Tikki follows Adama into the depths of the club.
The ceiling is lost in darkness. Sizzling bolts of laser light zigzag through the air. The walls are turning fields of stars and oversized trid displays flashing haute modern adverts and flickering scenes from the sunken dance floor. Adama’s table is one of many lining the aisles ringing the dance floor like tiered balconies. The music is loud and ponderous, throbbing, vibrating. The dancers turn and bob like mannikins on strings. Tikki keeps her eyes moving. Most of the club’s patrons are dressed in Penumbra-style: glowing neon over black; silvery monochrome that glints with pinpoints of light like stars; luminescent face paint. Males favor flowing shogun blouses and billowing trousers. Females tend toward kimonos and clinging gowns. Hair is samurai, cut back from the brow and knotted in back; or geisha, piled up on top in intricate weaves. Most of the bodies walking around look to have been sculpted at the better body salons. Credsticks are always glinting.
“What do you think?” Adama asks.
Tikki crinkles her nose in distaste, shakes her head. The original Penumbra is not like this. There’s nothing of the wild here, and silver-infected fashions raise her hackles.
Adama smiles apologetically.
A waiter brings food and wine. The food is grossly overcooked and smells like burnt-out waste, but Adama doesn’t seem to mind. Probably doesn’t even notice. Like most humans, he has only a token sense of smell. Fortunately, he’s the only one eating. Tikki stands to his left, keeping her hands free. She and her employer are in the open now and there are rules to be observed. Never compromise your hands. Never allow anyone to interfere with your eyes. Stay alert.
Adama makes the job difficult. He talks to Tikki constantly, as if she were merely a companion rather than a guard. Always, he insists on a reply. “What about that one?” he inquires. “Will she be my Leandra?”
Tikki has heard the question before. Finding the man’s “Leandra” is the primary objective of a night on the town. What he’s really talking about is finding and then playing with a suitable female, one who fits his specs. It isn’t half as odd as it sounds, and the way Adama plays the game only enhances Tikki’s estimation of him. He doesn’t simply look at the biffs strolling around, he sizes them up, like a hunter. Not a hunter like Tikki, but a hunter all the same. The instincts are right there for her to see in his black marble eyes. Adama knows about predator and prey, killing and death. He knows that killing is sometimes essential and that death is an intrinsic part of life. He knows that humans use a word like murder because they lack the perspective of the hunter, not understanding what occurs between predator and prey in the final moment, when teeth meet flesh and the waters of life pour out steaming and red to stain the earth.
In the wild, there is no murder, no laws, no moral rights and wrongs. There is only Nature, the contest for survival. She who kills tonight has food to eat and may thereby live to see a new dawn.
The true hunter understands this.
Even before Adama is finished eating, a curvaceous brunette brushes his shoulder with an elbow, then pauses, looking at him, smiling as if to apologize. Adama looks up and around at her and smiles, the next moment gesturing vaguely to the other chair at his table.
The brunette sits, smiles, begins a conversation. Tikki discreetly points a compact Fuchi SCX-5 ScanMan at her. The ScanMan declares the woman safe, unarmed.
“Will you be my Leandra?” Adama inquires.
The brunette laughs softly and turns to call a friend over.
That one brings another along.
Before long, Adama is surrounded by seven well-proportioned women who act as if enraptured by his talk. One by one, he escorts them onto the dance floor and back again. He buys them drinks. He compliments their hair, their clothes, their looks. He lights their cigarettes, chuckling softly when one or more of them provide a flame for his cigar.
Tikki is anything but surprised. She’s seen all this before. Perhaps the Fuchi pin on Adama’s lapel has something to do with it. Or perhaps, just as she has a talent for stalking prey, Adama may have a skill or an instinct for sitting and waiting, for lurking, for setting a subtle form of ambush. Or perhaps certain human females have a special sense for males who radiate power and wealth.
“Who will be my Leandra?” Adama asks.
The females all laugh.
The hour grows late.
