Fade to Black (18 page)

If not for Rico, Piper wouldn't even have considered going up against Fuchi. Her lover left her no choice.

They had to do right, never mind that it might get them all killed. It wasn't enough to just turn and walk away, let Surikov do as he would. They had taken "responsibility" for Surikov. They had to see him safely to whatever corporate home he wanted. They had to make contact with the appropriate corporate agent.

They had to cut a deal. And even that wasn't enough. They had to get Surikov's wife, too, or the man would remain a pawn of the megacorps.

A man with Rico's convictions didn't belong in the Sixth World. Piper only wished there was some finer' place where they could go, a place where doing right wouldn't get them killed.

Fuchi had developed the first desktop cyberdeck, the first neural interface. The corp had all but
written
the matrix out of whole code. Fuchi's advances in intrusion countermeasures had few rivals, and no real equals. Sleazing anything out of its cluster of mainframe computers was going to take miracle work.

Surviving the run would require intervention by the gods.

A direct confrontation with the cluster's awesome mainframes would only get her killed. She had to find another way.

She shot herself into Saganville, the heart of the Newark grid. Here, the gleaming white pyramids of system constructs, thousands upon thousands of them, crammed the datalines and rose a thousand levels into the electron night. Amid this megalopolis of constructs, Piper found a particular network address and pushed her signal inside.

Her iconic self stepped into silent darkness. Scents like sulfur and methane wafted past her. A voice, immeasurably deep and resonant, like the. voice of a god,
demanded, "WHO ARE YOU?"

Piper replied, "I am Arielle of Avalon."

"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

"I want information."

"YOU WON"T GET IT!"

"By hook or by crook, I shall."

"Oh, really? Well, maybe you will. Then again, maybe you
woo-OOOONNNNNNNTTTttttt!!!"

The final word rose suddenly into a cry, then a long, drawn-out scream that faded slowly away. As the scream faded, the voices of a thousand crows arose chattering, rasping, and ranting, raucously laughing.

The darkness before her resolved into a rickety bridge of vines and wooden slats just wide enough for one person to cross alone. The bridge spanned an immense crevasse, infinitely deep and filled with a boiling sea of fire. Piper took hold of the viny guide-ropes at waist-height and began walking across the bridge.

Abruptly, the vines parted and the bridge swung downward toward the roaring flames. Piper pulled a knotted cord from around her waist and hurled one end toward the far side of the crevasse. The hook on the end of the cord caught on a rocky prominence. Hand over hand, Piper pulled herself up.

Beyond the cliff-edge of the crevasse was a forest, shining darkly with menace. From the stunted, twisted trees, gnarled like monstrous creatures, hung the skeletal remains of those who had come before her, the persona icons of the doomed. Immense black birds chittered from the tree limbs and pecked at the tattered remains of the skeletons. A hideous smell like corruption hung heavy in the air. A thick grayish fog flowed slowly along the ground. Piper considered how to proceed.

Many paths led into this horrific electron forest. Danger lurked everywhere, in the trunk of a tree, in the stagnant waters of a malignant bubbling pool, in the huge black figures that loomed everywhere in the darkness, in things unseen, rustling softly through the undergrowth. Disease and death seemed to flow through the air and along the ground just as tangibly as the fog.

Piper found her way to a small thatched hut with a single rounded opening. She ducked her head down and stepped inside. The interior of the hut was gloomy. A small fire flickered at the center of the hard-packed floor. Smoke curled through the air. On the far side of the fire sat a dark figure wrapped in a ragged cloak and hood. This, Piper knew, was the icon of a decker known as Azrael. No one knew his real name.

Back in 2029, a virus of unprecedented power had swept through the world's computer systems, scrambling data and frying hardware. To fight the plague, the government of what was then called the United States created a special top-secret group known as Echo Mirage. The team did eventually beat the virus, but few of the special cadre survived with their sanity intact. They were deckers at a time when a direct neural interface produced sensory overload, and, often, incurable psychosis.

Azrael was reputed to be one of the few to survive Echo Mirage. If that was so, if he really had been with the project, he had not survived the ordeal unscathed. No program he wrote was without eccentricities, and he had a maniacal hatred of governments and corps that often seemed to surpass Piper's own.

"What is your quest?" he rasped.

"I seek information."

Azrael laughed and laughed, breathlessly and harsh, as raucously as the crows, then suddenly blurted,

"I know this, woman. You said it once already. Am I deaf? Do you think I'm deaf? What is it you really want?"

"Personnel and security data from Fuchi Multitronics."

"You quest the Black Towers?" Azrael laughed again, uproariously, hysterically. He laughed till he wheezed for breath, then he leaned toward the fire, peering at Piper from under the black shadow of his hood. "You will die."

"I think not."

Azrael shouted, "No one has ever penetrated the Black Towers' security processor
and LIVED to
TELL the TALE!"

"That is untrue."

Azrael laughed again, then whispered, "Maybe you're right. Maybe not. Maybe I can help you. Maybe not. How much are you willing to pay?"

"What do you offer?"

"I have secret information, very secret. Many deckers have died trying to sleaze my secrets from me.

How many have died? I can't remember. Many more have gone away wounded and bloody. I have unraveled a multitude. I have infected legions. I have dumped whole hordes. My code is great and my vengeance terrible. Terrible! What would you pay for the secret to the Black Towers? Tell me. What would you pay?"

"What do you offer?"

Azrael cackled, then rasped, "An access node that no one living has ever found. Special code that may make the difference between life and lethal feedback, specially attuned to the Black Towers' frequencies and security subroutines. A key, I offer you a key. Do you doubt it? No one has this key but I. Such secrets, such special code. What will you pay? Define your life in cred."

"What is your price?"

