Fade to Black

6

"Bird away."

The roof-mounted launcher fired her away from the concrete earth. The rush of acceleration coursed through her titanium-composite airframe. The thrust of her quad turbofan engines, already blazing with power, carried her into the night.

She climbed, engines to max, aiming her nose at the shroud of haze and fumes that hid the stars. Transparent red digits tumbling before her eyes ticked off altitude, energy, and a dozen other transient statistical indicators. Part of her noted those indicators, but only in passing. Mere numbers could never quantify the glory of flight, or the greater truths hidden in the dark. She unfolded her pinions, stretching her wings out full, and banked her engines, cutting power to practically nothing, gliding almost soundlessly into a slow turn that inspired a twinge of pity for all those million souls bound to the earth below.

Now that she was finally aloft, she could breathe. Flying recon drones hardly compared to the quantum rush of driving Federated-Boeing Eagles and Strike Hawks outfitted with military-grade ordnance and full electronics suites, but she could live with the difference. She'd flown her first dumb-boy when she turned fourteen. It was reassuring to note that if she took any triple-A, if she suffered any massive system failure, it wouldn't be her own flesh and blood body that went spiraling at Mach Two into the concrete earth.

For one thing, this CyberSpace Designs Stealth Sniper recee drone couldn't manage anything like supersonic velocity, for another, her flesh and blood body was far below her, still stuck in that frigging wheelchair, inside the command and control vehicle of the Executive Action Brigade.

She could see that vehicle now, through the light-gathering lenses in her belly pod. The heavily modified Ares Roadmaster with the sat dish on top, parked in a shallow gulch, an empty lot, between ferroconcrete huts.

Voices whispered in her ears. "Status on Air One…"

"Just coming on-line, sir…"

"Tell that fragging air jockey to get her butt engaged…"

Mentally, she could also see the scene inside the Road-master C C. The dim lights, the bank of consoles. Colonel Butler Yates, commander-in-chief of the Executive Action Brigade, pacing back and forth. Major Skip Nolan, the EAB's exec, monitoring communications between the ground teams, checking in with the commo operators, then leaning over her shoulder, she the one real rigger on the team.

Abruptly, Skip's voice murmured into her head, like he was right there with her, gliding through the night. "Get on-station, Bobbie Jo," he said softly. "Colonel's nervous tonight."

She smiled and said, "Affirmative."

The smile was for Skip. She hoped he read it. Everyone else in the world called her B. J., even her own mother, but that was never enough for Skip Nolan. He always wanted more, something special, if only to remind her that there was something special between them. She liked that. It made the whole world seem warmer, nicer, somehow.

As for the Colonel's nervousness, she could only agree. The Brigade had once been one of the foremost mercenary units in the western hemisphere, though under another name. Since the annexation of Mexico by Aztlan and the end of various squabbles in South America, the mere business had gotten very low-key. The Colonel had been forced to dispense with most of the air wing while turning in desperation to the corporate security field. The Brigade's lack of specialists and the Colonel's lack of contacts had made that move chancy. The transition had been rough and it still wasn't clear if the move would pan out.

Bobbie Jo checked her orientation, swung across the black stroke-marks of a dozen streets, then flattened out and slowed to a hover above the confluence of roadways that marked her station.

Hovering in stealth mode ate fuel like fire ate oxygen. Fortunately, she had talked the Colonel into equipping the high-performance Sniper with long-range fuel tanks.

"Air One on station, Colonel…"

"It's about time, dammit…"

Springfield and Market Streets came together like 8 great V, slicing through the jumble of buildings and cross-streets at the core of the Newark sprawl. It seemed ironic because that V pointed across the Passaic River to Jersey City and the soaring towers of Manhattan Island. The enclave of power and money. Where everyone wanted to be. Most of the millions in Newark would never get there.

"Status, Air One."

That was Skip, sounding very official. The Colonel must be leaning over her shoulder or breathing hot and hard down Skip's neck. Bobbie Jo focused her downward-looking eyes and went to work, computer-augmenting the best views.

The club stood on Springfield. The front of the place was all dingy and black but for the large gold letters hanging above the main entrance, reading, "Chimpira," whatever that meant. It was supposed to be a hangout for yakuza and other miscreants. Most notably, the miscreants the Brigade had been hired to shadow.

Target indicators winked rapidly in front of her eyes, picking out movement on the ground, computer-directed to single out human-sized targets only. Her view plunged to sidewalk level thirty-seven times in a row for a camera click glance at every face, every moving body, then every two-legged body anywhere near the front of the club. That included the three trolls and eleven Asian norms, all males, immediately in front of the club. None of her real targets were among them. She fired her gathered data back to the C C. The Colonel would have his status report and the Brigade's new fugitive unit would undoubtedly find some use for the digitized images in her burst transmission.

