Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  Skater shook his head.

  They crossed another path, passing underneath one of the first filigreed arches the dwarfs and orks had constructed when taking over the Underground. Instead of plascrete, a dome of carved rock occupied the space above them, making Skater suddenly feel small. Before the Underground had started going commercial, before the orks had hosed off the dwarfs and chased them from the place, the early constructions had been works of art.

  Maxine’s Bar and Grill occupied the corner of the next intersection. The neon lights showed nude metawomen shimmying and shaking across the front of the bar. The wide double doors showed up in the neon design as a dressing screen that the neon nudes cavorted from on either side.

  Skater accessed the Crypto-Circuit in the Commlink IV and whispered over the internal mike. “Elvis.”

  “Here, omae,” the big troll answered. “I’ve got my eye on you two. Wheeler and I are already in Maxine’s.”

  “Security inside the building is heavy,” Wheeler said. “They’re running deep on tech and flesh and blood. More than I’d expect for a simple meet and greet.”

  “However,” Archangel interjected smoothly, “Vankler is aware that Luppas is involved. By virtue of that, it would be in his best interests to assume Fuchi is as well.”

  Skater silently agreed with the elven decker. She gave her and Trey’s location as only a few meters behind Duran and Skater, making them easily able to close rapidly if needed.

  Skater followed Duran as they walked across the passage. Maxine’s also benefited from the architecture. Ornate friezes covered walls around the intersection, depicting some of the history of the building of the Underground as well as tragic scenes from the Night of Rage.

  “Company,” Duran growled.

  Skater ran his gaze over the dozen men who stepped from a biotech outlet store across the intersection from Maxine’s. The leader was a tall ork with polished fangs who looked like a poster model of ork dental hygiene. He wore biker leathers scarred from abuse, but repaired as much as was possible.

  Duran stopped in the middle of the street and kept his hands spread slightly away from his sides. Skater did the same. The ork passersby, definite citizens of the community, recognized what was going down and hastened to put distance between themselves and the two parties.

  “Duran,” the leader said.

  “Tyr,” Duran acknowledged.

  Skater picked up the resonance of the exchange, knowing the two men shared a history that wasn’t amiable.

  “It’s been a long time,” Tyr said. “Surprised to see you’re still alive. We don’t hear much about you these days.”

  Duran just returned the man’s gaze.

  “Take their weapons,” Tyr said to his crew. “All of them.”

  As Skater handed over his Predator, he noticed the two Ork Underground police members lounging in the shadows at the end of the block-long tunnel. Evidently Vankler had already purchased whatever official sanction he needed for the meeting.

  “He’s clean,” one of them said.

  Three other members worked at relieving Duran of weapons. Skater had counted nine so far, three pistols and an assortment of garrotes, blades, and throwing items with deadly edges or points. Two of them Skater had never seen before. They ran a portable cyberware scanner over Duran three times, but the loop never bleeped a warning.

  Satisfied, Tyr ordered his men to take them to Maxine’s. Skater followed Duran’s lead, not saying anything as they entered the bar, but his adrenaline level had his senses working overtime and his heart thumping solidly in his chest.

  26

  Skater sat at the big round synthmahogany table tucked away in a back corner of Maxine’s. All around him in the bar, razored klashce music imported by way of Jamaica hammered into the dark, featureless walls grimed by the constant use of nicosticks and pipes. The smell of barbecue overrode all other odors, but those of synthwhiskey and beer cut their paths through the montage of scents.

  To the right, three runways held strippers. The middle one stood on a raised dais, visible from any point in the club. The other two runways bisected the audience into wings, fantasy on the half-shell segregating the rowdy crowd. The dancers were elves, trolls, humans, orks, and dwarfs, and the bump and grind movements were ripped from ages-old sexual impulses. Mirrors lighted the wall behind the main stage, giving more depth to the crowded room. Cat-calls and risqué cheers followed the beat of the music and the swish of hips.

