"He is bad," thought Moonfeather. "Voodoo is bad."

She raised both hands to deflect a swirling wave of something from the hougan. In a perfect circle, everything around her roiled from the impacts of invisible bees, knives, needles, whatever form of mana darts he was throwing at her. Didn't matter. Screaming a short song for Cat, she raked her nails through the empty air, and the enemy mage stumbled back with deep bloody fiirrows slicing open his handsome face and chest. Shocked but defiant he still stood there. Drek!

The hougan recovered, his eyes going solid black as the pupils totally expanded. He was scanning her aura, looking for weaknesses. With a cry, he shoved his staff forward and a fireball rumbled down from the balcony toward her, filling the doss with blinding light. Moonfeather hissed at the thing and gestured. The fireball burst apart over his own people, two of them screaming as they hit the floor, rolling about to extinguish the flames covering their bodies before their handguns cooked off.

The balcony under Dredlocks began to sag, then leveled itself with a groan. Moonfeather slapped a stim patch to her thigh, going frizzy as to what was happening here, but then the stims hit and she jerked back to reality, spitting and radiating fury. She sacrificed the power held in a ring and a bracelet, and the doss got icy cold, the dripping blood frozen solid, and then the air got even colder. Age lines creasing on his slashed face, his breath fogging, the hougan screamed unpronouncable words at his stick and a broken chair hurled across the doss like an upholstered meteor. Every muscle painfully weak, Moonfeather forced herself to duck underneath the deadly bludgeon, just barely keeping her head intact.

She triggered her Beretta non-stop, but only two rounds hit the hougan on the armored coat as he shoved himself loose from the fallen balcony. The impact seemed to refresh him, and just as he began to laugh at her pitiful attack, the wooden railing in front of him detonated. The blast nearly knocked the staff from his grip and covered his bare chest with bloody splinters. Immediately, the hougan fell to the floor.

Feeling terribly nauseous, Moonfeather knew she could no longer fight. She grabbed a crystal hanging around her neck and spoke a few words. The invisibility spell locked into her oldest and most cherished fetish activated and she could breathe. She could only wait now.

His neck bloody from a graze from across his throat, Thumbs aimed his big chattering SMG at anything moving. Firing to the right, Delphia caught a motion off to the other side and jerked out his left arm. The VPR2 shifted the Manhunter to the other hand in a nano. It boomed once, and a norm in combat armor was blown off her boots to crash over a table and hit the floor upside-down.

Dropping the spent clip, Delphia dove over a smashed table to land behind a ripped couch, and slapped in another clip, wishing he'd taken a grenade from the Elite. This was a Scarlet Ribbon, a three-on-three formation with the corpse a diversion. The door the key in, and no way out. To even try was death. It was a beautiful trap, and they were in serious drek. He chided himself angrily, but the dwarf wanted a soft penetration first. Smiles and flowers. Howdy, neighbor! So much for fragging subtlety.

Another dead man's head exploded, brains and blood spraying everywhere in a grisly rain.

Wiping gray matter off his face, Thumbs dropped his exhausted SMG and charged at a pile of debris, slashing through the stuff with his forearm blades. Whoever was on the other side screamed and stumbled into view minus an arm at the shoulder. Grabbing the man's dropped Mossberg, Thumbs started firing again as a new punkster arose behind him swinging a laser axe. He strained to swing the CMDT around to meet the sizzling blade when the leatherboy jerked back, a hole in his head gushing blood.

From the kitchen, safely behind the fridge, Two Bears put another burst of the silenced Crusader into the ganger and tried again for the Vindicator minigun lying so tempting in the middle of the bloody carnage. Then he also spied a deck lying amid the papers and body parts. An antique Fuchi 2. It had been stepped on, or shot, and was busted wide, but decks meant data, so he tucked the relic under an arm and moved on, firing controlled bursts as he went.

The air above the combatants shimmered and buzzed from whatever the two shamans were doing to each other. Then a thundering rainbow filled the doss as the stained glass window shattered into a million knives, the shards swirling madly about, slicing everything and everybody into ribbons. Some punksters screamed as they were disassembled and the balcony torn to pieces amid spraying blood.

"Got him!" shouted Moonfeather.

Jerking a look, Thumbs gave a bellow of victory over the burping of his CMDT while heading for the exit.

