Fade to Black (20 page)

Piper grunted, and pushed through the door. The room beyond was small and bare. An old recliner sat near a Fujiki telecom. A sleeping bag and pillow lay along one wall. A garbage can overflowed with waste from a dozen or more Staffer Shack meals. Piper kept nothing important here because this place was expendable, and necessarily so.

Shank secured the door. Piper took a seat in the recliner and jacked in. She hesitated only a moment before initializing the cyberprog in her deck, just long enough to say, "If anything happens... tell
jefe
I was thinking of him. Only of him."

Shank grunted. "You sure this is a good idea?"

"There is no option."

Then she was sluicing down the datalines, slipping quietly from grid to grid under the guise of ordinary, low-priority E-mail. Taking the long way to the Manhattan telecommunications grid might cost her a little time, but she preferred to get there discreetly, unobserved, unnoticed. The moment the Black Towers of the Fuchi icon came into sight, she turned aside and entered a small white pyramid, just one of thousands on the Manhattan LTG.

The words "Village Plumbing" flashed in front of her eyes.

Then she was standing in a small electric-white room facing a sculptured dataline. The portal into the open line resembled an enormous skull with gaping jaws. Piper initialized the prog she'd gotten from Azrael.

A chartreuse skateboard appeared on the floor before her. The board blazed with the logo: Echo Mirage Express. Her iconic self suddenly exchanged its kimono for boarder gear: helmet, gloves, elbow guards, knee guards, hi-top sneaks. A flashing red and yellow sign appeared before the skull portal to the dataline, reading, "This Way to Fuchi Hell."

She stepped on the board and shot through the skull portal. The skateboard accelerated like a jet, the dataline beyond whipped back and forth like a snake. Sheer velocity tore at her clothes and forced her to lean forward almost horizontally just to keep from being blown off the board.

Abruptly, the dataline ended, the board vanished, her kimono returned, and she was plunging into a gigantic cavern of gray metal shapes and glaring, harsh red light.

Fuchi Hell.

She ripped a cord from around her waist and hurled the weighted end up and around to her rear. The weight caught on something, a pipe. The cord stopped her fall with a jerk. She swung back and banged against a wall of metal, then just hung there, taking in her surroundings. It was like hanging over the abyss, looking into the heart of some industrial monstrosity. The air smelled of molten metal. Enormous furnaces throbbed somewhere far below. Pipes and conduits ran everywhere. Spectral lights flickered and flashed.

All the scene needed to complete the hellish image were blazing fires and the moans and cries of tormented souls. Piper could hear those cries in her mind. They were the cries of the millions that corps like Fuchi doomed to miserable lives and wretched deaths.

Hand-over-hand, she pulled herself up, up, up to a gangway sided by a metal railing.

There, she discovered a huge iconic figure in a black hood and long robe with long, full sleeves. The figure arose from the gangway as if from out of a pool of liquid metal. The small red window in the figure's iconic chest winked in alternating sequence, in black, "Mysterious Stranger Smartframe. Beware."

"What do you know of Fuchi Hell?" the figure said.

Very mysterious. Piper resisted a sarcastic sneer, then considered the question, warily. "It's an echo. Like a mirage." '

"Reflecting greater realities."

"Apparently."

The Mysterious Stranger Smartframe nodded, and suddenly drew forth a sword more than two meters long, styled like a scimitar, and inscribed with mystical symbols in winking gold. "Follow."

"Lead."

The Stranger turned and led along the gangway, which led to an elevator, which shot up a thousand stories or more in just milliseconds. The elevator doors opened on a gleaming yellow room filled with row upon row of dataterms and dataterm operators extending off into infinity. "The Central Communications Node," said the Stranger. The elevator shot up another thousand stories. The doors opened on another room filled with rows of dataterms and operators, all orange. "The Central Management Information Node," said the Stranger. The elevator shot up further. Another room, this one red. "The Central Security Node."

Piper frowned. "You're showing me some of the most seriously secured nodes in the Fuchi cluster."

The Mysterious Stranger nodded. "You're welcome."

19

"It was
too ... easy ..."
Piper said, not for the first time, emphasizing the words profusely. "I can't help feeling like we're doing exactly what someone wants us to do."

Rico took a long drag off his cheroot, then looked back to the mirror and went on shaving three days'
 
growth of beard from around his heavy mustache. "You're right," he said. "We are doing what somebody wants. His name is Surikov."

"That isn't what I mean."

"We're doing everything we can think of to stay alive. What else can we do? We're locked in."

"This is Fuchi we're talking about."

Rico put the razor down on the sink, then slammed his fist into the mirrored face of the medicine cabinet That wasn't enough, so he hit it again. He dented the metal cabinet door, he shattered the mirror, he cut the frag out of his hand. But he didn't care about any of that. Right at this moment, he didn't care much about Fuchi or Piper's instinct about her run into the Fuchi cluster. When he looked at Piper it was to see her standing in the bathroom doorway with her eyes pointed at the floor and her face a pinkish color. That he cared about. He'd finally gotten through to her. He'd stood here and listened to all her explanations and now it was his turn to talk.

"You coulda been dusted," he said. "You coulda been traced. You coulda got Shank killed, too. You both coulda been nailed by Daisaka and interrogated, and then we'd all be dead."

"Please excuse me," Piper murmured.

"This, is supposed to be a team. I'm supposed to be able to trust you." The thought that he ought to be able to trust her more than anyone else on earth burned him enough to strike another match under his temper. He punched the medicine cabinet again. Hard. Piper's face went deep red, but it wasn't anger. It was shame, embarrassment. Rico had seen the color before. He hated himself for forcing her to it, but he couldn't help it

"You're right," she said softly. "I betrayed your trust The shame is mine. All mine. I'm very sorry."

