Striper Assassin (20 page)

Whores of both genders in Minimalist thongs and halters line the rampways, displaying massive pecs and perfect breasts, and offering to play any game, sate any desire, for fees and even for free. Most are obviously male or female. Others smell like one but resemble the other. Some even resemble different races, those not strictly human, such as elves. Patrons of the club come in practically every imaginable form, from poser elves to make-believe cats and sharks, phony samurai and pretend-Romans. Most wear Minimalist fashion: halters and thongs, shredded body stockings, straps and cultured chains. The elite among the decadent crowds adorn themselves with shifts and robes and electro-bodypaint that flashes with ever-changing patterns of color and graphic sexual imagery.

Down on the fourth level, someone jostles Tikki’s shoulder and curses her. Tikki bares her teeth with irritation and swings her right forearm like a club, the studded guard on her arm adding impact to the blow. Staggering away from her, a man falls, spraying blood. Anywhere else that would cause a commotion. Here, though, it’s just another part of the night’s entertainment. The Seven Circles Club is no ordinary nightclub. This is where the suits and salary men and exec secs come to mingle with the wannabe razor-crowd, the chippies, and the freaks to partake of the most decadent pleasures and experience life on the edge.

The man sprawls, bleeding. People cheer and shout and applaud. A female in little more than studded black straps lets out a shriek and comes at Tikki like a cat, talons uplifted as if to strike. Tikki swings her foot, knocking the female’s legs out from under her. Gravity and the hard floor do the rest.

Prey should respect the hunter or be prepared to suffer the consequences. That is Nature’s way.

The cheers get louder.

Tikki continues down the ramps.

The Abyss glows with a fiery haze. Adama sits at a table in his black suit, smiling and fingering his walking stick. No fewer than seven women are keeping him company, fawning over him, kissing him, laughing and smiling, whispering in his ears. Any one of the seven could have stepped out of a body shop advert. In the fiery haze of the Abyss, all appear to be redheads. As Tikki approaches, Adama briefly gestures. The seven females coo and smile, lean in to hug and kiss him about the head and neck, then turn to leave.

“Don’t be long,” Adama says.

The seven all turn back to assure him they won’t, then smile and wave and walk off. Tikki wonders how they could even hear him against the background of thundering music.

Adama gives Tikki a smile. With a brief motion of his hand he directs her gaze to certain items on his table, a pack of Dannemann Lonja cigarros and a mug of something that smells like cider. The cigarros are no surprise. Adama’s been supplying those in abundance since her first job for him. She wonders where he got the cider. Her favorite beverage is not too common. She slips the cigarros into her jacket pocket, sips the cider, then puts the mug down.

“Any problems?” Adama asks.

Problems? Tikki shakes her head. The assassination of Tomita Haruso and his yakuza comrades at the Ardmore Royal Residence Plaza went exactly as planned. No problems at all.

“Good. Very good.” Adama smiles, sips his drink. “We’ll have to discuss my next target.”

“Now?”

“Well…” Adama pauses to freshen his smile. “Later, perhaps. I have other business just now. You understand.”

“Sure.”

“My Leandra,” he adds, smiling at Tikki. Then he waves one hand as if to fan away a lingering cloud of cigarette smoke. “Or did you have something in mind?”

Tikki nods. There is one thing that should be mentioned. Considering its importance.

“Such as?”

“Competition.”

“Really.” Adama smiles as if pleased. “Someone’s preparing to move against me?”

“It’s possible.”

“You mean they’ve targeted my principal weapon.”

Tikki nods. The “weapon” he refers to is her, of course. Adama doesn’t seem surprised by the news, and rightly so. He shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised—Tikki isn’t. She expected reprisals from the moment she first contracted to work for Adama. It’s an occupational hazard. Humans never seem to grasp the essential truth of their own existence, that the majority of them are prey, and that they are born to breed and die, and little else. Even the most innocuous of humans seems to imagine that he or she possesses the rights and power of a hunter. The few predators among the human race, such as the yakuza, seem to imagine themselves indomitable, and so should be expected to turn against the hunter.