  “Long time, Quint,” Vankler said in a gravely growl. It was hard to judge his height with him sitting down, but Skater figured the ork was half a head shorter than him, probably a whole head shorter than Duran. But where height was a genetic washout, broadness was definitely overstated. Vankler’s shoulders were almost as broad in relation to the rest of his body as a dwarfs.

  “Long time,” Duran agreed.

  Vankler wore casual Vashon Island corduroy slacks and an open-throated olive Oxford. A tie hung smoothly over the shoulder of a blazer hanging from a peg on the wall behind him. His broad, generous face carried a number of scars that hadn’t quite washed out from reconstruction or faded over the years. The lower right canine, two fangs in front of it, and the four behind were all too perfect and white to be anything but prosthesis work. He wore his hair brushed back in a pompadour style. Eyebrows bulged over a shelf of bone above his hard, cold eyes.

  “We’ve been down some mean streets together, Quint,” Vankler said. “Been places where a lot of chummers never get to. We’ve seen the behemoth up close and lived to tell the tale.”

  “At the time, we thought we had to go down them. Living through things gives a chummer a new perspective.”

  Vankler summoned one of the topless waitresses, who hurriedly refreshed the drinks all around. “Can I offer you anything?” Vankler asked Duran.

  Duran appeared to give it consideration. “Buffalo wings, if Chen’s still around.”

  Vankler smiled, and this time Skater saw honest feeling in the man’s eyes. “She is.” He added the order to the waitress, then switched his attention to Skater. “Did Quint tell you we shared a history?”

  “He probably thought it wasn’t pertinent,” Skater answered.

  “Probably did,” Vankler agreed. “He always was a closemouthed son of a slitch. A number of clients paid for him for that reason, though. We did biz together for a time. Risked our hoops, and maybe had our hands on some big-time nuyen. Of course, back in those days it spent as easily as it came. That was when we did the work ourselves.”

  He spread his hands and gestured around the room. “Now I don’t have to take all the risks myself.” The waitress returned bearing two large woven baskets of buffalo wings with different glazes. She also put out a stack of small saucers.

  “We had quite the biz going on,” Vankler said. “Rolling numbers constantly in the black no matter how much we spent. An important clientele list that numbered the economically elite in this sprawl and in Cal Free. Then, a wiz piece of biz went down all wrong. Some of our people got geeked. Quint nearly ended up with a toe tag himself. Some of the ones who got flatlined were chummers. Or, let’s say as close to him as he lets anyone get. He got it in his head that I was responsible and took off.”

  “Old biz,” Duran said softly. “We got new biz now.” He reached into the baskets of buffalo wings and took out a half-dozen pieces, putting them on the saucer in front of him.

  Skater felt the tension clouding over the table. Even with the raucous music in the background and the nude dancers gyrating on the stages within easy sight, the by-play between Duran and Vankler held everyone’s attention. He missed the feel of the Predator at his side.

  “Jack,” Archangel called softly over the commlink. “Yeah,” Skater replied, covering his mouth with his hand to mask his response.

  “Vankler’s people are closing off the exits.”

  Skater shifted slightly in his chair, twisting so he could see Duran as well as take in the mirrors behind the stage. Th
e ork caught his eye briefly, following the glance with a short nod. In the mirrors, Skater barely made out the shifting shapes of more sec-guards threading through the crowd, closing off the two exits to the passages through the Ork Underground as well as the three carved stairways that curled up into the upper rooms. His stomach spasmed. “Stay frosty,” he said over the commlink. “We’re deep into this one. We’ll see how it plays out.” The sick feeling in his stomach told him he probably already had it figured, though.

  “Kylar Luppas,” Duran said. He gnawed flesh from a buffalo wing, then deliberately cracked the bone and sucked the marrow from it. He kept eating, but his eyes never left Vankler’s.

  “You have the credstick?”

  Duran smeared the grease from his fingers with a paper napkin, then passed a certified credstick over.

  “He’s with Fuchi,” Vankler confirmed. “Black ops. Just like you figured.”

  “What’s he working on?”

  Vankler shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What does Luppas usually work on for Fuchi?”

