A Motive with a Universal Adapter 01

And there was the Ronin's targeting reticle right on his orange-hot throat. "Bang," I smiled.

A three-shot burst rang out and he collapsed with a thud next to Dicer. Whatever strands of flesh and sinew still held his skull to his shoulders gave up and his head rolled off to the side.

"Holy shit, that was so cool!" Abby gushed from the doorway. She brought the camera right up to the dead guy's face to get the rictus of surprise. "I got the whole thing on film."

"Something for my highlight reel," I muttered, pushing myself slowly to my feet. "Stand back."

By this point, no one had kicked open the other two doors and started shooting at us, so I was pretty sure the stripped-to-the-bone apartment was clear, but I wasn't taking chances. I unslung the rifle and methodically cleared the other rooms.

"Do you think that's everybody?" Abby asked a minute later when I was done.

I picked up the shotgun. By my count, it only had one shot left. I thumbed seven more shells into the tube from the extra ammo in my thigh pocket. My shaking hands only dropped two in the process.

"I don't know. We have five more floors to check. But if the mine on the front door already got our guy, it doesn't matter." Standing next to the demolished door out to the hallway, I slung the M/P behind my back and hefted the Ronin at high ready. "Stay behind me. Hopefully this will all be over soon."

I swung out into the hall, behind the assault rifle and was immediately met with a rapid fire burst of bullets.

There was barely time to register the cyan and green figure at the end of the hall before my left shoulder caught on fire. I took another round in the ribs before my hampered reflexes swung me back into the room.

"At least one more," I told Abby, clutching my shoulder.

"Are you hit!?"

"It's not too bad." There was a little blood on my hand from my shoulder and a little more from my side, but not enough to worry about now.

I took a knee and leaned out into the hall just long enough to think off a three round burst before ducking back. The distinctive pop-hiss of an AK-47's muzzle brake replied with another volley. The shooter wasn't quick enough to lower his aim.

"I think it's just one guy, but his heat signature is so muted I can't get a good look at him. He must be wearing body armor."

"See if you can draw him out again," Abby suggested. "I'll try to get a look at him with the night-vision."

She knelt down with her camera on the floor, and I stood over her and counted to three. While the shooter and I traded volleys, Abby pushed her camera out the door long enough to catch the exchange of fire. With the armored front door behind him standing askew, enough light pollution seeped in from outside to give Abby a clear picture.

"This looks like military-grade body armor," she observed, looking at the sharpest frame she could pause.

"Shit. He's in full MetalGear," I agreed—an even newer model of the head-to-toe armor I'd worn as a mercenary in Lithuania. If he hadn't been wearing it when the lights went out, it probably took him all that time just to suit up. "Where the hell did he get something like that?"

"We're in trouble, aren't we?"

"Yeah, we will be. He's just keeping us pinned down for the moment though. Which means they're planning something." I held the rifle out the door and fired three more rounds down the hall just to keep him occupied. "We need to end this quick."

By focusing on keeping my hand steady, I managed to swap out the Ronin's ammo for a clip full of armor piercing rounds. They don't have nearly the stopping power, but they would get his attention.

"Listen, I'm going to try to charge him," I told Abby. "But I might not be fast enough or steady enough to take him down. While I have 'MetalGear' out there distracted, you should go out the back and have Owl drive you home."

"No way," she objected with a steely tone in her voice. "I'm getting the end of this story on film, no matter what."

"Suit yourself, Rhoades." There was a good chance her story was about to end with my death.

I had one hand grenade left that I'd planned to use to clear my way back out. I tossed it down the hall toward the foyer and we could hear the booster in the heavy armor scramble to find cover. Then there was a boom and I was out in the hall rushing the foyer as fast as my lethargic legs would carry me. The barrel of the Ronin cradled in the crook of my arm led the way.

'MetalGear' staggered back into view, framed by the half-open door behind him. I started shooting before he could bring his rifle to bear. Dots of red heat popped into the cyan-green shape in front of me. With a savage scream of effort, I put my shoulder down and plowed right into the center of him.

He staggered backwards, arms flailing, and stumbled through the front door, knocking it open. I desperately tried to turn my momentum to the side and take cover behind the wall.

