Striper Assassin (16 page)

“For what they did.”

“What they did to the world.”

“And everything else.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

* * *

06-02-54/18:03:21

Close-focus: a blonde biff with flawless features and
huge
jutting milkies smiles from behind her high desk in the lobby.

“No,” she says. “In fact, as far as I’m aware, none of the members of the Humanis Policlub has any sort of criminal record whatsoever. The screening committee of the membership council would never accept such undesirables into the organization.”

J.B. turns, peers off to Skeeter’s right, and mouths the words,
“Are you getting this?”

Of course he’s getting it.

Fragging dithead brainless twit.

* * *

06-02-54/18:27:33

Slow pan, zoom in, close-focus: main hall, Policlub HQ. Doors closed and locked, guarded by muscleboys in tees. An easy five hundred fraggin’ pixelhead citizens, pure humans supposedly, fill the folding chairs that flank the center aisle running straight to the head of the room.

Tonight’s special guest: Armant DeCreux, imported direct from Euro headquarters. “Theees mongreel rassses challeeenge de veeraaa exeestonnnce of de puur humannns…”

Blinking dotbrain foreigners.

“Theees cray-churrss arre eeevilll by nat-churrr…”

Nithead dirtbrain crap.

“Theees eeelves espeeeciallie…”

Now there he might have a point.

Never trust a bulldink fraggin’ elf.

Skeeter wouldn’t trust a damn dandelion-eating elf even if his mudbrained sister
married
one, which she wouldn’t, because she’s got at least enough brains not to. Besides, he’d stomp one or both of them before they could ever pull it off.

* * *

06-02-54/19:14:06

Split image: main lens on Horace Glick, Philly chapter commander, cybereyes on J.B.

Zoom in, close-focus.

Roll cam.

“You say that the Humanis Policlub has irrefutable evidence that orks within the city of Philadelphia have banded together into outlaw groups that are committing savage acts of violence including murder-mutilations and cannibalism against the general populace?”

“It’s not just the orks,” Glick says. “The whole range of metatypes is involved. And this isn’t just a local phenomenon.”

“And you have evidence to prove that?”

“Absolutely irrefutable evidence.”

“What sort of evidence?”

“Are you a news snoop or something?”

“Just a concerned citizen. What kind of evidence?”

“Vid, stills, you name it.”

“Any eyewitnesses?”

“Dozens. Hundreds, in fact.”

“Why haven’t you presented this body of evidence to the city attorney for prosecution?”

“Oh, we have. You bet we have.”

“And the city attorney has done nothing about it?”

“I think it’s pretty clear where the city attorney’s sympathies lie.”

Sure it is.

Effin’ dirtbrain poli skank.

23

When the blindfold comes off, Neona finds herself standing in some dark old decrepit hallway with black floor tiles and brown paneled walls covered with graffiti. Back the way she thinks she came, maybe ten meters off to her right, the corridor ends at a metal door. In the other direction, to her left, the hallway dissolves into black. Standing immediately around her are Hammer and his crew: Mickey and Dog Bite, the mage Dana, and Axle the rigger.

Smirking at her, Mickey now ties the black strip that had served as a blindfold around Neona’s right upper arm. “Somethin’ to remember me by,” he says.

Sure.

Neona swallows, feeling a shiver and trying not to be too obvious about it. She’s a little on edge. Mickey’s chrome-silver eyes make him look inhumanly cool, and his whole sneering attitude suggests that his only interest in her is what she’s got between her thighs. Dog Bite acts like he hates her, snapping and snarling, growling at her, arguing over practically anything she says. Hammer’s stone-cold and treats her like she’s utterly useless. Axle seems plain suspicious. Dana’s the only one who behaves at all like a potential chum, willing to let her strut her stuff. But just how much influence the mage has over the rest of the group isn’t at all clear.

Dog Bite presses a black stud in the wall. The doors to an extra-wide elevator, maybe a freight elevator, slide open, one rising, the other descending into the floor. Hammer lights a Millennium Red with a click of a silver-cased lighter and leads the group into the elevator.

Neona hesitates for the briefest moment, but there’s no point in trying to be careful now. If anybody has ideas about acing her and hijacking her deck, they could do it just as easily in this dingy hallway as wherever the elevator’s going. She’s past the point of no return. She’ll just have to play this one out, hope for the best, hope her luck improves.

The elevator rumbles and vibrates, going up maybe five or six stories. As the doors slide open again, Hammer lifts the smartgun that always seems to be dangling from his hand, and rests the weapon against his shoulder. Neona gnaws anxiously at her lower lip.

Someone, Dog Bite, nudges her from behind, pushing her out of the elevator and directly into a room. The room is gigantic, bigger than most apartments, any that Neona’s been in, anyway. Maybe fifteen, twenty meters wide and almost as long. The ceiling is kind of low, but that’s standard for lofts, if this really is a loft, tucked in above the main floors of the building. Neona sees a kitchen area off to the left, a rolling bar and living room furniture off to the right. Directly ahead is an open aisle that leads to a hallway. Probably to bedrooms, Neona guesses.

Dog Bite nudges her toward the right, and points, “Over there! Ain’t you got eyes!”

“Uh, yeah… yeah sure.”

Set against one wall is a cushioned armchair. On the table beside it is what looks like an industrial-grade telecom, black plastic and gleaming chrome, all the options, though the casing has apparently seen better days. One chrome port in particular is blackened and scorched, the black plastic around it seared.

“What happened to the telecom?” Neona grunts.

It’s just a casual question, more a symptom of surprise than anything else, but Dog Bite barks, “Never you mind! It’s none of your effing business, slitch!”