Inevitably, a favorite emerges, a voluptuous redhead with lightly tanned skin. She wears a clinging black gown that reflects the surroundings like a mirror. Adama glances at Tikki, inclining an eyebrow in question. Tikki scrutinizes the favorite and nods. Adama always asks her opinion, one hunter to another.
Privately, intimately, Adama asks the chosen one, “Will you be my Leandra?”
The woman smiles and nods eagerly, moaning, slipping her arms around Adama’s shoulders and nuzzling his neck.
Adama smiles as if satisfied. “My beautiful Leandra,” he says. “Will you come home with me?”
The chosen one nods and croons.
“Yessss… Oh, yeessss…”
Adama gives her his arm. Tikki leads them out of the club to the limo waiting at curbside. Tikki surveys the terrain in crossing to the car, letting Adama and the chosen one precede her into the limo’s rear compartment.
The environment seals shut with, a soft gush of air.
The limo glides smoothly through the city streets. The redhead, the chosen one, leans against Adama’s side, cooing and stroking the man as he keys the telecom.
Music begins, something loud and fierce and raw.
Tikki lights another of her slim Sumatran cigarros and allows herself a faint smile. The game will soon get interesting.
Humans delude themselves with the belief that they are thinking animals and therefore not animals at all. The truth, as Tikki sees it, contrasts starkly with that view. All animals think, to one degree or another. The human animal is a very sophisticated animal, with complicated thoughts and an almost endless variety of habits, but it is still an animal and thus subject to Natural Law and the challenge of survival.
The limo pulls up in front of Adama’s five-story town house. The redhead has yet to realize what’s happening.
The clues are too obscure.
The entrance hall of Adama’s town house is spacious and broad, floored in marble and adorned with paintings and other objets d’art. Adama shows the redhead, the chosen one, through the door on the left, into the drawing room. Tikki locks the door to the street. It’s a heavy door, heavy enough to be soundproof. Just like the rest of the house.
The door to the drawing room stands slightly ajar. From there Adama’s voice carries out clearly. He offers drinks. He pours liquids that gurgle softly as cubes of ice ring against the glasses. He says, in a poetical tone, “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright… in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
“Excuse me?” the chosen one asks.
Adama chuckles, laughs, louder and louder till he bellows with hilarity. The chosen one still does not understand.
That is easily remedied.
Tikki sheds her clothes and wills the change. Her body stretches out long. Her musculature swells immense. Fur the color of blood—striped with black—rushes up her arms and body and over her face. Hands spread wide and swell into enormous paws. She drops to all fours. Claws emerge, ears arise twitching and flicking, her long tail slides out from the end of her spine. Her breathing deepens and resonates with the menacing timbre of a long, low animal growl.
“What was that?” says Adama’s chosen, voice wavering with anxiety and doubt.
“A friend,” Adama says casually. “A good friend.”
“It sounded like… like a lion!”
Tikki steps up to the doorway leading to the drawing room and jabs one paw at the door as if to slash at prey. The door whips inward, slamming into the wall. The bang thunders through the house.
Standing near the center of the drawing room, Adama’s
chosen one looks over, then shrieks and fills the air with the stink of her terror, and that is good. Prey should always know it is prey, and should react like prey when faced with the hunter. Now in her natural form, her true form, Tikki is large even for that breed she so perfectly resembles, Panthera tigris altaica, the largest tigers on earth.
Tikki growls, then roars.
The chosen one screams.
Adama grins.
7
The night is cool and fine.
It’s so quiet that just the softest scuffing of a shoe against the gravel along the side of the road stands out starkly, sounding loud. Overhead a few stars show through the hazy clouds. A faint breeze drifts through the surrounding woods.
Sighing, she wonders how much further she’s gonna get tonight. It doesn’t look too good.
Her name is Neona Jaxx and she sits on a concrete block she found lying on the shoulder of the road. From time to time, she scuffs one of her florescent pink Reebok Sprinters against the ground in hopes of preventing any creepy-crawlers from climbing up her legs. The mere idea gives her shivers, and briefly distracts her from the flat rectangular presence in the bag she holds cradled in her lap, though never for very long.
