mesh-was secure.
'All right,' he whispered, and then slithered forward.
The hide he'd selected was above the restaurant, and his path forward was downhill and mostly wet-good English weather-and the gullies would hide him for most of the descent. The slings kept his subgun tight against the small of his back, no whispers, no rattles. Dad would've been proud. Fast and silent, the old SAS vet had said. Deke was both. He low-crawled into a culvert and risked a look.
A half-klick from where he crouched, his mother had borne him just before things had gone in the pot. His dad had been called up and snapped up into the unpleasantness before he'd even really gotten to know him, and then his Ma had started doing what was necessary to feed them and give them a roof-roofs, really, since the tricks never let us stay long-and Deke had gotten the start of his education in the realities of the Sixth World.
The drekking Barrens.
More and more dots popped up on his AR. Deke shut his mesh down to internals, closing off the queries from parking bots and restaurant menus. The remote aiming reticle from his gun flicked off his overlay, but Deke knew how to shoot without his implants aiming for him. He could bring the mesh back up quickly enough, but anything that wasn't wired direct would broadcast, and he needed to be unseen.
The misting rain thickened into a good English drizzle, not heavy enough to block his sight or raise a noise, just enough to start swallowing the small sounds of odd noises and his movement. Deke let the grin show-good English weather-and just for a moment forgot where he was and why.
Yaks. In the Barrens.
'I'm going,' he subvocalized. The processor smashed those two words to a zip-squeal and burst it out to be picked up by Lincoln's mesh. That was his signal-that meant that anything Lincoln saw through his scope that wasn't an early-middle-aged former SAS commando carrying a little yak princess out the door was a target for the big rifle he was snuggled up with. Deke gathered himself into a crouch, brought his subgun around, and triggered his mesh.
Then he sprinted.
His AR came active again and filled with dots, RFIDs sensing him and firing off announcements and queries. He made the ten meters between himself and the access door he was aiming at in about five seconds, which was about fourteen and a half seconds longer than it took the first of the over-the-counter security bots to see that his mesh wasn't one of the gangers and trigger what passed for an alarm.
That's right, kids, he thought. Run outside, where my friend Lincoln can see you.
It was forty seconds before the door opened, and a boy with iridescent facial tattoos ran out, cradling an old Ares repeater. Deke grabbed him from behind, swung him around and into the side of the building, then dropped him. The muzzle of his submachine gun was already pointing down-a single round was all it took, and all of that in the span of two seconds and a half-yelp of noise from the ganger. Deke ignored the tapping of the boy's foot against his as the body's nerves reacted to the loss of its brain. He was listening, his cyberear attuned for echo and canceling the masking rain noise.
A boom echoed through the night, so close it almost covered the mallet-striking-soft-meat sound of the large- caliber bullet hitting its target from around the building. Deke didn't bother looking in that direction. Lincoln's ghillie was more than enough cover to conceal him from the likes of these pukes.
Seven. Deke heard footsteps coming, but they stopped before they appeared out the door. He frowned, looked down. The dead boy had dropped his Ares where someone in the hallway could see it. Damn it, he thought. Then he slid away from the doorway.
Bullets punched through the light metal of the door as one of the gangers inside lit through a whole magazine. Deke grimaced as hot bits of metal flecked against his face, but none got in his eyes. He squatted, subgun ready. His cyberear had already adjusted for the noise of the gunfire. Footsteps.
One set of footsteps. The clatter of a magazine hitting the floor. No answering click of a new one being seated.
Deke stood up, slipped his gun around behind him on its sling, and clenched his fist. Precise pressure from his ring finger against a specific part of his palm triggered a mechanism in his fist. A ten-centimeter blade slid from between his ring and middle fingers of his right hand, mono-edge sharp. Deke stepped around the door and took two long steps.
The ganger was maybe eighteen, fit but with the added paunch around the midsection that a young man gets when the near-constant exercise of youth is replaced with the sedentary complacence of one's early twenties. He was fumbling with a magazine for the bullpup-style subgun he was carrying. He saw Deke, and his eyes went as big as saucers. His mouth opened, ork's tusks prominent.
'Shite-' Deke heard, but that was all the man had time for. Deke swung an uppercut at the kid, hard enough that when it landed it lifted the ork ganger off the floor. He didn't fall, though, because his jaw was caught on the edge of the blade protruding from Deke's fist, the blade that quickly sliced through the jawbone holding it in place. The kid collapsed, blood and bits of bone and gray matter leaking out of the gaping hole in his chin.
'Bloody hell,' Deke whispered. 'Another kid.'
Six.
A message window popped up on Deke's AR. ALARM TO CITY-DON'T KNOW WHO. Deke blinked the message closed and pulled one of the matte black automatics from his thigh holster. A remote alarm? All the way out here? For gangers? He looked down.
The dead kid's arms were tattooed.
Oh, shit. These weren't gangers. They were yaks.
Rival yaks.
Deke drew in a deep breath and flashed a warning to Lincoln. His instincts screamed at him for standing in one place this long. He crept around the body and down the hall, pistol presented. He'd only used a single round from his subgun, and there were still twenty-nine more in the magazine, but he didn't want to be spraying bullets around in a room where his paycheck-I mean, the little yak princess-might be held.
Deke moved toward the front of the building. He'd been in restaurants like this one before-there'd be a little maze of rooms in the back, then the kitchen, then the main dining room out front. He kept the pistol leveled and moved steadily. His boot soles made no noise, not even being wet. Nothing jingled.
'I see you, runner,' a voice said. Deke jerked the pistol around toward the source of the sound, but it was a speaker in the ceiling. 'That's right. I'm watching you.'
'Nice to know,' Deke said, resuming his advance. He came to a junction, turned toward the front.
'I wouldn't go that way, runner,' the voice said.
Deke went that way.
When he'd been ten his father had gone out to deal with looters or something-his mother was never good with stories-and never came back. All he had of him were memories of the brief times they were together when his father had been on leave. Times when the man had been drinking and spilling his soul to his eight-year-old boy, confessing his sins and passing on a veteran's wisdom in his catharsis.
'Never do what the blokes want, lad,' he'd said one night, eight or nine deep in his pints. 'They say go left, you go right. Nine times out of ten, they was just misleadin' you anyway. An' if they weren't, well…you'll know where to find them.'
An alert pinged on his AR as Deke passed a junction in the corridor, barely a few meters away from the large swinging door that had to lead into the kitchen. He's just entered a mesh zone, an overlap. Most of the area around here was dead zone-no Matrix-but a node had just popped up. Deke frowned.
A buzzing in his ears erupted. Jamming. That meant they knew about Lincoln. Deke gritted his teeth and reached around to a small pouch on the small of his back. He pulled out a small canister, twisted the top, and nudged the door open far enough to shove it through. As he expected, a hail of gunfire tore through the door the instant it moved.
The flash-bang exploded. The light was blocked by the door, but the sound carried through like a punch, and even though he'd prepared for it, it still dazed him for a second. And a second was all the bloke needed.
ALERT. Red letters flashed across his vision. 'Bloody hell,' Deke mumbled. His overlays started twitching. The hacker was messing with his mesh-with his own bloody network-and although he'd not fully penetrated the OS, he was trying. And he might succeed. Deke was a samurai, not a hacker. He had hackers on retainer that updated his mesh. But he wasn't one himself.
