her combat boots on under that long skirt. I’m not proud to say I was too scared to get close enough to check. Mavis bites.
Anyway, I hear you asking: What the hell were you guys doing at said gala?
Oh, nothing much. Just extracting Wildside.
For anybody who’s lived in a cave for the last six months or so, Wildside is a band. And just so we can be as inconspicuous as possible, they’re a band consisting of a sasquatch, a pixie, and a centaur. Which kind of sounds like the beginning of a re- ally bad joke.
A fraggin’ centaur. You know: four legs, horse face, long tail? Yeah. Inconspicuous was not gonna happen.
Did I mention we were twenty grand in the hole?
The only good news about the whole thing was that they
wanted to be extracted. Apparently their current label pulled a
few fast ones on them when they were starting out, and when they got popular and started raking in the nuyen, they found out that they were only seeing a fraction of it. Needless to say, their label was keeping a tight hold on them, and they wanted a change of management.
That’s where we came in.
It was all planned out, Mr. Johnson told us. Wildside was one of the acts on hand for entertainment at the shindig, which was
being held in a ballroom on the top floor of one of the Downtown hotels. They’d do their set, then head off to take a break in one of the side rooms. We’d slip out, take out the two goons guarding the door and whatever security wonks the label had stuck to the band’s asses, and escort the band members to a waiting freight elevator. Johnson’s people would be waiting in the parking ga- rage with appropriate transportation. In and out, one hour max. Easy as falling off a horse, right?
Okay, given the job, maybe that wasn’t the best choice of metaphor. And anyway, I wasn’t too sure of our chances of sneaking out with a horse and a giant walking carpet. At least the pixie would be easy to hide. If need be, Loogie could stuff him in his pocket.
Wildside was scheduled to be the third act on the playlist. The second one, three ork kids with more volume than talent, were up when we got in. I stayed near the buffet table and scoped the place out while Mavis and Loogie moved off to take their posi- tions, Mavis to start working her magic in the Matrix and Loog to get over by the door where the band would head out after their set. Normally, giving Loogie a “lurk and look unobtrusive” job would be about as smart as trying to goose Lofwyr, but there were enough trolls at the party that he actually kind of blended in. Now I knew who’d rented all those tuxes. As one of the few
“Yeah. Sitting tight.” “Loog?”
“Good to go.”
So now it was just the waiting. I put a few hors-d’oeuvres on a plate and watched the crowd, scanning for anybody who looked suspicious. It would have been great if we’d had some magical support, but it also would have been great if we’d had the twenty grand we needed and hadn’t had to take this job at all. I picked out the likely security guards and marked them on AR, but if things went the way we planned we wouldn’t have to deal with them. All the violence would take place on the other side of the door Loogie was watching.
The orks finished their set and ran offstage to scattered ap- plause, disappearing through Loogie’s door. Then the applause got a lot louder and we got our first glimpse of Wildside.
We’d seen them on the trid, of course. Who hadn’t? But the trid didn’t do them justice. I moved in a little closer to the stage as everybody packed in to get a better look and they launched into their current hit song. I’d heard some pretty weird music in my day, but hearing Meltdown live had to be one of the weirdest. The centaur, Dmitri D, played a guitar adapted for the fact that he only had three fingers per hand; he looked like the top half of your stereotypical metalhead and the bottom half of a small draft horse. The pixie, Flick, was a little glowing force flitting around like mad in the back, zipping back and forth through something that looked like a theremin pimped out with a laser show.
And then there was Stellaluna, the sasquatch. Three meters tall and covered in light brown fur, she was belting out something that sounded like ground zero at a nuclear catastrophe, complete with emergency sirens. Only more melodic. You didn’t really get the full effect on the trid: the music thrummed through my body, reaching into me on some deep level. If I, the original mundane, could feel that, I guessed that the spellslinging types in the crowd were wetting themselves right about now. “Okay,” I muttered into the comm. “Get ready. They’re only doing the one song, so—“
That was about when the cake in the middle of the buffet ta- ble exploded. The one I was standing directly in front of.
