Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  At the other end of the hallway, Trey was borne back by the manaball, unable to break the momentum Luppas had put behind the spell.

  Luppas didn’t think he’d geeked his opponent, but he knew there was some serious injury dealt. He started to go forward, to press the advantage, then from the corner of his eye he saw one of his mercenaries put a rocket launcher to shoulder.

  “No!” Luppas yelled helplessly. He didn’t remember the man’s name—he was one of the new faces Gunther Octavius had recruited for this operation—but it wouldn’t have done him any good from the astral anyway. Nor could Luppas strike him down from there.

  The rocket leapt from the launcher, closing the distance to the wall beside the ork shadowrunner. Luppas stayed long enough to make sure neither Skater nor Falkenhayne were harmed by the blast.

  He sped back out of the building and dropped back into his meat body. He opened his eyes in the Ares Master and pushed himself out of his seat, calling out orders immediately. “Strike team Alpha, you are to disengage!” The dull roar of the explosion still echoed over the tacticom, punctuated by small-arms fire.

  “Sir,” a man’s voice replied. “Withdrawal at this time—”

  “Will be done immediately or I’ll have your head as a paperweight,” Luppas shouted. “You people were to identify and close off possible retreat within that structure, not engage.”

  “Sir, they took us by surprise. They knew we were—”

  “Cut comm,” Luppas ordered. He strode through the Ares Master, signaling to the two men who held Deja Chilson.

  The two mercs stood up at once, dragging the female ork with them. They’d captured her easily at her doss, but she’d fought. Her clothing was disheveled and torn, and one eye was halfway closed where a rifle butt had been used to put her down.

  “Speedball Two, this is One.” Luppas dropped through the truck’s door onto the pavement, knowing the residents in the dosses around them were probably already hitting their PANICBUTTONS to call for Lone Star.

  “Go, One,” Octavius responded.

  “Bring your team into the underground parking garage, Two, and let’s take them down inside.”

  “Affirmative.” Octavius cleared the channel.

  Carrying an assault rifle, Luppas ran across Overlake Drive West, closing on the underground garage. It was minded by a dog-brained security monitor. Turning, he spotted the demolitions man among his group and waved the man forward.

  Luppas stood behind the man as he slapped shaped charges on the door and the dog-brain housing. “Speedball Three, this is One. Turn that virus program loose.”

  “Yes sir,” Kossuth replied.

  Luppas had known that the chances were slim of taking Skater and his crew quietly. He hadn’t planned on an all-out skirmish taking place, either. But calls to Lone Star had been taken into account. The virus program Kossuth was unleashing into the PANICBUTTON system through the LTGs even now would light up several districts of Bellevue at one time. Instead of having one target to respond to, Lone Star would be trying to answer the call of dozens. That wouldn’t stop the calls going through, but the program would at least thin the numbers that Lone Star could answer with.

  “Sir,” the demolitions man said, “I’m ready here.”

  Luppas reached out and slapped the man on the helmet, giving him the go-ahead.

  The demolitions man yelled, “Fire in the hole!” a heartbeat ahead of the explosion that peeled the doors from the underground garage and sent them spinning away inside.

  Luppas let his point man go through first, gave the man three paces, then followed in his wake, leading the rest of the team. Like the others, Luppas wore heavy black armor, looking insectoid in the shadows. He reached up and pulled down the visor of his helmet, then activated the infrared circuitry.

  Klaxons screamed inside the garage, reverberating within the enclosed space. Security lights flared to life along the walls, creating pools of bright light that cut holes in the shadows filling the area.

  Three elevators led down into the underground parking area. In seconds, his team had divided up, surrounding the closed doors of the elevators, taking cover where they could while they trained their weapons on the entrances.

  “Speedball Three, have you accessed the tower’s surveillance programming?” Luppas stood beside a Chrysler-Nissan Jackrabbit only a few meters from one of the main support pillars. The men holding Deja Chilson stood behind him.

  The ork woman was in full frenzy, struggling against her captors.