The anonymous black nylon bag holds a gray macroplast case inscribed with the Fuchi logo. Inside the protective case is a Fuchi-6 cyberdeck in mint condition. It isn’t top of the line anymore, hasn’t been for a while, but it’s the slickest tech she’s ever had in her own two hands. Almost half a million nuyen off the shelf. A deck with real power, a load rate that’s pure quicksilver, and the capability to do things she’s only dreamed of. She can’t help but hold it tightly, squeezing the rounded edge of the safety case against her stomach till it hurts.
What she paid for the deck can’t be measured in nuyen. That’s really what makes it hurt.
She wipes more tears from her eyes.
None of her chums back in Miami liked either the Johnson or the job. It was she who talked them into it. The Johnson’s offer of the Fuchi-6 as part payment must have blinded her to everything else. Until then she’d been creeping along with a Sony CTY-360 rebuilt so many times the internals looked like spaghetti, a silicon mishmash that almost no one could figure out, much less repair. With a Fuchi-6, she figured she’d slice through the Matrix like lightning—and she did, only that didn’t help her buds.
The Johnson turned out to be dirty, a real slot. The job was a setup, and her buds all got smoked. Neona would have gotten scragged too, except that she picked up and ran and never stopped.
That was six weeks ago. Since then, nothing. No more problems. Just bad memories, sleepless nights.
Rides to nowhere.
Thirty klicks short of Philadelphia, a rigger dumped her out of his cab like so much spare change. She’s lonely and alone feeling the price for her newfound fortune, her Fuchi-6.
It’s pretty bad, but she knows it could be worse.
Now, from a ways off, comes a distant rumbling, guttural and deep, kind of like thunder at first, but rising slowly and steadily in volume till she realizes it’s a cycle. Not a battery-powered whiner, either, but an old-style petrochem chopper.
Disappearing into the darkness, the road is flat and narrow and flanked by trees. She looks down the two-lane to her left, the direction from which she came. That way leads back toward Miami and the chummers she left for dead, a thought that squeezes a few more tears from her eyes. She wipes them with the back of her hand and looks again. The noisy chopper sounds like it’s right on top of her and she still can’t see a thing.
Then, all at once, there it is—five, six meters away, roaring past her like a jet, blurring before her eyes, a phantom machine glinting in the starlight.
Caught by surprise, she sways back, catching her breath, clutching at the macroplast case in her lap.
Whoever is riding the thing is driving with no headlight, no lights at all.
The thudding roar of the engine Dopplers down, then drops like a brick from a roof, going almost silent. She hears the whispery breeze rustling the woods and the metallic rasping, almost a ringing, of the chopper’s chain-link drivetrain. She squints up the road in the direction of Philly, catches a glint of starlight on chrome, but that’s it. The chopper rumbles again, thudding briefly. What’s happening? She’s certain the hog slowed down, but is the rider going on ahead or coming back?
Abruptly, the phantom’s back, gliding across the two-lane on a diagonal, coming straight toward her. That’s when the headlight flares like a supernova glaring right into her eyes.
For a few seconds, ten, maybe more, her dark-adjusted eyes are too busy screaming in protest for her to do more than squeeze one forearm across the bridge of her nose trying to block out the light. The chopper stops directly in front of her, rumbling smoothly. Neona guesses she shouldn’t be surprised to have gotten hit by the beam. A girl with spiky mohawk hair, wearing a black vinyl jacket, sitting here all alone in the middle of nowhere at sometime around midnight—she’d be suspicious, too. Hell, she wouldn’t even have slowed down had she been riding the bike.
