Authors: Nyx Smith
Striper Assassin (2 page)
Up on the big screen, Enoshi bows his head.
Ohara smiles acidly. At least his fool of an aide has not yet used his name, not over an open telecom line. Ohara is careful about security, and demands no less from his subordinates, what with all the neoanarchists and other radicals yearning to work out their deep-seated psychological disturbances against the upper strata of the corporate hierarchy. His condominium here in the Platinum Manor Estates is registered to his corporate benefactor, rather than in his own name. He also employs a pair of elite Birnoth Comitatus executive protectors around the clock, plus other defenses as well.
“Please excuse me, sir,” Enoshi says in a typically ingratiating tone, apologizing for the interruption, as certainly he should. “In this case, however, I thought—”
Ohara isn’t interested in the rationale. “Get on with it.”
“Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir. I have just received word from our chief of security that Mister Robert Neiman is dead.”
This comes as a surprise. Ohara frowns at the thought of losing a chunk of the corporate architecture he has so artfully redesigned. This is not only inconvenient, but at least briefly disturbing. Neiman was head of the Special Projects Section of Exotech Entertainment, a closely held subsidiary of KFK and Ohara’s primary realm of control. Since joining KFK, Ohara had lifted Neiman from the dusty crannies of mere research to control over the special unit that has recently made Exotech a hot corporate property. He had given Neiman a taste of real power, and been well-rewarded.
“What in fragging hell happened?” Ohara growls.
“I’m told that all the details are not yet known, sir.” Enoshi replies, his face ever impassive. “It appears that the police are treating the matter as a deliberate killing. A murder. They have divulged nothing specific.”
“I want a full report!” Ohara snarls, but he is far less outraged than he sounds. What the police will readily divulge and what they will surrender under pressure are two different things. Obviously, they have no suspects in custody or they would have said so up front, while making the standard notifications to Neiman’s next of kin, and of course, to his corporate master, Exotech.
The concept of some minor police official withholding information irks Ohara, but it’s not worth getting upset about it. That is a matter for Enoshi to handle, a minor issue of intercorporate prestige.
As for the actual details of Neiman’s death, Ohara has little interest. It is enough to know that the modern metroplex provides abundant opportunities for a person to get himself killed. All it takes is a single slip. Even a normally cautious individual like Neiman might commit a fatal error in judgment. The man probably had no inkling of what was coming until it was too late. Ohara has seen it happen that way.
One can never be too careful.
“Yes, sir,” Enoshi says, again bowing his head. “I will get you a full report. Immediately. Is there anything else?”
It should be obvious. Even half-asleep, in bed with a pair of sex-addicted biffs, Ohara’s got more on the ball than his toady senior aide and so-called chief of staff. As if there could be any doubt. He allows himself a sarcastic smile. The only problem with the Japanese, the one most serious problem, is that they have no initiative. They can’t make a decision without first consulting a committee of thousands—everyone they work with, everyone they work for, right on up to the chairman of the board of directors—if Ohara let them go that far.
Unfortunately, in an organization like KFK, and a world like that of 2054, Ohara can’t avoid dealing with the “culturally challenged.” Drones like Enoshi are too deeply embedded within the structure. They’re pervasive.
“Who’s Neiman’s assistant? Baines?”
“Bairnes, sir.”
“Right.” Details like that, the names of junior staff members, are what he pays Enoshi to know and know by rote, as if written into his soul. Ohara’s responsibilities run more toward the big picture, the complete picture, as from atop the corporate heap.
“Tell Bairnes he’s about to be promoted. I want his assessment of the Special Project Section’s current strategy in my queue by tomorrow noon. And that is to include his recommendations for changes. Don’t waste my time with visuals. I want hard text. Paydata. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Enoshi says quickly. “I’ll notify Mister Bairnes at once.”
“See that you do,” says Ohara, abruptly cutting the connection.
5
The name of the club is “Spit’s” and tonight the cataclysmic fury of bruiser metal roars out from the entrance, sending a feral rhythm through the steel-and-concrete canyon whose glaring neon billboards rise to thirty and forty stories. Sky swimmers drifting far overhead blare with the audio tracks of adverts winking and flashing on ten-by-eight trideo displays. Ground traffic hums and growls and squeals along four narrow lanes of pavement. The breeds and breeders alike crowd the crumbling sidewalks: humans and metas, polis and skinheads, suits and scats, trogs and toughs, wannabe razors in studs and leather, the NeoMonochromes and tats and electro-bodyware freaks, and all the other thousand sweating, swearing, shouting variants to be found in the postmodern, post-Ghost Dance, re-Awakened urban environment.
Just down the street, voices rise sharp and vicious. A flurry of fists ends with the flash of a knife and the quick, dull thumping of a semi-automatic weapon. One man slumps to the concrete, all but disemboweled. Another staggers toward the corner, bleeding copiously from the shoulder. One dies, one survives. To the victor go the spoils.
Philadelphia
metroplex, downtown Saturday night.
Tikki leans back against the gleaming, wet-look front of the vibrating nightclub and lights a Dannemann Lonja cigarro, long and slim. She smiles, only to herself. She’s in her element here, amid the throbbing pulse of the urban jungle, where the noise assaults the ear and the street life flows eternal. To her, the passing crowds are a single, seething herd of animals oblivious to the gaze of the hunter and to the intimate nearness of death.
They are prey without eyes.
