11 - Shadowrun - Novel - Striper Assassin by Shadowrun

Author:Shadowrun [Shadowrun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-03T07:00:00+00:00

30

The warehouse is six stories of grimy brick, squat and square, and very wide across. It stands north of Franklin Bridge and just east of the interstate, amid the congested confusion of streets and buildings crammed between the highway and the waterfront. The garish neon sign rising from the warehouse roof proclaims:

DELGATO MOVING AND STORAGE

PHILADELPHIA’S PRIMO MOVERS

Axle hangs almost motionless in the night some five hundred meters above the rooftop sign. In reality, he’s sitting in a van on the ground, but that is a trivial detail. He’s jacked into his heavily modified Mitsuhama control deck and flying his Aerodesign Condor LDSD-23 surveillance drone. It’s like hanging from a balloon, dangling in empty air. Hydrogen gas cells provide lift. Turboprop rotors keep him on station. His eyes are Versatek zooms, thermographically enhanced, with a heads-up display in targeting mode feeding him data from his ground-seeking radar. He can see practically the whole world beneath him, every direction at once, kind of like looking through a super wide-angle lens, but without the distortion. Targeting sights direct his attention to everything that moves in the vicinity of the warehouse.

Rats, a flight of birds, an alley cat—another hour of this and he’ll succumb to terminal boredom.

“Anything?” Hammer asks.

The voice jogs his brain in odd ways. For just an instant, he loses touch with the jacked-in analog of his drone senses and he’s back in the van, behind the steering wheel. He must be bored. A quick image, more a memory than anything else, flashes through his mind. He sees the inside of the van. Hammer in the passenger-side front seat, Mickey and Dog Bite and Dana sitting in the rear. They dumped Angel, the decker, at Dana’s old place a few hours ago.

“Axle!” Hammer growls.

But for the lights of the glaring sign on the roof and a few spotlights illuminating doors and the loading dock in the rear, the warehouse is dark. Deserted, too. “Nothing’s moving.”

Hammer grunts.

Axle won’t be surprised if tonight’s surveillance turns out to be a waste of time. The biker biff that led them here claimed that Striper had a doss on the upper floor of the warehouse. There’s an apartment there all right, but no Striper. Dana’s inspected the whole building astrally, not once but twice already. All she found was an empty apartment and a lot of packing crates and cartons. The only unusual thing she reported was an “ambiance of violence”. What that means is anyone’s guess. Axle supposes that the warehouse may have once been the scene of violence in the past, but how that applies to their situation now, if it applies at all, he hasn’t got a clue. Neither does Dana, apparently.

Abruptly, a warning bleep sounds in his ears. A targeting sight zips across his field of vision. He zooms in automatically. Way down below, in the deep shadows between the buildings, something’s moving toward the warehouse.

“Contact,” he says tersely.

Hammer demands more data, but for the moment Axle ignores that. His thermographic enhancement is

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