An hour passed. The Colonel kept demanding more data from Skip, and Skip kept hounding her for more digipics. She circled the club. When the first of the miscreants, the supposed leader, finally appeared, Bobbie Jo fired her alert signal to the C C.

Target One moving Target One moving…

She fired digipics in a continuous stream back to the C C. Target One exited via the front of the club. Through her computer-enhanced closeups, she saw that he was a Hispanic male of medium height and build and that her images of him matched exactly the digitized pics in her ground-based memory. An Asian female soon followed him out of the club. That was Target Two. Tall and good-looking. Light-skinned for an Asian, but there was no mistaking the slope of her eyes. The two of them met in the alley beside the club and moved to the alley at the rear of the club. There they met Target Three and Target Four: a heavily built ork male and a long-haired dwarf male. Together, they moved through the alleys to King Boulevard and around the corner to Stirling Street. There they entered a gray and black ghost of a van.

Target Alpha moving, all targets onboard…

She repeated that.

Brigade comm traffic murmured rapidly in her ears. Ground-based surveillance units' were moving into position to follow the van, designated Target Alpha. They didn't have much time. Target Four was a rigger and very hot with wheels. Even as the last of the group climbed into the van and closed the side door, the van was rolling, picking up speed, smoking tires and really moving out.

Bobbie Jo prepared to follow. No need for stealth mode now. Her on-board combat comp set three green target indicators to winking in front of her eyes. Those pointed out the pursuit vehicles. Ground One, Two, and Three, dark mid-sized sedans with stock New Jersey plates. Standard procedure called for one sedan to close with the target vehicle, follow for a short distance and then turn off, while another one closed in.

It didn't work out that way. The van blew the light on Howard and roared up South Orange Avenue. Bobbie Jo's warning was all that kept the pursuit vehicles from being left in the dust. As the cars raced to catch up, the van turned left onto Fourteenth Street and into a gridwork of streets and cross-streets lined with cars and crammed with buildings. The van careened through the grid at breakneck speed, gaining ground with every turn. It broke out onto Springfield Avenue, blew a series of red lights, and in another minute was flying down the entrance ramp to the South Newark Transitway.

Abruptly, Bobbie Jo heard a muted stammer that sounded like autofire weapons, then a voice, distant but urgent, exclaiming, "Ground Three! Ground Three! We're in the middle of a gang bang-up!"

The other two cars were out of the grid and racing up Springfield, but they were nowhere near getting the van into visual range.

"Air One status!" Skip barked.

No choice.

The van was disappearing into the dark of an underground section of the transitway. The pursuit cars would never catch up. Target Alpha was flying. Bobbie Jo punched up her engines and dove, turbofans screaming, to the roof of a tandem-trailered truck just then sluicing down the incline and into the dark of the transitway tunnel.

It was like pitching into an attack run.

One moment she had only the dark haze of the night above her, in the next, she was sandwiched between the roof of the truck's lead trailer and the massive girders supporting the ceiling of the transitway. She had about a half-meter of airspace above her and about the same below. One errant breeze, one minor electronic fluctuation, and the girders above or the truck below would smash her into oblivion.

That scared the hell out of her, only she didn't let herself feel it. She reminded herself that she really wasn't there. Her body was safe. Only the electronic sensorium of the Sniper drone was at risk. But that didn't help. She kept on, redlining her emotive indexes. The truck provided cover. The broad roof of the trailer and the glaring lights of the cab would keep her hidden from anyone within easy visual range. She searched ahead with her eyes. Target indicators winked, then she spotted the gray and black ghost-van veering across two lanes and into the gray-lit tunnel of a transitway exit. Target exiting target exiting… Her target indicator winked rapidly, then blinked out. She didn't dare follow. The exit tunnel was too confining, and she'd be spotted. The targets were pros, and the van was believed to be equipped with advanced electronics that might very well include short-range antiair radar. Bobbie Jo did what she had to do. She stayed with the tandem-trailered truck for another eight hundred meters. The instant the transitway surfaced again, she punched up full power. The steady whine of her engines rose to a cyclone scream. She arced up and back, soaring over the, city, then quickly flipped to bring her belly pod to bear on the ground below.

A dozen target indicators winked in front of her eyes.

She was still scoping them out, sweeping back and forth across the city, hunting the target, when Skip called her back to base.

The Colonel was not happy.

Rico grimaced, clenching his teeth. Barely an hour had passed since he'd accepted the job from L. Kahn and already he didn't like it. The whole thing could be a set-up.

