structure he was on.

  “Bribes usually don’t work with DocWagon employees,” Duran pointed out.

  “No,” Skater agreed.

  “So I guess we lean on them.”

  Skater wrapped his boots on the outside edges of the fire escape and used his hands as brakes. He released enough pressure to slide quickly down to street level. “We bend them, but we don’t break them.”

  “Sometimes, we don’t get those choices.”

  “So we’ll hope for the best.”

  “I take it we’re going to try for the extraction?” Trey asked. “Yeah,” Skater replied, creeping to the corner of the alley and drawing the Predator. He peered out across the street at the DocWagon team. “Mr. Johnson knew this was going to be a piece of hot biz, and didn’t tell us the half of it. The way I look at it, he’s gone to considerable lengths to get that body and probably wants it really bad. If we make the recovery, I think we’ll be in good position to renegotiate our fee.”

  “Truly,” Cullen Trey said, “you’re a man after my own heart.”

  “Maybe,” Skater said, “but let’s just hope I’m clever enough to keep us all from getting our hoops fragged. Wheeler, stay with Archangel and keep her covered while she’s running the Matrix. Trey, you’ve got the street. Elvis, Duran, you’re already out here at ground zero, so you’re with me. Let’s do it.” He stepped out of the shadows and onto the street, keeping the Predator tucked down along his leg. Killing the DocWagon personnel wasn’t an option, but wounding them enough to take them out of the play was fine.

  Of course, the DocWagon team wouldn’t be held to those same rules. He felt himself getting tense inside as he crossed South Twenty-first Street. The distance separating him from the SRT members melted away.

  3

  Kylar Luppas glared through the bug-smeared windshield of his Saab Dynamit 776TI at the confused tangle knotting up passage along I-5, blaring his horn to warn the GMC Bulldog Step-Van with parcel post markings ahead of him. The Bulldog’s driver stepped on the brakes hard, setting off the ruby taillights bright as the spotter lamps Luppas’s mercenary team had used for rapid dust-offs in the Desert Wars a few years back. He flinched instinctively. His own men had died in the brightness of those lights used in the same fashion against them, pin-pointed for snipers.

  He was racing inside, knowing he was near the rogue exec his employer had instructed him to track down and bring in. After days of searching, Norris Caber was almost in his grasp. Lupus still wasn’t certain how long Caber had gone missing before he’d been assigned to find him. The megacorps were always tight-mouthed with their information. The telecom report spotting Caber on the I-5 had come in from his Control less than five minutes ago. It was 1:54:12 a.m. now. If he couldn’t bring the man in, Luppas’s orders were to terminate Caber with extreme prejudice. And Fuchi Industrial Electronics carried a lot of prejudice. Especially to someone who betrayed the corp.

  Tapping the feather-touch of the turbo-charged sports car’s accelerator, Luppas cut the delivery truck off as it tried to pull around a Ford Americar whose driver had probably been wounded in the reported action between the Spike Wheels and the DocWagon SRT crew. The troll manhandling the Bulldog blared his own horn back, then lifted a thick arm to flip Luppas the bird.

  “Speedball One,” a feminine voice said from the console, “your satellite uplink has been routed and connected. Phillips Tacticom on-line.” Ramona Fishbein was back in the Seattle Fuchi offices, monitoring the whole situation through a series of low-level orbiting satellites. As Control for the op, she carried some weight, but Luppas made the decisions in the field.

  Leaving the highway completely, Luppas negotiated the narrow band of trees, cultivated bushes, and grass that separated the traffic lanes of the interstate. Sedans and light-trucks with reverse lights flaring phosphorus white raced past him. The Phillips Tacticom was a military-type communications system he was familiar with from his Desert War days, capable of scrambling transmissions that were very hard to break.

  A human came running out of the darkness ahead of Luppas, waving his arms and shouting.

  Luppas thumbed the power button and dropped the sports car’s window. He also reached for the customized HammerII Model 61 OS pistol tucked into a synthleather holster under the console, drew it, and kept it out of sight.

  “Fragging troll go-gangers are drekking everything!” the man shouted. “You’d better turn around now!” He was a sallow-complexioned human with bright red hair brutally sawed into a narrow cap of a mohawk, dressed in stained gray and green coveralls with the words “McPhearson’s Garage” stitched over the left breast in scarlet thread. He was apparently part of the crew trying to clean up the mess.

  Scanning down the highway, Luppas watched the Spike Wheels go-gangers working over the wrecked cars. A fire-engine red Honda-GM 3220 Turbo lay in the middle of the intersection, turned turtle and upside down. The front end was accordioned in by a massive impact that left scratches all along the driver’s side. Luppas’s practiced eye told him the car had been hit by a bigger and heavier vehicle. Many of the other vehicles showed damage from the auto-weapons the troll go-gangers brandished, which also accounted for the fires licking at some of them. As he watched, one of the trolls fired another round from his anti-tank weapon and made a direct hit on a truck trying to turn around and slip away.

