Nyx Smith - Fade to Black

The order came at 19:40 hours.

Ten minutes later, Skip Nolan stood in the dingy, litter-strewn alley behind the street of ghetto rowhouses in Sector 20, North Caldwell. Like the four men and two women of Team A, he wore the armored assault uniform of the Executive Action Brigade.

The Team B leader signaled ready. Team B would take the front and upstairs portions of the narrow rowhouse where the runners had holed up. Team A would take the rear and basement areas. Somewhere up above, in the night, Bobbie Jo had the whole block under surveillance. No one had entered or left the house for hours. Ground-based surveillance teams had seen lights going off and on and curtains moving and figures silhouetted against window shades. The house was hot, making infrared analysis difficult, but no one had any fears that the runners might have slipped away again. A vibration detector dropped onto the roof of the house had picked up people moving around inside, and a laser snooper had picked up conversation off one of the windows. And on top of all that, the runners' van was parked right behind the house.

The runners were there, no question about it, and now, according to orders, they were going to be taken down. Skip didn't know why the Brigade should suddenly go from a surveillance role to an interdiction role, but he wasn't planning to worry about it. That wasn't his job. Taking down runners in the Newark metroplex wasn't so different from scoring smugglers along the C.A.S.-Pueblo border or supporting a coup in Guatemala. The world was full of conflicting interests. When forces clashed, somebody lived and somebody died, and maybe once in a while the right people got what they deserved.

He keyed the mike of the headset worn under his helmet. "Team A, Team B… let's rock."

Two men swung a portable ram, smashing the rear door of the rowhouse right out of the frame. As the door went down, a third trooper flung a stun and smoke grenade that went off with a bang. Squad One rushed into the kitchen, weapons tracking from side to side, then called "clear" and moved on. Another grenade banged from the front of the house. Skip followed Squad One through the swirling smoke as far as the stairs to the basement and there pointed Squad Two up the hall toward the front of the house.

Another grenade detonated upstairs. Squad One called out that the basement was clear. Skip started toward the front of the house, but already he felt the uncertainty gnawing at the pit of his stomach. One room after another came up clear. Still no weapons fire, no report of confrontations, no sign of the runners. In another moment or two, the Team B leader would call the second floor clear and then Skip would know that the worst had happened yet again. The place was empty. The only bodies present belonged to the E.A.B.

How the hell had those fraggers gotten away?

"Bitches stay in the car."

None of the women complained, and that was well. The call regarding the change in the runners' status had come at an untimely moment in Maurice's studies. The last thing he wanted to do was waste time traipsing around die metroplex after a group of recalcitrant runners, but unfortunately he had no choice.

Gathering his coat around him and hefting his walking stick, Maurice stepped from his Mercedes limo. The night was cool and quiet, but rife with a tension that hinted at things to come. Claude Jaeger stepped up beside him. Maurice looked at the faint shimmering in the air before him and shifted to his astral senses.

Vera Causa stood facing him. She smiled and turned to indicate the house directly behind her, saying mind-to-mind, This dwelling gives a fine view, master.

Maurice looked at Jaeger. "Clear this house."

"Is that an order?" Jaeger replied.

"Consider it a recommendation."

Jaeger nodded and walked over to the rowhouse's front door. The woman who answered the door fell without a sound, then Jaeger proceeded to neutralize the rest of the occupants. Maurice moved through the house to the kitchen. Through the transparex-panes of the rear door, he could see the dark, litter-strewn alley behind the house and the mundane forces now gathering.

Vera Causa indicated the rowhouse directly opposite. That was the runners' safehouse. The runners' van waited there. Finding the house and the van had not been difficult. A spirit such as Vera Causa moved with the speed of the astral. She could pursue a supersonic jet halfway around the globe. The forces of the Executive Action Brigade had literally led his ally here.

Taking refuge in the wastes of Sector 13 had provided the runners with more safety than they knew. Vera Causa had refused to enter the area, despite Maurice's command to follow them from their meeting with L. Kahn at Newark International. Maurice himself found that blighted region discomfiting to approach on any but a purely mundane level. It had therefore been necessary to forego any direct action. Continuing to monitor the Brigade had led them here to Sector 20 and the district of North Caldwell.

Maurice watched with interest as the dark armored figures wearing the flash of the Brigade gathered at the rear of the house and prepared to force entry.

The runners had a shaman, called "Bandit." Despite Maurice's best efforts, he had been unable to learn much about this shaman. Many people in the plex seemed to know his name, but few admitted to anything beyond a basic physical description and facile rumors. An astral glance at Bandit's aura and the foci he carried, such as Maurice had caught at the airport, might lead one to conclude that Bandit had little true ability in the Art, and even less in terms of true power.

That was obviously an inaccurate perception, Maurice now saw. The rowhouse occupied by the runners was protected by a powerful ward, a lattice of blue-green energy that throbbed in brilliant counterpoint to the rhythms of the natural energies pulsing and flowing through the night in this part of the plex. Any magician could cast a ward, but only one of considerable ability could cast a ward as strong as the one now burning before him.

This indicated to Maurice that the shaman must be masking his aura, and to do that he must be a powerful magician, an initiate, in fact.

This changed things considerably. It made Bandit a potentially dangerous opponent, and it urged Maurice to caution. The ward could certainly be defeated, but that would likely cost Maurice energy, and he had not come prepared to begin any sort of conflict at anything less than his full measure of vitality. The appearance of this unexpectedly powerful ward warned him to wait and watch.

The Brigade's troopers stormed the house, smashing down the rowhouse's rear door and entering like soldiers. The ward of course had no effect on their entrance, providing only a barrier against spells and astral surveillance. No form of sorcerous traps appeared to be keyed to it.

They seem confused, master, Vera Causa remarked.

They?

The soldiers.

An insightful observation, Maurice thought, for a spirit so recently conjured. Vera Causa's rapid progress along the learning curve gave him cause to wonder yet again. The raid of the safehouse soon ended. The runners were not found. Maurice projected onto the astral and moved into the alley to watch and listen to troopers there. They appeared disturbed.

The runners, it seemed, had not been observed since they had entered their safehouse. They had gone inside and stayed there. They had not departed via their van or any other vehicle. They had not climbed out through the roof and made their way across the rooftops to another location. How, then, had they escaped? Maurice circled the safehouse, stepping through the walls of the adjoining rowhouses and out to the street in front of the safehouse, then around and back to the alley. The building walls adjoining the safehouse were intact, so the runners had not simply broken into an adjoining structure and slipped away. Only one direction remained in which they could have gone, and that was down.