Fade to Black

by Nyx Smith

An image leapt into the back of his mind, something like a jet fighter swooping low over the buildings off to the left of the intersection. A red schematic flashed in front of his eyes: A CyberSpace Designs recon drone.

  "Bird's with us again!" he snarled.

  "Burn it!" Rico barked.

  A targeting indicator winked-locking on. Thorvin popped the M-134 minigun out of his roofpod and opened up. Three bursts, and the drone went spinning wing-over-wing, down and out of sight.

  * * *

  Bobbie Jo felt the slugs battering her airframe, then the flare of fire from the long-range fuel tanks.

  Alarm indicators flashed and flickered. The skin over her right wing split and burst into tatters. The concrete ground came swirling toward her.

  She screamed. Blackness swallowed her.

  14

  Another bone-rattling impact and they were clear of the attacking forces converging on Mott Street.

  Thorvin had the power plant opened up wide, and the noise was deafening. The roar of the engine rising into a stammering whine that chipped away at the nerves like sustained autofire. Hanging onto his seat with one hand and his Predator 2 with the other, Rico clenched his teeth and stared into the passenger-side rearview mirror. He tried not to think about the people bouncing around in the rear of the van. There wasn't time.

  "Splash one drone!" Thorvin bellowed over the scream of the van's engine. "I'm heading for the freaking you-know-what?'

  Rico nodded. "Do it!"

  Surikov cried out from the rear. The slag was scared and rightly so, but he and Dok would have to deal with it. Bandit's warning that someone was about to bust the Mott Street safehouse had come none too soon. The hostiles had moved in on foot and in cars and in vans and had even thrown up a drone. Probably, it was Daisaka Security, the security arm of Maas Intertech's parent corp, Kuze Nihon.

  Nobody with organized paramilitary forces brought out the heavy guns just because they felt like partying. There had to be a reason for the attack, and Surikov was the only one that made sense. But the point that bothered Rico most was not who or why, but rather how the opposition had gotten to them at Mott Street. How had they been found out?

  Two possibilities came to mind. One was that someone might have tailed them to the safehouse, despite Thorvin's declarations to the contrary. Rico didn't think that very likely. Two, Piper might have been traced through the matrix. She was equally sure that nobody had traced her, but that didn't mean she couldn't be wrong. Rico didn't think much of that possibility either, for the simple reason that where the matrix was concerned, Piper was usually right. Was there something he'd overlooked? And what in fragging hell could it be? He couldn't believe that anyone on his team had given them up.

  One thought came to mind.

  He looked at Dok. "Check the slag for a snitch."

  "What?" Dok exclaimed. "Now?"

  "Do I look like I'm joking ?"

  Dok stared for a moment, swaying with the violent motions of the van as it skidded around a corner, then, he bent, broke open his medpack and went to work.

  They already knew that Surikov had implants: datajack, chip memory, subprocessing unit. A really advanced skillwire system. Lots of tech drek to expedite and accelerate his scientific research. L. Kahn's chip-dossier had mentioned it. What it suggested to Rico right now was that Surikov might also have been implanted with some kind of electronic microtransmitter, something that Maas Intertech or Daisaka Security could home in on if the slag ever got "lost." or snatched.

  Stuff like that wasn't common, but for top execs and ramjamming research slags like Surikov, neither was it unknown. Rico cursed himself for not anticipating the possibility and getting Surikov checked out sooner.

  Surikov was lying flat on the floor. Dok bent over him, hanging onto a cargo strap. Two seconds later, the med scanner in Dok's hand began to beep shrilly, and Dok looked up, wide-eyed.

  * * *

  "Come on, Monk! Hurry!"

  Minx grabbed his hand and tugged, propelling Monk forward, down a flight of stairs leading to a subway station. Only at the bottom of the stairs Minx turned right instead of left, yanked open a metal door marked, PLX-3, AUTH PERS ONLY, and tugged him right through the doorway.

  The door slammed shut at his back, then everything went black. Minx tugged him ahead at a run.

  Their feet echoed against the floor, a smooth, hard floor that seemed basically level, though cluttered with stuff that rustled around his ankles and crunched under his sneaks.