The heavy door swung away and just as the doomed booster regained his balance, the tripline pulled tight and the second claymore in front of the building exploded, propelling his shattered remains back inside.

I was knocked to the floor by the dampened pressure wave, but otherwise I was fine. I mean as fine as could be expected.

As quick as I could, I forced my arms to bring the Ronin up to cover the stairs. The landing at the top was devoid of anything hot enough to register on my thermograph.

The staircase had probably been quite ornate once, but its railings and decorative treads had long since been scavenged. An empty cavity in the far wall probably held a bank of mailboxes. On the other side of the room a hollow elevator shaft gawped at the carnage.

MetalGear was slowly bleeding orange and yellow onto the bare concrete floor. The poor fuck who tripped the first mine was in much worse shape. The largest chunks of him had already cooled to a blue-green.

"Rhoades!" I hissed into the darkness while keeping the staircase covered, "Check these guy's faces."

I was answered with a groan from the hallway and I glanced over to see a crumpled heap of orange-red.

"Rhoades!" I called louder. Then, against my better judgment, I abandoned my vigil at the bottom of the stairs and hobbled over to where Abby lay, alive but clearly dazed.

"Rhoades! Snap out of it!" I urged, jogging her shoulder as I knelt beside her.

Abby pushed herself up to sit next to me. "What happened?" she grunted.

"Yeah, what the hell happened?" I had thought she'd have had enough sense to film from the cover of the apartment doorway. I should have known better.

"I was right behind you...and you were shooting..." she recalled, massaging the back of her neck. "And then you tackled MetalGear... and that's the last thing I remember." Then her eyes snapped open. "Oh god, what did I miss? Did I get it on film?" She scrambled in the dark for her camera and breathed a sigh of relief when she found it intact.

"Can you stand?" I tried to pull her up, but I was barely steady enough to hold myself up and had to brace a hand against the wall.

"Yeah, I think so."

"Check the faces of these two guys," I pointed, returning to kneel at the bottom of the stairs. "If one of them is Nero, then we're done here and we can go home. I'll cover you."

Abby found long dreadlocks on the biggest chunk of the first guy's head, so he was obviously not our guy.

I was hoping we'd find Nero's face under MetalGear's helmet. It took Abby a few seconds to figure out how to get it off. There was a resemblance, but after using her night-vision camera to compare him to the print out, Abby decided he wasn't our guy either.

Which meant Nero was upstairs. He had to be. My heart sank.

"The front door is all clear," I told Abby. "Go wait in the Herkimer with Owl. You probably have a concussion. You're in no shape to continue."

Abby strode over to me, slung her camera up to her shoulder, and cocked a hip to one side. "I'm in better shape than you Miss Weeble-Wobble." She reached out a hand to help me up.

"Fine. I gave you two chances. You might not get a third."

"I might not," she conceded.

We stared at each other for a long second.

"Don't crowd so close," I said at last, pulling the steel plate back across the front door and locking the draw-bolts in place.

"Oh, trust me. I learned that lesson."

With one hand against the wall of the staircase, I started up and Abby followed a dozen steps behind.

On the first floor up we found four apartments, two smaller one-bedrooms at the front of the building and two larger two-bedroom units at the back. All had been stripped bare of any amenities, but they were obviously occupied. A random assortment of cots, mattresses, and folding tables and chairs furnished most of the individual rooms.

Some doors stood open. Others were closed and some were even padlocked. In some rooms, clothes and scop wrappers and other garbage were strewn about. Others had neatly organized footlockers or duffle bags.

But there were no people.

The next three floors were more or less identical. Occasionally we found a TV, an odd sofa or bookshelf, or tools and parts spread out on a work table. Some rooms were decorated with graffiti, posters, or screamsheet center-folds. A couple of half-eaten scop burgers and open cans of Smash suggested we caught the Black Queens completely by surprise.

"They may be planning an ambush on the top floor," I warned Abby as we approached the final landing. "That might be why MetalGear was trying to stall us. This is your third chance."

"I guess it is," Abby acknowledged, but she showed no sign of turning around.

As we expected, there was a hallway at the top of the stairs with four doors off it, two on either side—two closed, one half-open, and one wide open. The hallway was empty, but beneath one door, wisps of blue and green air currents danced in my thermograph as they dissipated into the hall. The room behind that door was warmer than the others.