  Luppas was certain then that the accident hadn’t been that at all. He also had to wonder how much the go-gangers knew and who had put them onto the man inside the Honda-GM. Luppas himself had been looking for the man for two days and had gotten no closer to him.

  Kyle Luppas was as tall and slim as most elves, with bronzed skin so dark it almost looked black in the night, contrasting sharply with the yellow-bone color of his hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. A stylized tattoo of an Eastern dragon started to the outside of the arch of his right eyebrow, trailed down the side of his face, and curled its tail about his neck. The only interruptions to the artwork were the planes of his face and a quartet of long, thin shrapnel scars showing white against the bronze.

  Even though it was dark, he sported a pair of specially machined, wraparound Whitelaw Electric Sunglasses because his eyes were so sensitive to the neon lights of the inner sprawls. He wore a dark plum-colored Mortimer greatcoat over a black-violet, double-breasted Vashon Island three-piece suit. The sapphire tear on the silver necklace around his throat was his primary spell focus.

  “This is Speedball One.” Luppas powered his window back up and spoke into the tacticom. The wrecker driver still stood outside his car, frantically motioning for him to back up. “Speedball Two, do you copy?”

  “Speedball Two copies, One. We’re in the helo and closing on your position.”

  A thin smile carved Luppas’s nearly lipless mouth. Speedball Two tonight was Gunther Octavius, one of the
people from his old group. A man who knew how to take orders without asking questions. “Two, confirm enroute and ETA.”

  “We scrambled airborne, One. ETA is . . . four minutes twenty-seven seconds.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Two.”

  Luppas stepped lightly out of the car, just missing the wrecker driver with his door. “You responded to the call. What did you see?”

  The man hesitated. Knowing too much sometimes got you killed as quick as knowing too little.

  Luppas backhanded the man in the face, rocking his head back. When the man tried to become hostile, he showed him the HammerII. “I don’t have all night.”

  “Okay, okay,” the man said. “Take it easy. I got here in time to see the DocWagon SRT going at it with the Spike Wheels. Evidently they didn’t know about the go-gangers, because they come in light. The Spikes roared up like outta nowhere, blazing guns as soon as they were within range. The DocWagon team responded, taking a hit from some kinda slotting missile launcher or something, but they broke the ranks of those fragging meta—trolls—and sent them buzzing turbo. I was pulling into place, gonna wait on clearance from Lone Star to haul the salvage away, when the gangers returned. No questions asked. They just opened fire and started killing people.”

  “Where’s the DocWagon crew?” Luppas demanded.

  “They picked up the guy they were after and slotted it out of here.”

  “Describe the person the DocWagon crew picked up.” When the man seemed on the verge of belligerence once more, Luppas leaned in again.

  The wrecker driver covered his face with his arms. “All right, all right. It was a man. Maybe late twenties. Dark hair. Overweight. Guy who looked like any other corp geek would look.” Without a word, Luppas got back in his car and drove toward the Spike Wheels go-gangers. He was only minutes behind his prize and the fat bonus that went with it.

  4

  The ork SRT member standing at the passenger-side door of the DocWagon vehicle in front of the Mariah Building started getting fidgety when Jack Skater was still six meters away and closing. The ork’s firearm was thonged into snythleather at the hip, not convenient at all. Trying to look casual, he dropped his hand to his side.

  Skater motioned with the Predator, still four meters away. “This close, you make an awfully big target, chummer.” He checked the time on his retinal clock: 01:59:34 a.m. The Johnson had hit the time right on the nose. The stitched patch on the ork’s shirt read FHARON.

  “Both of the others are still alive.” Elvis stepped out from behind the truck. Dressed in black like Skater, the troll samurai was nothing short of an awe-inspiring three meters of sweat-enhanced muscle and bio-augmentation. His on-going dance with death was displayed in an accumulation of scars, his twisted left horn, and a silver-crowned tusk that sparkled in his easy smile.

  “Let’s have the gunbelt,” Skater said. “Slowly.”

  Two knives, a set of macroplast knuckle-dusters, and a Fichetti Tiffani Self-Defender landed on top of the gunbelt. Elvis scooped them up in a big hand and deposited them in the truck.

  “Get the truck out of here,” Skater told Elvis.

  The troll opened the door and fitted himself into one of the twin bucket seats with difficulty. The engine turned over sluggishly before catching.

  The ork acted more nervous, but readily complied with Skater’s unvoiced request that he move down the street toward the front of the Mariah Building. Skater stayed a full step behind him, tucking the Predator II out of sight.

  “Turn at the corner,” Skater said. He felt nervous and exposed. Knowing Duran was less than a block away down the street and keeping them covered with a sniper rifle didn’t help as much as it should have. Perspiration continued trickling down his back, making the clothing stick to him.

  Nocturnal sprawl predators had gathered in the alley where Elvis parked the DocWagon truck. Of the two-legged and four-legged variety offered, Skater felt safer with the rodents and felines.