Neona bites her lower lip, tries to contain her nerves. She’s never met a real group of runners that didn’t at least
know
a decker. A lot of groups
have
one. Probably most did. Maybe the scorch mark on the telecom is what happened to the decker they used to work with. Better just keep that thought to herself.

Hammer settles his bulk into an easy chair, crossing his legs over a hassock.

“Any time you’re ready,” he says.

Easy to say. but it’s not that simple. Neona steels herself inwardly. If she’s gonna get anything out of this at all, she can’t let them think she’s a total rube. They’ll just take her for all she’s worth and run, or worse. She turns to face Hammer squarely. “If I’m gonna do this for you guys, I want something up front. I don’t work for free.”

Before Hammer can respond. Dog Bite jumps on her again. “You want somethin’? I’ll give you somethin’! Who the hell you think you are! You didn’t tell us drek about that chip!”

“That chip was virgin.”

“Sure it was!”

“There was nothing on it but that one data file! I can’t pull out something that was never there!”

“You’re a poser! That’s what you are!”

Hammer and his crew are in the midst of getting started on a run. All Neona knows about it is that the group has to locate someone. Why they must do that or what happens when they succeed, she doesn’t know, and at this point she doesn’t really want to. She’s got her own problems.

The chip in question contained a single data file on the person they’re supposed to find. Examining that chip was the first hurdle. Ransacking the global Matrix for any data that might aid in the search, that might pinpoint the person’s location, is the job before her now, and that’s enough to worry about. That and what a successful run through the Matrix will do for her relations with Hammer and Company. Even if she never works with the group again, a good run might earn her a good contract through them, and that’s just what she needs.

Hammer holds up a slip of paper, offers it to her. She walks over and takes it, looks at it, letters and numbers, a bank address. “There’s five thousand nuyen in that account,” Hammer says. “If you get what we need, it’s yours. And maybe we’ll have more to talk about then.”

“Okay.” It sounds fair, even good.

“If you don’t get what we want, the money better still be there, or you’re meat.”

Neona nods. “You got no worries.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I’ll get what you want.”

“Just do it.”

Like the man says…

Neona sits in the cushiony armchair beside the telecom and slides the gray macroplast case marked with the Fuchi logo out of her nylon bag. As she opens the case to bare the keyboard, she notices Axle, the rigger, peering at her intensely.

“Is that a Six?” he asks.

“Just the case.”

The rigger nods, looking like he already knows the whole story. Neona figures he must know something about decks and deckers. Must be surprised to see her using a stock case. A lot of deckers would rather cut off an arm than work a deck right off the shelf. Or so they say. To hear them talk they’d much prefer some freakish collection of spare parts stuffed inside a junk case. And maybe that’s what Neona would have said before she got her hands on a real Fuchi-6.

Back where she comes from, you don’t tear up a perfectly good Rolls Royce just because it’s “off the shelf.” You scope it out to make sure it don’t contain any surprises. You do what you can to improve it when you got the time and the money. The one thing you don’t do is cannibalize it for parts and start building something on your own. Not unless you’ve got the equivalent of a Fuchi research lab and a mega-nuyen budget. A deck like a Fuchi-6 is too hard to come by. People die for a lot less.

She slots the deck’s fiber-optic lead into the blackened port on the telecom, powers up, and watches the deck’s display as her start-up utility runs a quick diagnostic. Software is where she really takes pride in herself. She wrote her own start-up utility out of whole cloth in just a few hours. She also wrote or modified every other prog in the Fuchi’s memory.

The deck checks out, like she knew it would. The telecom seems okay, too. She’ll leave the deck’s display on in case Hammer or someone else decides to watch over her shoulder. That might encourage them to trust her. Nothing she needs to keep secret will show on the screen anyway.

She slips a fiber-optic lead into the datajack in her head and slithers down a quick blackness.

Into the neon room…

It’s a virtual workspace inside the deck, useful for programming and for aligning her head before she dives down a dataline and into the Matrix.

Tonight, she dives straight through…

Down the line…

And suddenly she isn’t plain old Neona Jaxx anymore. Her infamous streaks of bad luck don’t mean nothing. Her uncertainties fade to zero. She navigates the data stream like a born-to-fly electron angel, a ramjammer in pulsing gold neon, with a halo and wings and a keyboard guitar, and now she’s skating ahead and into the glowing face of a pyramidal node. Her fingers rush over the keys of her keyboard guitar and a swirling stream of alphanumerics sluices from the integral speaker, spirals into the node and disappears. An instant later, the node’s open and she’s streaming ahead, into the Northeast Philly local telecommunications grid.

She makes a telecom call of herself and heads straight to Directory Assistance, then fires herself through a succession of nodes till she hits the Delaware County LTG and the Sanwa Bank’s W.C.C.A.N., Worldwide Customer Computer-Access Net. Like any legitimate customer, she takes the front door, checks on the account Hammer described, and uses the secret passcode to stash five thousand nuyen in an account of her own.

Somewhere back along a few hundred klicks of fiber-optic cable, her meat fingers race across the keys of her Fuchi-6, and her meat-body voice says, “Okay… The nuyen checks. Here I go…”

A discontented male voice barks something nasty, but she doesn’t hear it, just the tone, and right now that doesn’t mean anything to her.

Next stop: Austin LTG.

She loads and executes the Chinese Flyer. She got this along with the Fuchi deck in that run back in Miami, the run that killed her chums. In its original form, the Flyer had a traitorous subroutine that launched an independent prog the moment they started their run. That prog informed their intended target that she was coming, and what her chums would be doing while she rode Matrix overwatch. That’s how her chums got killed. She almost got fried herself. Since then Neona has written the secret subroutine out of the program code. The Flyer was more than worth the effort.

The Chinese Flyer isn’t subtle, and she has to rewrite the code after every run, but she’s never found anything faster—and right now fast is what she needs.