Fade to Black

by Nyx Smith

  As Bandit passed through the astral form of the bay door, he entered the glare of directed mana, a spell, like turning to face the sun. Instinctively, he tugged himself back, back into the dim radiance of the loading bay. As he did that, he threw up a shield, a spell of his own, surrounding his astral body in a sphere of guardian power.

  Then-nothing. No mana bolts streamed through the dormant aura of the bay door to strike his shield.

  No monstrous spirits appeared to confront him. Just what had he encountered? He descended into the ground, moved forward a ways, then came up through the buildings on the far side of the street. He saw an old, fat man seated on a toilet and smoking a fat cigar, but other than that... nothing.

  The night sky shone with the reflected radiance of the Earth's energy. The air rumbled with the workings of nearby factories. Cars and trucks moved along the streets.

  The magic that had glared in his face was gone. It had touched him and disappeared. What was it?

  What could it mean?

  Trouble, for sure.

  They took the meet in Jersey City, on Pacific, right near the railroad yards. Meets at very high-profile localities like malls hadn't gone too good in the recent past, so this one was taking place in the litter-strewn parking lot of the local Quik Shop store.

  At three a.m., the lot was deserted.

  Rico looked around from the passenger seat of the van. The surrounding neighborhood was grunge, three-and four-story grimy brick and cracked, crumbling sidewalks. It was like Newark's worst, only the cops still worked here and they never went easy. Jersey City had its own private corporation and that corp had its own cops. They were a mob like all the other mobs, only they had the law behind them. They specialized in street justice. Make the wrong move and you ended up sprawled in some dark corner with a hole through the back of your head.

  Not a good place for pyrotechnics. The Jersey City cops rode in armored cars and command vehicles and had assault teams on twenty-four-hour alert. If things got real hot, they called out the fragging panzer.

  Or one of their gunships.

  At a quarter past the hour, a crimson Toyota Ambassador pulled into the lot. It was marked for Paladin Cabs. That meant body armor, run-flat tires, and gun ports.

  Tonight it also meant a bodyguard. The guard looked like a gutterpunk in razor-sharp threads. He came out of the rear of the cab in a dark gray suit, glanced toward the street, stood up, glanced toward the street, closed the door of the cab, and turned to face Thorvin's van. Then he shot another glance toward the street.

  Rico recognized the habit. It was something you developed after seeing too many people sliced and diced to bloody ribbons in the thrasher parts of the sprawl.

  A pro would keep his eyes moving, but he'd be discreet about it. This said something about the slag inside the cab. Osborne might be a dangerous man, but he'd never walked the razor himself. If he had, he wouldn't have a clown like this for a guard.

  At Rico's signal, Shank tugged open the side door of the van and then waited, crouching, watching the clown and cradling his M22A2. Rico gave the clown a few moments to adjust to that, then pushed open the passenger door and stepped outside.

  Osborne came over to face him. With a quick look up and down, he said, "You did a fine job on my security." Rico nodded. "You got sticks?"

  Osborne drew a synthleather wallet from his jacket pocket, folded it open, and handed it over. Rico checked the credsticks with the reader on his belt. They checked out.

  "We'll set the delivery once we "got the merchandise."

  "When do you go?"

  "Soon."

  "Make it so. I've got a lot riding on this deal. Do it fast enough and we'll have things to discuss in the future."

  "Sure, amigo. Slot and run."

  Osborne nodded, got back in his cab, and left. Rico glanced up at the night sky, then returned to the van.

  The nightly rain would be coming soon.

  Too soon.

  36

  "Time is oh-two forty-five hours."

  Rico acknowledged that over his headset. The message came from Piper and it meant she had done everything she had to do inside the Crystal Blossom condo's mainframe computer.

  Rico keyed his headset. "Go."

  The helo veered abruptly, vectoring left and up as the doors siding the main compartment slid open.

  Rico wound the thick, slik-coated drop-rope around his left forearm and popped the safety line affixed to his commando harness. Shank nodded from the door opposite.

  Abruptly, they were coming up over the edge of the roof of the Crystal Blossom condoplex.

