Part of me wanted to know what the frag was going down behind me, back down the alley. Who the hell was hashing it out with Kat and Moko? The more logical part of my mind wrote the question off as meaningless. Anything that eliminated pursuit was all to the good, wasn't it? "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," and all that jazz . . .
The alley ended, and I was out onto a backstreet. Another skidding turn—left, this time—and I started to slow down. There was silence behind me—no gunfire, no running footsteps. Were Kat and Moko down, or had they just broken off pursuit? If the latter, they—or their friends, come to think of it—could still be tracking in on me, using the hypothetical locator that had led them to me in the first place. Frag, I had to ditch that thing fast . . . but doing a striptease in the middle of the street probably wasn't tactically sound, for various obvious reasons.
My heart was pounding in my ears, and my calves felt like somebody had worked them over with a nightstick. Had I eaten dinner, I'd probably have been busy losing it. I jogged on, trying to decide what to do next ...
. .. And slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid plowing into the figure that emerged from the shadows ahead of me. Instinctively, I brought up the Manhunter.
No, I tried to bring up the Manhunter, but my right arm was damn near paralyzed from the crack on the elbow. My left hand snatched the big pistol from my numb right. I triggered the sighting laser and set the red dot center-head.
Dark, liquid eyes widened in panic. A tastefully made-up mouth dropped open.
She was beautiful, was the elf facing me. Just shy of two meters, I guessed, willow-slender, with the kind of face that might best be described as "why men fight."
Hooker, joygirl, sex-worker—that's how I labeled her initially, but then I saw her clothing. Top-tier corp garb, that's what she was wearing. A skirtsuit that probably cost as much as a small car. Polished titanium jewelry: earrings, necklace, matching bracers on her wrists. Those bracers flashed in the streetlights as she showed me empty hands. "Don't shoot. Please!"
Instinctively, I lowered the Manhunter. The more rational part of my brain knew it was a bad idea, but the knight-in-shining-armor lobe seemed to have suddenly taken over. The instant my gun was off-line, she extended one of her slender palms toward my chest.
And then fragging shot me. Flame flashed from the bracer, and pain drove deep into my chest, a long, lancing needle of agony that went through the light body armor as if it wasn't there. I tried to bring the Manhunter back up, to return the favor on my way out, but the thing suddenly weighed a couple of hundred kilos.
I was still trying to think of a witty exit line when blackness crested over me like an ocean wave and carried me down, deep deep down.
17
Light. Morning.
I lay there—wherever there happened to be—for an unmeasurable time, just staring up into a mellow, sourceless light. If this was death, I kind of liked it. No pain, no worries, no fears. No real thoughts either, and certainly no analytical awareness of the future. I was just the eternal, living now, with as much concern for the past or the future as a fragging bunny rabbit. It was pleasant, and for I don't know how long I just grooved on it.
It didn't last, of course—the good drek never does. Way too soon, I started to become aware of my body. The lazy lub-dub of my heart. The slow, deep bellows action of my lungs. The touch of soft sheets and a firm mattress against my back.
And the throbbing pain of a puncture wound in the center of my chest.
That realization brought an end to the timeless grooving, let me tell you, chummer. As if the realization of pain had opened some kind of stopcock, memories of the past and fears of the future come flooding back into my brain. I think I whimpered then. Somebody had bagged me, and bagged me good. The elf-biff had distracted me with her looks and body language, then driven a narcodart into my chest. Good tactics, with forethought and planning. That still left a couple of important questions, though.
Who? And, more important, why? Work on the "who" first, I decided.
Moko and Kat? Doubt it, chummer. A drive-by was more their style. (Frag, if I'd been a millisecond slower, it would have worked and I'd be dead right about now.) Ryumyo? Doubt it; Kat and her friends were almost certainly after me on the worm's orders. King Kamehameha? Doubt it; he'd had me in his clutches in Iolani Palace and let me walk. Harlech the elf? Doubt it, for much the same reason. Which left ...