The price was high, as Piper had known it must be, and she had little with which to bargain.

* * *

They were somewhere in Sector 15. Shank had seen a sign a while ago that read "Scotch Plains", but he wasn't sure if that was a district name or a street name or what. He hadn't seen much besides that sign, a few trucks, some steel and ferrocrete warehouses that looked abandoned, and fences. The fences were usually of the chain-link variety, three or four meters high, and topped by coiling razorwire nasty enough to discourage almost anybody. The only things Shank had seen inside those fences were piles of scrap, mountains of scrap: crete, steel, autos. And a helluva lot of junk.

Abruptly, Thorvin veered the van across three empty lanes of roadway and slowed them to a halt facing a chain-link gateway.

"What're we stopping here for?"

"Need some parts, you freaking frag."

"What for, halfer?"

"Gotta build something for Rico."

Shank looked again at the gates. The sign there in red and yellow. "That says 'toxic waste.'"

Thorvin snorted. "Don't believe everything you read, fanghead."

"Who says I can read, skankface?"

The gates swung open, the van rolled through into a junkyard like the Grand Canyon.

* * *

Clad entirely in non-reflective black, Claude Jaeger moved through the darkness like a darker shade of night, a shadow, a ghost, perhaps a trick of the eye, an illusory image without form or substance, as silent as the night.

The place was in Sector 7, amid the jumble of streets between Stuyvesant and Grove, just over the line from center city. It was called "Meat City". The buildings were old and crammed together, with coffin hotels and cubies filling the side streets. Every kind of scalpel mechanic and medtech had an office or clinic here. Some of the docs were frauds, some dealt exclusively in transplants or contraband chrome. Few were legally licensed. Few cared if a person had any kind of SIN or if the implant a client desired was on the federal government's prohibited list.

This was also where a person came if they just couldn't live with that armor-piercing slug stuck under their ribs or if they wanted to trade body parts for money.

The alleys were lined with chipheads and other derelicts, human refuse, squatting in plastic shelters or just lying on the concrete ground, all short a couple of organs and any number of limbs. Corpses went into the ferrocrete Ditch of the Garden State Parkway. Black-clad sanitation crews swept the Ditch clean every day at dawn and dusk. Claude had good reason to know of that. The art of the physical adept often compelled him to contribute to the carnal chaff disposed of in the Ditch.

Tonight, though, he had other business. A small matter by which he would collect some nuyen. The nature of the business concerned him little, so long as it gave him the chance to express himself through his art.

The little night-glo red-on-white sign on the back alley wall, read, CyberDok: Top Chrome, Vat Organics, Primo Rates ...

This was the clinic and residence of John Dokker, former mercenary, and his friend, Fillecia Antonucci, ex-cop. Both were members of the team hired to bust out Ansell Surikov. That made them important. It might eventually make them dead. Precisely what happened depended on events, Claude knew, and on the wishes of Maurice's client, who had provided the data on John Dokker and the other runners.

Next to the small sign, a black metal door. After a pause, it slid aside, letting Claude step into the dark space beyond. The door slid shut behind him. Momentarily, the tall, gangly form of the mage Maurice came into view, coalescing as if out of the empty dark. "This way," Maurice said, pointing with his walking stick.

Doors opened before them. Claude sensed the magic Maurice used to defeat the mechanisms of locks, but didn't know or care about the spells. Such were the province of technicians.

Two stories up, they entered a room subtly lit like a birthing chamber, crammed with hi-tech equipment, a veritable jungle of cables and tubes, consoles, control panels, and numerous transparex tanks, both large and small, filled with discreetly bubbling fluids.

As Claude stepped forward, he saw clearly what hung inside the fluids of the transparex tanks: a human hand, an eye, a leg, a mass of tissue like blubber. Various internal organs. These would be cultured matrixes, bioclonal secondaries, and a potential source of DNA-matched replacement parts for John Dokker and Fillecia Antonucci, should they ever require replacement parts.

A remarkable achievement for a former mercenary. Claude had never seen a setup like this outside of a corporate lab. He could only guess at what all of it must have cost. It was, however, largely irrelevant as far as tonight's work was concerned.

Maurice tapped the keys of a comp terminal. With a soft gasp of air, a small rectangular port opened in the side of the gleaming metal container standing beside the comp terminal. On the tongue that slid out through the port was a metal disk, briefly awash with swirling vapors. Inside this disk, and the second that soon appeared, would be the original tissue samples from which the clonal matrixes had been grown.

Properly handled, and properly utilized in ritual sorcery, these samples would provide a material link to their original hosts.

And that suggested the point of tonight's business.

17

The meet came down in Sector 4, Newark International Airport. The heaviest security zone in the plex. You couldn't even get into the sector with a weapon unless you met the right guard at the right entrance with the right amount of nuyen. Rico put Filly onto that. She had contacts with the Port Authority cops, and she knew how to talk cop lingua and how to pass the cred.

Thorvin had the driver's seat, Filly the passenger side. Rico had the bench seat in back to himself.

Piper, Dok, Shank, and Bandit were waiting back at the Rahway bolthole with Ansell Surikov. Every one of the six of them had agreed to go on with the job as Rico intended. Only Piper and Filly had raised any serious objections, and here was Filly riding shotgun and greasing palms to get them into the airport. Had simple loyalty bought that? Rico could hardly believe it. He had seen so much of the world's treachery that he had trouble believing that such loyalty even existed. Then again, he couldn't think of any other explanation.

It had seemed odd to him that the two women with the crew should be the ones to argue, to object the loudest and clearest to the madness he had in mind. Until he thought about it. Until he realized that most women he had known-even as a kid-seemed somehow more closely tied to life and living than any man could ever hope to be.