Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  The go-ganger lost control and went down in a flesh-eating skid that ended suddenly against a retaining wall. The Viking’s gas tank blew like an incendiary, igniting the big troll.

  Recovering and accelerating again, Luppas cut hard left, ramming into a go-ganger he’d outrun. Hammered by the Saab, the big troll came bounding off his machine and splatted against the car’s windshield with enough residual force to rip the bulletproof glass from its moorings. Crimson threads gushed from the go-ganger’s mouth and nose, streaking the fractured glass. Then he was gone, rolling across the buckled rooftop.

  With a pronounced shriek, the Saab blasted into the knot of Spike Wheels, mowing them down like tenpins. Only one of them managed to escape the onslaught.

  Luppas had already noticed the troll making his getaway. The Saab drifted to a bumpy stop over metas and machines, coming around in a looping one-eighty. He had to batter the door open, aware that some of the go-gangers were getting to their feet around him.

  Concentrating on the patch of pavement just ahead of the go-ganger, imagining it rising out of the ground in a sudden wall, Luppas threw his spell.

  Slight waves of shimmering force spat from his hand.

  In the next instant, the pavement suddenly became malleable, standing up a meter high and two meters wide directly in front of the go-ganger. The troll tried to brake and go around the barrier, but there was no time. The motorcycle crashed against it and sent its rider flying head-first against the grill of a GMC 4201 truck. The orange and black diagonal warning lines slashed across its massive front bumper suddenly went blood-red. The troll never moved after he dropped.

  Luppas released his hold on the pavement and turned his attention back to the other go-gangers. One of them was lifting a Colt Cobra SMG into the crook of his elbow.

  Luppas raised the HammerII pistol and fired the final two rounds from the magazine. The bullets caught the troll in the face, but they didn’t exit through the back of the ganger’s massive head. His bulletproof helmet kept the rounds bouncing around inside and through the skull for a few more passes.

  Ducking behind the dented hulk of the Saab, Luppas thumbed the magazine release, dumped the empty, then reloaded with one of the clips containing explosive rounds from under the seat. He shoved two more into the pockets of the greatcoat.

  The thrum of powerful rotors sounded overhead. Looking up, Luppas saw the outline of the matte-black Hughes Airstar 2050 closing in from above. No numbers littered her sides; she was neuter as she could be. The cargo door was open and a figure in a black urban Patterson Camo-Spec battle dress uniform clung to the side.

  “Hey, omae!” Gunther Octavius called over the tacticom. “We made the party.”

  “I want two of them alive,” Luppas said to his second. “Affirmative.”

  Bullets from the go-gangers skated along the hardened exterior of the Airstar, then it was zooming in for the kill. Luppas rose over the line of the Saab with the HammerII in both hands, ready to defend his team.

  6

  Archangel sat in the contoured chair bolted to the floor of the Leyland-Rover Transport van’s cargo area two blocks from the Mariah Building, in the same spot where she’d been with the computer equipment most of the night A datajack connected her to the sleek deck on the small built-in work table where she was handling the fiber link that had spoofed the Mariah Building’s security network. She was busily recording bits and pieces of ongoing security vid and aud to play back into the systems later when necessary to mask the team’s insertion.

  Knowing what it took to stay pro, Skater made sure his shadowrun team maintained access to any hardware they needed. It took serious nuyen to make serious nuyen. It was part of Skater’s rep that he was a man who could get into places he’d never seen before, do things many thought were impossible. And Skater had made his rep even before some of the others had jumped on board the team.

  Some of it came from ability and nerve. Some of it came from having the right tools, and Skater made sure the team invested as a team, picking up equipment where and when they needed it. Everything else depended on sheer luck.

  They’d hijacked the Leyland-Rover Transport van yesterday afternoon from a mall area in Renton, purposely choosing one set up as a workstation for a plumbing outfit. Wheeler had accomplished the necessary renovations in a matter of hours—installing back-up power generators for the deck, ripping out the extra shelving they hadn’t needed, bolting racks onto the walls for the gear they did need, and adding a paint job that had rendered it the faded gray and white it now was—with help from Skater and Elvis.