  Minx slowed. Something heavy banged and something metallic squealed. A door swung open. They stepped out onto a concrete safety walk that ran along one side of an underground roadway. Monk couldn't recall having ever seen this part of the transitways before. The roadway, only two lanes wide and divided by white dashes, extended off in both directions for a few hundred meters before curving out of sight. The pavement looked really clean. No litter anywhere.

  Minx looked back and forth, up and down the roadway, then thrust back her wildly frizzled hair, now glowing red and orange, and grinned.

  "This is it," she said.

  "What?"

  A rumbling arose into a roaring like a race car. A gray and black van came screaming around the curve to the right, blew on by them and disappeared around the curve to the left. Minx frowned.

  "Huh?" Monk said.

  As the van disappeared, a storm of amber blips began washing across the walls of the transitway, appearing from around the curve to the left. The roar of the van faded away, then swelled. Another truck, a sort of tow truck, came screaming around the curve to the left This time Minx nodded, glanced at Monk and pulled him ahead, under the railing guarding the safety walk, then down onto the roadway.

  The tow truck roared like a semiballistic jet, amber strobes blazing from above the cab and from inside the massive front grille. Monk watched that grille coming closer and closer and closer until it seemed huge, titanic, and it suddenly occurred to him that the truck wasn't slowing down and he was standing right in front of it Abruptly, Minx yanked him aside, and the tow trucks tires screamed and white smoke billowed into the air.

  "Come on!" Minx shouted.

  The tow truck screeched to a halt, the door swung open, and Minx all but pulled Monk up the steps and into the cab.

  The truck roared ahead. The acceleration was incredible. It thrust Monk against the back of the broad bench seat, holding him there till he could hardly breathe. He glimpsed a pair of black-gloved hands gripping a steering wheel and the front dashboard, blazing with controls-lights, graphic indicators, LED dials and gauges-all winking, gleaming, flaring and flashing incessantly. He stared wide-eyed at the broad white lines of the roadway streaming toward him in a blur. Exocentrical Rumination blasted from speakers all around.

  "Who's your friend?" someone shouted. "Real booty!"

  There was that word again.

  Minx grinned. "This is Monk!" she yelled. "Monk, this is Harry! Harry the Hack, people call her! She's the best hack in the city!"

  "Yeah?" Monk shouted, wondering what a "hack" might be.

  Minx nodded, smiling.

  "Used to drive a cab!" Harry exclaimed. "Never managed to lose the tag!"

  Minx sat back, and Monk leaned forward to get a better look at Harry. She had gold-blonde hair drawn back into a thick braid. She also had the perfect, cosmed-generated face of a Maria Mercurial novastar, complete with languid bedroom eyes and a small dark mole a little above and beside voluptuously full ruby lips. She wore a shiny, studded black jacket and black engineer boots. She took a quick drag on a brown Sunset Neon cigarette, then looked across at Monk and grinned.

  "What the hell are you looking at!" she shouted.

  Monk looked at the dashboard. A TV/3V show was playing on the vid there. "As The E-Mail Turns," rolled across the screen. The first scene showed a glowing neon man in a glowing neon room pushing glowing neon envelopes around on a glowing neon desk, and muttering incoherently. Monk hadn't ever seen this show before. If it ma
de any sense, it escaped him.

  Something barked. Monk looked aside to see Minx giving a hug and a kiss to a huge dog with glaring red eyes and vicious white teeth. "We call 'im Prince!" Harry shouted.

  Prince of Darkness? Monk wondered.

  Minx, and Harry burst out laughing.

  Abruptly, the corridor of the transitway vanished, and they were sluicing through a sea of automobiles and trucks. The tow truck roared and squealed. Horns blared, sirens wailed. Monk caught a glimpse of a bus hurtling straight toward the right side of the tow truck's cab, a solid wall of cars charging straight toward the tow truck's nose, and a crowd of people abruptly scattering from all around the tow truck's front and sides. Buildings, towering buildings, black rain-tarnished retrofitted brick and ferrocrete buildings spun past in a blur.

  Monk felt himself wrenched forward, practically out of his seat, then thrust against the passenger door, then back the other way, right across Minx's lap and practically into the jaws of the giant, red-eyes-glaring Prince of Darkness dog.