"Dammit, I care about you."

"I'm not worthy."

Rico looked at the shattered mirror, but his anger drained away to nothing. "You shouldn't 'a gone off on your own. You shoulda waited for me. We shoulda had a plan. We shoulda
thought
about it You
ka!"

"Yes, I understand. Please forgive me."

Reality was harsh. Maybe Piper was on her own when she went into the matrix. That was irrelevant.

If they didn't work as a team, they were dead. The world was too dangerous a place for any one person to see all the angles, even those involving just the matrix. You had to stop and think. You had to get other perspectives, other input. You had to think it through all the way, not once, but twice, and all the while stay aware that there was a larger world that might, maybe just by accident, get directly between you and what you wanted.

Rico took a deep drag off his cheroot then clenched his teeth and began picking broken bits of mirror out of his hand.

"You got lucky," he said.

"Yes, you're right." Piper agreed.

Twenty minutes later, Piper had no choice but to swallow her shame and get on with biz. She'd been prepared for this: Rico's anger, her own responses. "Inevitable" was the operative term. She had not dared allow time to degrade the prog that had been her key into the Fuchi cluster. That meant no time to plan, as Rico said. No time to consult, no time for considering other options, no time for what might have been a last good-bye. She was quite certain that what had angered Rico the most was that last, no good-bye. It was like a betrayal of love. The semblance of betrayal was only superficial, but that did not mitigate the shame she felt They joined the rest of the team in the living room.

Fortunately, no one asked about the loud banging in the bathroom or what might have caused Rico to cut his hand so badly. That would have been unbearable. Piper jacked her deck into the trid, then used the large screen to display the data she had snatched from the Fuchi mainframes. She had background data, building schematics, security procs and assessments, everything they would need to bust Ansell Surikov's wife out of Fuchi's clutches.

The woman's name was Marena Farris, and Fuchi had a complete file on her. She had originally been an analyst with the Fuchi security unit charged with reviewing corporate personnel.

"That's how we first met, in point of fact," Surikov remarked. "Marena conducted my annual review, perhaps three, four years ago. It was rather a foolish affair, actually. How was I getting on with my staff? That sort of thing. We got to talking, and, well ..."

They were soon married. Surikov claimed that Farris had come to despise Fuchi, its labyrinthine security regulations, the Byzantine corporate structure, and the paranoia all that inspired. Farris took the unusual step of going on indefinite leave so that she would be able to spend time with Surikov whenever he was out of his labs. Piper supposed that if a woman cared enough for a man, she might give up almost anything to better promote their mutual happiness.

Farris lived in a luxury condo tower on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The building was owned by Fuchi, but used primarily by execs and other employees of Fuchi subsidiaries. Security was tight.

No matter. They began developing a plan.

In the dark of the bedroom, Rico capped off a bottle of Nutrimax tonic water and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. With his Jikku eyes, he watched Piper grope around at the side of the bed, then slip carefully under the covers. Her face was a grayish mask. She turned her back to lie on her side.

Rico reached out to smooth a hand over her hair.

"You're still angry with me," she said softly.

"Maybe," Rico admitted. "But tomorrow we might be dead meat,"

"Yes ... you're right. Please excuse me."

A moment passed, then she turned toward him and snuggled in against his side, laying her head on his chest. Rico ran his hand over her hair some more. It was smooth and soft like silk. "I don't wanna lose you,"
 
he said. "That's why I got so burned."

"You were right," Piper whispered. "I was wrong. I'm so ashamed."

"It couldn't be helped."

"Jefe,
I don't know ..."

It wasn't worth worrying about, not now. "L Kahn ain't gonna be too happy when we give him the news."

"That is true."

"I don't know about this one, chica. I didn't like it from the start. Maybe it's like you said. We're just doing what somebody wants."

"We can think about that tomorrow."

"Sure. Tomorrow."

* * *

The van rushed down the transitway, shifting lanes, veering from side to side, bypassing other traffic.

Rico glanced to his rear for about the fourth or fifth time, finding it hard to keep his mind where it oughta be.

Piper shared the rear bench with Shank, but she didn't seem any more aware of him than anyone or anything else. She had her axe in her lap, her head down-turned. Her long, curling black hair had slid in front of her shoulders, obscuring her face. She was past yesterday's trouble, the embarrassment he'd caused. Probably, she was praying. Talking to the kami again. Rico wished that didn't make him so uneasy.

There had been a time, before he met Piper, when no one he knew paid any heed to gods till death was right around the corner, staring them in the face.

He'd known Piper for almost five years now and he still wasn't used to her praying.

Getting old. Obsolete? Maybe he'd been born that way. A couple of centuries too late. Into a world where honor meant nothing and a man's pride could be measured by the caliber of his gun. He figured he had some life left in him, regardless. Never mind what that slitch Ravage said.

"This gonna be a charity job, bossman?" Shank said gruffly. "Or we gonna get paid?"

"We'll get paid," Rico replied, lowly.

Shank and the team would get all they were due, and not just their share of the up-front money, even if Rico had to reach into his own pockets. Right now, the money was the least of his concerns.

Staying alive, at least a step ahead of the opposition, was the number one priority. After that came money. Somewhere in between staying alive and getting paid came his personal resolve to do what had to be done, find Surikov a new home, get the slag's wife busted out so that neither of them would be trapped in the ferrocrete fist of their corporate overlords. Rico just thanked his luck that he had a team he could rely on. Otherwise, everything went to scag, right out the window.

The transitway surfaced into Sector 10.

Time to get serious.