Fade to Black

13

The room was dark, but Rico's custom Jikku eyes turned the darkness into a dusty gray like twilight. He eased himself out from under the covers, then up off the mattress he and Piper used for a bed. The building on Mott Street wasn't a regular doss, the furnishings nothing more than what they absolutely needed. A simple mattress was good enough to sleep on. A ragged old couch was good enough for sitting. Rico walked over to the couch, then sat down and lit a cheroot. The tea still sitting in a cup on the low table before the couch had gone cold.

Piper's little slim-stemmed pipe lay in the ashtray next to the tea. Rico remembered how strange it had seemed the first time he saw her toting the thing. While running hot wire and other dirty games down in the Carib and South America, he'd seen women toting all kinds of smokers-but a pipe? That was different. Piper said she'd picked up the habit from her mother, but she never talked much about her mother. Rico gathered that her mother was Japanese, and attracted to elves. Piper talked even less about her father, but what little she said usually came with a lot of acid. Rico had guessed that her father was an elf and about as treacherous as any corp. The few times she'd mentioned him, she always ended up talking about corps, and how none could be trusted.

The bedsheet rustled. Piper lifted her head, looking around, then rose onto one elbow. "Jefe?" she said softly.

"Go back to sleep, querida."

"What time is it?"

"Almost five."

The time didn't matter. He and Piper weren't on watch for another two hours. They'd gotten clear of the Maas Intertech facility, dumped the helo, and run around a while in Thorvin's van, checking for shadows. No pursuit had appeared. Sometime tonight they'd contact L. Kahn, exchange Ansell Surikov for the rest of their money, and be done with the deal.

"You should rest, jefe."

"I'm resting. Go back to sleep."

Runs like these were rough on Piper, Rico knew. She couldn't concentrate only on the matrix. She had to deal with the meat world, too. Security setups, progress of the penetration, coordinate things. Make sure the right elevator was at the right floor at just the right time. Give Thorvin a go, not early, not late, so the chopper and the ride home would be exposed for the least amount of time possible. It was a lot to deal with. A lot of pressure. Probably the worst of it was that no one, least of all Rico, could really know just what she went through, because when she went into the matrix, she went alone.

It humbled him. It made him feel like his skills and abilities weren't really any big deal. Most men were made to fight, to face pressure, conflict. They were born that way. But for a woman to go. through what Piper did… that was something special.

"We did good," she said softly.

"So far," Rico agreed.

"The kami were with us."

"It ain't over yet."

"What's bothering you, my love?"

"I don't' know." Rico felt restless, uneasy. Instinct said the run had gone too smoothly. No one had gotten as much as a scratch. That rarely happened. The price of a run against a major corp could usually be measured in blood. Had they simply been lucky? Was some surprise still to come? Something that would make up for the easy way things had gone so far…

His brain kept reminding him about the team and the plan. The team was experienced and the plan had been a good one, worked out in detail. There had been plenty of weaknesses in the Maas Intertech facility, and the plan had exploited them. On that basis alone, the run should have gone smoothly.

"I don't think I'm gonna sleep till we get rid of this slag," Rico said.

"You" re too good a leader."

"I'm responsible."

"You're not a god."

"I'm doing all I can do. That's my job."

That was all anyone could expect, no more, no less, and his adamant tone cut Piper short, hie he knew it would. They'd had this talk before. Rico had no illusions about his capabilities. He couldn't know how things would turn out. He couldn't see into the future to discover how they were being used-if they were being used-or how L. Kahn or somebody else might be planning to betray them. Rico's job was to see that they came outta this alive, the whole team, and Piper especially. That made it hard to sleep or rest, to do anything but worry about what was coming next.

"I'm gonna check around a minute."

"You need rest, jefe."

"This won't take long."

A moment to pull on his pants, another to pick up the Predator 2 lying on the table beside the bed. A few more to do what he needed to do. He stepped across the hall to the second bedroom. Surikov was in there, asleep, stretched out on a mattress. He looked okay. Dok said he'd survived the bustout in good shape. A little tired, a little over-excited, but no worse for the wear. Dok and Filly had the room to the right, at the end of the hall. They looked okay, too. No lights anywhere. That was standard. Rico moved up the hall to the main room. Shank stood at one of the windows overlooking Mott Street. He held the butt-end of an M22A2 braced against his hip. Thorvin stood at one of the rear windows with an SMG. Bandit sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

"How's it scanning?" Rico asked.

"Wiz, boss," Shank answered.

Thorvin grunted and nodded.

Rico paused in front of Bandit. The shaman's eyes were open and staring straight ahead. "Something in the air," Bandit said. "Feels bad."

"Like trouble?" Rico asked.

Bandit looked up at him, and said, "Good bet."