  "Now!" Thorvin said.

  Rico stepped out into empty air.

  The timing was precise. The helo slowed just as he slid to the end of the drop-rope. He hit the roof's flat, gritty surface with both feet, tumbled once and came up onto his knees, scanning the rooftop with his Ares Special Service in hand. Shank landed an instant behind him. The helo arced away so as not to attract attention, dwindling into the night and the infinitude of buildings and glaring lights sprawling across Manhattan.

  The roof was clear. Rico rose and jogged over to the building's southern face. Shank followed. They pulled black climbing ropes from their harnesses and thrust K-2 autopitons against the low ferrocrete wall rising like a rim from around the edge of the roof. The cryomag tips of the K-2s burned holes straight into the crete. Secondary probes then extended outward from the pitons' main shaft, embedding the devices in the crete.

  That took about five seconds. They spent another three or four connecting the ropes to the pitons, then to the I.M.I. power winches on the front of their harnesses.

  "Set," Shank growled.

  "Go."

  The winches were programmed. From the roof, fifty stories above the ground, they fell about eleven stories straight down, then the winches cut in. Harnesses jerked and pulled. They slowed, jogging feet-first off the face of the building. They came to a halt before the wall of mirrored macroplast panes guarding the living room of Condo 35-8. This was where they'd picked up Farrah Moffit and where they would now find Ansell Surikov.

  They applied flashtape to the mirrored windows. One quick flash seared a large hole through the panes.

  They swung inside.

  The heart of the Crystal Blossom condoplex mainframe used standard CPU matrix iconology. a white room walled by control panels. At 02:44:58:21:19 or so, Piper attached a black-box program icon to the Master Logic Panel icon, then transmitted her ready signal to Rico.

  "Time is oh-two forty-five hours."

  * * *

  A while passed, then a warning signal from the engineering subprocessor advised of a breached external wall panel in Residence 35-8. The black box on the main console piped that signal, changing it, shunting it to the building diagnostic subprocessor, initializing a Level 1 diagnostic search of engineering subsystems.

  Momentarily, another warning came, and another diagnostic search began.

  The loop was complete.

  "Alert! Alert!"

  Hearing that, Skip Nolan looked down the row of comm operators facing the spectrally lit consoles lining the Executive Action Brigade's command vehicle. One console was showing its red alert light on top.

  Op Three was working the console rapidly.

  Fingering his headset, Skip stepped up behind the Op. Window One on the console's main display showed a broad expanse of city populated by soaring towers gleaming brightly in the night

  "We've got a hit," said an excited voice. A burst of static interrupted the signal. The transmit display on the console ID'd the speaker as part of Ground Eleven, the surveillance team assigned to monitor a tower on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

  "Ground Eleven, report," said Op Three.

  The surveillance agent's voice returned in mid-sentence, "-just skimmed the roof. We make it a Hughes Stallion, possibly armed. We've got some activity-"

  More static.

  "-scanning two unknowns rappelling down the sout
h face."

  Window Three on the console's main display abruptly zoomed in on the Crystal Blossom condoplex.

  Two dark, human-sized figures seemed to be clinging to the building's mirrored surface, maybe thirty, thirty-five stories above street-level. Something flashed, and a black squarish patch appeared in the building's mirrored skin. The two figures disappeared into the black patch.

  Skip suppressed a curse.

  He'd been all but incredulous when Colonel Yates ordered a surveillance team to monitor the exterior of the condoplex. What the hell did this building have to do with their mission? The brigade didn't have resources to waste like this. Their targets were somewhere in Newark, not Manhattan. They'd scraped up enough street-level intelligence to be reasonably sure of that. All the colonel would say was that he had special intelligence, not through regular channels.

  Now it looked as if someone were making a run on the condoplex. Skip jacked into the console, replayed the vid, and zoomed in tight on the two dark figures hanging at the side of the building. Computer analysis found a ninety-seven percent correspondence between the figures on the wall and datastore references on two of the runners who'd participated in the run against Maas Intertech.

  That was a match.