  Minx looked down at him and smiled and gently pressed his hair back from his brow.

  "That's the other thing, you booty!" she called over the deafening roar of the truck. "Whenever you ride with Harry, you ALWAYS wear YOUR SEAT BELT!"

  There was that word again.

  Booty.

  "HERE WE ARE!" Harry cried.

  For a moment, the tow truck seemed to turn sideways. Tires screamed. Monk, still sprawled across the seat, felt his feet and lower legs drawn inexorably toward the ceiling. Then the truck stopped suddenly, and he tumbled onto the floor under the control console. Minx and Harry burst out laughing.

  "Come on, Monk! Come on!"

  Minx grabbed his hand and tugged him from the cab and down onto some street somewhere in Sector 2, near Port Sector. He could smell the rank river, the Passaic River, that was for sure. Maybe Newark Bay, too. The street immediately around him, lined with old factory and tenement buildings, looked like a disaster area. Cracked-up cars straddled the sidewalks and sat at odd angles all over the street. Bodies lay all over the place, too, some of them still moving. Slags in paramilitary armor stood around shouting at one another. Emergency strobes atop ambulances and Omni police vehicles and other cars and trucks flickered and flashed brilliantly against the dusky suffusion of early dawn. The tow truck growled. Harry had a thick cable stretched out from the rear of the truck to a big blue sedan sitting on its side.

  Minx tugged Monk in another direction, straight toward some heavily armored slag sprawled over the curb. The patch on his shoulder pictured something like a gorilla.

  A light flashed, and Monk realized Minx had a camera pointed at the slag's body. She bent down for a close-up. A real close-up shot. So close she nearly had the lens of the camera touching the surface of the pool of blood slowly trickling out from the under the gleaming reflective faceplate of the slag's helmet. And then she moved the camera just a bit aside and lowered her mouth ... her mouth ...

  "Monk?"

  The world began slowly turning around him. He glimpsed Minx smiling quizzically at him and caught sight of Harry grinning and laughing just before the street tilted on end and everything went black.

  "You booty ..."

  15

  The van glided through the back streets of Rahway, straddling the border of Sector 13. The gloomy dawn resembled twilight. The ancient buildings flanking the road cast dark shadows. Rico knew this part of the sprawl as the Dead Zone. Nobody lived here but ghouls and wandering gangers and the odd slag on the run. There was no power and no water but what people found for themselves. The badges didn't hardly know the place existed, and that was probably good for them, the cops. The fog from some long-ago metaphysical catastrophe rolled forever through the streets. Devil rats, some as big as small dogs, peered from the alleys and out of the windows of abandoned buildings. The only light came from the fires in metal storage drums or seeping down from the sky through a pall of dark clouds.

  "Freaking dust devil!" Thorvin growled.

  A swirl of fog evolved into a storm of dust and grit rattling against the sides of the van. Rico glimpsed a series of grotesque shapes, faces, contorted bodies only vaguely human, flowing over the windshield and around the van like ghosts, but he knew these were just an artifact of the storm. Metaphysical FX. A token of the Dead Zone. It passed as swiftly as it had come.

  "Status," he said.

  "Clear," Thorvin growled. "Freaking clear. I got a fouled intake port, but we're freaking clear."

  The van rumbled and turned across the road and slowed, descending a steep ramp into a sublevel garage. The garage door trundled down behind them. "Building okay?" Rico asked.

  Thorvin nodded. "It's clean."

  Rico looked toward Bandit, but didn't bother asking for confirmation. Magicians didn't like using magic in this part of Sector 13. Too much static. That was what Bandit said. Rico took his word for it. "Set the watch," he told Thorvin.

  "It's set already," Thorvin grumbled.

  From the outside, the building didn't look like much, two stories of crumbling brick with rusty-looking steel shutters over every door and window. The appearance was deceiving, though. The place was a fortress, equipped with sensors, offensive and defensive systems, all capable of independent, computer-directed operation. No one would have to stare out any windows here. The building and its automated systems would stand guard for them.