  The vehicle’s ident number was faked; they’d made sure it didn’t have a match anywhere in the Seattle area. Skater saw no reason to chance laying down a trail even to a vehicle they would eventually wipe clean and abandon, after again stripping it of any ID.

  He was the first to make it back to the van. “Has Lone Star got a lock on the DocWagon truck?” he asked as he shrugged into the borrowed med jacket. Elvis had also snatched the DocWagon ballcap with the company logo that had been hanging from the truck’s rearview mirror.

  “No,” Archangel said, her eyes constantly scanning the nine monitors set up in front of her in a three-by-three configuration.

  The scenes on the monitors were in color, black and white, infra-red, and thermographic. They changed as regularly as a metronome, a little signature burning onto the screen’s lower-right corner with each pulse to ID which floor, room, and/or camera view was being used, as well as the time/date stamp. It was now 1:58:23 a.m. The fiber link let her cover the whole building. A pad hanging from a magnetic hook at the side of the monitors was covered in Archangel’s fine script. Skater knew they were listings of the various camera views.

  He leaned against the van for a few ticks and stared at her. Archangel was beautiful, complexioned a milky white. Her heart-shaped face perfectly set off her bronze elven eyes swirling with gold flecks. A shimmering cascade of platinum blond hair spilled across her shoulders and down her back, tucked up over one pointed ear. The datajack at her right temple caught the moving light show and shadowplay coming from the monitors and gleamed. Her baggy pants and shirt tried in vain to cover the lean, muscled curves beneath. Who she was and where she came from, though, were another matter. The only things Skater knew about the woman were that her name definitely wasn’t Archangel and that she was a drek-hot decker. Everybody, he’d figured when adding her to the team, was entitled to their secrets; he had his.

  Skater snapped back into action. “No one’s coming toward Shastakovich’s Funeral Home?” He slipped on a pair of gloves with the palms cut out to allow better cooling. So far, no one had figured out a way to trace palm prints. Tissue was another problem altogether, but he’d decided to risk leaving it exposed over losing part of his grip. Hands were important in his line of work.

  Macroplast inserts across the knuckles and the backs of his gloves provided armor as well as a weapon. He took up the filled-to-capacity backpack that stood in readiness beside the cargo door of the van.

  Wheeler grabbed the other pack, then pulled on the light green DocWagon jacket Skater offered. The dwarf rigger stood only a little over a meter tall and his heavily muscled shoulders were nearly that broad across. His feet looked impossibly large, but were tucked into hobnailed boots that he would have put up anyone’s hoop for being unkind enough to mention that fact. He wore his chestnut-colored hair long, tightly coiled into a single plait down his back. Beneath his immense nose, his full, arrogant beard was slightly darker. The datajack on his temple shone like a freshly minted coin. He was the team’s transport specialist, and he’d had plenty of experience. When he wasn’t on a run, Wheeler often put in time working for DocWagon as a rigger specializing in high-threat response assignments.

  “Not yet,” Archangel said with the icy cool that was her trademark in the biz. “For a modest fee, which I expect to be recompensed when we’re paid, I arranged for a diversion in Doc-Wagon’s system. I gave a group of
thrill deckers who were playing in the Matrix tonight a few of DocWagon’s less security-intense passcodes to forage among the files. It would be chump change for us, but a few of them can turn some decent nuyen for a couple hours work. The DocWagon deckers will have too much cyber-traffic jamming their own retrieval systems to locate that particular truck for a while.” She raised an arched brow. “As long as the SRT members are in no position to call it in.”

  Elvis rounded the back of the van and deposited the DocWagon dog-brain unit on the van floor. “They won’t be calling till somebody unties them.”

  “So we got a window,” Quint Duran growled, stepping out of the shadows as silently as a leshy cutting through a forest. The ork had been down some hard roads as a mercenary and it showed. His dark, bushy hair was frosted with silver. Gold hoop earrings curled tight against his elongated ears. His face was seamed and scarred, and something malevolent burned almost constantly in his dark, hooded eyes. His synthleathered armor made him look like a dreadnought from the spirit world come to wreak havoc. The Franchi SPAS-22 combat shotgun he carried did nothing to soften that impression.