"NO!" screamed Delphia, when a pile of trash erupted and he found himself face to face with a razorboy who'd been digging a tunnel through to him. Sons of slitches were buried like land mines in the wreckage. The guy was in patent leathers, garishly painted, dripping with chrome, but he wore it like a costume, not reg clothes. Razor spurs jutted from both hands like cactus thorns, and he was packing a netgun. Not a kill, but a capture-them-alive weapon. Both moved to aim and fired. Delphia won. But as the man doubled over, a woman behind him fired a burst from her Mossberg and Delphia was hit in the arm, stomach, thigh from the stream of high-velocity lead. He went down firing in return.

Off amid the reeking destruction, another deader's head exploded.

Forgoing the Vindicator, Two Bears dashed headlong from the kitchen, skirting the riddled wall and reaching the hallway door. Yanking it open, he stopped with a jerk, the elegantly wrapped handle of a wakazashi, the formal Japanese short sword, sticking out of his belly. Blood was pumping everywhere. His blood.

The Crusader dropped from the dwarf's hands as the troll in the hallway shoved the blade upward, gutting him like a fish. With a shuddering sigh, Two Bears keeled over to the filthy floor. Katana and wakazashi in both hands, the troll samurai administered the death stroke and moved into the doss with chipped speed.

Blowing off the face of his newest attacker, Delphia was staggering for the door when a blurry image moved into the peripheral field of his sunglasses. He fired blindly without turning. The blur stopped, and dropped.

"Now!" screamed Moonfeather, her body seeming to appear out of nothing. At the same time a shimmering barrier of crackling electricity formed a curved wall between them and the remaining attackers. Stumbling outside as best they could, the three had just cleared the doorway when the hallway was filled with light and the building shook as if drop-kicked by a god.

"Green means high-explosive," Thumbs said with a grin, not a scratch on him.

"Hai, I noticed," wheezed Delphia, holding his bleeding leg. He'd been hit with a mixed clip of rounds, the tracer splattered on his hip not setting his clothes on fire because he'd paid extra for protection against that. The next was a dumdum that had hit his gut like an express train. Ballistic cloth stopped full penetration, but that kinetic force had to go somewhere. And the fragging third and fourth had been an AP round that went through his suit and him too. Couldn't get a slap patch on until he dropped his pants, and this was not the place for that.

"I gotcha," omae said Thumbs, sliding a massive arm around the smaller norm. "We're gone."

"What about-" questioned the now visible Moonfeather, starting toward the still form of the dwarf sprawled on the floor. There was something in his hands. A deck. She raced to snatch it.

"Leave him, he's dead," gasped Delphia, fumbling to reload his gun with one hand, just in case more were outside waiting for them. His fingers refused to obey and he dropped a full clip as they stumbled down the stairs. Nobody bothered to pick it up.

And nobody attempted to hinder their departure. The lobby was as empty as before, and when they reached the street, the Elite was at the curb, Silver at the wheel, Seco in hand. Both doors sprung open as they approached, and the runners stumbled in like drunken tourists lunging for the last taxi in Overtown.

"Duck!" shouted Silver as she tossed something globular and striped green over the roof with her left hand. Bullets pinged off the light armor of the Elite, one side window cracking from the deflection of a heavier round. She peeled away ticks before a deafening blast shoved the vehicle off at an angle and the front of the Dorsey Park dossplex disappeared in smoke and flame.

Sirens were sounding in the distance as Silver wheeled wildly into traffic, dodging bikers, pedestrians, and other cars in a pinball game of slam and rebound. Horns filled the night-time darkness with a cacophony of noise.

Delphia lay pale and bloody on the back seat. Moonfeather slit off his pants and placed trauma patches on every wound. Awkwardly, Thumbs fumbled to operate a PocketDoc, a device he'd never used before. Silver kept the headlights off to reduce targetability, and the battered black Toyota Elite disappeared into the northbound traffic of the Miami sprawl.

The sounds of fighting in the doss long over, Wesley pushed open the back door to the upper-floor apartment cautiously as if expecting resistance. The rusty hinges creaked horribly, and when the door finally reached a half meter wide, he froze at the awful sight of the carnage displayed. But even as Wesley started to retch, his dirty hands moved expertly over the broken bodies, taking weapons, credsticks, optical chips, and everything else he could stuff into his patched pants. The smell of feces and blood was thick enough to taste, but he ignored the stench. He'd encountered worse, much worse, on the streets. Just never this fresh. Some of the bodies were still warm. That was the bad part. The suggestion of life where there was none.

Loaded down to where he was barely able to waddle, Wesley slipped quietly out the back door, closing it behind him and locking it with a key taken off the wall. An extra knife, solid and made of good steel, was slid under the jamb as a shim to hinder the pursuit he knew would be coming.

