Who Hunts the Hunter (17 page)
“Art!
Art
!”
Art charges ahead. Brian wonders if maybe he should’ve taken the day off, but then runs to catch up. Art stops at the junction, looking down the tunnel to the left. Five meters along, a water-tight door in the tunnel wall stands wide open, only blackness beyond.
A water-tight door .. ? like on a submarine ... ?
“What’s the frag is a door like that—”
“Ain’t you never heard of flow valves?”
“Sure, but I never seen one like that.”
Art grunts."This is where the fun starts. You ready?” Brian stares at the door and the blackness beyond, then says in a low, angry voice, “Just what are we facing here? Orks? Does that
door
lead into the ork underground?”
Art turns to face him, jabs a finger at his armor-insulated chest. In a voice low, angry and menacing, Art says, “Some of them look like orks, but they ain’t orks. Not anymore."
"Then what are they?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Yes, I fragging do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Do I have to repeat myself?”
“You’re slotting me off, kid.”
“Not likely.”
“Oh, no?”
“You got too big a sense of humor.”
“Hah-hah. Funny, kid. Real funny.” Art nods, sharply."We’ll see how funny you are when those scummers come straight at you. You know what they do when they catch you? Do you have any idea what those things are capable of?”
Brian hesitates."You’re telling me there’s more than one of them?”
Art leans into his face, and whispers, “Good guess.”
The street is just a hairbreadth beyond the border of the Bronx, in a crumbling district called Pelham. The shop located at midblock looks like a rat hole, crammed into a narrow space between a burnt-out warehouse and a rotting tenement building. Tikki pushes the door of the shop inward. It creaks. The shop’s interior is dim and dusty and crowded with every kind of electronic device: everything from telecoms to comp decks, kitchen appliances, and security devices. Mounted up near the water-stained ceiling, also veined with cracks, is a pair of Ingram SMGs mated with vidcams. One gun silently turns, tracking with Tikki as she walks toward the rear of the shop. The other stays pointed at the front door. The shop owner must be a careful person.
At the rear of the shop, behind a wooden-tone counter, sits a small male with thin gray hair. A magnifying device hangs before his eyes from the metal band ringing the crown of his head. He wears a white shirt, black suit jacket, and blue felt tie. His right hand holds something that looks like a circuit board. His left hand is pure cyber, some kind of multifunction tool, now a drill, faintly whirring, now some kind of soldering iron, sending a faint trail of smoke drifting up.
As Tikki approaches the counter, the man lifts the magnifying device from in front of his eyes and lays the circuit board aside. He looks at Tikki blankly.
“Langkafel,” she says.
The man nods, and, rising from his stool, lays his hands, such as they are, against his side of the counter. He speaks in an undertone, an almost timid murmur."I am Heinrich Langkafel. Good morning. How may I help you?”
Tikki puts the telecom from NewMan Management Systems on the counter."Tell me everything it knows.”
Langkafel nods vaguely, eyebrows rising. He smells less of anxious uncertainty than simple indecision."An unusual request,” he says in his sheep-like murmur."May I ask ... is this your device?”
“Who carried it in?”
Langkafel nods again, seeming willing to accept that as his answer, but then says, “You will understand, I think, if I remark that a businessman must be mindful of his reputation. How is it, if I may ask, that you happened to come to my shop with this request?”
“Number four-two-six.”
A nervous, sweaty scent enters the air. Langkafel hesitates, watching her. That is a sensible reaction. Number 426 refers to Lau Tsang, a ranking member of the triad organization known as the Large Circle League. Lau Tsang is the “Red Pole” in charge of enforcement for the New York metroplex. Lau Tsang does not hesitate to kill or brutalize
people who displease him. Lau Tsang is a dangerous person.
And powerful.
“Yes ... yes, of course.” Langkafel nods. He takes the telecom in hand and looks it over."Naturally, I’m happy to assist the friend of a friend. What you ask will not be difficult. A few simple tools. I would ask in return only a modest fee.”
Tikki’s been to the bank, tapped one of her accounts. She lays five fifty-nuyen notes in Fuchi scrip on the counter.
This close to Fuchi-town, the corp’s scrip is as good as certified cred.
Langkafel picks up the notes."That will be quite adequate,” he says."The work will take a few minutes. Do you wish to wait?”
“I’m waiting now.”
“Yes ... yes, of course.”
Ten minutes later, Tikki’s walking out with five sheets of densely packed information, a hardcopy direct from the telecom’s memory. Included in that info is a list of telecom codes. Those codes identify the originating telecoms used to make the last one hundred calls to NewMan Management Systems. Only one code appears more than once and it’s in the local telecommunications grid.
The question, then, is this: could O’Keefe have called the telecom at his NewMan Management office, presumably to get his messages—not once, but five times—from the same telecom, such as the telecom in his home?
And is O’Keefe that stupid?
The Doc Wagon Crisis Response Team drops from their CRT twin-engine VTOL on rappelling lines to the roof of some grungy squatzone building, and opens up with SMGs. Dr."Hoot” Hoganoff leads the charge to the fire escape. There are fifteen orks and a dozen yakuza killers all trying to cut him down with autofire and grenades, but nobody keeps Dr."Hoot” from the scene of a medical emergency.
Abruptly, the channel changes.
CyberRider appears, somewhere in the sprawl, racing through a gauntlet of howling, blood-drenched vampires and groaning gore-splattered ghouls on his Harley Magnum Express, fitted with quad-mounted machine guns and rocket launchers.
Again, the channel changes.
This time it’s Taffy Lee, swaying in time to a slow, languorous rhythm and smiling, and opening the front of her neomonochrome dress and baring her fabulous quivering boobies with their thick, jutting ...
