by Jak Koke
"I’ve got the Lone Star grid crunching on a loop," Mole said. "They won’t get any calls from this area for a good ten or fifteen minutes."
"Chill," Hendrix said. "Layla?"
"I’m on it." She lifted a rocket launcher from the space on the floor between the seats. A swivel mount on the barrel clamped to the door. "Get us a little closer."
"Remember that Winger lives," Hendrix said. "You can injure him, but don’t kill him."
"The troll?"
"Expendable."
"I like when you say that," Layla said, then straightened her hat and sighted the missile.
Winger pulled onto Venice Boulevard, a road that was supposed to be four lanes wide each direction, but had been under heavy construction for years. Under demolition is more like it, Hendrix thought. "Fire when ready," he said.
The missile flew with a burst of flame and a loud hiss. And when it hit Winger’s stepvan, just over the rear axle, the explosion threw the stepvan forward and sideways. The rear of the vehicle ripped open as it plunged onto its side and skidded through the construction markers before hitting a concrete barricade.
Hendrix pulled his Ares Alpha and stopped the van while Layla jumped out, carrying her Ingram. We won’t be smoked by any surprise magic this time, Hendrix thought. Then he too stepped out onto the street amid the sunlight and the noise of passing traffic.
Using his door as a shield, Hendrix brought the Alpha up and sighted on the only two openings in the overturned step-van, the passenger door and the double side doors, both of which were now on top of the vehicle. The flaming rip in the rear wasn’t large enough for anyone io squeeze out.
"Layla," Hendrix said. "Use a tear gas grenade to flush them out."
Layla nodded and pulled a grenade from her belt with a smooth motion. She heaved it the five or six meters into the stepvan.
White smoke billowed from the stepvan’s openings, blowing away in the wind as it drifted up and out. A minute later, a huge shape jumped from the side doors, diving headfirst in an arc. Hitting the pavement fast and rolling to a crouch. Firing shots from the shotgun as he rolled.
The door in front of Hendrix rocked into him as the shotgun slugs hit. He aimed at the fast-moving target of Venice Jones, chewing up pavement with the combat gun’s ammo. Damn, he's fast. But several rounds hit home on the troll. And Layla’s did as well.
Then Venice Jones came for Layla, dodging and running, very hard to hit. Hendrix pegged him two or three more times, but the huge figure, spattered and dripping with blood, would not go down. The troll dodged a last time and lunged, lightning-quick, for Layla.
Hendrix heard her yell, "Slotting tusker-frag!" Then the stepvan’s door slammed shut and shots went off. Hendrix moved fast, glancing back toward the overturned vehicle to make sure Jonathon Winger wasn’t about to pop out and open fire. The tear gas should’ve flushed him out by now, so he'd probably been knocked unconscious by the crash.
Hopefully, he's not dead.
Hendrix clicked into wired mode, rapidly stepping around the front of their stepvan. Ares Alpha combat gun in front of him. He cleared the hot grill and peeked around to see Layla and Venice Jones dancing the dangerous dance. Circling each other at close quarters.
Layla, the stupid slitch, had set her Ingram on the ground. Or perhaps Venice Jones had knocked it from her hands. The troll’s shotgun also lay on the pavement a few steps from them. The troll hulked over her, his clothes shredded from gunfire to reveal form-fitting body armor underneath. Even so, several wounds bled, soaking his tattered clothing with crimson.
Hendrix moved quickly to a position that gave him a view of both the wreckage and the fight. Then, since there was still no sign of Jonathon Winger, he brought his Ares Alpha to bear on Venice Jones.
"No, Hendrix, don’t shoot," Layla yelled. "Let me finish him."
Venice Jones moved then, almost too fast to see, his massive hand striking out for Layla’s throat.
Layla blocked it and stepped lightly to the side. "Gonna have to do better, tusker-frag," she said.
But the strike was only a decoy for the troll to sweep Layla’s legs. He must’ve noticed that one of them was recently injured. Layla fell back, and Venice Jones continued his motion. Pivoting insanely fast to strike down, a fist to the throat.