  “If she doesn’t settle down,” Luppas said calmly, “shoot off one of her fingers.”

  Deja Chilson stopped her struggles, eyes rolling whites and her nose flaring. Blood streaked down one side of her mouth. “I didn’t do anything to you,” she said. “I don’t even know who you are or what this is all about.”

  “Shut up,” Luppas said, “or I’ll have your tongue cut out.” He watched the doors intently.

  “Speedball One, this is Three. I have the tower’s surveillance systems operational. I have a parasitic hold on them, but I can’t influence anything they do.”

  “Understood, Three. Do you have the targets on-screen?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Where are they?”

  “The seventh floor.”

  “How many are operational?”

  There was a brief hesitation. “It’s hard to say, sir, with all the smoke in the area. And there seems to be some kind of interference that won’t let the infrared systems operate properly.”

  “Keep me apprised,” Luppas said, staring at the elevators. “They don’t have anywhere to go.”

  * * *

  Skater thought he saw a shimmering in the air along the empty space of the hallway that reminded him of magic spells being cast. The same kind of optical effects were usually visible.

  “Trey,” he called over the link.

  “He’s there with you somewhere, omae,” came Elvis’s voice. “He’s not here.” Elvis sounded tense, not used to being sidelined.

  Using the door to the doss as cover, Skater raised the Predator and put three rounds into one of the mercs. The rounds dropped the man instantly.

  The other mercs, instead of pressing the advantage of their sheer numbers, drew back.

  There was no reason to come after him, Skater realized as his heart thumped leadenly in his chest. They had him trapped right where he was. His left hand ached as he maintained the grip on the canister. He thought about Emma, remembering that he hadn’t said goodbye, remembering that he hadn’t parted on good terms with Larisa either, and he hadn’t been there when his grandfather died. So many missed opportunities. And he had to wonder how many of the team he was going to lead to their deaths, the way he’d led Shiva.

  The outside people should be able to get away clean. The only risk was Cullen Trey, who’d stubbornly returned to bring the attack to Kylar Luppas on the astral plane. With Luppas’s foci and fetishes, even if the elf merc stayed on the physical plane, Trey had explained that he might be able to attack through an active spell lock or focus. It was a slim chance, but one worth taking, Trey had said tersely.

  But Duran . . .

  Skater looked at the smoke curling from the hole blasted into the wall beside the closed elevator shaft. Fraggit, he’d killed them both, brought them here partly out of his own guilt for what had happened to Larisa and gambling on the small chance they’d be able to squeak through the battle alive.

  He turned around and looked at Falkenhayne, wondering if there was anything he could say. She, at least, was no worse off than before he found her. It was cold comfort at best.

  “Kid.” The voice sounded weak and shaken over the commlink.

  “Duran?” Skater whirled back to look at the elevator, not believing his ears.

  “You plan on pitching a tent in there, or are we gonna buzz turbo?”

  A flash of edged metal appeared between the two warped elevator doors. A second later, Duran’s gloved hand shoved throug
h after the knife and forced the doors back.

  “Move it!” Duran growled.

  The elevator cage was locked into position halfway down, revealing the empty shaft and the thick plasteel cable above it. The ork, bloody and listing badly as he stood, slammed the knife down in front of one of the doors, preventing them from closing.

  Skater felt some of the doubt inside him shift, not quite making the long distance back to hope, but there was a stubbornness in him that refused to just lay down and die. He stepped around the corner and threw the canister toward the gathered mercs at the end of the hallway.

  The canister bounced as it went, hardly making a noise as it struck the white carpet, then started spewing smoke from the top in thick gouts. The smoke was laced with sizzling-hot sparks that hung in the air and totally fragged over infrared and thermographic vision. Even metas with better than average night vision usually had their sight spotted with black holes as a result.

  Two mercs moved forward, hosing the hallway down with bullets.

  Duran caught one of them with a burst, and Skater sent the other one spinning away with a round into the shoulder. The falling mercs got in the way of the other men behind them, and all of them vanished from Skater’s view as the spewing smoke filled the hallway.