The telecom screen goes black.
“Yo,” Monk says.
“Hoi, yo,” Minx says, lying down beside him on his lounge of cushions, blankets, and pillows. She smiles and cozies up against his side and lays her head on his shoulder."You still awake?”
“Is it late?”
“It’s morning.”
“Yeah?”
“You booty.” Minx giggles."You make me so wiz happy.”
“Yeah?”
The idea makes Monk tingle. Minx is the most gorgeous stunning beautiful woman he’s ever known, from her wild frizzled hair, changing from red to reddish orange to reddish gold and back again, to her gleaming eyes and pert nose, her slim, luscious body, and her little girlie feet. He still can’t believe that she actually likes him, much less that she
loves
him, or wants to be with him all the time. Yet, she lifts her head to nod at him and smile, then kisses him full on the mouth, and briefly exhales into his mouth, his throat, his lungs. They breathe into each other’s mouth a couple of times. It makes him hotter than sex.
And then they’re tearing at each other’s clothes and jerking around, tussling, twitching, shivering, gasping, lunging together. It’s like a fight, but every move sends them flying closer to climax, and when it’s all over they’re both winners.
“Are you happy?” Minx whispers.
“Sure,” Monk replies."With you.”
“Me too.”
It’s hard to believe how his life has changed since he met Minx. She got him a SIN, not a SIN with his name, but a SIN’s a SIN. Some of her friends got them whole new identities and the jobs with the Newark Coroner’s office, and even keyed them on this new apartment. The apartment’s not very big—not here in Newark’s Sector 3—but it’s their space and now they’ve got the nuyen to do what they want with it.
Mostly, they’ve just thrown down a few mattresses and lots of cushions and pillows, installed a big mother-fragging telecom, and tacked some of the Minx’s pictures to the walls.
The pictures are jewel. They come from all over the sprawl, pictures of bodies, corpses, hanging out of wrecked cars, lying in streets, on stretchers, some missing body parts, or with holes in their heads or other places, drooling blood and gore and various internal organs. One of the best ones shows this slag’s decapitated head sitting in the middle of a transitway lane with its eyes wide open and an expression like,
Is
this
for
real?
Monk chuckles, just thinking about it.
When he finally gets around to writing his TV/3V script or simsense treatment, the one that’s going to make him famous and rich, so rich he’ll make money just moving his bowels, he’s going to have to write in a big part for Minx, just to thank her.
He’ll make her a novastar, as big as Taffy Lee.
Even bigger.
Brobdingnagian.
Nude, and gorgeously lovely, Minx leans down over him, smiles, and kisses him."Listen, booty,” she says."If I told you we had to go do something, would you do it? without asking why? Do you trust me that much? Do you?”
Monk ponders."Sure.”
Minx smiles and nuzzles his cheek, and strokes his neck, making his nerves tingle all the way down to his feet."We have to go see somebody,” Minx says.
“Wiz,” Monk replies.
“He’s kind of different. You might think he’s strange.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We call him the Master.”
“Yeah?”
Minx smiles and nods.
“Nova.” The Master.
Why not?
The morning is hell. The Human Genome Group fires off a batch of priority reqs for some rush project that absolutely requires her personal attention, and Mr. Audit, Kurushima Jussai, requires her personal explanations for any number of trivial matters that any ordinary wageslave could understand.
On top of that, she can’t keep her composure. Wildly emotional thoughts keep popping into her head. Scottie’s back! He’s
alive!
Amy’s forced to run off to the lav or take refuge in her office to grin like an idiot and brush tears from her eyes.
When she thinks of all the times she worried that Scottie might have succumbed to the dangers of some dark corner of the sprawl, gotten mixed up with shadowrunners, or worse ...
All she can do is shake her head and moan.
Harman calls, and immediately notices the conflicting emotions on her face. She’s hardly begun explaining when he says, “I didn’t know you had a brother.”
Trying to explain about that brings her back to earth. She stalls by talking about her and Scottie as kids. That gives her time to try to understand why she’s never mentioned her brother to Harman. It’s more than just a lapse of memory. It’s a deliberate omission that she’s considered at least in passing dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and it disturbs her.
Having a shaman for a brother, if that’s what Scottie really is, isn’t something a straight suit should brag about. Shamans don’t make good suits; corps and corporates mistrust them. That fact has influenced her in the past, when Scottie wasn’t around, when she and Harman were new, but she won’t let that affect her anymore. If Harman really cares about her, and wants to forge a future with her, this is something he’ll have to accept.
He seems to take the news all right. Before she’s finished, he smiles oddly, and says, “Does this mean you’ve got magic genes?”
“Oh god, no ...” What a joke."I’m as mundane as they come.”
“Suppose you have children?”
Now that’s a sudden, frightening turn-about. Amy hesitates. The thought holds her speechless, if only because she can’t honestly answer it with a definite no. Science has yet to determine exactly what is the genetic difference between a magician and a mundane. There’s no way she can be absolutely certain that any child she might have would
not
turn out to be magically active.
“Amy, I’m just kidding.”
“I’m sorry. I just—”
“No,
I’m
sorry
,” Harman insists."Of course you don’t see anything funny in this. It was a foolish thing to say. I apologize.”
Amy draws a deep breath, and says, “Does this change anything?”
“What, your brother? I’d like to meet him. But this certainly doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“I’m so glad you said that.”
“Well ...” Harman smiles warmly, but that fades into a matter-of-fact expression, sincere but sober."I won’t say I’m not surprised. In fact, I may be more surprised than I realize, if you know what I mean. As far as anything else goes ... well, why don’t we talk this out over dinner?”
“Yes, you’re right. Let’s do that.”