  “Wetwork. Close-cover. Watch-over. Extractions. Anything particularly messy, potentially a drain on the Fuchi coffers, or that requires a heavy hand combined with a fine touch. Fuchi gets guaranteed exclusivity.”

  “But Luppas takes work on the side,” Duran said.

  “Not himself. Rather, you might say he subcontracts it to his own people.”

  “Who does Luppas report to at Fuchi?” Duran asked. “Miles Lanier,” Vankler said as he lit a cigar. “Though I’ve heard a rumor that may be changing.”

  Skater filed that fact away. He knew of Miles Lanier. The man was a legend among runners because of the sec work he’d done to protect Fuchi from data thieves. Any change among the status quo of Fuchi was worth serious nuyen.

  “If Lanier’s out of the loop, who does Luppas report to?”

  “Who else, my man? Richard Villiers himself.”

  “You ever get a feel for what Luppas is working on?” Duran asked.

  Vankler laughed his sputtering Harley laugh again. “That would be drekking paranoid, wouldn’t it? Not to mention fragging risky. Luppas is not a joker you’d want to slot around.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Duran said. “You got the information I asked for regarding Luppas?”

  Vankler reached into the jacket on the peg behind him and brought out a glassine envelope. Ironically, a Fuchi-made Disk Protek covered the disk inside the envelope. He placed the envelope on the table and pushed it across. The glassine slid easily.

  When Duran made no effort to reach out for the envelope, Skater took it and tucked it away. The hard-driving music changed again, the brief lull allowing the excited male and female voices to slam into the sudden void, then they were washed away by the next set. The new girls taking their places on the stage upped the ante with a hard-grinding burlesque that drew a snowfall of nuyen notes onto the stages.

  “Then,” Duran said, his eyes fixed on Vankler, “I guess we’re done with this biz.”

  And in that split-second, Skater felt the full measure of the danger they’d stepped into suddenly come spilling down around them. Almost like a group organism guided by nuclear magnetic resonance devices, Vankler’s yabos closed in, tightening the circle.

  “Not completely,” Vankler said. He leaned back in his chair and dropped one hand below the edge of the table. Duran left his hands on the table. “ ’Sup?”

  Skater felt ice cold claws scrape along his spine, digging in tight for a nanosecond, then slithering on.

  “Now it gets putrid,” Elvis said over the closed loop of the commlink. “Hang on, chummers, I’m on my way.”

  “If you can’t do it safely,” Skater instructed subvocally, “leave it and buzz turbo. Not all of us have to go down now. Maybe we can make our own way out.”

  “No way, Jack,” Archangel said. “Luppas isn’t the type to leave a job half-done.”

  “No truer words spoken,” Trey agreed.

  “We all get out of here,” Wheeler said. “Our only shot of getting clear is to do it as a team.”

  Skater forced his breath out, keeping the oxygen flow going.

  “Biz,” Vankler answered Duran. “You paid me for information on Luppas. I’ve got a vested interest in the man.”

  “Your piece of his biz,” Duran said.

  Vankler shook his head and stoked the cigar again. “That’s something to protect, but not everything. I figure you for the biz that went down at Shastakovich’s Funeral Home last night. If Fuchi has Luppas involved, we’re talking about a serious score. Can’t let that pass me by.”

  Still relaxed, a loose smile playing with his thin lips, Duran said, “I should be used to you selling me out by now.” He paused. “You’ve got a problem, though.”

  Vankler looked amused. “How do you figure?”

  “I came here today waiting to see this score go down like this.”

  Vankler spread his hands, entertaining his group. Still, Skater noted the tension filling the man. Duran was probably the single most dangerous man he knew. Even Elvis, with all his rolling Amie-Awesome cyberware, wasn’t as coldly methodical as Quint Duran when events came down to the killing ground.

  “So what are you going to tell me?” Vankler asked sarcastically. “That you’ve got a cortex bomb in your brainbox with enough bang to post this table as a memory? That you’ve got a Judas switch punked up in your pinkie?”

  “No,” Duran stated quietly. “But you know me. You know I never walk into a situation I don’t think I can walk out of. You want to bet I’m wrong this time?”

