Lone Wolf (10 page)
By the time I’m rumbling onto Northeast Sixtieth Street, the sheets of rain and the wind in my face have cleared my head to some degree—and it’s just enough to let me know exactly how drekky I feel. I park the bike in the back alley, chain it securely to the building’s gas meter. Then I unlock the metal back door to the building, locking it again carefully behind me, and climb the narrow stairs to the second floor. The hallway—just as narrow as the stairs—is empty. The door to my apartment’s at the far end, at the front of the building—I picked it specifically for the view out over the street and down to the front door of the building. Out of habit, I check the telltales I always leave around the door. Nobody’s opened it since I left here a few days ago. Not that I expected anyone to have done so—Bart’s uninvited visit a week back was the exception, not the rule. I unlock the door and pass into the small living room with its kitchen alcove to the right. I’m hungry, but on consideration I decide I want sleep more than I want food. Anyway, I know there’s nothing in the fridge except a bottle of vodka and some yogurt that’s probably quietly developing into some new form of life by now.
I turn left into the bedroom, stripping off my soaked jacket as I do so. I fling it toward the chair—miss, but what the frag—and slump down onto my bed.
My portable telecom’s just where I left it, on the bedside table, jacked into the LTG socket in the wall. I power it up and hit the keystroke sequence that’ll log me onto UCAS Online. While the machine’s making the connection and shaking hands with the UOL mainframes—somewhere in Virginia, I think, though of course it doesn’t matter—I pull off my boots and make fists with my toes in the ratty carpet. I set my H & K with its two spare clips within easy reach on the floor next to the bed. (Again, not that I’m expecting trouble, but there are some habits you just don’t want to let slide into disuse.) The telecom beeps, announcing it’s ready.
On the ride over, I dictated my innocuous “get back to me quick” message into the chip in my secondary slot. So now I use a cylindrical carrier to extract the chip from the base of my skull, and slip it into the peripheral slot of the telecom. I display a directory of the chip’s contents, and make doubly sure that the file I’m going to upload to the telecom, and from there to UOL, is the right one—the innocuous message, not the report to the Star that would get me a bullet in the brain. Then I check it again. I know I‘m tired, and I know that tired people make mistakes. A single wrong keystroke, and the wrong file goes shooting down the datapaths of the LTG and the Matrix. Yes, it’s the right file. I trigger the transfer.
A second or two later, my message is stored securely and safely on the distant mainframe, ready for my controls at the Star to view it and recognize what it means. I know I really should check the message bases to see if there’s something waiting for me, but I just don’t have the jam at the moment. My brain feels like it’s full of spiders, and my eyeballs like they’ve been sandblasted. I break the connection.
The pillow on my bed is calling to me, its siren song so strong I don’t even power down the telecom. I swing my legs up onto the bed—cold in the wet jeans I can’t be bothered taking off—and slump backward. I feel the welcome blackness of sleep envelop me even before my head hits the pillow.
* * *
What the frag time is it?
My bedside chrono’s set up to project a dim time display onto the ceiling over my bed. I peel my sticky eyelids open and look up. I see that it’s 0332, which means I’ve been
asleep less than two hours. Why did I wake up?
Then I hear the sound again, the one that had penetrated my sleeping brain and mingled with my confused dreams. The insistent chirp of my cel phone. Frag! Who the frag is calling me at fragging oh three-thirty in the fragging morning? Have they no fragging respect for the fragging dead?
It can’t be the Star. Procedure doesn’t allow for them calling me direct, for any reason. (And to reinforce that, I’ve made sure they don’t even have my number.) Blake’s got the number, as do a few other higher-ups in the Cutters. They could be calling me, but why? I’m off duty for the next twenty hours, and Blake didn’t say anything about being on call. Conceivably, some emergency’s come up and he needs all his Praetorians around him, but frag him and the hog he rode in on. I’m not answering. “Get fragged,” I grunt to the phone. Obligingly, it shuts the frag up. I roll over and close my eyes again.
