Nyx Smith - Fade to Black

"Ground Four and Five," Skip said. "Intercept hostiles."

Where Mott Street met Raymond Boulevard, a dark brown Brigade sedan suddenly shot right onto the roadway, broadsiding one of the hostile sedans, only to be struck in the tail by the van accompanying that car.

Then, the runner's gray and black van came roaring out onto Mott street at mid-block, turning toward Fleming. The hostiles coming up the street from that direction, a car and a van, abruptly split left and right, skidding sideways and effectively blocking off the roadway. The runners' van didn't even slow down. It slammed against the sedan's front left side, bounded up onto the sidewalk, then down again, and went roaring straight at the corner.

Autofire punctuated by the thumping of heavy weapons was breaking out all over the place.

Thorvin had the power plant to the max as they hit the street, engine roaring, tires screaming, laying a trail of smoking black as he turned up the block. He saw the big sedan and the van coming straight at him, splitting left and right to block the roadway. No way he was stopping. The combat subroutine of his onboard computer performed an immediate analysis on the sedan and put a rapidly winking red indicator right where he should hit the sedan for maximum effect.

It was quite an impact. Nearly shook the datajack right out of his skull. Cost him an outboard sensor array. But he had the speed up to eighty kph by then and-freaking hell-the physics worked! He caught a glimpse of the sedan spinning half a circle as he bounded up over the curb and tore a path down the sidewalk and straight to the corner. Just a simple matter of mass versus energy, really.

Corner coming up fast.

Skid turn-no other way around it.

Bullets pounded off his skin as the tires gave a banshee wail and sent him sliding sideways around the comer.

Alarm bells in his ears.

An image leapt into the back of his mind, something like a jet fighter swooping low over the buildings off to the left of the intersection. A red schematic flashed in front of his eyes: A CyberSpace Designs recon drone.

"Bird's with us again!" he snarled.

"Burn it!" Rico barked.

A targeting indicator winked-locking on. Thorvin popped the M-134 minigun out of his roofpod and opened up. Three bursts, and the drone went spinning wing-over-wing, down and out of sight.

Bobbie Jo felt the slugs battering her airframe, then the flare of fire from the long-range fuel tanks. Alarm indicators flashed and flickered. The skin over her right wing split and burst into tatters. The concrete ground came swirling toward her.

She screamed. Blackness swallowed her.

Another bone-rattling impact and they were clear of the attacking forces converging on Mott Street.

Thorvin had the power plant opened up wide, and the noise was deafening. The roar of the engine rising into a stammering whine that chipped "away at the nerves like sustained autofire. Hanging onto his seat with one hand and his Predator 2 with the other, Rico clenched his teeth and stared into the passenger-side rearview mirror. He tried not to think about the people bouncing around in the rear of the van. There wasn't time.

"Splash one drone!" Thorvin bellowed over the scream of the van's engine. "I'm heading for the freaking you-know-what?'

Rico nodded. "Do it!"

Surikov cried out from the rear. The slag was scared and rightly so, but he and Dok would have to deal with it. Bandit's warning that someone was about to bust the Mott Street safehouse had come none too soon. The hostiles had moved in on foot and in cars and in vans and had even thrown up a drone. Probably, it was Daisaka Security, the security arm of Maas Intertech's parent corp, Kuze Nihon.

Nobody with organized paramilitary forces brought out the heavy guns just because they felt like partying. There had to be a reason for the attack, and Surikov was the only one that made sense. But the point that bothered Rico most was not who or why, but rather how the opposition had gotten to them at Mott Street. How had they been found out?

Two possibilities came to mind. One was that someone might have tailed them to the safehouse, despite Thorvin's declarations to the contrary. Rico didn't think that very likely. Two, Piper might have been traced through the matrix. She was equally sure that nobody had traced her, but that didn't mean she couldn't be wrong. Rico didn't think much of that possibility either, for the simple reason that where the matrix was concerned, Piper was usually right Was there something he'd overlooked? And what in fragging hell could it be? He couldn't believe that anyone on his team had given them up.

One thought came to mind.

He looked at Dok. "Check the slag for a snitch."

"What?" Dok exclaimed. "Now?"

"Do I look like I'm joking ?"

Dok stared for a moment, swaying with the violent motions of the van as it skidded around a corner, then, he bent, broke open his medpack and went to work.

They already knew that Surikov had implants: datajack, chip memory, subprocessing unit. A really advanced skillwire system. Lots of tech drek to expedite and accelerate his scientific research. L. Kahn's chip-dossier had mentioned it. What it suggested to Rico right now was that Surikov might also have been implanted with some kind of electronic microtransmitter, something that Maas Intertech or Daisaka Security could home in on if the slag ever got "lost." or snatched.

Stuff like that wasn't common, but for top execs and ramjamming research slags like Surikov, neither was it unknown. Rico cursed himself for not anticipating the possibility and getting Surikov checked out sooner.

Surikov was lying flat on the floor. Dok bent over him, hanging onto a cargo strap. Two seconds later, the med scanner in Dok's hand began to beep shrilly, and Dok looked up, wide-eyed.

"Come on, Monk! Hurry! "

Minx grabbed his hand and tugged, propelling Monk forward, down a flight of stairs leading to a subway station. Only at the bottom of the stairs Minx turned right instead of left, yanked open a metal door marked, PLX-3, AUTH PERS ONLY, and tugged him right through the doorway.

The door slammed shut at his back, then everything went black. Minx tugged him ahead at a run. Their feet echoed against the floor, a smooth, hard floor that seemed basically level, though cluttered with stuff that rustled around his ankles and crunched under his sneaks.

Minx slowed. Something heavy banged and something metallic squealed. A door swung open. They stepped out onto a concrete safety walk that ran along one side of an underground roadway. Monk couldn't recall having ever seen this part of the transitways before. The roadway, only two lanes wide and divided by white dashes, extended off in both directions for a few hundred meters before curving out of sight. The pavement looked really clean. No litter anywhere.

Minx looked back and forth, up and down the roadway, then thrust back her wildly frizzled hair, now glowing red and orange, and grinned.

"This is it," she said.

"What?"

A rumbling arose into a roaring like a race car. A gray and black van came screaming around the curve to the right, blew on by them and disappeared around the curve to the left. Minx frowned.

"Huh?" Monk said.

As the van disappeared, a storm of amber blips began washing across the walls of the transitway, appearing from around the curve to the left. The roar of the van faded away, then swelled. Another truck, a sort of tow truck, came screaming around the curve to the left This time Minx nodded, glanced at Monk and pulled him ahead, under the railing guarding the safety walk, then down onto the roadway.

The tow truck roared like a semiballistic jet, amber strobes blazing from above the cab and from inside the massive front grille. Monk watched that grille coming closer and closer and closer until it seemed huge, titanic, and it suddenly occurred to him that the truck wasn't slowing down and he was standing right in front of it Abruptly, Minx yanked him aside, and the tow trucks tires screamed and white smoke billowed into the air.