  “He’s flapping his lips,” Tyr commented harshly. “Sounds like pure spew to me.” His pistol was in his hand.

  Duran grinned, and there was nothing friendly or humorous about the expression. “Your call, Vankler.”

  The tension filled the immediate vicinity despite the augmented strains of music blasting the club. Under his Kevlar-lined jacket, Skater was sweating. Emma was at the safehouse, watched over by two of Elvis’s friends who had instructions to turn to fog if they didn’t make their check-in times. He felt confident his daughter would be safe no matter how this went down.

  Skater tried to relax and think, but there was no way and no time.

  Duran exploded into action a heartbeat ahead of Skater, and everything went to frag, the strum and drang once more bursting lose.

  27

  Skater threw himself from the chair into a diving roll. Before his outflung hand touched the floor, a silenced SMG belched a rage of bullets that smashed the chair into pieces. He dropped and rolled, boosted reflexes moving in response to his survival instinct.

  Hooking a foot behind the heel of the yabo nearest him, Skater rammed his other foot against the man’s knee from the side. It only required seven or eight kilograms of pressure to break a regular flesh and blood knee, considerably more if the knee was augmented. Skater’s kick exceeded the tolerances for both.

  Bone shattered inside the joint. Shards of ivory and metal reinforcements slashed through the skin and clothing in an explosion of blood. The wounded man shrieked as he came down.

  Duran’s hands flashed. The speed and skill that he possessed turned the broken chicken bones he’d gathered before him into deadly weapons. Splintered stumps of ivory jutted from an eye of the man to Vankler’s left, penetrating to the brain.

  The yabo grabbed at the bone shard protruding from his eye, but it was buried so deep and covered by so much blood that he couldn’t get it out before death claimed him. He dropped into the men near him, throwing them all off balance. Other men cried out as well, hit in the faces, throats, and eyes by other impromptu darts Duran had made.

  Still, the ork hadn’t been able to put all the combatants out of commission. From point-blank distance, bullets and flechettes slammed into his bulletproof clothing. Knocked off his feet, Duran went down.

  Unwounded yabos poured from around their wounded compatriots yelling for blood, pulling weapons
into view. Pandemonium erupted over Maxine’s, underscored by the razored music blasting from the macrospeakers.

  Skater pushed himself into motion again, diving for the man whose leg he’d broken. The man writhed, one hand grabbing for his shattered leg while the other maintained a death grip on his SMG.

  A bullet hit Skater high on his left shoulder, blocked by the Kevlar-weave of his jacket. He ignored the pain and grabbed for the SMG, prying it loose. Wrapping his free hand in the yabo’s clothing, he rolled, pulling the screaming man over on top of him as more of Vankler’s people opened fire.

  By the time the bullets caught up to him, Skater was under the man. He felt the vibrations of the gunfire slam into the yabo. The street samurai reached for Skater’s face with a fistfull of razors gleaming from his fingertips as Skater raised the SMG and raked an arc of withering death at the man nearest him.

  Before the yabo had a chance to sink his finger razors into Skater’s eyes, a bullet cored through the back of his head and blew through his forehead. Blood sprayed over Skater as the man quivered and flatlined, whatever cyber-circuitry melded to his nervous system shorting out as life left him.

  Skater rolled from under the dead man, the SMG up in his fist chattering and jerking like a move-by-wire system gone spastic. The slide blew back empty without warning and locked.

  Vankler moved up from the table, dodging back and trying to bring out his pistol.

  “Quint!” Skater called over the commlink.

  “Here, kid.” The ork twitched to life again, moving sluggishly by normal standards, but still fragging quick next to his opponents. His empty hands flicked out, grabbing two men nearest him and breaking body parts with audible snaps, converting them into human shields and roadblocks to create distance from the other yabos closing in. “Don’t get your shorts in a wad.” He sounded out of breath, but otherwise intact. Blood smeared his face, staining implacable features.

  Elvis arrived almost unnoticed. The big troll slammed a body block into the knot of orks surging for Duran, bowling them down. Still moving, he cleared men from Duran with bone-cracking swings of his huge fists.