Fade to Black

Special thanks to readers Scott Lusby, Ted Swedalla, and Dave Zimmerman, John S. Franca-villo and Fern R. Francavillo for productive and unique critiques of the original manuscript, RNC for keeping me honest and more, VD, AP & CR for language tips, JF who knows I'm alive, and TZ who might suspect, RB, SD, KM, FW, JAW and RZ, for, among other things, enthusiasm and support.

And, of course, Oscar, Madeline ... and Ginger Ann ...

Long may you run.

1

At 01:14 hours, everything went dark: the rooftop lounge, the aeropad outside it, every light, beacon, and security system guarding the top of the tower.

Gordon Ito slipped on a pair of light-intensifying shades, checked his watch, and motioned the uniformed security officers out of the rooftop lounge. Only his personal bodyguard remained.

The blackout was on Gordon's order, engineered via a diagnostic program running on the tower's operations mainframes-initialized in error, should anyone ever ask. The blackout had been a pre-condition for the meet about to occur. Gordon did not like the pre-conditions, but he liked far less the reasons that had compelled, him to call for the meet.

Recent events now forced him to roll up one of his games, a covert op. The prospect displeased him, all the more so because ending the operation would require special action. All evidence of the op had to be spirited out of the competition's hands, that or eradicated, before any embarrassing disclosures could be made. This would cost Gordon a few more nuyen from his clandestine operating budget, but that meant nothing compared to the risks and the potential for disaster. The games he played always involved high stakes, commensurate risks, and ominous potentialities.

Now, the chopper came into view, a grayish specter cast in silhouette by the radiant illumination of the soaring towers of lower Manhattan. The rhythmic thumping of the craft's rotors resounded softly against the lounge's floor-to-ceiling windows. Gordon recognized the chopper's configuration, that of an A.C. Plutocrat, a big helo with luxury accommodations, usually reserved for the corporate elite.

Carefully, the chopper settled onto the aeropad outside.

"Iku beki desu,"
said Gordon's bodyguard.

Gordon shook his head. He would attend this meeting alone, as arranged. He would not need the bodyguard's protection. That much he could be sure of. The person he was about to meet considered him too valuable a customer-and perhaps too dangerous a potential enemy-to let anything unwise occur.

Outside, the whirling rotors slowed. Gordon stepped forward. Double transparex doors snapped open before him. As he walked out onto the aeropad toward the waiting chopper, the wind howled and tugged at his tailored suit. The aeropad sat perched some two hundred and fifty stories above the street, atop Tower Five of Fuchi Industrial Electronics' monument to economic imperialism. The wind always raged up here, and it was always cold and harsh. Gordon knew that better than most.

The door in the flank of the chopper swung open like a pair of jaws, the lower section descending to provide a set of steps. A man too tall and lean and gaunt to be anything but an elf descended the steps, his long black duster flapping in the wind. Approaching Gordon, he extended the hand-held probe of a weapons detector, checked the device, then motioned at the Plutocrat with his chin.

"Estd bien,"
the elf said.
"Entre."

Gordon climbed the steps up into the narrow space directly behind the flight crew. Both pilot and copilot wore helmets with full, nonreflective visors that masked their features completely. The pair sat like statues, facing their controls and the broad forward windshield of the chopper, never once turning their heads.

The door to the rear cabin swung open. Gordon stepped through. The elf followed.

The cabin was ostentatiously appointed in black and red and gold-crushed velvet on the walls, full carpeting, lush drapes. A pair of men in black mirrorshades and sharply cut gray suits waited to the left and right of the door. One was big enough to be an ork bodybuilder, the other looked Asian and had the build of a sumo wrestler. Impassive faces, casual postures. Nothing Gordon hadn't expected. Nothing he'd not seen before.

The woman seated in the captain's-style chair at the rear of the cabin looked Spanish. She had her sable hair drawn back sleek and flat from her brow. The gold wire lead of a datawire hung from her right temple. She wore black visorshades, a sparkling red jacket adorned with swirls of black, tight black slacks and gleaming scarlet boots. Her name was Sarabande. She was
kuromaku,
a fixer. She motioned casually to the chair facing her from across a small oval table. Gordon accepted the offer and sat down. The subtle thumping of the chopper's rotors grew louder as the craft ascended, swinging out over lower Manhattan and across the Hudson, toward the blighted regions of Jersey City and Newark. Gordon glanced at the drape-covered windows and guessed at the chopper's movements. He also checked his watch: 01:18 hours.

The upper stories of Tower Five would be back on-line by now, fully illuminated and operational, while some slag down in Facility Control would be wondering what the hell had happened. "Your business?"

Sarabande said. "On chip."

"
Muy Men."

Gordon opened the synth-digit replacing the end of his left pinkie and drew out an optical chip couched in a wafer-thin plastic carrier. He held out the chip-carrier. The elf examined it and passed it to his master.

A compact console rose from the center of the table. Sarabande slotted both carrier and chip into a receiving port. Several minutes passed. Gordon waited.