Then there’s a knock on the fragging door. My eyes snap open again and look at the time display. It reads, 0333, so no, I haven’t been back to sleep.
And that’s when my instincts kick in, those little warning bells inside my skull, my belly, and half a meter lower. I can almost hear my bag contract. Something’s wrong here ..,
Instinct’s important for someone who’s undercover. Important? Frag, it’s life itself. Supposedly I’m one of the Star’s best undercover cops—that’s what my superiors tell me when they want to stroke my ego, at least—so that should mean mine are some of the best instincts going. All I know is that I’ve come to trust those weird little feelings. And now those instincts are telling me that something’s going down.
A phone call, then a minute later a knock on my door. Unrelated? Maybe. Or maybe the phone call was an attempt to find out whether I’m home or not. When I inconsiderately decided not to answer, I forced my caller to use other methods. Like a knock on the fragging door.
I swing my legs—chilled and very uncomfortable—off the bed and reach for my portable telecom. The Wenonah— “security building” or not—never had any security for private apartments: no cameras or sensors, not even a viewer in the fragging door. For obvious reasons, I rectified the situation when I moved in. Set into the door frame over the door is a tiny videocam and microphone arrangement set to narrowcast a data stream on a frequency jiggered to my telecom. I hit the keys on the keyboard, thanking whatever spirits—or my own laziness, or whatever—didn’t let me power the thing down. The screen lights up and I can see what that tiny hidden videocam is seeing.
Four figures in the hallway outside my door—two men, two women—all wearing what look like armored leathers. None have weapons out, but there’s something about the way they’re standing that kicks the volume of my internal alarms up a dozen notches. They’re tense, they’re ready— for what? I think I can guess. Frag!
One of the figures—I peg her as the leader—is right up to the door, and she’s raising her hand to knock again. The fisheye lens on the videocam and the angle of view make it impossible for me to recognize anyone.
The biff knocks again. As she does. I’m up on my feet, pulling the telecom jack out of the wall. I scoop up my H & K, and let it and the wire have a little conversation. With my left hand I pick up the telecom, balancing it like a waiter carrying a tray. I move like a ghost out of the bedroom into the living room, keeping my eyes on the screen.
The woman in the image steps back and shakes her head. Three of the figures—the biff leader and the two men— reach into their jackets, and out come weapons. My instincts are deafening now, but I don’t need them anymore. My conscious mind knows what’s going down: a hit. Another gang trying to take out a key Cutters member? Who the frag knows, and for the moment it doesn’t matter one good goddamn. Idees can wait.
In the telecom screen, I see the leader turn to the second woman, the one who hasn’t pulled heat. Bonelessly, the second woman sinks down onto the floor in full lotus, eyes closed.
Shaman? Mage? It doesn’t matter—it’s magic, there’s no other way to read it. She’s getting ready to go astral so she can just sashay in through the door and take a look-see around the place. When she finds me here, the drek will really hit the pot. the lens-induced distortion on the screen makes it tough to pick out exactly where everyone’s standing relative to the door, but at least the hallway’s narrow. Up comes my H & K, and I give it and the wire a split second to figure out the fire lines.
Almost too long. The mage’s eyes snap open, and I know she’s “seen” me. (Frag, this magic drek’s scary.) She opens her mouth to say something.
And I clamp down on the trigger, a long stuttering burst right through the door. In the telecom screen I see the biff leader take most of the burst in her upper chest and throat, and down she goes spouting blood. I walk the burst into the others—tougher than it sounds when your point of view is different from the direction in which your gun’s pointing. Something like trying to write while you’re looking in a mirror. One slag triggers his own SMG and I instinctively drop to a crouch, his burst stitches the already-dead-or-close-to-it leader, then he’s down. The second man’s also going down—not dead, not yet—with a lot of his face missing. I cap off another short burst aimed lower, and see the mage’s head deform under multiple bullet impacts. I drop the telecom, scuttle forward still in my crouch—Do they have support? If so I’ll know in a moment—and kick open what’s left of the door.