  Cullen Trey approached from the front of the Leyland-Rover, a smile splitting his handsome face. Dressed in black clothes and armor that were as functional as they were flattering to his slender build, the combat mage also sported a black Kevlar cape that reached to his ankles and had a short collar attached. A dark amethyst jewel cut in a long cross nearly eight centimeters tall and little more than half that across held the cape together. He also carried a polished wooden walking stick with a silver gloaming owl’s head capping it.

  “Evening all,” Trey said cheerfully. “Nice night for shadows.” Before joining the team, he had been a free-lance mage, working through fixers and handling a variety of runs. He was one of the best mages Skater had ever seen.

  “Jack,” Archangel called.

  Skater looked over, then followed her pointing finger to the mini-trideo set behind the driver’s seat where a tridcast was in progress. On the small screen, a helicopter was debarking a crew that looked as if it had been in a firefight. Skater guessed the troll gangers were probably involved. “Spike Wheels?”

  Archangel nodded. “They returned to the site of the crash-and-dash.”

  “Who’re are the guys in the whirlybird?” Wheeler asked. “The media report hasn’t said. They came out of nowhere and hit the Spike Wheels without warning.”

  “They weren’t running with our target,” Skater said.

  Duran nodded in agreement. “If they had been, they’d have made the extraction, not Doc Wagon.”

  “Which means, by default,” Cullen Trey said, his voice not quite so cheery as he scanned the trid, “that they must be after the same popular little corpse that we are.”

  “Looks like there’s plenty of others there to choose from,” Elvis rumbled. The trid screen showed the dead littered around the burning car, and more going down under the guns of the arriving hard crew. “And those guys are adding to the choices.”

  “They’re good,” Duran admitted. “Maybe they’re part of Lone Star’s elite?”

  “No.” Archangel made a note on the pad beside the bank of monitors, as able to multi-task as her deck. “According to the Lone Star bandwidths I’ve got access to, Lone Star has team enroute, but not physically at the scene.”

  “Their magicians could be assensing the field ahead of the physical troops,” Trey pointed out. “Perhaps I could go take a peek myself.”

  “No,” Skater said. “We’ve got the target’s twenty confirmed, and we’ve got a plan of action. If you go tripping over there and get assensed yourself, you could lead people back to us. Either Lone Star or this group. We go with what we know here.”

  “Kid’s right,” Duran growled. “We may have a firedrake by the tail, but we get to choose the moves. All we have to do is grab the chunk of road pizza everybody’s so interested in and buzz turbo. Not simple, but we set out tonight thinking we could do it. Me, I still think we can.”

  Skater prompted each of the others in quick succession. Not suprisingly, Trey and Elvis stuck with their votes in favor of making the run.

  “I’m in,” Wheeler said. “We’re gonna have the spurs put to us if this thing goes drek-o, but, chummers, I’m having too much fun to stop now.” He pointed a blunt forefinger at the trideo. “That much interest is only interest on the nuyen we’ll be fleecing our Mr. Johnson out of.”

  “Archangel?” Skater asked.

  She looked at him, but he couldn’t read her features. “Let’s do it,” she said after a beat.

  Emma came to Skater’s mind for a moment. And in that moment she was every reason not to continue the run, yet she was every reason to attempt it. He hadn’t told any of the others about the demands from some woman named Deja concerning Emma that he’d received through one of the message drops Kestrel managed for him. That the woman was able to find him at all without being in the biz was scary enough, and that he knew nothing about her at all was even more scary. Her demands for nuyen were even more unsettling. Kestrel was a fixer, one of the best in the biz, and a chummer who owed Skater big over the years. But even Kestrel was turning up empty on the name.

  “I don’t want anyone geeked inside the building,” Skater said pointedly to Duran. The ork was the most willfully violent of the team.

  “Then make sure you don’t let you or the short man”—the ork nodded at the dwarf—“get close to getting scragged. You’re on my shift and I take my responsibility seriously.”