Tikki knows how to handle that. First, she’ll play bodyguard so Adama can enjoy his night of fun; then, she’ll hunt. Track down this stupid prey that turns to face her and do what must be done. It shouldn’t be too difficult. No more than in the past.

“What will you do?” Adama asks.

Tikki gazes at him for a moment, wondering why he asks, then gives him a faint look of amusement. “Maybe I’ll go on vacation,” she says.

Adama smiles, then laughs out loud.

Uproariously.

26

Eighteen hours gone and he returns to the loft to find Axle and Dana just sitting around. The black girl, the so-called decker, is lying on the sofa like a lump of meat. It’s enough to sour his mood. Hammer lights a Millennium Red, takes a deep drag, then walks over to the kitchen area for a bottle of Coors Extra Dry. If he or Dog Bite or Mickey don’t turn up something soon, they’ll be skanked. “Well?”

“We’re not really sure what happened, Hammer,” Dana answers quietly. “She crashed. I guess about two hours ago.”

By that, of course, she means the decker biff fragged up somehow and got blown out of the Matrix. Hammer isn’t too surprised. This is what he gets for skimping, for hiring unknown talent from out of town. This is what he gets for not personally supervising things. He snaps open his bottle of Coors and turns to face them, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “She dead?”

“No,” Dana says, pushing back her long black hair. “I think she’s just dazed. Out of it.”

“Did she get anything?”

Dana looks to Axle, who’s sitting with the decker’s Fuchi-6 across his lap. Axle shrugs. What does a rigger know about cyberdecks? What does anyone know about anything?

“I think the deck’s kind of scrambled,” Axle says. “I managed to get some stuff on the screen, but that’s it.”

Hammer takes a drag off his Millennium Red. “What stuff?”

“Well…” Axle glances down at the deck, taps a key. “It looks like Striper’s using the name Fallon Sontag. I don’t know where Angel got that data, but there’s some notes here, not much. Apparently, Striper used the name Sontag to go to L.A. and Chicago, possibly as a media snoop.”

Hammer has a sip of his Coors. Knowing Striper’s working alias might help. He’ll have to get a decker, someone he can trust, to do a sweep of the city’s data bases. A pro like Striper might use more than one alias, but at least it’s a definite lead. Everything else they’ve turned up so far, everything he and Mickey and Dog Bite have found out, comes under the heading of maybes and maybe-nots. Striper’s been seen all over the place, on both sides of the Delaware, in everything from classy yakuza hangouts to parking garages to the most scurvy dives in the city. People say she’s rabid, vicious. Smart, too. She doesn’t seem to make a habit of frequenting any one club or bar. She’s always on the move. That makes her a more difficult target.

She also doesn’t hesitate to hurt people, human or otherwise. Supposedly, she scragged some ork and then stole his cycle. That’s something to keep in mind. Hammer tried his contacts in the ork underground, but they could add nothing.

It’s going to be a bitch of a job.

“I don’t guess either of you know if our decker friend got herself traced.”

“Traced?” Dana gasps. “Traced
here?”

Axle turns his face toward the ceiling.

Hammer downs the rest of his beer, tosses the bottle toward the sink. “Right. Let’s the get the frag out.”

“What?” Dana says. “Out where?”

“Do we take the deck?” Axle says.

“Wait a sec!” Dana exclaims. “What about Angel?”

Hammer pauses long enough to crush his smoke under the toe of his shoe. “Take the deck. Leave the biff.”

“We can’t just leave her, Hammer.”

Hammer watches Dana for a moment, then heads down the hall to his room. Dana is becoming a problem. When did she get so sensitive? She won’t kill anybody, she won’t hurt anybody—what’s next? Next, she won’t do anything that isn’t nice. Mage or not, if she gets any worse than she already is, she’s out. Hammer’s got enough trouble just trying to keep the team together, keep them all from getting smoked, to deal with any more unnecessary baggage.

