Striper Assassin Read online

  Shadowrun :11

  STRIPER ASSASSIN

  Nyx Smith

  Part One

  Predator

  1

  Prey is prey.

  Human, elk, ork, troll—it makes no difference. Two-legs or four-legs does not matter. That was the first thing she’d ever learned and she’s never forgotten it. All beings are part of Nature’s scheme. Each has its proper role to play in the immortal cycle of life and death, where there is only the hunter and the hunted, predator and prey.

  The world of humans knows her as Striper, but her real name is Tikki and tonight Tikki hunts.

  The soft hum of human technology fills her ears, and the oily scents of machinery tickle her nostrils. She wrinkles her nose and flicks her nails, patiently awaiting the moment of death, when the plotting of many hours, the study and the preparation all come together in the climax of the kill. She has tracked her prey carefully. She knows its spoor, its habits. Now the stalking is done, the trap is set. Soon the prey will enter her killing ground, and then all questions will be answered, all doubts resolved with lethal finality.

  It is just like hunting in the wild.

  The elevator waits, motionless. Tikki stands inside. The control panel there hangs open, showing an array of wires that connect the elevator controls to a diagnostic portacomp used by repair techs. The comp, dangling from the open panel, gives complete override control of the elevator; it has persuaded the building’s central computer system that the elevator is undergoing routine maintenance. A second array of wires connects certain colored cables from the elevator control conduit to a small, palm-sized monitor hanging beside the portacomp. The monitor provides a view of the area just beyond the elevator doors, courtesy of the building’s own security cameras.

  There are two elevators, one in service, one not. The elevator Tikki commands waits with doors closed at the level of the underground parking garage.

  The moment of the kill approaches.

  On her monitor, Tikki sees a long black Nissan Ultima V limousine roll into the garage and glide to a gentle halt before the elevators. An instant later she hears a soft ding from her left. That is the other elevator, the one in service, now arriving at her level, the sublevel garage. She counts off the seconds… one, two, three. A light flares on the portacomp. Her ears detect a soft rumbling. On the monitor, she sees the doors of the other elevator sliding open. A small group of five people steps out. The individual she awaits is a slim Asian male with the traits of old age: thin white hair, deeply wrinkled face, frail-looking hands. His name is Ryokai Naoshi and he is one of several ranking yakuza bosses targeted for assassination.

  Ryokai’s status among the yakuza will not save him. Tikki knows about yakuza, knows that they possess great power and many soldiers. But that is irrelevant to her and no reason to forego tonight’s work. Every animal has its weapons, some possess more than others. The successful predator eludes the dangers posed by her prey, and, once committed, strikes ruthlessly to the kill.

  Ryokai and his companions move toward the limo.

  Tikki keys the portacomp.

  When the doors in front of her trundle open, she is holding a Vindicator minigun, a large and cumbersome weapon with six revolving barrels that are already whirring. No need for her to leave the elevator. The limo is right there, barely five meters away and just slightly to her left. Ryokai, his two bodyguards, and another suit and a stylishly attired female are just coming up alongside the limo. One of the suited bodyguards abruptly snaps his head around and looks in Tikki’s direction, but even he is too slow, too late.

  They are all in her direct line of fire.

  Tikki squeezes the trigger.

  The Vindicator roars, the whirling barrels spitting fire, the weapon’s rapid-fire stammer rising to thunder quick and raw. Armor-piercing shells chew up the side of the limo, smashing windows and flattening tires, shredding the soft-bodied humans in-between like so much fleshly foliage. Shattered glass and spraying blood shower the limo and the concrete floor. The bodies twist and spin and topple. Tikki spends the final few rounds of the Vindicator’s fifty-round magazine on her primary target, Ryokai’s body. It leaves the corpse looking like carrion, shredded pulp, and that is very satisfactory.

  Her contract for tonight’s kill required that the hit look like a hit and that it be very noisy and overwhelmingly destructive.

  Contract complete.

  She stabs at the portacomp. The elevator descends to the maintenance sublevels. From there, she will depart via various utility tunnels.

  All goes according to plan.

  Null sheen, as the humans say.

  2

  The last thing that seems at all real to him is the sudden clenching pressure of Jennifer’s hand at his elbow and her soft, sudden exclamation, like a gasp.

  Then the nightmare begins.

  A roaring like thunder fills the air, fire flares in his eyes, then comes pain, an ocean of pain, a galaxy of pain, more pain than he had ever imagined might afflict a single person, agony, excruciating, without end, without limit. Piercing him from every direction. Pounding into his skull. Slamming through his whole body. Some part of him can’t believe that one person could suffer this degree of agony and survive. He feels as if pain alone, like a tangible physical force, might split him apart, break him into pieces and crush him, smash him into atoms.

  What comes next exceeds comprehension. Despite the agony, he’s moving, moving fast, as if shooting down a long dark tunnel. Faster and faster. Till the speed is ripping at his flesh, tearing at his limbs, wrenching at his whole body.