The glaring headlight turns aside. The rumbling chopper seems to come a little closer. She lowers her arm enough to wipe at her eyes, and gets her first decent look at the slag on the bike. From the looks of the black hair falling to his shoulders, his strong features, the bandanna around his neck, the broad shoulders and heavy build, she guesses that he must be an Amerind. Black synthleather jacket ornamented with fringe and studs. Dark pants, heavy boots. He rolls the bike to a halt a short distance away. She can feel the heat from the engine, can almost feel him watching her through the mirrored lenses of his shades.
The shades must be low-light specs, that or two-ways, reflective on the outside, clear from within. They add to the image of power. Like this is no one to frag with, chummer.
Slowly, carefully, she stands up, struggling to find a smile. “So, hoi,” she says.
In reply, he motions at her with his chin, like he wants to know what she’s doing, what’s going down.
“Waitin’ for a ride.”
“I got a ride,” he says.
His voice is like a low growl, so intensely masculine it’s almost animal. It sends a quick shiver up her spine. She tries not to show it, whatever it is that’s suddenly got her heart thumping so hard. “Yeah?”
“Come closer.”
Another shiver slips up her back. She can’t tell if it’s excitement or fear. Something’s happening here, but what? The urge to turn and run right into the tree line, run for her life, careens wildly through her thoughts even as Neona steps closer, one step, then another. She definitely gets the feeling that he’s looking her over from behind those mirrored lenses. Incredibly, she finds herself desperately hoping he likes what he sees. He could be just what she needs right now, more than just a ride. If nothing else, he looks like he could make the world a lot safer for a girl who’s long on programming and short on hand-to-hand. The view from her angle is impressive. She likes her men hard, even a little rough. This one looks rougher than most.
From little more than a step away, she can see he’s dark for an Amerind, if that’s what he is. The darker the better. Really light-skinned people make her feel glitched, like a cake too long in the oven, burnt almost black.
“What’s in the bag?”
A flush of anxious heat rushes up the back of her neck. She forces a smile. “Nothin’. Just a deck.”
“A good one.”
How did he guess that? She deliberately mixed truth and falsehood to try and protect the deeper truth, the fantasy deck in her hands. She feels a gnawing of real fear, but shrugs, struggling to keep up the act. “It’s decent.”
“You’re a decker.”
“Yeah.”
“A good one.”
Where is he getting this from? A rush of giddy fear blossoms into an uncontrollable grin. Is he reading her aura? She’ll fall over dead if he turns out be a mage. “I’m decent, too.”
“You want a ride
?”
Is he kidding? “Sure.”
“What’s your name?”
“People call me Angel.”
“Get your pack, Angel.”
“Okay.” She’s practically breathless, and grinning, as she turns back toward the shoulder of the road. This slag has got her reeling! She’s never met anyone who affected her this way before. He’s just scary enough to be real, but not quite so scary as to send her running. She stumbles and almost flops on her face just reaching down to pick up her small backpack. Good thing she’s been traveling light. She’s feeling way too muzzy to even want to deal with much luggage. She slings the pack from one shoulder, the Fuchi-6 from the other, and turns back to the chopper man.
She can’t stop smiling.
“What do I call you?” she asks.
“Ripsaw.”
More chills up her spine. The name suits him. Any handle he used would have to be hard and sharp like razor claws. Anything less menacing would seem absurd.
“Get on.”
“Okay.” That growly voice is turning her to butter. She lifts one leg up and over and slides onto the back of the hi-rider seat, which is just high enough for her to see over Ripsaw’s shoulders. The bike never moves, never sways, like it’s planted in stone, till she’s settled in her seat. Then, the engine rumbles, briefly revving, and the chopper rolls around in a smooth half circle, then starts accelerating up the road, running straight as an arrow.
It’s still hours before dawn when they pull into the hard-packed lot of a truck stop just off the main highway. In the light of a passing rig, Neona gets her first clear look at the back of Ripsaw’s jacket. The synthleather bears the cat’s head logo of the Sioux Wildcats. She’s heard that name before. On the news somewhere. Something about some banger Native American Nations military unit.
[Shadowrun 11] - Striper Assassin Page 3