A red and white cruiser marked for Minuteman Security Services Inc., the local law, comes rushing up the block, strobe lights flashing, siren squealing. Tikki had nothing to do with the killing just down the sidewalk, and she does not plan to hang around long enough to see whether or not the law will believe it. She turns and steps around the corner of Spit’s, into the alley there. Two minutes later, she’s heading down a long tunnel leading to the
She hasn’t been in Philly long, but the terrain is familiar, just one more sub-sector of the vast metroplex sprawling away to the horizon, an urban nightmare that will one day blanket the globe. Cablecast trideo, the global computer networks, and the world’s hopelessly interlocked economies have so homogenized the urban lands where Tikki hunts that she often has to stop and remind herself where she is. Telling one place from another is sometimes that difficult.
Of course, there are nuances to the terrain, special dangers and other distinctions, most of them rather minor, but the careful predator learns the differences with every breath, every glance, every snatch of sound.
Also, Tikki has good contacts who provide her with the most essential information.
Her fixer in Chiba steers her to the right people.
As the express roars through the dark, dank tunnels under the earth, a uniformed Minuteman cop strolls up the aisle to the end of the last car of the train. That’s where Tikki stands, leaning against the car’s rear wall. Her eyes take in the cop’s every movement. Her nose discerns nothing unusual, no hint of either excitement or alarm, though the slag strolls right up to her, looking her over. It’s easy to guess the cause for his interest. It’s highly unlikely that he has spotted the Kang heavy automatic concealed at the small of her back. Rather, it’s probably a question of image.
Tikki is tall for a female, tall and lean. Her eyes are covered with black Toshiba mirrorshades, and her face is a carefully painted mask of crimson red, striped with black. Her close-cropped hair, including the wispy tuft floating down over her left brow, is tinted to match her face. She wears gleaming blood-red leather—jacket, mesh blouse, slacks, fingerless gloves—all “striped” by the studded bands at her neck, wrists, waist, and on her supple boots.
All the studs are brushed steel. Tikki has sometimes worn gold studs in the past, but never anything silver. Silver is retro-skag. She hates it.
“ID?” the cop says, facing her from a step away.
Tikki lifts her special card right up in front of his face. A squeeze of one corner displays her City of Philadelphia. Inc., weapons permit and official bodyguard ID in alternating sequence. The cop doesn’t react except to move his eyes like he’s reading, then to compare the picture to her face. She could put a monofilament sword straight into his gut right now and he wouldn’t even notice till he felt the first searing rush of pain.
Amateurs and fools are everywhere. Her primal heart urges her to lash out, take this prey, an easy kill, but she resists.
Some other night, perhaps.
The train squeals to a halt in the bowels of the
The suits all wear the colors of their corporate affiliations pinned to their lapels, just like yakuza or ordinary street gangs. Only the corporate gangs have names like Cigna Universal, Renraku, ITT-Rand, SmithKliner, Fuchi, or Aztechnology, each with its special area of influence and interest. The only difference between the corp gangs and the street gangs is the texture of the violence they do and the number of bodies they leave lying around. None really obey the law. Rather, they exert themselves to evade the law, evade capture, evade punishment.
Tikki often wonders why humans bother making laws at all. At best, laws provide unnecessary complications. To her, the only laws that really matter are the ones governing survival, the struggle between predator and prey, and the balance between the thousand species of animals walking the planet. Nature’s laws.
The herds ascending the escalators are about half white and half black, brown, or tan. Asians account for a far less significant share of the population here than in other cities, but their power and influence is ubiquitous, obvious at a glance. Trogs and other metahumans maintain a low profile. The Night of Rage still simmers. The slogans of the Alamos 20,000 and various other anti-meta policlubs cover the sides of the trains, the platforms, and concrete columns like so much spattered gore.
Tikki has no problem with racially motivated hate and violence. It keeps the herds looking in every direction but the one from which she’s coming.
She rides up to the ground-level concourse.
Meters-tall trideo screens climb the walls, flaring and buzzing with adverts. The herds of suits spread out to fill the wide floor. Subways, buses, and commuter rail lines all converge here in the
Tikki is stopped twice for ID checks. That’s nothing more than she expected.
Clusters of telecom stands turn the broad floor of the concourse into an enormous pinball game, breaking the rivers of hustling salarymen into hundreds of individual streams. Tikki steps up to one of the stands and puts a wad of chewing gum over the telecom’s visual pickup. When the time on the telecom’s display shows 20:05:00, she thrusts a certified credstick into the chrome port. Her fingertips tingle, the telecom bleeps. The words “Enter Telecom Code” wink on and off, on and off. Tikki leans toward the display like a near-sighted geezer, interposing her head between the screen and anyone who might try to look over her shoulder. She taps at the keys. Three times she enters the code, and three times she hears sounds like a telecom bleeping at the other end of the line, followed immediately by a return of call tone. She is into and through several secured telecom systems that quickly. Midway along she lifts a Fuchi MemoMan recorder to the telecom’s audio pickup. The corder spits out a rapid-fire electronic melody that gets her past a specially coded protocol barrier.
The telecom’s display goes blank, jet-black. A male answers, in Japanese. Tikki’s Japanese isn’t fabulous, but she gets by.
“Who’s this?” he asks.
“Two guesses,” Tikki murmurs.
Her reply is enough for a voiceprint analysis that clears her call through the final barrier. Call tone returns. Tikki taps in a final number. A new voice, also male, comes on the line. It is a computer-synthesized simulation of the voice of her Chiba fixer. The agent’s name, translated from the Japanese, means Black Mist. He makes connections for her worldwide and performs other services, all for a fee.