Frag this! Hendrix thought. He aimed his Ares Alpha at Venice Jones’s knees, and squeezed the trigger, blowing out one, then the other with two quick bursts.
The troll screamed in pain, arching his back as his punch went wide. Venice Jones crumbled to the pavement. Incapacitated.
Hendrix smiled. It was an effective injury. Layla’s pride would be wounded because the troll had bested her. She would want the kill for herself as a small redemption.
Layla pushed to her feet and kicked the troll in the face. "Frag you!"
Venice Jones said nothing. He merely lay still, his chest heaving as he tried to concentrate on staying alive.
Layla was slotted off. Nobody fragged with her pride. She gathered up her Ingram and targeted the troll’s head. "You better confess your sins, tusker-frag," she said, "if you think you got a snowball’s chance of not going to Hell."
No response from Venice Jones.
Hendrix turned and approached the overturned stepvan. In seconds, the troll would be dead, and Jonathon Winger’s head would be theirs.
46
Maria came back into her body as quickly as she could, opening her eyes to see the broad, deep-chocolate face of Maurice looking down on her. The tiny rows of his hair glistened with sweat, and his expression showed concern. "You okay, shaman?" he asked.
Good question, she thought. Her astral struggle with the mage had nearly killed her. Maybe if it had been nighttime, Maria would have had a chance to beat that slitch. Maybe.
The mage had blindsided her with the rapid succession of hellblasts targeted on the stepvan. And then, when Maria put up an astral shield and confronted her with Stoney, the slitch called up a strange spell, the type of which Maria had never seen. A mana fog had surrounded Maria, filling the astral around her with a brilliant white glow. A radiance that blinded Maria’s astral vision, her astral sense of direction. She tried to run, but the glowing fog stuck to her. She’d been completely blind and couldn’t come back to her body.
It had taken her several minutes to shake off the spell and find her way back. And by then, Jonathon Winger was driving away, and it was all Maria could do to prevent Dougan and Maurice from burning to death in the alleyway. The mage slitch had run for her little Saab car when she saw Maria stand up, no doubt to finish her task of killing Jonathon Winger.
Maria told Stoney to pulverize the little Saab, and she watched with detached pleasure as the spirit materialized next to the car and crushed the tiny glass and metal machine to a crumpled mass. The mage stopped in shock a few meters from the vehicle, shaking her head at the sight of her destroyed car. Then she turned and stared back at Maria with a look of sheer despair in her eyes before running out of the alley and around the corner into the street.
Maria sat up now and looked herself over. Whole, complete except for some surface burns on the skin of her left hand. And she was tired, exhausted beyond her breaking point. "I’ll live, I think," she said.
"That’s good," said Dougan, walking up the alleyway toward them. He smelled of burning hair and soot. His black duster was scorched in several places and his face was smudged. "We’ll need you for this last little bit of biz."
"No more biz for me today," Maria said. "I’m scragged."
"Just this last bit," Dougan said. "I’ve got some new data. I think you’ll want to hear it."
"What now?"
"As you know, I hired this decker to do a scan on Tashika, trying to see if we could get some goods on him."
"You never said anything about that."
"Well, I did," Dougan said. "And she just found something. It’s nothing we can use for blackmail, but it’s worth mentioning."
"Spill it, daisy-eater,"
said Maurice.
"Yeah, spill it," Maria said.
"I think Tashika was responsible for the military attack on the Compton school," Dougan said. "He ordered the strike that killed Jesse."
"What?" Maria said, feeling the ground tilt beneath her. "Jesse? How is that possible? Tashika is a corporate suit; he had nothing to do with the Lost Election."
"Tashika is yakuza," Dougan said. "Has been all his life and will be until he dies. The yaks had informants in Compton, and that’s how Tashika learned that some runners who’d helped with the election hit were holed up in El Infierno. He simply passed along the data to Lone Star and the Calfree National Guard as a gracious gesture." Dougan let out a sharp laugh. "A debt to be repaid at some future date no doubt."
Jesse’s dark, haunted face hovered in Maria’s mind. She had distant memories of the two of them, very young, swimming naked in a warm, crystal blue ocean. Before she’d been taken by the priests. Before he’d run away.