Which left the fragging yakuza, didn't it? The yaks could be as brutal and direct as anyone else when circumstances warranted, but they could also pull something pretty elegant if they wanted. Like the elf-biff and her bracer.
And that answered the "why" all too well. I'd cacked their oyabun ... or, at least, I'd been closely involved in his cackage. The yaks had always been deep into payback, teaching lessons, and sending messages. That meant the fact that I was still alive wasn't necessarily a reassuring thing. It simply meant they were planning to take their time over making me dead.
Wonderful, oh joy.
My body wasn't yet under perfect control of my mind, but at least I managed to sit up and look around. I was in what looked like a hospital or clinic room, judging by the powered bed and antiseptic white walls, at least There was no furniture beside the bed—no chairs, no bed tables, nothing else that could serve as a weapon of opportunity. No window, either.
The door was to my right, flush with the wall. No knob, just a push-plate, which meant the door opened outward. Which, in turn, meant I was denied that old trick of hiding behind the door and cold-cocking the first person to come a-visiting. Locked, of course.
And that was it for the room. No closet, no door to an adjoining room. Not even a light fixture in the ceiling, just standard-issue flatpanel lights set right into the acoustical tile.
I threw back the single sheet covering me. I was naked, of course. That didn't surprise me; it was just one more move in the familiar security game. My captors knew how much harder it is to be heroic and innovative when you're bare-ass naked. With a silent curse I pulled the top sheet off the bed and wrapped it around me. Better to look like a refugee from a toga party than display my shortcomings in public, I figured. Then I began prowling around the room, looking for . .. well, looking for anything that might help me get out of there. I didn't know exactly what that anything might be, but I figured I'd know it when I saw it.
My captors didn't give me much time. The click of a maglock disengaging froze me in midprowl. I was all the way on the other side of the room, much too far for me to reach the door in time for anything heroic. (And, of course, my captors would have known that, timing their entry by watching me on a surveillance monitor.) I gathered what shreds of dignity I stili had to hand, drew myself up to my full height, and prepared to give the first yak soldier through the door a serious dose of imperious stink-eye.
It wasn't a yak soldier who came through the door, though. Not what I imagined to be a typical yak soldier, at least. She was elf and Polynesian—three strikes, as far as the yaks I'm familiar with are concerned; male, human, and Nihonese is more their style. She gave me a coldly polite smile and said, "Good morning, Mr. Montgomery."
(I sighed. What was the deal here? Everyone and his fragging hamster knew my name . . .)
She looked competent and confident, did this elf-woman. She didn't have any obvious weapons—sensible, since it was conceivable I could have taken any heat away from her and used it myself—but she did look poised and ready, like a martial-arts expert. She was dressed in conservative corp-type fashions—nothing extravagant or flashy, but still definitely well-heeled.
In my peripheral vision I caught movement in the hallway outside the door. There were two more figures out there. I couldn't see details, but it was a sure bet they were packing serious heat, and were ready to take me down if I made the first wrong move against the elf-slitch. I sighed again and just stood there in the middle of the room, wrapped in my sheet.
"Here," she said, tossing a small, soft-sided suitcas
e onto the bed. "Get dressed please, Mr. Montgomery," she went on emotionlessly. "Someone will come to fetch you." And with that she turned on her heel and walked out. The door shut behind her, and the maglock snapped back into place.
I crossed to the bed and sat down heavily on it. For a couple of minutes I stared at the suitcase as though I was expecting it to sprout fangs and go for my throat. Just what the frag was going on here anyway? Maybe it wasn't the yaks who'd bagged me after all. Unless there was something big that I was missing—not an unreasonable possibility, I had to admit—the only interest the yaks would have in me was to make me dead, in as protracted and messy a way as possible. That kind of game wouldn't involve giving me clothes beforehand, would it?
I shook my head. Then I reached over and undid the latch of the suitcase.