I turned to Abby with my finger to my lips then pointed at the suspect door. She nodded her understanding.

Breach, then duck—that was our procedure. I kept a jittery hand on the doorframe to steady my tottering balance. I tried the knob. It turned. With one hand I pushed the door open and with the other I pulled myself back behind the wall and out of the line fire.

It took all my focus to execute a simple one-two motion without falling on my ass. My whole body was starting to tremble. The last of the Lucidrine had been consumed from my system leaving my desiccated nerves thirsting for more.

The door swung in, but the expected gunshots did not greet us. Instead there was a cacophony of grunts and moans and anguished cries from inside the room. I pulled up the Ronin and swung around the door frame, keeping my shoulder against it for balance.

There was a mass of heat in the middle of the room, red and orange and yellow, surging and undulating in a way that caught me completely off guard. A dozen spots of red flickered around the periphery, and I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing.

"Oh my god!" Abby gasped beside me. I watched her enter the room ahead of me, her cooler camera fixated on the shape in the middle of the floor.

I switched from thermograph to normal vision. The room was lit by a dozen candles.

In the middle of the floor, there were five guys gang-banging one girl on a bare mattress. They had her plugged up air-tight: cunt, ass, and throat. She had matching cyber arms, all chromed up, that she braced on the chest of the guy she was straddling. A fourth guy was barely managing to jack off with her feet and another was trying to get off between her tits despite the odd posture he had to contort himself into.

None of them were paying any attention to us.

"I need to cum..." the guy in her mouth muttered over the squishing sounds and slapping flesh. "I need to cum so fucking bad... Oh god, please make me cum..."

They were all dripping with sweat and fucking her with manic desperation. Fingers dug into her flesh as each guy worked his cock like a piston. Their clothes were half on, pants around knees and ankles, her skirt around her waist, like they hadn't even had time to undress.

"They must be tripping on Jezie or something like it," Abby commented. "It's like they don't even know we're here."

"God, I love this..." the guy in her ass groaned. "Don't stop... please don't stop... please, please, please don't ever stop... I love it... I love it... I love it..."

Without slowing the relentless bucking of her hips, the girl let the cock slip from between her lips releasing a cascade of drool down her chin. Collectively all six of them gasped for air. The girl reached for the shoulders of the guy between her tits and clung to him, panting. And then she looked over at me through locks of damp hair.

I looked her right in the eyes, and there was nothing there. No emotion. No joy, no fear, no lust. It was like her mind had gone away and left her ravaged body behind.

The guy with his dick unattended, gathered up her bedraggled hair in his hands, turned her face to his crotch, and jammed himself back into her mouth. It was then that I noticed the link cables—five of them—snaking out of the back of her head.

Her neural processor was plugged into the processors of each of the guys.

"She's jacking all five of them at once," I pointed out to Abby. They say jacking another person is the most intimate thing two people can share. I wouldn't know. I've never tried it.

"What!? Holy shit!" Abby zoomed in to get a close-up of the girl's neural port. "God, what a fucking slut. I've never even heard of anything so filthy."

"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!" the guy trying to stroke his dick with her feet cried out. "Oh god, I need those fucking dicks in me so fucking bad! God, please make me cum!"

If the stories I'd heard were true, her brain was literally in six places at once, trying to reconcile all of the sexual stimulation from six bodies. Each guy in turn was feeling everything she felt. Add to that the effects of an aphrodisiac party drug like Jezie and I can't even comprehend what kind of erotic feedback loop they were locked in.

"Please, please, please, please... " the guy in her ass started babbling. "I wanna cum. I wanna cum. You have to make me cum... Oh please, oh please, oh please..."

"I wonder how much the smut-nets will pay for this," Abby speculated aloud.

I was more concerned with trying to figure out if L. Nero was one of the five outputs. What would happen to the others if I killed him while they were still neurally linked?

I took an unsteady step into the room and was suddenly aware of cold steel on my right shoulder, crossing under my chin, constricting around my throat. By the time I was able to react, it was too late. My neck was locked in a cybernetic choke hold by someone who had snuck up behind me while I was distracted.

The Ronin's status readout vanished from my vision as the link cable was yanked out of my processor.