A wave of heat crested in Maria’s head and she found herself on the dirty pavement. All that was so long ago that she wanted to put it to rest. And she thought she had. For so long, she’d set up a safe life for herself and Pedro and Angelina. Away from ghosts and distant memories.
She felt a hand on her arm, helping her to stand. "Are you all right, Maria?" It was Dougan’s voice.
"No," she said. "I am not all fragging right!"
Dougan stepped back. "I think I have a solution," he said. Maria narrowed her eyes on him. "You always have a slotting solution, Dougan," she said. "And it always gets us hoop-fragged."
Dougan held his hands up as if to ward off the sting of her words, to stop the onslaught of her vehemence. "I’m sorry, Maria," he said. "This is my last idea. But I think you’ll like it."
She just stared at the elf for a minute. He looked back at her, but his gaze was soft. Entreating her to trust him. "Okay," she said finally. She had no more trust for him than she’d ever had; he was one of the smoothest liars she’d ever known. But at one time he’d cared for her, and she for him. Besides, she didn’t have any brilliant ideas of her own. "Go ahead; spill this plan of yours."
"It’s simple really," Dougan said. "We keep the appointment for the exchange as planned."
"But we don’t have the data."
Dougan held up a chip. "We do," he said. "I downloaded the data from Winger’s headware before he escaped."
"Seriously?" Maria didn’t remember Dougan getting anything from Winger.
"No, because there wasn’t time to wait until the drug wore off; hyper frags with data transfer. But Tashika won’t know that. We could tell him anything."
"What for?" Maurice said. "He’ll know the chip is belly-up as soon as he slots it."
"We don’t let him get that far," Dougan said. "We geek him first."
"What?" Maurice said.
But Maria had been following Dougan’s line of thought all the way. She’d known what he was going to say. Putting the suit on ice would solve their problems. Plus it would be perfect closure for Jesse’s death. Revenge after all these years.
"Let’s do it," she said. "Let’s fragging do it so I can go home."
47
In the meat world, Jonathon huddled in a fetal crouch against the shattered side window of Dougan’s stepvan. He squeezed his eyes against the rain of tears gushing from his eyes and held his breath to keep out the gas. He felt the zen of biker training slow his metabolism. His body might be here awhile.
But his mind wasn’t in the meat world; Jonathon was a stealthy black beetle, zooming at high speed over the city. He was in a rigger’s verisimilar reality, piloting his Cyber-Space Designs Stealth Sniper drone, launched from the Westwind’s trunk before the accident. He rotored at nearly 100 klicks per hour, as fast as the drone’s turbine could fly him. Through the towering skyscratchers, along the freeways and under bridges, dodging and darting to reach the accident.
Now, Jonathon saw the overturned stepvan in his holo-camera vision and readied his sniper rifle. What happened to Venny? he wondered. Then he saw the troll, lying on the pavement, blood oozing onto the concrete from wounds in his knees. A blond human woman stood over him, aiming an automatic weapon at his head.
A black-skinned man with a bald head was walking away from them. Toward the wreckage. Are these the same runners who hit us in the limousine? But the thought was fleeting. It didn’t matter.
Jonathon sighted on the woman with the gun and opened up. The sniper rifle coughed, a barely audible sound amid the rumble and screech of traffic.
Perfect shot. The bullet hit her in the back of the skull, and went clean through. A bloody hole blossomed on her face, spraying bone and teeth and bits of brain as it flowered. She lurched forward from the impact, hurtled to the pavement like a ragdoll.
The black man turned, very fast. Very fragging fast.
Jonathon zipped up and sideways as the street merc sprayed bullets after him. Jonathon aimed the sniping gun again and fired. The bullet should have hit the merc’s head just like the woman’s, but the man wasn’t there anymore. He was diving left, over and behind a concrete construction barricade.
Jonathon whirled the drone around into position and pivoted, bringing the sniping gun to bear once again. Target inline, dead-center on the bald black head. Fire. Such a small recoil, a whispered cough.