"You sure you saw a drone?"

"Of course I saw it," Thorvin snapped, steering the van around one final corner onto Mott Street. "Any moron with freaking infrared goggles coulda spotted it. I oughta know a freaking Cyber Designs Stealth Sniper Series 53 when I see one. I broke one of the freaking things down about a year ago just to see how it worked. It ain't top of the line, but it ain't half bad either. It's serviceable. All right for standard recon. It just hasn't got anything like the kind of electronics to beat what I got in this van."

"Yes, but whose drone was it?" Piper said. "And who was it eyeing?"

Shank grunted. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."

Rico turned his head to look out the passenger-side window, into the side-view mirror, then at the dark, decaying buildings slowly passing by. Piper's questions struck right at the core of the problem. Rico wished he had answers to match them. He had plenty of guesses, but he didn't like those guesses any more than Shank's suggestion about coincidence.

L. Kahn could have arranged to put up a drone just to send a message that he'd be watching, alert for treachery. It would be a stupid thing to do because Rico would take it as a sign of betrayal, but then L. Kahn didn't necessarily know that Thorvin had the gear to spot the drone.

Any fragging thing was possible. Every one of the four of them in the van had at least one warrant out for them somewhere in the U.C.A.S. Cops and feds and practically every corp in the world all had riggers who could put up drones. Some of the local security companies used drones for ordinary surveillance, like night watchmen. And, like Shank said, it was definitely possible that the drone was completely unrelated to anything that mattered. There were dozens of jobs being worked at any one time within the bounds of the Newark plex. Sometimes you couldn't turn a corner without stepping into the middle of somebody's dustup. It just seemed too coincidental to be coincidental that a drone had shown up overhead just as they were leaving Chimpira.

On the other hand, Thorvin had lost contact with the drone once they reached the transitway, and nothing else had happened to suggest that they were being followed. "You didn't see no cars following?"

"Not a freaking one."

Still what bothered Rico was the one possibility no one had mentioned: they might already be blown. The corporate "entity" they were supposed to penetrate to make their retrieval might already know they'd been hired for the job. That "entity" might have been watching L. Kahn and might be hunting for the four of them at this very moment.

Preemptive op is what corp security slags called it. They'd be careful, Rico decided. Now more than ever. They'd get off the street and stay off as much as possible until the job was done. They'd check out everything two or three or four times before they started the run. They'd build in backups on top of backups in case anything went wrong. If they found even a hint of evidence that L. Kahn was playing games, they'd handle that, too.

Four a.m., the rain started coming down. Right on schedule. First it drizzled, then it poured. In less than a minute it turned into a torrent. The corps controlling Manhattan seeded the clouds most every night in an attempt to clear the garbage out of the air. Like they said on TV/3V, the rain brought the garbage down indiscriminately, on the just and the unjust alike.

Momentarily, the safehouse came along on the right, a three-story brick building that had been condemned a decade ago, then uncondemned. City records showed it as turned over to New Jersey Consolidated Power and Light. Piper had made it that way.

The place was crammed in between a two-story factory and a nine-story moving and storage tower. It had two brown metal bay doors large enough to accommodate a semi and no windows at ground-level. The door on the right began rising as they approached. Thorvin had the transmit code. He drove the van across the sidewalk and right inside. The door trundled down behind them.

The ground floor looked like a junkyard, one big room filled with mechanical parts and equipment, a pair of Scorpion motorcycles, a spare van. Thorvin called it his emergency repair shop. What he called it or how he used it mattered far less to Rico than that the rigger should have what he needed to jury-rig repairs when they were on a run.

Rico led the group upstairs. The second floor had bedrooms, a kitchen, and the main room, which doubled as both a living room and conference room. Rico set Shank and Thorvin to clearing up the garbage lying around since God knew when, then handed Piper the datachip from L. Kahn. Piper had her axe. They'd stopped to pick that up. She'd scan the chip, print out a hardcopy, and they could get started with the job.

Piper took the chip, but then slid her arms around Rico's neck and said softly, anxiously, "This one worries me, jefe."

Rico exhaled heavily. "We just gotta be careful, chica. I think we're playing with big boys this time. Some damn megacorp."

She nodded. "I'll get to work."

"Good idea."

Rico checked on supplies: food, ammunition, other gear. The devil rats in the basement had been working on the power lines, so he got Thorvin down there to patch things up. When he returned to the second floor, he found Piper sitting on the sofa, axe in her lap. Her eyes rose to meet his.

"Got something?" he asked.

"Surikov," Piper said. "Ansell Surikov. That's who they want us to get."