The hallway’s a slaughterhouse, the air thick with the reek of blood and drek. My stomach knots and threatens to spew, and my heart feels like it’s turned to ice. I want to be sick, I want to scream, but I can’t let myself. I clamp down the old control and turn off the emotions. Let the brain handle things, but don’t let the heart in on the party. Not yet. I can have my nervous reaction later. Icy, soulless now, I look around.
The body count’s total—if the second man’s not dead yet, there’s nothing anybody can do to save him. I hear screams and yells of alarm from the surrounding apartments, but nobody’s doing anything brainfragged like opening their own doors. Thank Ghu for small favors, but I know they’re just that. Around me there’s got to be a dozen fingers all punching in 911 on telecoms and cel phones, calling in the clans.
Frag, and I kind of liked the Wenonah, too.
Time’s my enemy, I know that. Lone Star doesn’t patrol the Ravenna area very frequently, but there
are
patrols. A cruiser might be only a couple of blocks away. Worse, the hit team might have back-up outside, already alerted by the sound of the carnage, charging up the stairs to the second floor at this very moment. And if that isn’t enough, eventually somebody—maybe packing something unpleasant—is going to open his apartment door to see what the frag went down. I’ve got to move—now.
Back into the bedroom, sit down on the bed and pull my boots back on. Snag my leather jacket from the floor .. .
Frag, almost forgot my wallet with my credsticks— including the special one that can, if I issue the right code. access the contingency funds the Star set up for me. (That’s crucial. My personal accounts are fragging near empty, as befits my cover.) Out into the living room and then through the abattoir outside, moving fast but smooth. Never run if you can avoid it; you're less likely to trip and more likely to see what’s going on around you. Fast the first three bodies, step over the head-shot mage . . .
Then stop like I’m paralyzed. The top of the mage’s head is distinctly missing, but her face is still recognizable. And I do recognize it, and that recognition twists the knife of fear in my guts.
It’s Marla, the Snake shaman who was on my team when we hit the Eighty-Eights’ depot. Already knowing, deep down, what I’m going to see. I look at what’s left of the other faces. I recognize them all, every one of them.
They’re Cutters.
The engine of my Harley Scorpion howls in my ears as the glowing lines on the tach and speedo stretch upward. Wind and rain lash my face, and my drenched hair sends cold water seeping down the back of my neck. It’s cold, but nothing compared to the chill that’s already settled in my spine like dirty ice. I’ve got the bike bars in a death-grip, squeezing them so hard my forearms ache. It’s the only way I can stop my hands from shaking.
The Scorpion is screaming through the night, the big bike pushing its limit, wailing south on Highway 5 at one-sixty klicks. It’s not that I’m going anywhere—or that I know where to go—it’s just that I need to think, and I think better when I’m moving, preferably sitting in the saddle of a high-powered speed machine. It’s always been like this, even when I was growing up in Lake Geneva, before my family moved the fifty klicks or so north to Milwaukee proper. I’d wanted a trail bike, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it. Instead they got me a fifth-hand Bombardier WaveRunner, a water jet-powered thing that looked like a cross between a snowmobile and a miniature boat.
I sneered at first, but after taking that puppy out on the lake and cranking it up, I felt like I was home. My folks preferred my “lake hog” to a bike, on the grounds that water was softer than asphalt if I ditched. What they didn’t realize was that the WaveRunner, with the throttle cracked wide open, goes so fast that water’s no more compressible than concrete. I proved that one day in a spontaneous race with a neighbor who also had a WaveRunner, when I jumped it over a ski-boat’s wake, corkscrewed in, and broke my leg in three places—along with the keel of the lake hog. My folks got me fixed up, but they wouldn’t—categorically would not—let me do anything but sell the WaveRunner for scrap.