"A very complete dossier," Sarabande said finally. "The work to be done will require extensive preparation and will entail a high risk. What price will you pay?"

Gordon replied, "Whatever it takes."

"I will require an immediate advance of three hundred thousand nuyen."

"I want multi-level back-up and I want the job expedited."

"Five-hundred thousand nuyen."

"And you guarantee completion." Sarabande showed no reaction. "The work will be attempted by competent parties taking all reasonable steps to ensure success," she said. That is your guarantee." Gordon nodded. It would do.

2

The bar was little more than a counter jammed into an alley between a noodle bar and a booth selling bootleg simchips. The silver-eyed trog behind the counter had a set of snap-blades strapped to his right forearm and a Remington Roomsweeper holstered low on his left hip, He didn't take nothing but certified cred. The tequila he served was synthetic, lousy and cheap. So was the soykaf. For the price of a drink or a kaf, you got to elbow in between the other "clients" and stand there under the awning and watch and wait.

Rico ordered a shot and a kaf, then stood watching the throngs cramming the alley, shuffling by, sometimes near enough to brush his front.

This was Sector 3, Newark metroplex. Free zone. SIN-less territory. No passes, no badges, no restrictions. No System Identification Numbers. No straight suits. The people who lived here couldn't hack it in Manhattan because they had no corporate connection, no background, no SIN. No official anything.

Every slag and slitch had their program for survival. Those who walked the razor knew the rules of the game. Here in Sector 3, if you wanted to live, you carried metal, heavy metal, and you didn't make no secret about it. If you had implanted chrome, you made sure everybody knew it, or at least had reason to suspect it. If somebody met your gaze and held it, you didn't look away for even an instant, because an instant was all it took. This was 2055. There were slags walking the streets who would cut out your heart and feed it back to you before you could know you were dead.

Rico leaned back against the bar, one hand dangling near the butt-grip of the Ares Predator 2 slung from his hip. He kept his eyes moving. He didn't show anything with his face.

Before long, the silver-eyed trog leaned over the bar to say near Rico's ear, "The man's ready, chummer." Rico nodded.

The alley led onto
Ridge Street
. Rico joined the jostling, hustling stream of people heading that way: chipheads, gangers, groupie wannabes, day laborers, cheap muscle, anonymous gutterpunks. Every slant of human, ork, elf, troll, whatever. They went dressed in cheap paper uniforms, studded synthleather, gleaming mylar, glistening spandex with chains and ribbons and glowing fiber optics. Face tats and body color. At least a few of these slags were here because they wanted in on the biz. Sector 3 might be impoverished, over-crowded, crime-ridden, the seventh and lowest circle of a decaying urban hell, but it was one of the best markets in the plex. Anything could be had for the right amount of nuyen. And some things could be had for practically nothing at all. People said this part of the plex used to be lined with little two-and three-story houses, brownstones, tenement apartments. Nice places where nice families lived. Rico doubted it. The traces were few, and most of what people said usually amounted to pure drek, like what comes out the butt-end of a bull.

Sector 3 was all steel and crete now, rising up seven stories with retrofitted pipes and conduits, all of it scorched by the acid of the nightly rains and stained black and brown by soot and all the other garbage in the air. Garish neon signs glared from every direction, the night burned as bright as day. Stores and shops filled the ground floors of the buildings. Booths and stalls flanked the sidewalks. Ad stands lined the curbs, sound tracks reverberating, echoing. The street itself was divided in half by four-and five-story coffin hotels that ran from corner to corner, served by rusted metal gangways. Vehicle traffic was banned. You caught an auto-cab in the underground, or the subway, or you walked Rico paused to look as the staccato stammer of automatic weapons arose suddenly from the general direction of Abington Avenue East He saw only the mass of people surrounding him, passive, stone-featured faces. He took his lead from the crowd and continued on. The rising shriek of belt-screamers alerted him to the DocWagon High Threat Response team coming his way, bruising path through the congested street. The two orks with the team ran interference. Rico shoved into the crowd at his left to get out of the way, then turned the corner onto
Treadwell Street
.

At mid-block was a four-story brownstone with a porch and steps sided by black metal railing-a remnant of the times long gone, if what people said was so.

On the brownstone's porch waited a pair of razorguys in studded blue synthleather. They were prime cutters, chromed to the max and willing to prove it. Rico knew that for a fact, he could have guessed it at a glance. The cutters held themselves like real gillettes, like they had whatever it might take to meet any challenge from the street. They watched Rico start up the steps with what looked like casual indifference, but as he reached the porch, they stepped into his path-no hesitation, no doubt about what they were doing.

Stop or fight, that was the message.

Sometimes a man had no choice but to fight. This wasn't one of those times. Watching the cutters'
 
eyes, Rico said, "I'm expected."

"We know," one said quietly.

Moments passed. Rico waited. Custom had to be satisfied. Certain things had to be done in certain ways. You didn't just walk up the steps to the man's house and breeze right through the front door. Rico knew all that and had no objections. If nothing else, respect demanded it.