"Drop it!" a masculine voice ordered, jamming a gun barrel behind my left ear. At that range, even the smallest caliber bullet would shatter the bone under my kevlar skin and kill me instantly.

There are ways to break a hold like that if you know how. Bones break. Tendons tear. Joints hyperextend. Meat gives you a lot of options. Steel doesn't. Steel is unyielding so you have to pick your moment just right.

I let the Ronin slip from my grip. It clattered to the floor.

Abby looked up with a stifled gasp and redirected her camera back at me and the mystery assailant as he dragged me to the side and put his back against the wall.

"Who the hell are you people?" he snarled, pointing his weapon at Abby now. It was a stubby, sawed-off shotgun with a box magazine. A link cable draped back under his arm. He was giving me an opening to break his hold if only I could have made my body move fast enough.

But I couldn't force my retarded reflexes into motion.

The steel crook of his elbow pressed into my windpipe and my mind scrambled for an escape. My shotgun was pressed between his body and mine. My boot knife was out of reach. My best chance was to go for my pistol slung under my shoulder.

"Whoa, whoa!" Abby put her left hand up but kept filming. "I'm not armed! I'm just the network cameraman. She's your competition, not me."

"This is gonna be on TV?" the gonk asked, turning the shotgun barrel back on me. His anger seemed to be momentarily overcome by curiosity at this unexpected turn.

"It is on TV, cobber. I'm broadcasting live," Abby told him, circling the orgy in the middle of the room to get a better frame on us. "Three million people are waiting to see her die, so if you'll just go ahead and pull the trigger, the show's over and I can go home early."

Clever ploy. Abby could get out of here alive with some gruesome footage of my death and maybe even turn a profit. I was almost too impressed to feel betrayed.

"What fucking show!?" the booster demanded, tightening his choke hold. The rage was back in his voice.

"You ever seen 'Solo Hunter' on ICS?" Abby asked. "It's new this season. Competitors hunt each other through the Combat Zone."

"So you motherfuckers sent this psycho bitch into my home to kill my family for fucking ratings!?" Spittle flecked my cheek as the booster ranted at the camera, turning his weapon back on Abby again.

"No, no, no!" she protested. "Your guy Nero—he signed up for the competition!"

"Who the fuck is Nero?"

Of course Joe's assassin gave a fake name to the police. Why wouldn't he?

I tried to slowly ease my trembling hand up to my holster, but the motion was too jerky. When he felt me squirm, he yanked me up hard and turned the shotgun back on me.

"Hold still, or I swear to god, I will rip your fucking head off!"

"This guy," Abby held out the freeze-frame printout.

The goon reached over and locked the weapon into a mounting bracket built into his shoulder. The muzzle pressed into the back of my head forcing me to nod forward, squeezing my windpipe even more. With the shotgun jacked into his processor, he could still blow my brains out with a thought.

He reached for the printout and Abby handed it to him.

"Oh, that's Rook," he spat and tossed the picture to the floor. "That sounds like the kind of stupid shit he'd do. But you fucked up, bitch." He jeered at me as he reached his free hand into my jacket and pulled out my pistol. "Rook's not even here. He came back talking about a big score he made and took a bunch of guys up to Chatsubo to celebrate."

I cursed myself for screwing this up so bad. The intelligence was hours old. I should have taken the time to verify the target was on site before launching my assault. I was sloppy and now it was going to cost me.

"Hey, what's your name?" Abby asked, keeping the guy talking. She tapped her ear to indicate a radio trans-ceiver implant. "My producer wants to know what name to put up on the chyron."

He didn't answer right away, unclipping my M/P from its sling and pulling it out from between us instead.

"Call me Kurabu," he answered at last, then turned toward me and sneered. "It's the last name you're ever gonna hear. That scares you, doesn't it?"

The punk had misinterpreted my trembling spasms for fear. I had to figure out how to use that to my advantage. But first I needed that shotgun pointed away from me. If I was at the end of the barrel and did anything that might cause his trigger finger to clench reflexively, or cause the wrong synapse to misfire in surprise, Abby would get a very abrupt ending to her story.

"So, what does Rook win when he kills this bitch?" the booster who called himself Kurabu asked Abby, jerking me up onto my toes.