  The tunnel grows brighter, brilliant, blinding. He plunges into an incandescent whiteness, a searing inferno of white. Utterly overwhelming.

  Without end…

  3

  By two a.m. the old road is deserted, leading north through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Confederated American State of North Carolina. In the distance lightning sears the black vault of the night, and the sound of thunder resounds through the hills like barrages of massed artillery.

  Raman stands along the shoulder of the road. Gleaming steel claws protrude from the studded black bracer sheathing his right forearm. He watches the bulging eyes of the man hanging from the razor-edged blades. The man, like his companion sprawled nearby, wears the corporate uniform of the state patrol, and he is dying for his indiscretions. Blood streams from his midsection to pool on the hard-packed ground around his feet. Before long his eyes glaze over. His body goes limp. It is a death Raman considers unfortunate for the trouble it may bring, but wholly unavoidable.

  Raman lowers his arm and lets the body fall. He dislikes having to kill law enforcement officials, but these two left him no choice. They sought to prevent his escape.

  The contract cops’ dark blue Nissan Interceptor sends blips of red and blue across the face of the trees flanking the road. Other cars and other police will soon be coming. Perhaps even airborne vehicles. Raman’s recent work in Atlanta seems to have roused half the Confederated American States. He glances around quickly, then gives the snapblades a shake before retracting them with a soft snick of gleaming metal. Obviously, he must continue his headlong rush to safety. His record is too long to risk being snared by the authorities. Arrest would surely be followed by conviction, imprisonment and death, and that must never happen. It is his promise to himself.

  Better to be cut down by a hail of bullets, left to die alone in some rubbish-strewn alley or along a forgotten stretch of highway than be confined in a prison to die like a lamb at the hand of his executioners.

  Death itself is not the issue.

  Death is his brother. Raman has no fear of it. When he dies, he will die free, as fate should have it.

  Some other night, perhaps.


  His stolen Harley Scorpion awaits him on the shoulder just a few steps back. Raman sets the engine to whining and tears out onto the pavement, hurtling up the road. He hunches forward, shifting his weight to keep the hog’s front tire on the decaying blacktop. A few kilometers more and he’ll be across the border and into a part of the world known as Virginia.

  The irony of the name draws from him the wry flicker of a smile. There is nothing virginal anymore.

  Nothing, nowhere.

  4

  In a room awash with a reddish haze Bernard Ohara awakens to the cozy heat of the bed and the warm, yielding pressure of a pair of female bodies, one on his left and the other on his right. The names that go with the bodies are Christie and Crystal. Both biffs are blue-eyed blondes; they look and sound and feel enough alike to be twins. Their figures are miraculous, exquisite, lush. Ohara is sure the biffs owe their extravagant proportions to Gold’s Premier Salon or some other similar establishment specializing in body sculpture, but doesn’t care.

  His only interest is their willingness to please him. That’s why he keeps them, why they came to his attention in the first place.

  Lying there in the blood-hued dark, Ohara recalls with a smile his promises to get the twins into trideo, perhaps even state-of-the-art simsense productions. Those promises have since become irrelevant, much as he had expected. The biffs aren’t interested in acting. All they care about is money. They will do almost anything for the right amount of nuyen, wait on him like slaves, warm his bed. That doesn’t stop Ohara from wondering if having them on chip might be even more exciting than the real thing. It often works out that way—with the right emotive overlays, the right editing… and so forth.

  Something warm and wet slips over his ear. Moist lips gently brush his cheek. Long-nailed fingers graze his neck, his chest, moving to caress him lower down. His new implant responds with a speed and resolve he still finds astonishing, but that he has come to relish. In mere moments he is hard as stone, aching for it.

  One of the biffs moans and climbs onto his hips, taking him inside. Her husky pleas urge him to exuberance. The grip of her body sends an electric thrill streaking up his spine to erupt all through him with explosive delight.

  It leaves the biff panting, sprawled over to his side. Ohara grunts contentedly. The other one, Christie or Crystal, whichever, begs for a turn. Ohara smiles and gives it to her hard and fast, the way he likes it.

  As it ends, the telecom bleeps.

  His private line.

  “Drek,” he grumbles.

  The Hi-D telecom display set into the wall beyond the foot of the bed shifts to a muted gray. The stylized corporate logo of KFK International, Kono-Furata-Ko, appears briefly at center-screen, then swells to fill the background as the rounded features of an Asian male come into view.

  It is Enoshi Ken, Ohara’s corporate aide.

  “Give me the remote.”

  One of the biffs. Crystal, or Christie, presses the remote into his hand while squirming sensually against his side, nuzzling his neck, trailing a hand across his groin.

  Ohara grunts, keys the remote.

  Audio only.

  “I said no interruptions, dammit!”

  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 traff
ic 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 Market Street subway. The next arriving train fires her across town toward the Schuylkill River.

  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.