  The colonel's long shot appeared to be paying off.

  Skip looked up the line of consoles to the crippled body in a wheelchair. Bobbie Jo, her mind and spirit, were linked to an underpowered backup drone drifting slowly over eastern Newark, futilely, it now seemed.

  She was too far from the action to make any difference, way too far away. The drone was too slow, and Bobbie Jo was getting too timid. She'd be lucky if Colonel Yates didn't cancel her contract. The colonel didn't believe in on-the-job therapy.

  If only she could have found the will to pilot one of the brigade's assault choppers ... Things might've worked out better for her.

  But-no time for that now.

  He jacked into his command console. "Alert, alert. Cap One, you are go. Stand by for target designation on channel three."

  A monotone voice replied, "Acknowledged. Lifting off."

  From the background came the rapid thump-thump-thumping of rotorcraft.

  When the lights came on, Surikov lay on the bed with his legs hanging over the side like he'd been sitting there a while, then just leaned back and fell asleep. He wore a black robe. He looked about fifty, sophisticated, with thinning hair and a close-trimmed beard turning gray. Extra weight around the middle.

  Not a big man. Not a small one either. A liquor bottle lay close to hand.

  Rico tossed the bottle back toward the center of the bed and tried shaking Surikov awake. When that didn't work, he took the opportunity to press Dok's DNA scanner against Surikov's arm. The check took about thirty seconds and came back positive. ID confirmed. Again. He tugged Surikov up into a sitting position and cuffed him. Surikov grunted, moved his head, gradually starting to come around. He smelled like booze. "What ... ?" he mumbled. "Who's there? What's going on?"

  "We're taking you to the Garden."

  "A garden of delight," Surikov said, smiling stupidly. "That's my wife."

  "We're taking you home."

  Surikov stared for several long moments, then rubbed a hand over his mouth and made an obvious effort to get hold of himself. "How ... Tell me ... how do we proceed?"

  No fragging guano.

  * * *

  The runners had called him Cannibal.

  With her head lowered and hair hanging around her face, Farrah watched the runner watching her, trying to look as if she were doing anything but paying him any attention.

  He made her nervous.

  According to what she'd overheard, the runners had brought this Cannibal in specifically to stay with her, to serve both as guard and jailer. The ork runner had referred to Cannibal as a "hired gun." He looked like that. Like the kind of person who would do whatever someone asked, as long as the pay was satisfactory. Red and black slash-tats made his face a vicious mask. His teeth were filed to points and colored jet-black. He wore some unusual dark metallic armor on his upper body, and a small grayish skull dangled from his left ear. He carried a compact rifle-possibly a submachine gun-a pair of pistols, a rather short-looking sword, and numerous knives.

  Farrah wished the runners had trusted her enough to leave her by herself. She would rather they'd left her here in handcuffs and manacles than leave her unfettered with this scuzpunk for a guard.

  Cannibal leaned against the wall opposite and watched her. Some unknown quanta of time slipped past. Cannibal pushed away from the wall and turned and walked slowly out of the warehouse lounge. His footsteps moved up the hall. The door to that space beyond, the loading area, squealed and then banged.

  Silence descended, but lingered only moments.

  Too soon, the door squealed and banged again and Cannibal returned. He leaned against the wall again, facing her, cradling that rifle in his arms. He grinned.

  "Do I make you nervous?"

  How to reply to the sociopathic personality? Farrah tried to decide. She could not expect him to observe any of the ordinary social conventions. Almost any response at all would only encourage him. An outright challenge, looks or words of defiance, might well incite him to violence. Better, it seemed, for her to do nothing, say nothing, make no response whatsoever. Better to appear completely cowed, in hopes of providing little or no provocation.,

  "I could do you in a second," he said. "I could do you in a way we'd both enjoy. One time I did this biff in bed. First we bopped, then I took her heart out. I could do you like that. One minute, you're in heaven. The next..."

  Farrah suppressed the tremor that rose up through her insides. If he came near her... if left no choice but to try to save herself, she would have one chance and one chance only.

  It would be do or die.