Minutes later, a squad of combat troops dressed in Lone Star uniforms came bursting in through the front door, weapons out and ready for anything but what they found: naked dead, smashed furniture, numerous small fires, and a crucified ork. By the time the officers finished searching the two floors of the huge doss and decided to break down the back door, all they found was a trail of bloody bare footprints on the stairs going up to the first floor and then out again into the alley. They lost the tracks in the prickly weeds of a vacant lot. When more Lone Stare reinforcements and a Doc Wagon team arrived, everything and everybody of any importance was long gone.

12.

Pink neon biinked constantly outside the bedroom window. On, off, on, off. Primitive Morse for look-at-me. The one table in the sparse room was covered with wire and bits of equipment from a dozen different decks, radios, and even selected parts from the telecom. If old Walter Gibson and Rube Goldberg had a kid, this would have been their first creation. A 3D Jackson Pollock.

Swung around to point at the wall, the trideo was showing the wallpaper the classic 'Vampire Hunter D!', the noise of it masking their soft conversations from any possible eavesdroppers beyond the thin foamboard dividers.

"Is it working?" asked Thumbs hopefully.

"Ssssh," said Silver, eyes closed, fiber-optic cable connecting her to the Fuchi 8 and then the sparking ruin of the Fuchi 2 recovered by Moonfeather from Two Bears' hands. Seated uncomfortably in a cheap macroplas chair, Silver was jacked into the mess.

"Why did Two Bears risk his life to grab this?" she mumbled, not taking her attention off the cobbled-together Frankenstein. "Files corrupted, recovery programs scrambled, databytes flickering about in here as random as snowflakes in a storm! Gods, this is totally trashed. A complete waste . . . whoa, what was that?"

Silver became perfectly still, except for her fingers tapping variously on the keyboards of both Fuchi decks. "I'm going in!"

Dressed in only boxers and T-shirt, Delphia was shaving in the washstand with the complimentary free soap and a cheap razor. His wounds were still sore as hell, but for a man who'd been shot a half a dozen times only hours ago, he was doing fine. All the way here, Moonfeather sang a healing song over him, and as they pulled the Elite into the parking lot of the north Miami Domino Motel he stumbled out with the others on his own feet. Starving, but alive. Gods, was he hungry!

The Domino was a classic by-the-hour. And even though it wasn't Saturday night, or a holiday, four people of assorted races and different sexes renting one room for the whole night did raise the clerk's interest. The stickful of creds lowered them, though, allaying his suspicions, and they got the rent-a-doss. It was cheap, but relatively clean.

Rinsing the razor off under the tepid tapwater, Delphia wondered what the magic done on him was going to cost. He already had a sneaking suspicion what pound of flesh the Cat shaman wanted from him.

"What do we do about Two Bears?" asked Thumbs, watching Silver work.

"Word on the grid is that he died yesterday," said Moonfeather. "Now it's true." She was sitting on the bed, her bracelets, rings, and necklaces spread out before her. Occasionally, she would sing to them, or just hum to herself. Nothing seemed to be happening, but she looked pleased.

"The services are tomorrow," added Delphia, drying his face.

"Buried so soon? How come?"

"Some religious thing. He's got to go under within twenty-four hours."

"I liked him," said Thumbs for no apparent reason.

Pulling on fresh clothes he'd taken from the trunk of the Elite, Delphia shrugged. "He was a Johnson. He fragged up. Now he's wormfood. Happens to everybody eventually."

"What do we do if there's any usable data on the chips in that relic?" asked Moonfeather. "Call the Johnson and collect the fee?"

"We have the number," confirmed Thumbs, reaching into a plastifoam box and pulling an icy beer into view. He popped the top with a callused thumb and took a draft. "So who makes the call?"

"Me," said Delphia in his no-nonsense tone, buttoning a shirt. "I'm the one who talked to the J. Anybody else chats him up and we could blow the deal."

"And all those lovely nuyen," added Moonfeather.

"Hey," said Silver softly, getting their attention as she jacked out. "I'm starting to download." She spoke in a whisper as if afraid a loud noise might terminate the tremulous connections. Everybody crowded around her, but not near enough to jostle an elbow.

She spoke ever so softly, "Found something. My Fuchi 8 can download a thousand times faster than this old thing could when it was brand new." Fingers tapping, keyboards clicking. "Yeah, there we are, sweetie. This is a lot easier than running the Matrix. Don't need anywhere near the concentration to twig the job. But if I pull on the data too hard, the jury-rigged system will crash, scrambling all those zeros and ones and there'll be nothing left but a half-melted paperweight people paid blood to get."