  “Move!” he told Falkenhayne, grabbing her wrist. She hesitated for only a moment, then ran out into the hallway with him.

  Keeping one hand on the woman’s wrist and the other tight on the Predator, Skater guided them toward the barely visible elevator cage, keeping his body between Falkenhayne and the mercs. A heavy-caliber bullet caught him in the side, not penetrating his armor beneath the coveralls but hitting hard enough to take his breath away and throw him off-stride.

  He bumped into Falkenhayne, knocking both of them into a fumbling skid for the elevator. They slid to a stop less than a meter away.

  Duran reached out and caught a fistful of the woman’s duster. With a heave, he yanked her into the elevator cage.

  Skater pushed himself up and forward, going in low under the top of the suspended elevator. He dropped to the bottom and uncoiled instantly. “Thanks, Quint.”

  “ ’S okay, kid. You’da done the same for me.”

  Skater plucked the knife from the floor and let the doors close. Bullets smashed through the cheap plastiwood and polyfiber core of the doors. When they closed, there was no more light.

  Duran switched on a penflash and played the narrow beam over the control panel. Gouges scarred the interior walls. The ork tagged the Suspend button and the cage rocked into motion again.

  Skater accessed the commlink. “Wheeler.”

  “Here, chummer. Luppas and his people have secured the underground garage. You should have felt the explosion.”

  Skater hadn’t. He looked at Duran.

  The ork nodded and touched a button for the first floor. “We knew they’d be there.”

  “We knew maybe,” Skater said.

  “First place they’d go to muscle us over,” Duran said. “If you or I were running the ops on this one, that’s what we’da done.”

  “Only if we had to go in hard,” Skater said. He preferred finesse. Tense and nervous, watching the floors drop away on the digital read-out, he felt cold and sweaty all at the same time. Every breath he took felt shortened, tight because of the pain in his side.

  55

  The elevator doors opened on the apartment tower’s first floor.

  Cautiously, Skater peered around the elevator door frame.

  A half-dozen frightened people, two of them wearing Knight Errant uniforms, stood in the foyer amid an array of plastic trees and flowers. A mural covered the wall to the right, showing a wooded glen where a lone elven Amerind sat cross-legged on a rocky outcrop overlooking a serene lake. The clouds overhead were twisted into the shape of a gray-blue bear that looked down on the Amerind knowingly.

  They all turned at the sound of the warped elevator doors shrieking back into their housing. The two Knight Errant secguards brought their weapons around. Before either of them could fire, Duran shot them in the face with DM SO pellets from a Squirt he carried in a chest holster. They’d planned for “friendly” resistance as well.

  “Back away,” Skater told the four people who’d frozen into position. “There’s no need for anyone to get hurt.”

  The four people faded the heat at once, leaving the foyer open and the way to the main doors of the apartment tower clear. Duran holstered the Squirt, baring the shotgun for all to see.

  “One step behind me,” the big ork growled to Falkenhayne. “You stay there and I can get you out of here in one piece. Scan?”

  “Yes.” The woman tried to make herself as small as possible behind Duran.

  Skater moved toward the entrance at a half-run, not wanting to leave Falkenhayne behind but needing to get into position. He accessed the commlink. “Elvis.”

  “Here.”

  “Bring the van around when I tell you.”

  “I’ll be there, omae.”

  A shadow flitted against one of the nightscapes hanging onto the side of the entranceway. Skater’s combat reflexes came on-line immediately, pulling the Predator up into firing position.

  “Duran!” he yelled, throwing himself behind a huge plascrete pot that held an artificial elm tree twice as tall as he was. “Get down!”

  The ork went to ground at once, wrapping an arm over Falkenhayne’s shoulders and pulling her with him behind one of the overstuffed sofas crowding a little conversation area in front of the management desk.

  A black-clad merc swung around the corner of the entranceway. The machine pistol in his hands rattled death.