  Rico watched his team pile out of the van. Two hours' sleep hadn't done anybody much good. In any run you reached a point where the adrenaline made you think you could go on forever. But close your eyes and relax for a moment and fatigue washed over you like a floodtide. The abrupt departure from the Mott Street safehouse and the wild ride outta there, like a run through a war zone, hadn't helped.

  Predator 2 in hand, Rico led Shank on a quick sweep of the building. The place was clean. The van was clean. Every member of the team was clean. And now Surikov was clean. For sure. Checked and rechecked and declared safe.

  Surikov had been the problem. Maas Intertech had implanted a microtransmitter into the back of his neck, then somebody had homed in on that electronic snitch's signal to find him. Guano like that sounded simple enough, but it presented the always image-conscious corps with a potential image problem.

  Regardless of the truth, the corps liked to avoid being portrayed as oppressive tyrants monitoring and controlling every aspect of people's lives.

  That Maas Intertech would take a risk on that score implied that either Surikov was more of a heavy jammer than anyone had admitted so far or else the corps were getting more protective than ever of their assets.

  Rico blamed himself for not expecting that. The unexpected was an integral part of the game. You planned for what you could and hoped and prayed that nothing important slipped by or that you could fix it before somebody got wasted!

  Dok had removed the transmitter, null sheen. Rico had tossed it into the rear of a pickup back in the transitway. Now maybe they'd have some room to breathe. A few hours, anyway.

  Thorvin headed into the sublevel utility room to bring auxiliary systems on-line. Rico sent Filly and Shank to the kitchen to get out food and supplies, and Dok and Surikov into the main room, the living room, to lax out Then he slid an arm around Piper's waist. She met him with a kiss. "I need you to check the newsnets," he said. "Find out what's happening."

  "I understand, jefe."

  No need to explain that she shouldn't do anything that might get her signal traced through the matrix.

  She understood that this building around them was their bolthole. This was where they ran if they got into trouble. It was never used unless the primary safehouse got blown. Only Thorvin had been here more than a handful of times, and then only to install the security systems and get the place functional.

  Piper moved down the hall to the telecom room. Rico checked that the toilet was working, then stepped into the living room. Surikov was collapsed on the sofa, slumped deep into the cushions. H
e didn't really look bad for a guy his age and weight. A little tired, maybe a little overwrought. Dok was checking him over. He looked up as Rico lit a cheroot.

  "Where are we?" Surikov asked.

  There'd probably be no harm in telling Surikov that, but Rico had more to consider than just Surikov.

  He had to think about tomorrow, all the tomorrows he and his crew might ever have. Surikov was on his way home. No way of knowing what he might say to security people when he got there. No way of knowing who might eventually hear what he had to say. Better to tell him nothing, no more than he absolutely had to know. Today's corporate friend was tomorrow's enemy, and ultimately you had to consider all the corps enemies. Corps and corporates served only one master, the almighty nuyen. That was their only loyalty. "We're safe," Rico said. "All you need to know, compadre."

  "What... what happens now?"

  "We sit tight. You relax. You got nothing to worry about."

  "I'd feel better knowing something of your plans." Surikov hesitated, looking anxious. "What happens next, I should say. As concerns me."

  Rico guessed questions like that were natural. No man liked to feel powerless. If Piper was any standard by which to judge, women didn't like it either. "It's like this," he said. "We make final arrangements to hand you over. Then you go home."

  "I take it you're the leader?"

  Rico nodded.

  "We haven't been introduced."

  Rico took a deep drag on his cheroot and slowly blew the smoke out through his lips. "Numero Uno," he said. "Number One. That's what you call me."

  "I see." Surikov didn't seem too sure about that. Mostly, he seemed anxious. "I'd like to talk to you about ... about my going home, as you call it."

  "What about it?"

  "What 'home' are you referring to?"

  The point grated.

  It had been no big deal to find out where Surikov used to work before he got snatched by Maas Intertech. Surikov had an international rep in biotech and cybernetics, headware design. Piper hadn't needed to go any further than the public databases to dig out his whole history. He'd been working for a subsidiary of Fuchi IE. called Multitronics until Maas Intertech decided to recruit him without the option of saying no.