Rechs stood and turned on one of the showers. He was unsure if water was running to the building, but he figured the Soshies who’d taken it over had probably worked out a way to get it back on. After a moment the line sputtered and coughed, then spewed out a brown filth that was every bit as disgusting as the sewage he’d just crawled through. But eventually the stream turned pure, and Rechs rinsed himself clean, hoping the stench would swirl down the drain with the polluted water.
The bounty hunter followed the one exit out of the shower room. Hearing only the sound of water dripping from his armor, he entered an adjoining bathroom. Rows of toilet stalls featured doors barely hanging on their hinges. On the opposite wall stood shattered sinks and broken mirrors. The finishing touch was the dead junkie on a mattress amid the ruin.
The junkie had been someone years ago. Everyone was someone once. But he’d ended up here. In… this. And then dead. His body lying here ever since. Forgotten. Unfound. Maybe no one cared.
Yet another thing that fell into the category of not-Rechs’s-business. Much of the galaxy was like that. And if you spent too much time looking at all the things that weren’t your concern, well, then you were liable to forget what you were after in the first place.
Rechs moved quietly through the dark labyrinth of the basement. He passed through a gym and entered the lowest level of what had been a parking garage. Consulting his downloaded map on the HUD, he assessed possible routes into the main building areas. Unfortunately, though he knew all about the security on the outside of the building, he had no idea what the disposition of forces was on the inside. But it was time to find out. Before the Nubarian bot arrived with whatever it could find to get the Soshies moving.
Rechs quietly cleared one level at a time as he moved upward through the garage, which twisted back on itself to reach the top. The level just below the building’s main entrance.
He heard them before he saw them. A small team of pros around what was clearly an escape vehicle. Another high-end sport utility sled. There were three of them in and around it.
Probably their job was to be ready to boogie at any minute, just waiting for whoever was in charge to give the word. One at the wheel. One stretched out asleep inside the rear cargo section with the back hatch open. And the last one walking back and forth near the speedlift, smoking and talking to someone over comm.
The elevator was the fastest route up and into the building. And the pro walking near it was in constant contact with someone—probably a team leader elsewhere in the building. So neutralizing the sentry would alert the rest of the building. Then the prisoners would be iced and everyone would flee.
No go, thought Rechs.
One lone light, an emergency floodlight, was still active near the elevator. None of the pros had low-light imaging gear that Rechs could see. He spent a long moment in the darkness beyond their pool of light studying the situation, and then he began to move.
As he advanced through the shadows, using the parking garage’s pillars for cover, the armor’s HUD detected the building’s wireless spectrum signal. It provided no access to their internal comms, but it did provide access to the building’s old systems. Stuff that once was the latest in smart-interface living to make sure the residents felt like masters of the universe. Working the command interface on his sleeve, Rechs hacked into the garage’s atmospheric and door controls with little problem.
First he shut down the floodlight near the elevator—after taking a moment to deploy his stealth cloak to cut down on any ambient light reflection that might still be active in the area. If they used ultrabeams, they’d see him for sure.
“Ah, c’mon!” shouted the sentry in the darkness that had suddenly enveloped the extraction team. Then he was on his comm device shouting at someone. “We got lights out down here again. Get Juju over to maintenance to flip the breaker. We’re not sitting down here in the dark!”
A reply came back, but Rechs was already on the move. He slipped between the sled and the sentry and headed toward the elevator in the thick darkness. To the men he would be little more than a passing shadow.
At the last second, he keyed his interface and sent a command to open the doors to the lift. Their quiet whoosh made the nearby sentry jump. But there was no lift inside the shaft. Just an empty well leading up into the building.
“Who’s there?” shouted the sentry, apparently thinking someone had just arrived in the basement via the elevator, but unable to see anything beyond the bare light of his handheld comm device. “Hello?” He tapped his comm again. “Yeah, tell Juju the speedlift is acting funky, too.”
Rechs stepped into the well of the elevator shaft, stared up into the darkness to make sure the elevator wasn’t coming down on his head, and then closed the door with a couple of taps on his wrist. Cut off, but inside the shaft, he magnetized his gauntlets and began to climb upward between the repulsor tracks.
46
“We’re ready in ten to start recording the stream,” said one of Loth’s lieutenants over the comm.
Loth acknowledged the transmission and crossed to the big window to watch the streets below. There were fires in the distance. The sky was red—late-afternoon red—and filled with the buzzing gnats that were marine SLICs trying to intimidate the Soshies into getting off the streets and returning to their homes and dormitories. The marines seemed oblivious to the fact that they were only