It was a good thing the explosion was designed to make a lot of noise and attract a lot of attention rather than cause injury, or I’d have been a red smear on the floor. Instead, I felt gooey chunks of icing patter across the back of my rented tux and stick in my hair.
“Okay, nobody move!” a loud voice yelled. A guy leaped up onto the front of the stage, brandishing a small but deadly look- ing SMG. Others—all human, all in tuxes—appeared around the periphery, their own SMGs aimed at the sec-guards.
Somebody screamed. The crowd teetered in a perfect equi- librium, poised between obeying the order and surrendering to its collective lizard-brain panic instinct.
“What the—?” came Loog’s voice over my ‘link.
the crowd, the gunmen, and the band. How the hell were we gonna get Wildside out of here if these chuckleheads were pull- ing off a heist on the high-society sheep? I watched the twenty grand sprout wings and begin to fly away.
No. Wait. That was the pixie.
One second he was there, and the next he’d disappeared. “Mavis?” I muttered.
“Workin’ on it,” came her tight reply.
The guys with the guns didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the band. I wondered for a moment why they were there, but then the one on the stage made it clear: “Okay, you meta scum, listen up! You move, we plug ya, got it? We’re the Human Militia, and we want one million nuyen. Now. Or we start sendin’ rich metas outta here in body bags. Got it?” He waved the gun around for emphasis.
Oh, great. Bigots.
Amateur bigots, even. How the hell did they even get in here?
Fraggin’ useless security.
The crowd was petrified. Even the trolls, who probably could have steamrolled these twits without ripping their rented tuxes.
“What’s the plan, Joey?” came Loogie’s voice over the link. “Gonna have a lotta dead people in here if these guys get twitchy.”
“Yeah,” I growled. “And they’re fraggin’ up our extraction.” The air split with the shriek of a siren, so loud I thought it was going to break my head open. It was exactly the sort of sound that KE’s SWAT vehicles made. Don’t ask me how I know this. I just do, okay? What the frag?
All around the room people were clamping their hands to their heads. All but the Human Militia guys, who were all sudden- ly looking around in panic, trying to figure out where the cops were.
I realized what was going on right about the time Dmitri the Centaur reared back, spun on his hooves, and booted the dude on the stage so hard with his back legs that the guy went airborne and landed in the middle of the crowd. His SMG went flying in the opposite direction.
“Go!” I yelled into the link as the screams started again. Ev- erybody, including the gunmen, was freaking out. I vaulted up on the stage next to Dmitri, as behind us Stella kept up the steady shriek of the siren. She grinned at me, her teeth flashing white in her hairy face.
“Get us the hell out of here,” Dmitri said in his thick Russian accent.
“Workin’ on it,” I said through gritted teeth, already pulling out my own gun. Unfortunately all we’d been able to smuggle past the guards were handguns, which weren’t going to hold up too well against those SMGs. We’d have to move fast, before they figured out there weren’t really any cops.
diversion. “Get down here,” Loog snapped. “I can’t use these fuckin’ tiny guns.”
“C’mon,” I told Dmitri. “You’re a target up here.”
“I am target wherever I am,” he said, but he got up a head of steam and leaped gracefully off the stage, coming to rest in a spot the crowd had cleared. He still held his guitar.
I didn’t know how many of the Human Militia guys there were. Loogie tossed me an SMG. “Mavis, you got that elevator open yet?” And where the hell was the pixie?
“Not yet. Looks like their decker’s better than their muscle.” Fucking great. “I guess you don’t do stairs, huh?” I asked Dmitri over my shoulder.
The look he gave me could have cut through plasteel. To my right came the unmistakable sound of SMG fire. Oh, this just kept getting better. Loog and I wore armor under our tuxes, but Wildside were sitting ducks, or horses, or whatever, if the lead started flying.
Dmitri turned, slung his guitar onto his back, and made some kind of elaborate sign-language gestures toward the stage. The sirens stopped, replaced with the sound of a distorted voice over a bullhorn: “This is Knight Errant! You are surrounded! Drop your
weapons!” This was followed by a series of shotgun blasts.