If this had been an old-style action-espionage flatfilm, the clothes in the suitcase would have been a finely tailored dinner jacket with black tie and patent leather shoes. No luck there, chummer. The case contained simple tropical-weight casual wear: shirt, slacks, shoes, and undergarments. All in my size—or close enough to it—incidentally. No armor, predictably, and definitely nothing I could use as a weapon. Even the shoes had apparently been chosen to minimize their effectiveness as weapons, in case I'd happened to be an expert at savat. The uppers were rough fabric almost like burlap, and the soles were rope. (No drek—hemp rope.) They were comfortable enough, though, and that was all that mattered at the moment. The bag also contained my wallet, my 'puter, and all my credsticks.
So I dressed. Shrugging into the shirt introduced me to a complex spectrum of pain radiating from the region of my left shoulder blade. I breathed in deeply and worked the shoulder ... immediately regretting it. The pain was almost enough to knock me flat on my hoop. I tried the deep-breath thing again, a lot more cautiously this time.
Okay, the pain was bad, but more the dull, throbbing kind you get from a major contusion. The light armor I'd been wearing had spread the kinetic energy of the impact over a wide enough area that it hadn't punctured my precious skin. Also, the fact that the pain wasn't knife-sharp stabs told me that my ribs weren't broken. Be thankful for small favors, I told myself.
I'd just finished dressing when the maglock snapped back again. (Yes, I was definitely under observation.) The same elf-slitch appeared in the doorway, backed by the same two barely glimpsed figures in the hallway behind her. "Come with me, please, Mr. Montgomery," she said.
I came. What the hell else was I supposed to do? I followed the corp-biff out from my room into the hallway, hanging a good pace back. The two shadows—elves too, but surprisingly beefy for that metatype—fell in behind me and to the sides. Both had tasers on their belts and held oversized stun batons ready to swing. Chill, brah, I wanted to tell them, I'm not planning anything militant unless you force me into it. But I held my tongue.
Along the corridor we went, the elf-biff walking point, me walking slack, and my two armed side-men picking up the rear. Decor-wise, the place still looked like a hospital, but it didn't take me long to start second-guessing that conclusion. Hospitals—the ones I've visited, at least—have antiseptic-looking people always hurrying to and fro, carrying pocket 'puters and portable scanners. The air's always filled with that hospital smell—equal parts rubbing alcohol, urine, fear, and despair—and PA systems are always telling Dr. So-and-So to do such-and-such stat. Not here. We were alone in the hallway, me and my escorts. The air smelled of nothing whatsoever, and the loudest sound was the tap-tap of the elf biff's stiletto heels on the acrylamide tile floor.
We reached a T-intersection and turned left. An ideal place for a nurses' station if this were a hospital. Here, though, there was just a bank of three elevators. One opened its doors as we approached, and the elf gestured for me to stop.
If I'd wanted to make a break for it, this would have been the time. Something I'd learned early in my training in the Star is that getting into an elevator with a captive is—like getting into a car—an activity that requires good technique if you don't want your captive to take advantage. The three elves had good technique. One of my burly side-men went in first, holding his stun baton ready. Then the biff gestured me in. The second muscleboy followed, his baton lightly touching my kidney. Only once I was inside and secured—one stun baton at your kidney, another touching your groin is a frag of a disincentive against trying something stupid—did the corp-biff step inside.
Hey, they could have saved themselves the trouble if they'd only asked me. Making a break for it when I didn't know where I was or which way to run just didn't seem to be a reasonable option at the moment.
Take, for example, the fact that the "hospital" was apparently two levels underground—judging by the elevator control panel, at least. Frag, if I'd made a break before this, I'd probably have bolted down a fire-escape stairway, and found myself running out of options in a real hurry.
The door sighed shut, the corp biff touched the UP button, and off we went. Moments later, the macroplast doors hissed open again, and our entire entourage stepped out.
Into the reception area of what was obviously a high-tone corporate building. Lots of chrome, lots of polarized mirrorfinish, lots of technoflash. All the trappings you'd normally expect: holos on the wall of suits schmoozing with politicos and other reprobates; waiting-room furniture that costs more than an apartment in downtown Seattle; reception desk, complete with glamour-faced receptionist jacked into the system; big corp logo on the wall behind said reception desk. For a moment I focused on that logo.