  “Tell me about the client that you just dropped off, Fharon,” Skater suggested.

  “What do you want to know? We caught a squeal about a crash-and-dash on Eye-Five. When we got there, those fragging Spike Wheels showed up and started cutting unholy hell. Before I knew it—”

  Skater cut the ork off. “Tell me about the client you just picked up.”

  “The guy’s wristband IDed him as Norris Caber. We got to the scene, one of my partners slotted his credstick, checking out the usual for his name, address, and med history. Popped up Coleman January. We were thinking maybe he took Caber’s wristband, or maybe Caber loaned it to him. I took a tissue sample, so we could match it against what DocWagon has on file.”

  “Was January in your files?” Skater asked.

  “No.”

  “What did you have on Caber?”

  “Usual med history. Nothing that caught the eye. The way the guy got geeked in the crash-and-dash, a med history wasn’t gonna be any help anyway. Spirits couldn’t have saved him unless they were ready to raise the dead.”

  “What line of work was Caber in?” Skater asked.

  The orb shook his head. “To get into something buried that deep, I’d need a higher sec clearance than I’ve got now.”

  “Did the victim match up with Caber’s files?”

  “He had a different face,” Fharon said. He touched the underside of his chin. “But if you knew what to look for, you could tell he’d had some work done. Recently. Maybe only a week or so back. Looked like good stuff.”

  “Thanks,” Skater said.

  Elvis took his cue and moved before the word was out of Skater’s mouth, seizing the troll and putting him into a sleeper hold. In seconds Fharon’s unconscious weight dropped in the troll’s arms. “He’ll be out for awhile.”

  “Jack,” Archangel called over the commlink.

  “Go.”

  “While I was trying to get into the DocWagon system and decrypt some scramble IC covering their client files while looking for our target, I intercepted a file from Lone Star requesting that the body be turned over to them. They’re trying to locate this DocWagon unit now.”

  A metallic screech sounded behind Skater. When he looked, he saw that Elvis yanked the DocWagon truck’s dog-brain and CPU from the console by strength alone. Sparks spit through the vacated space. A copy of all the files that had been sent and received would be on the drive. When Archangel had time, there was a chance she could download the information, possibly giving them a new angle.

  “How did Lone Star get interested in the target?” Skater asked.

  “The Spike Wheels are still at the crash-and-dash site and a dozen people or more have gotten killed,” she told him. “Lone Star investigators are demanding the corpse. They think January was a target and not some poor slot who got caught in an act of random violence. They want that body.” Skater’s mind spun, latching onto all the variables, turning them over as the adrenaline surged through him.

  “Okay, kid,” Duran called over the commlink, “say we’re maybe minutes from being fragging invaded here. This much drek cycling the bowl, that body’s gotta be worth some serious nuyen. What’s it gonna be?”

  For a moment, the fear squirmed around inside Skater, bringing with it the face of his daughter. They were running blind now and the scan wasn’t good for a runner who’d popped his ante on a run gone way bad. The advance money the Johnson had given them for recovery of the corpse was only enough to keep him scrambling another month or two, if he kept expenses leaned out. It cost to be invisible in the sprawl. He needed the score, and that was the bottom line.

  Skater took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. We do it. Rendezvous back at the van. Move!” He paused long enough to remove Fharon’s DocWagon jacket, then grabbed one lying on the seat that the ork rigger had obviously discarded. In the next instant, he’d taken his place back in the shadows, moving fast, working to stay one quick step ahead of sudden death.

  5

  Luppas steered the sports car wi
th one hand, aiming it down I-5 at the Spike Wheels clustered near the crash-and-dash. The gangers were ready to buzz turbo from the scene. If Norris Caber had left anything behind in the wreck, Luppas wasn’t going to let it be taken. A feral grin split his face as he drew fire from the go-gangers, closing on them as they tried to get away. The bullets hammered the Saab like hail, spitting brief lightnings from the impact areas.

  The last two go-gangers hopped aboard their Vikings, putting heated rubber to the pavement as they sped after their playmates.

  Luppas didn’t hesitate and took the Saab screaming across the blocked interstate. He steered hard, depending on the vehicle’s European-styled suspension and handling to see him through. He missed the overturned Honda 3220 by centimeters, eyes narrowing behind the Whitelaw sunglasses for a moment as the smashed vehicle suddenly went up in flames. Then the Whitelaws adjusted the polarization.

  The Spikewheels were suddenly in front of him, spread out and heading back the wrong way on the highway, straight for the line of disorganized traffic a hundred meters in front of them. If they made the line of cars, Luppas knew they would be hard to catch because the off-ramps could take them all over Tacoma.

  The elf pinned the accelerator to the floor, listening to the modified engine opening up. In a heartbeat, he was among them. Drawing even with the last troll, he pulled hard right and made contact with the Viking’s rear wheel. Metal grated against metal, and a shower of sparks jetted up from the contact.