  “You’ve got the hallways,” Skater said. “I’m going to depend on you not to deflect whatever pursuit we have. Let the action run its course. Otherwise they’re going to spread out and it will get harder to depend on their being predictable.”

  Duran gave a short nod.

  “Trey,” Skater said. “You’ve got the street. Do not engage anyone unless the van is made. Same reasons. We’ve prepared for pursuit, and if we’ve prepared enough, they’ll be blocked where we want them to be blocked. You’re there only as a safety valve.”

  “As you say,” Trey said with a nod.

  “Elvis, you stay with the van. Protect Archangel, and get the hell out of here when Wheeler and I reach the top of the Mariah Building.”

  “Done and done, chummer.” The troll dropped a massive fist onto Skater’s in a good-luck gesture.

  “Wheeler.” Skater shouldered the pack.

  “I’m standing in your shadow, omae,” said the dwarf rigger. “You won’t make a move without me.”

  Skater took a last look up at the Mariah Building, took a last deep breath, took just an instant to send a hopeful prayer to all the spirits his grandfather had believed in. Then he was in motion.

  The run was in full blitz, the sturm and drang cycling every move they made, waiting for one false step.

  7

  Luppas moved forward hurriedly, concentrating on the burning hulk of the Honda-GM 3220 at the epicenter of the crash-and-dash on I-5. The flames spiraled high over the vehicle now, feeding off the fuel leaking from the broken lines. That could be part of his recovery fee burning up.

  He knew he was going to pay the price for using too much magic too quickly before the night was out. He focused on the burning husk of the Honda-GM, testing the power in his mind. When it felt right, equal to the task, he threw a hand out. Waves of shimmering force tore across the battlefield.

  The spell slammed into the burning car. Immediately, the flames acted like they’d been hit by a physical force, spreading out in one flash-blinding arc of resistance. Then they were gone.

  Luppas leaned heavily against the Saab, his knees weak and shaking. Perspiration dripped down his face, soaking into the expensive suit. He took a fresh grip on the HammerII, but just couldn’t find the strength in himself to feel really comfortable with it. He peered around, tracking shadows. The Whitelaws glasses had already adjusted to the decrease in light.

  The matte-black helo continued to hover above them. A Vigil
ant rotary autocannon mounted on a hardpoint remote turret slung under the Airstar’s belly moved in tandem to the pilot’s head movements through the sensor links. The visible laser sighting, clearly chosen as a deterrent to any attempted involvement by the civilians at the fringes of the battle zone, stabbed a long ruby finger through the night. The laser slid over vehicles and bodies, never touching one of its own ground team members.

  “Speedball Team, this is One,” Luppas said. “We’re on a time frame here. Ops are git and go. I want every Spike Wheel, alive or dead, in custody ASAP.”

  The affirmative replies came in rapidly.

  Luppas took a moment to center himself, repeating a few well-chosen mantras in ancient Farsi. By the time he was drawing his third breath, the mantra was pumping him up and cleaning his head.

  “Control,” he called over the tacticom, “this is Speedball One.”

  “Speedball One, Control copies,” Fishbein answered.

  Luppas walked into the zone, knowing the helo pilot would wire his position into the team’s Global Positioning array, pinging off the Sony Nav-Dat he carried so his own team would know he was there. With the satlink interface through a low-orbiting satellite provided by Control, his team would know where he was at all times. “Do you have a fix on the primary target?”

  “Negative, One.” Ramona Fishbein sounded properly bent about the situation. “DocWagon’s computers are experiencing a mild frag-up, from what I’ve been told.”

  “How long before it’s sorted out?”

  There was a hesitation. “That’s unknown.”

  Luppas grinned to himself. Fishbein hated admitting her little pet puters couldn’t do everything at any given instant. “Maybe I can find something out from this end.”

  “Whatever you think you can find out,” Fishbein said, “I’ll be standing by and ready to check it out.”

  Luppas reached the smoldering Honda-GM. He took a pair of gloves from his pocket to protect his hands while he sifted through the debris.