  Partially hidden behind the huge plascrete pot, Skater raised himself up on one arm and fired the Predator. He pulled through seven shots, less than half of them hitting his target due to the bad angle and his haste in shooting.

  The merc jerked backward, crashing through the latticework of small, multi-colored windows, then spilling out onto the short flight of concrete steps leading into the building.

  Skater reloaded his weapon, wondering where the frag Lone Star was. Lone Star would have been after them as hard as Luppas and his group, but at least the Star personnel might have wanted them alive. A quick glance at Duran and Falkenhayne assured him the ork had taken the woman to safety.

  “Elvis, get that drekking van up here!”

  “On my way.”

  “Jack,” Wheeler called over the commlink, “the merc forces out here are mobilizing. They’ve seen Elvis.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Skater said. He glanced back at the elevators, seeing the other two cages in motion, dropping toward the lobby quickly. The damaged one they’d come down in was frozen in place, held there when Duran slammed the Suspend button again. The cages, whether they were filled with concerned residents or with mercs, would arrive in seconds. Neither would be helpful.

  The commlink beeped for attention in Skater’s head. He shifted frequencies and opened up the channel he’d reserved for Quentin Strapp.

  “What’s going on over there, Jack?” the federal agent demanded in his rough voice.

  “We got made,” Skater replied.

  “Do you need help?”

  “No.” Skater made his way into the blood-spattered doorway and gazed outside. Elvis left the van’s lights off as he drove the vehicle toward the apartment tower. The DocWagon markings on the side partially explained its presence, or would at least hopefully slow Luppas’s gunners from firing immediately. All of the markings were magnetic appliques, highly illegal but things they’d used before and kept in storage at one of their equipment dumps. “Can you slow Lone Star down?”

  “The Star’s not going to be a problem, Jack,” the federal agent said. “Somebody let a virus loose in their systems, judging from what we’re monitoring here, and set off PANIC-BUTTON alarms for blocks in every direction. Those teams trying to respond to all the alarms are positively slotted because they won’t know whether they’ve g
ot a legit alarm or not till they look around. If I wasn’t such a trusting soul, I’d be wondering if you had something to do with that.”

  “If I did,” Skater said, “I wouldn’t have allowed this frequency to be known by you.”

  “Of course, I’m not thinking maybe you could be playing satellite ricochet with the signal and not telling me about it,” Strapp replied.

  Skater stepped over the dead merc as Elvis brought the van to a screeching stop in front of the apartment tower. “Trust me,” he said.

  “I am. I just don’t like it.”

  Duran was starting toward the van when a military helo took form overhead. The beating rotors sounded just ahead of the rapid beat of the heavy machine guns on the firmpoint spewing tracer rounds across the street.

  The van wasn’t bulletproofed. They’d stolen it from a sprawl linen service that didn’t have a problem with theft or armed assaults.

  “Get out of here!” Skater waved Elvis off as Duran guided Falkenhayne back to the relative safety of the apartment tower doorway.

  The heavy-caliber bullets slammed against the street and cut through the van, then chewed holes into the side of the apartment tower.

  “Cheshire!” Strapp called.

  “Back off,” Skater replied. He pointed the Predator at the helicopter’s plastiglass nose and squeezed the trigger rapidly. The rounds didn’t penetrate the thick glass, but they lit up brief explosions that left burned marks in their wake. “I’ve got to lose this channel. I’ll get back to you.”

  “I can have a team—”

  “Stay back,” Skater ordered. “If you make a move before I tell you, you’ll slot this thing up good. You keep that in mind, Strapp.”

  The helicopter pilot jerked sideways, the rotors missing the building on the other side of Overlake Drive West by less than five meters. He managed to recover, though, and set up again.

  Elvis had the van underway, roaring east along the street.

  The helicopter swerved in the air, tracking the van.

  On the original commlink channel, Skater said, “Wheeler, can you take the helicopter?”

  “Give me a second.” The rigger’s voice sounded calm, controlled.