The merc didn’t have much room to move, but he tried lurching to the side as the bullet hit his shoulder and tore through the armor plating to the flesh beneath. He was speaking subvocally at a frantic pace; Jonathon saw his mouth move. The merc moved to put more of the barrier between him and the drone, then aimed his combat gun.
Jonathon dodged the barrage of bullets, plummeting for half a second, then zipping laterally to bring the merc into aim again. The bullets missed, but just when the black head came between the cross hairs a blinding white flash overloaded the holocameras.
Flash grenade.
By the time the drone’s holocameras had readjusted, compensating for the glare, the black man was gone. Jonathon scanned around, but couldn’t find him. Then the merc’s stepvan powered up and screeched off into traffic, leaving the sprawled bodies of Venice Jones and the woman runner lying side by side on the pavement.
Jonathon came back to his body, nearly out of breath in the real world. The world of meat and bone. He tried to maintain calm and focus as he took the Ingram SMG and quietly, quickly climbed up out of the stepvan, through the passenger window, and down onto the concrete.
His legs buckled under him as he landed, gasping for breath. He crouched there sucking in deep breath after deep breath, wiping the water from his eyes on his sleeve. After a minute he heard the rhythmic pulse of a helicopter approaching. He looked up and saw a white Hughes WK-2 Stallion with the DocWagon logo emblazoned on the side.
About fragging time.
Venny must’ve pressed the emergency call on his platinum account wrist band when he went down. Jonathon tried to stand, finding that he could walk. He made his way stiffly to Venny.
Jonathon could see the troll’s massive chest heaving as he breathed. Still alive. "Can you hear me, chummer?" he asked.
Venny uttered something incoherent.
"You hang on," Jonathon said. "DocWagon’s almost here."
48
In the grimy public telecom booth of a Hollywood Stuffer Shack, Synthia sat on sticky vinyl and stared at the blank screen. Though exhausted and drained, she fought off sleep, healing from the exertion of fighting the owl shaman.
The ghost image of Hans Brackhaus sparkled in the blank screen, haunting her. Watching her, always watching. Moments ago, Brackhaus had looked at her with his cold alien eyes and his hard-as-chiseled-stone features. He refused to discuss failure or anything else over the telecom. Said he was on his way, anger and cold menace in his voice.
Jonathon, Synthia thought, why didn’t you stop? She felt the churning blade of despair in her gut, twisting and chopping her insides. If only I could have talked to you, p
urged the data from your head. . .
But that was past. She couldn’t afford to dwell on it. She needed to look to the next step. Finding Jonathon again. Getting him to purge the data. He’s bound to show up at the match in a few hours, she thought. I can contact him then.
The huge black Rolls-Royce Phaeton limousine pulled up into the Stuffer Shack’s parking lot, Brackhaus’s car. Synthia took a deep breath and stepped out into the heat and humidity of the late afternoon. She felt an ache in her bones and a sickness in her gut as she walked the few steps to the limousine.
A door opened for her and she climbed into the plush, air-conditioned interior. The too-comfortable seat enveloped her like a velvet glove, tempting her to just close her eyes. Forget and dream.
"I am disappointed in your progress," Brackhaus said. "Pained actually."
Synthia stared into the man’s eyes, like chips of blue ice. "I’ve done all I can," she said. "I’ve destroyed all physical copies of the data. Only one remains, and I plan to erase that as well. I’m sure Jonathon will show up at the stadium for the championship match. I’ll meet him then."
"I can no longer afford to wait, Miss Stone. Because of your failure to contain the information, I have taken matters into my own hands."
"What do you mean?"
Brackhaus thought for a moment. "Well, I suppose I can tell you, considering . . ."
Synthia just waited, trying to ignore the tightening pain in her stomach.
"I can no longer risk leaving Winger alive. I have . . . made arrangements for him to be killed. It’s not the way I would have preferred, but circumstances dictate immediate action."
A chill shook Synthia and she realized that whatever had remained of her composure was rapidly evaporating. "You hired an assassin?"
"Assassin is a nasty word," Brackhaus said. "But yes, more than one actually. They will hit him at the stadium. If Winger does show up for the match, he will die."
"Give me one more try," Synthia said. "I know I can get him to purge the data. I just need to talk to him."