There isn’t much in his room that he needs. Most of his gear is downstairs in the van. He tosses what he absolutely cannot leave behind into a duffel and slings the bag from his shoulder.

The danger is that the fragging biff decker, Angel, hosed up on a run against some really major corporate data base. The megacorps are all multinational. Some have offices and/or subsidiaries right here in Philly. Those that don’t have their own in-house security services have security on contract, and one thing those outfits do is hunt down deckers who violate corporate datasystems. Sometimes it takes a few hours, or even a couple of days. The point is that some of the outfits, like the Renraku Red Samurai guards or the First Force mercenaries, have been known to reconnoiter by fire, shooting first and asking questions later—if anyone’s still alive to question. Hammer isn’t going to hang around here till he hears the thumping of a Northrup gunship, or worse, a Hughes Stallion delivering a strike team to the roof.

As Hammer steps back into the hall. Axle hustles back into the bedroom opposite and starts banging things around, rushing to pack up and move out. Hammer returns to the main room. Dana is leaning over the decker, Angel. The mage’s hands are glowing green, and Angel is moaning.

“Two minutes,” he says.

“Hammer,
please!”
Dana shoots a frantic look back over her shoulder. “I can’t rush this.”

First aid, as Hammer is well aware, isn’t Dana’s strong suit. There was a time, back when she and Hammer first met, when she hardly seemed to care about people at all. Forget about first aid. Arcane knowledge was all that mattered. Manipulating power, the elements. Discovering secrets. Lately, it seems, all she does is jammer and moan. She’s losing it, losing her grip, her edge. Maybe she isn’t good enough to do the magic she wants. Who knows? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. She can be replaced.

“Two minutes.”

Dana groans softly, and so does her patient. Hammer crosses the room and enters the freight elevator. Axle comes hurrying up the hall and into the main room carrying a pair of suitcases. At a cry from Dana, he turns. Hammer clenches his teeth and jabs at the elevator controls. The doors close. The elevator descends. One thing Hammer won’t miss about this building. The elevator’s too fragging slow.

The van waits by the loading dock behind the building. Hammer tugs the side door open and climbs in. He stows the duffel bag with the rest of his gear, then gets in behind the wheel.

A little more than two minutes later, the door on the loading dock swings open and out come Dana and Axle. Each is carrying one of Axle’s suitcases, and, between them, the decker biff. Angel looks mostly unconscious, eyes like slits, head lolling. She stumbles and the three of them almost fall right off the loading dock. Hammer curses. It’s another thirty seconds before the three are finally into the van and sliding the side door closed. Hammer keys the engine and drives around the side of the building to the alley leading to the street.

Coming up the middle of the alley is some partygirl or street ho Hammer hasn’t seen around before.

One thing about her, the biff, ho, whatever she is—she’s got big hair, a huge curly mass of black. Hammer likes that. She’s wearing black visorshades, a black fringed jacket with gold flash, and some wispy kind of black blouse that covers her chest, some of it. Her skirt is barely long enough to cover her crotch, and she’s riding ten-story heels. Overall, not half-bad.

The alley’s narrow. Run the biff down or stop, that’s the choice. Hammer’s tempted, but then the biff waves at him like an old chummer and comes toward his side of the van.

Hammer puts the smartgun to the sill of the open window.

“Oooh, baby,” the biff says, husky-voiced, smiling, and waving a hand very casually at the smartgun’s muzzle. “Keep the piece to yourself. You know someone name ’a Hammer?”

Hammer frowns. “What?”

“Hammer,” the biff says. “Got a doss around here?”

“What if he does?”

The biff takes a moment answering that, looking at him like maybe she already knows who he is. “I got some stuff to sell. Paydata. Very hot.”

Sure. “What about it?” Hammer growls.

“Well, do you know the slag or what?”

“Talk to me.”

“I’ll talk to Hammer, thanks.”

“That’s me.”

“Oh, yeah?” The biff smiles wryly. “I hear you’re looking for some mainliner called Striper.”

“Don’t waste my time.”

“You want Striper? I’ll take you to her.”