TIC, it said in a curlicued, stylized font. And below that, in smaller letters—almost as an afterthought—the expansion: Telestrian Industries Corporation.
Telestrian. Where had I heard that name before?
Memory flashed back. It was a Tir Taimgire corp, wasn't it, with an arcology somewhere in Portland? Not much activity outside the Tir itself—or so I'd thought. This facility seemed to indicate otherwise. I wouldn't have so much as recognized the name if there hadn't been all that hash-up some time back during a highly publicized reorganization of the elven corp.
The receptionist behind the desk—elf, natch—flashed me a fifteen-gigawatt smile as I passed by. It didn't seem to matter one iota that I was being escorted by two muscleboys, each prodding me in the back with a stun baton. It occurred to me that, even if I'd run through the lobby buck-naked and on fire, she'd still have fired off that same practiced smile.
On we went, my friends and I, past the reception desk into the atrium of the TIC building.
That stopped me in my tracks—earning me two painful pokes in the kidneys, but I hardly noticed. I've never been much for typical corp architecture. Too many corps seem to get into the old macho "I've got the biggest architect" kind of drek, forgetting that people actually have to live and work in their monuments to too much cred and too little taste. Not TIC—at least, not here.
The place was bright and airy, the atrium open to the azure blue sky above. Open-sided corridors looked down onto the atrium from all three stories of the building. People were doing about their corp business along those corridors. As I watched, one slag on the second floor reached over the railing and plucked a blossom from one of the flowering trees—that's right, trees—that grew in the open area. He sniffed the flower appreciatively, then stuck it into his buttonhole before moving on. Birds twittered and cheeped from the boughs above me, and the air was full of perfume.
Under one of the trees was a small conference table. Half a dozen intense-looking corp types were discussing something—discussing it quite heatedly, judging by their body language. I couldn't hear the first word of what they were saying, however; the "conference room" was obviously equipped with white-noise generators.
"All right, already," I said peevishly as my two sideboys poked me in the back, and off we went again. Over to the far corner of the atrium, and up a movator to the second floor, then up another to the third and top.
Top floor—executive suite. I could tell im
mediately. The pearl gray carpet on the floors was deeper-piled. The art on the walls was more understated, elegant, and obviously expensive. The people passing by in the halls were better-dressed. (Don't get me wrong: Even on the ground floor, people wore suits that would cost as much as a car. The only difference on the third floor was the model of car—Jackrabbit or Westwind.) I could almost smell the cred in the air.
Along one of those open-sided hallways we walked, then turned away from the atrium and into serious suit-land. We approached a big set of double doors that had to be real mahogany and not wood-grained duraplast. The doors silently swung open before we reached them. The corp-biff jandered on through with me at her heels. The two muscleboys peeled off, though, and stayed outside the doors, which immediately swung shut behind me. Which implied serious security on this side of the doors, of course. Surveillance cameras at the very least, and probably spirits or elementals on a very short leash. Just as well I wasn't planning anything untoward at the moment.
On jandered my escort, past various office doors—all mahogany, all notably missing nameplates; presumably, if you didn't know where to find the office you wanted, you just plain didn't belong here. Another couple of turns, and another double door; this time floor-to-ceiling transpex with some kind of chromatic coating that made the doors look like huge opalescent soap bubbles. Again the doors swung back as we approached and again closed silently after us.
End of the line, apparently. The elf stopped in the middle of an antechamber or waiting room and gestured silently to one of the coral-hued leather couches. And then, still without saying a word, she turned on her heel and strode back out through the soap-bubble doors.
On a whim, I tried to follow. Predictably, those doors didn't open for me the way they did for her.
Okay, so I'd been bagged by pros and taken to see some high corp suit who had something he/she/it wanted me to know ... presumably. (Unless TIC was a yak cover, and this was the waiting room for the torture chamber.) I remember reading once that, "Life is just one damn thing after another." Wrongo. It's the same damn thing over and over again.
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