They others stood and watched the cracked lights on the old Fuchi change color and patterns, moving to the technological tune of the decker, who played the keyboards like an ambidextrous pianist. After a few ticks, a thin stream of smoke curled up from the Fuchi 2 and it went dark.

"Dead," announced Silver. "The recovery program burned her out. Just couldn't take it. Poor dear." Removing the fiber-optic cable from her temple, she looked at the technological rat's nest lying before her with a puzzled expression. In the background, Vampire Hunter D confronted the dark shogun and revealed who he really was. A fight between the titans immediately ensued.

"Beer?" asked Thumbs politely.

"Any kaf?"

"Nope."

"Beer'll do. Thanx."

"Well?" asked Delphia, straightening his cuffs. "Anything?"

"Yes and no," Silver said, rubbing the cold can along the side of her face. "There was a record of the original transaction about the book chip. Not the contract with the publisher, but the private contract between Gordon and the author."

"Say again?" asked Thumbs, thrusting out his tusks.

Silver still held the beer to her throat. "Gordon didn't write the fragging book. It was a lie. He was the ghost author. A front for the real writer."

"Why hide that you wrote a book?" inquired Moonfeather making a face.

Thumbs crushed an empty beer can. "Why write the book is the real question?"

"Because he had too much to say, and wasn't allowed to talk," rationalized Delphia, adjusting his suspenders. "Somebody who knew great secrets and could not speak of them." He started to walk and talk. "It's a common problem among the upper echelons of any gov or business. Bursting with forbidden knowledge, somebody hired a nobody to front for his public confession. He got to talk, and stay safe at the same time."

"And Gordon got some nuyen and a hot rep for basically doing nothing," observed Moonfeather. "Sounds like a win/win to me."

Leaning forward, elbows on knees, Thumbs snorted rudely. "Yeah, except for that getting crucified part at the end, a sweet deal."

On the trideo, lightning crashed as the mutants escaped, and norms attacked vampires while the great castle began to fall apart amid the civil war of blood relatives.

"Was there a name?" asked Delphia bluntly.

Silver sipped the beer. "Yeah, some chummer named James Harvin."

Moonfeather gawked. "The James Harvin?"

"There might be another," Delphia growled. "But I have only heard of one in town."

Thumbs halted in the process of opening a beer with a tusk. "Harvin," he said.

"James J. demigod-this-town-is-mine-frag-you Harvin. The CEO of Gunderson Corporation. The guy who ordered the Night of Law. That James Harvin secretly wrote a book about pirates?"

"Apparently so," said Silver, starting to pull wires and turn off switches.

"Whafor?"

"Maybe he likes pirates."

"Maybe he is a pirate. Or used to be, anyway."

Thumbs drained his beer and opened another quickly. "How are we going to arrange a meet with a top drawer like him?" asked Moonfeather, polishing a large catseye gem on her T-top.

Swallowing a mouthful, Thumbs laughed bitterly. "God needs an appointment to see Harvin. Us? Null program."

"Silver, think you can get into their system and dig some data?" Moonfeather breathed on the stone and polished some more. "What Harvin knows, I'll wager his mainframes do also."

"Yeah, buried under so much IC it'd sink the Titanic II. Pillage the frames of TGC?" She shook her head. "No way."

"So what about Atlantic Security? Use it as a back door," offered Delphia, taking a seat. "One owns the other. They must have a sweetheart deal to exchange data."

"Zero sum there. AtSec also writes the IC guarding most of the major corps and multinationals in the Carib League," said Silver, patting her deck as if it was a pet. "Nobody's getting past their black ice without at least one executive access code or using the master terminal in Harvin's private office."

Accepting a beer, Delphia vetoed that. "The system's probably triple-sealed too. That's standard. Unless it's Harvin accessing the mainframe, it'll blow and bring a drek-load of guards with shotguns and chipped hellhounds and tox knows what else. Blessed Yomi, just getting into his office would take a miracle!"

Silver shivered.

"Yeah? Well, I can get us the access codes," said Thumbs, setting aside his beer. "Maybe a couple of the codes. Fresh, hot, and tight."

For a tick, nobody could speak. Vampire Hunter D finished rolling the credits and Mobilesuit Gundham began immediately, the intro music fast and jazzy, with lots of bass and brass.

Something banged on the wall from the other side. "Turn down the fragging cartoons!" shouted a muffled voice. "It's three in the bloody hack, ya gleebs!"

Reaching for the bedside table, Silver turned on the radio too.

"Argh!" screamed their neighbor, and then his trideo started blaring the jazzy fight music from Xabungle. "Ha! Take that!"

"You're telling us you can get us into Harvin's files?" smirked Moonfeather contemptuously.