Striper Assassin (14 page)

The slag with the Ingram watches her a moment, then leans the smartgun back against his shoulder. The mage lowers her hands. They all turn away.

“Hey,
wait!”
Neona calls. “WAIT A SEC!”

This time the guy with the Ingram turns around and steps right into her face, glaring. The Ingram presses lightly into her left ribs. “What’s your beef?” he growls.

Neona swallows. What she’d give right now for some heavy-duty back-up. “I’m just… I’m new in the plex. Tryin’ to make a connection.”

The guy tilts his head, studying the side of her head where she’s got her datajack, her right temple. “Yeah? So what?” he says.

“Know anybody who needs a decker?”

“You a ramjammer or a chiphead?”

“I’m burning chrome on a hotjack!” she blurts adamantly. The slag just watches her for a moment, glancing down at her bag, then says, “Hardwired?”

“Neu… neuromantically radical,” she stammers.

The slag opens his mouth to say something, but doesn’t get any further than that. A troll built like the front end of a bus comes up behind the group and brawls, “Hammer! Cloak da iron,
dammit
! ’Fore I count zero on you!”

Hammer, the slag glaring into Neona’s face, lifts a hand to his mirrorshades, and shouts back, “I’m talkin’ biz with a Mona Lisa!”

The guy with the silver eyes and smirky grin nods at Neona and says. “Let’s try ’er, Hammer.”

“HAMMER!”
the troll roars.

Hammer’s face turns a furious red, but then the mage puts a hand to his right shoulder and says, “Let’s go outside and talk.” With a glance at Neona, then a glance back at the troll, she adds amiably, “We’re not looking for grief.”

“Yeah,
right!”
Hammer looks at Neona, then nods curtly toward the main entrance. Neona follows the group outside.

It’s looking like maybe she’s made a connection.

That would make it a good night.

20

The digital display on Tikki’s wrist chronograph reads 00:56:29 as she steers the stolen Volkswagen Super-kombi III into the southwest parking field of the Ardmore Royal Residence Plaza. She notes with satisfaction that, as usual, a minimum of a half-dozen other personal-use commuter and cargo vans are scattered about the parking field, along with a wide variety of standard autos, everything from executive sedans to basic econocars. Maybe a thousand vehicles in all. The Volkswagen will blend in just fine.

The sprawling apartment complex lies just off Route 30, just beyond the Philadelphia city limits. Nine tall towers rise from the orange-vapor glare of the parking fields. At this hour, the only other illumination is from the desolate ground-floor lobbies and the flaring red strobes of aircraft warning lights stroking the dark night sky.

All very, very good.

Tikki steers the Volkswagen around the parking field. Position is important. There are no empty parking spaces close to Tower Seven, but that is no problem. She planned to park at a distance. Tikki finds a space where she can park the van with the rear window facing the southwest façade of Tower Seven at a range of about two hundred meters. She cuts the engine and waits, waits and watches, then gets down to business.

Tonight’s work requires that she carry an unusual amount of gear. That meant careful planning and now requires methodical execution. Tikki takes her time, spends a few moments adjusting the fit of her gloves, black plastic ones that fit like a second skin. She moves to the rear of the van and takes a Walther XP-700 semiautomatic pistol from her compartmentalized duffel bag. The XP-700 is one of the few match-grade precision weapons that load more than one bullet at a time—five rounds via an integral magazine, and one directly into the firing chamber. The weapon is loaded and ready to go.

Tikki kneels on the back bench seat and takes another look around. Except for the vehicles parked there, the parking field is deserted.

With a touch of a sensor tab, Tikki lowers the van’s rear window, then braces her arms on the back of the bench seat and sights in on the southwest face of Tower Seven. The pistol’s flat-black finish absorbs light rather than reflects it. The Ares optical night sight brings the distant rectangle of a fire door so close it seems only an arm’s length away. Tikki inclines the muzzle of the XP a bit, bringing the security cam mounted just above the door clearly into view, seeming close enough to touch. The Lumex laser targeting module puts a sharply focused red dot on the upper surface of the downward-angled cam to indicate her exact point of aim.

When she pulls the trigger, there is only a quiet thump, thanks to the Fabrique silencer.

Through the optical sight, Tikki sees a hole appear in the top surface of the security cam. That is exactly as planned. She also glimpses what seems to be a quick shower of sparks. Better and better. She touches the tab to raise the van’s window, returns the Walther to the duffel bag and crouches down to wait.

In about three minutes, according to her wrist chrono, a car comes squealing into the parking field, amber strobes flashing as it races through the turn, then rushes across the lot toward the southwest fire door. The timing is important, suggestive. The first time she gave Ardmore security a reason to respond, a car showed up in about thirty seconds. That was two weeks ago. Response times, on average, have been growing progressively slower even since.

The car slows abruptly in approaching the fire door, then races off across the lot, then returns, then races around some more—back and forth, back and forth—and finally comes to a halt by the fire door.

A uniformed guard gets out and looks around, then up at the security cam. He tugs on the fire door, which does not open. He glances back and forth, then again, and again, then gets into his car and lifts something to his mouth, probably the mike from the dashboard com.

Twenty minutes pass. A police cruiser rolls into the lot and pulls up beside the security car. The guard gets out. The contract cops do not. This is the sixth night in just under two weeks that someone has shot at the complex, or committed other acts that might be taken as mere vandalism. The targets on other nights included parking field lights, lobby windows, and the cardkey lock on one of the automated booths at the entrance to the complex. One of the private vehicles that patrol the complex was also vandalized, forcibly entered, and stripped of various equipment.

The guard puts on a good show, but the response times tell the story. No one gets very excited about a busted security cam. Their voices carry across the parking field, in through the van’s side windows, to Tikki’s ears. Audibly enough for her to discern tones and emotive inflections, even if she doesn’t catch every word.