And then the air above us lit up with an array of flashing lights—you know, the kind you’re not supposed to look at if you have epilepsy. The crowd, including the gunmen, went nuts. A tiny, high-pitched voice giggled near my right ear, but a quick glance revealed nothing there.
“Got the door,” came Mavis’s voice. “Hurry up, though. Might not have it for long.”
“We need the elevator,” I said with a glance at Dmitri. Stella was wading through the crowd now, still pumping out great imitations of various KE sounds. Her big furry form towered over everybody but the trolls. If the gunmen hadn’t been trans- fixed by the pretty lights, she’d have been Target One. Up close, the smell of her damp fur reminded me of a dog I’d once had. “We’re outta here,” I told them. “Where’s Flick?”
The giggle sounded in my ear again, and I felt a tiny weight settle on my shoulder for a second. “I got this!” a high-pitched voice said.
“What about all these people?” Loogie demanded, trying to shepherd Stella toward the door.
I risked a glance over my shoulder. Flick’s lightshow was still going and, wonder of wonders, it looked like the crowd was fi- nally getting their act together and realizing that they had the gunmen outnumbered. Obviously the Human Militia guys were counting on shock and surprise to let them get into position, but whatever plans they’d made were pretty much screwed at this point. I guess they hadn’t expected to get their asses kicked by the band.
Okay, I wouldn’t either. That would just be embarrassing. “They’ll be okay,” I said. “Come on!”
if the pixie had a levitation spell: maybe we could turn Dmitri into the world’s first pegacentaur.
We surged through the open door, Loog going first to make sure the coast was clear. Good thing he did, too: as soon as we all got in and slammed it behind us, voices yelled from the other end of the hallway. “Hold it!”
Oh, frag, I’d forgotten about the label guys.
There were four of them: two near where we’d come in, like they were debating whether to go back in and try to rescue their charges, and the other two down by the break-room door. All of them had guns out.
Loogie and Dmitri moved in unison like they’d planned it: Loog brought a fist the size of a devil rat down on the left guy’s head, and Dmitri swung his guitar over his head and cracked it down on the right guy’s skull. Both of them dropped instantly.
Holy drek, the freakshow played hardball! Maybe we’d get out of here after all. Shame about the guitar, though.
Stella had stopped making her KE noises, but now the harsh sound of an alarm—a real one this time—erupted out of unseen speakers all around us. “Got the elevator!” Mavis’s voice said in the ‘link. “Go, go. Already got Knights showin’ up downstairs. End of hall, past the break room! Go!”
Loog and I moved fast, putting our armored selves between the band and the remaining gunmen. This was gonna hurt, but we couldn’t let the band take hits. It looked bad to Johnsons when you let your clients get plugged.
I shouldn’t have worried. I kept forgetting about Flick. I still hadn’t seen the little fragger, but suddenly the two gunmen shrieked and dropped their guns, clutching their hands together like they’d just grabbed hot wires. “Yes!” the tiny voice cried in triumph. “We’re outta here!”
And we were. We slipped past the stricken gunmen (Loogie and Dmitri made quick work of them on the way by, as Stella fa- vored them with that little riff everybody knows from trid car- toons: You know, the one that means, ‘too bad, you’re screwed’). Mavis was waiting for us in the elevator. She gave our motley little group a sideways look, but otherwise didn’t comment. She
was wearing her combat boots, I noticed.
Stella was grinning like her face was gonna split in half as the elevator trundled its way down toward the ground floor. She held up her furry hands and whipped out a whole stream of sign lan- guage aimed directly at me. I looked helplessly at Dmitri. “What’d she say?”
The centaur was grinning too. “She says this is most fun she’s had in years. Wants to know if we can do it again sometime.”
Flick’s giggle came again, and I felt tiny hands picking icing out of my hair.
“Uh…” I said with a glance at Loog and Mavis. “Tell her we’ll get back to her.” ✖