  37

  No alarms, no shouts ...

  So far so good.

  Rico watched Surikov pull on the hi-visibility orange jumpsuit with built-in plastic shoes Intended to ID him as a noncombatant, then helped him get into a commando-style harness. Surikov moved slow and fumbled a lot, like he was still feeling whatever he'd been drinking, and like he'd drunk too much.

  Rico hustled him out to the living room, the slag stumbling and tripping in the dark. Rico kept him upright and forced him ahead, then keyed his headset. "Time check."

  Piper replied, "Time is oh-two forty-eight hours."

  Maybe another minute went by. Rico kept his eyes moving, glancing toward Shank and the entry to the condo. He kept expecting to hear shouts, shots, detonations, a Fuchi security team blasting into the place and spraying the room with autofire. What he got instead was the thumping of a helo. As the sound drew near, a blackish blur shot through the hole in the exterior window panels, smashed across the top of the wetbar, shattering bottles and glasses, then thudded against a wall.

  The blur was a stickihook, a macroplast weight with an adhesive skin and a loop connected to a rope.

  Shank rapidly freed the rope from the hook and brought it over. The rope had three ends, each with a mountaineer's heavy metal clasp. Rico snapped one clasp onto Surikov's harness and one onto his own.

  Shank took the third.

  Surikov seemed to wake up then. He pointed toward the hole in the window panels, saying adamantly,

  "We are not going out through that-"

  Right.

  Rico put a medjector to Surikov's right arm and fired.

  The slag blinked and jerked his arm away, then got woozy-looking, like he might slump to the floor.

  "Time check."

  "Time is oh-two fifty hours."

  Shank helped get Surikov over to the hole in the window panels. The rope connected to their harnesses grew taut.

  One quick look and they went together through the hole.

  * * *

  The roof of the foundry gave easy access to a window on the warehouse's fourth floor. Claude Jaeger waited several moments, watching. The
window, easily visible from the street below, slowly settled into a gummy, glutinous mass oozing over the window sill like mucus. The mage got that much right, at least Claude hopped through the empty frame, landed lightly on his feet and sank into a crouch. This floor of the warehouse smelled of resin and paint. Piles of antique furniture, some apparently made of actual wood, divided the space into long, narrow aisles. Claude found his way to the stairs. Two flights down, he paused before a metal fire door and listened.

  Footsteps approached, softly echoing-the calm, measured footsteps of a sentry, one wholly unaware of any intrusions onto his turf. Claude drew back and flattened himself against the wall to the left of the doorway. In a moment, the door banged and swung inward, right past Claude's nose. The sentry followed through. In that instant, Claude saw the sentry's face from only a few steps away. The man's eyes gazed straight ahead, into the greater darkness of the stairwell.

  Claude's fist shot forward and back, and the sentry collapsed. The satisfying feel of snapping bone and crunching cartilage lingered. Claude smiled, then dragged the sentry's body fully into the stairwell.

  One down, one to go.

  When the rest of the runners returned to this hideyhole, they would find only death. By then, Claude would be waiting in ambush.

  He moved cautiously through the doorway and into a large space, the truck-loading bay located at the front of the building. He stood on a loading dock at the rear of that bay. The extra-large door to a freight elevator stood immediately to his left. Beyond that an ordinary-sized door. This led into a narrow hall, past an office, a lavatory, then into a smallish room outfitted like a ramshackle tongue.

  The woman there, seated on a cushioned bench, looked like she belonged with the slitches in the holopics on the walls around her. enormous hair, jutting breasts, a face both sublime and whorish. As Claude entered, she lifted her head and drew back fearfully, eyes wide and round.

  She gasped and blurted, "Who are you?"

  Claude smiled and continued toward her. "Your friends sent me to get you out of here."

  "What?" She looked at him as if astonished.

  But when he reached for her, astonishment turned to animal fear. She jerked aside and began rising to her feet. Claude seized her elbow and flung her down onto the bench. Her head tilted back and her jaw dropped open and something like a blackish length of spaghetti or string shot out from under her tongue.