It’s just one more incident of malicious property damage, they seem to decide. Probably it’s all random.

“So call repair,” says one of the cops.

Good, very good.

The cops soon depart.

The guard stands around a while, then drives around a while, then finally goes away and doesn’t come back. Tikki spends a few moments in preparation, then pulls on a knee-length lightweight black duster. She has no further use for the Volkswagen van and abandons it where it sits.

Duffel bag in hand, she walks across the parking field to the fire door. The second floor of the apartment tower projects out over the ground floor and casts moderate shadows over the door. That provides some useful cover.

She takes a pair of Zeiss Optik CFS-49 goggles from the duffel bag and slings the unit around her neck. That’s so she can bring them quickly into use when the moment arrives. She could have put them on in the van, but preferred not to walk across the parking field with a military-grade vision-enhancement device dangling from her neck.

Under the duster she wears a nylon-reinforced web belt and harness. From a clip at the front of the belt, she pulls out a passkey marked for Ardmore security. She presses the On tab. Something like a standard cardkey slides out the business end of the device. She fits that to the fire door’s cardkey port, and the unit engages automatically.

The door buzzes and clicks.

Tikki pulls the door open, returns the passkey to her belt, then lifts the Zeiss goggles over her eyes. A pair of blue laser beams cross the doorway, one at chest-height, the other just below the level of her knees. The beams spring alarms if interrupted, but Tikki can easily by-pass them. She removes the duster, tosses it between the beams, then follows the duster, bending under one laser and stepping over the other. Still carrying the duffel bag, she enters the stairwell, then eases the fire door shut behind her.

Penetrating supposedly secure civilian facilities is generally no problem. What Tikki has encountered so far—guard patrol, security cam, hi-tech lock, laser-activated alarm—is about standard for apartment complexes. Enough to deter the average felon. For her, a casual slide. All it takes is preparation.

No further use for the duster. She kicks it into the dark space beneath the final flight of stairs descending to ground level. No basement access here, but that’s no problem, either. She pulls on a black ski mask that covers her whole head, but with openings for ears, nose, and mouth, and a wide gash for her eyes that allows for full peripheral vision. Even though Tikki often relies heavily on her ears and nose and even her mouth for data about her surroundings, vision is her primary perception, just as it is for humans. Sometimes she wonders if that might be all she has in common with the breeders.

To the left of the fire door, set into an inside wall, is a large metal panel marked Danger High Voltage. She knew it would be here because she’s consulted the building plans. The panel was pivotal in her planning. Now, she pulls the panel open and hooks a small diagnostic comp over the lower flange, then draws out a section of white-and orange-striped wire. Using an Armalite multitool, she strips a short section of its insulated plastic coating, connects two leads from the Telex comp to the stripped section of wire, then cuts the wire between the two leads. This effectively disables the motion detectors monitoring each of the stairway landings above her.

The Ardmore complex relies on strategic placement of security elements, rather than blanket coverage. Security cams watch all external entrances and selected internal locations. Tikki has to worry about only three, those located on the second-, fourth-, and sixth-floor landings directly above her. She connects a second device to three colored wires from the panel. This device, purchased locally, is called a line-looper. She’s tested it to make sure it works. What it does is record what a security cam sees over the course of, say, a millisecond, then feeds that recording endlessly to the central monitoring station. That effectively blinds the cams to what’s really passing by.

Tikki knows that a decker could have been of help in this operation, but she avoids using them unless absolutely necessary. Deckers rank among the class of things she considers to be perverse. Projecting one’s consciousness into the electronic realm of the global computer net is perverse. Animals have meat bodies because they were meant to live in a world of meat bodies. Abandoning one’s flesh and blood like a tool no longer needed strikes her as grotesque. She mistrusts anyone who would do that, all deckers, nearly as much as she mistrusts all mages.

She mistrusts computers too, just generally.

There is also the fact that a decker would demand a minimum of several thousand nuyen to do electronically what she has accomplished with just a few simple tools in just a few seconds. At this stage in her operation, she can spare both the time and the effort.

She heads up the stairs.

The unexpected occurs as she nears the third-floor landing. The stairway door suddenly bursts open with a thump, letting a skinny male adolescent in a tee and shatjeans onto the landing. He doesn’t seem to notice Tikki until he’s reaching for the handrail and starting down the steps, coming right at her. He merely glances at her, his face showing no expression. Hurrying on, he goes right past her.

None of that fools Tikki. The boy’s physical reaction to the sight of her is immediate and telling. The scent that floods the air shouts of surprise and chilling fear. The young one knows that something is wrong. From her black ski mask and the gear on her belt, he’s got to know she means trouble. That compels her to respond.

Adama would be very displeased if she let this young animal live, placing her mission in jeopardy. Her mission is maximum destruction, and only her own survival rates higher than that. She puts the duffel bag on the steps, then leaps to the landing immediately below. The youth turns and looks up, wide-eyed, filling the air with terror, even as she descends.

It’s over quickly. She slams him back bodily against the stairwell wall, jams her left forearm across his throat. At a precise movement of her right fist, a supple black spike snaps out of the mount on her right forearm. The prey realizes what’s coming and floods the air with the stink of excrement. Tikki bares her teeth, suppresses a growl, and drives the spike into the juncture of throat and jaw, right up into the brain.

Death is instantaneous.

Tikki retrieves her duffel bag and continues up the stairs. Going up twelve flights or even fifty or a hundred with only occasional pauses to listen or test the air is no problem. She’s in excellent condition, always has been. Tikki can push herself to the point of collapse before exhaustion finally sets in. Her mother could do that, too.