The infrared-enhanced cameras in her belly pod clearly picked out the big ork standing just inside the second-floor window overlooking Mott Street and the smaller dwarfish figure by the window in the rear. For almost an hour, the pair had barely moved except to turn their heads, and that made Bobbie Jo wonder. The average gutterpunk didn't have anywhere near that kind of discipline. Most runners she'd spied on here in Newark and other plexes had the discipline of the typical rock'n roller. They were more interested in breaking out the beer and the whiskey at every opportunity. After a run like the one against Maas Intertech, most would've thrown a party, complete with bootleg chip and recreational psychochems.

A quiet voice, the words, "Good bet…" came to her over the radiolink. Probably via the listening post set up in the tenement across from the runners' hideyhole. A laser mike directed at a window. The runners seemed worried about something. Bobbie Jo could understand that. Skip Nolan's voice quietly arose. "Air One, status."

"No movement," Bobbie Jo replied. "No change." And no more banter over the radio. It had died out over the last hour or two. The team inside the Command and Control vehicle was tired. So was Skip. She could hear it in his voice. Bobbie Jo was feeling a little worn herself. The runners had slept most of the day prior to their run against Maas Intertech and were sleeping in turns right now. The units of the Executive Action Brigade had been working fourteen-hour shifts since the beginning, since picking up the runners at that yakuza bar, Chimpira. Now only Colonel Yates seemed to have an excess of energy and that was because tailing the runners had changed from a silicon glide into serious biz. The runners had gear they weren't supposed to have. The chopper they'd used to get out of the Maas Intertech facility hadn't been so wiz, just ordinary radar, but the van, that gray and black phantom, it had presented problems. The dwarf rigger who did the team's driving and probably most of its repairs had the van outfitted with some kind of wild military-grade sensor gear. Getting the equipment to sleaze it had cost the Executive Action Brigade a few more nuyen than Colonel Yates had been prepared to spend.

Bobbie Jo could still hear the man cursing, cursing everybody, especially the runners and the Brigade's current client "If those scummers pull any more crap, we'll ice 'em! We'll ice 'em all!"

Talk like that worried her.

Icing the runners would be murder pure and simple, and, if nothing else, in direct violation of their orders, their contract with the client. That would make everything they'd done so far a waste of time and effort. They'd forfeit their contract and any money they had coining, and the Brigade's rep would slip a few more notches. Bobbie Jo didn't think the Brigade could afford it.

Abruptly, her ground-based combat comp went into active mode. Targeting indicators began winking in front of her eyes. She felt a shock of surprise strike straight into her gut as apparently random movements below her suddenly resolved into the semblance of a pattern.

She saw matched sets of vehicles, dark blue sedans with vans, moving rapidly along the streets that bracketed Mott Street If she read their movements correctly, all those vehicles would arrive at opposite ends of Mott Street at almost the same instant. She broadcast her alert signal. Even as her squeal hit the air, two dark-clad figures appeared on the roofs of buildings facing the runners' Mott Street hideyhole. Those figures moved toward the front of the roofs as if to take up sniping positions. Focusing her lenses and zooming in, Bobbie Jo saw that one of the figures wore a dark uniform with shoulder flash that included the likeness of a black ape.

What the hell was going on?

Ground teams reported more movements, furtive movements through back alleys, uniformed persons with automatic weapons taking up positions.

This was crazy. It suddenly looked like a commandostyle raid was about to hit the runners' hideyhole, right here in the middle of Newark's Sector 2. It didn't seem possible. Yet now she heard Skip firing off orders to Brigade units on the ground, declaring toe approaching vehicles hostiles, and then she saw the big bay door at the front of the runners' hideyhole rolling up.

"Ground Four and Five," Skip said. "Intercept hostiles."

Where Mott Street met Raymond Boulevard, a dark brown Brigade sedan suddenly shot right onto the roadway, broadsiding one of the hostile sedans, only to be struck in the tail by the van accompanying that car.

Then, the runner's gray and black van came roaring out onto Mott street at mid-block, turning toward Fleming. The hostiles coming up the street from that direction, a car and a van, abruptly split left and right, skidding sideways and effectively blocking off the roadway. The runners' van didn't even slow down. It slammed against the sedan's front left side, bounded up onto the sidewalk, then down again, and went roaring straight at the corner.

Autofire punctuated by the thumping of heavy weapons was breaking out all over the place.

Thorvin had the power plant to the max as they hit the street, engine roaring, tires screaming, laying a trail of smoking black as he turned up the block. He saw the big sedan and the van coming straight at him, splitting left and right to block the roadway. No way he was stopping. The combat subroutine of his onboard computer performed an immediate analysis on the sedan and put a rapidly winking red indicator right where he should hit the sedan for maximum effect.

It was quite an impact. Nearly shook the datajack right out of his skull. Cost him an outboard sensor array. But he had the speed up to eighty kph by then and-freaking hell-the physics worked! He caught a glimpse of the sedan spinning half a circle as he bounded up over the curb and tore a path down the sidewalk and straight to the corner. Just a simple matter of mass versus energy, really.

Corner coming up fast.

Skid turn-no other way around it.

Bullets pounded off his skin as the tires gave a banshee wail and sent him sliding sideways around the comer.

Alarm bells in his ears.

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.