Never trust an elf

Lights and occasional noises from some of the rooms indicated that there were still active company folk on this level, so they moved through it as quietly as possible. That wasn't too hard. The late-night wage slaves were snugged by their consoles in isolated cocoons of light. They had no interest in the corridors, or anything beyond their little worlds of chair and workstation, for that matter. Besides, it was easy to sneak along on carpeted floors.

Once aboard the freight elevator, Kham pressed the button marked BL4 and they started down. Chigger overrode a signal from Level Three, ordering the car to proceed without responding to the suit or wage slave calling for an elevator on that floor. Reaching Level Four, they soon found new reason to be cautious. Most of the illumination panels were out and those that remained lit were functioning at reduced output.

"Economy measure," Ratstomper suggested tentatively, almost as if she didn't believe it herself.

Kham reached up and lifted the panel covering one of the darkened fixtures. Like its covering, the bulb was intact. In the first office they found, Rabo used the terminal to contact Chigger.

"Cut off," the decker told them. He didn't know who had done it, but he was sure that it wasn't an authorized reduction.

Kham cherished the thought that an employee might be responsible, until they found a guard sprawled at the first corridor junction, his neck broken from be-

hind. The conclusion was inescapable; someone else had also made an unauthorized entry into the facility. Two minutes later, in the fitful light of the darkened corridors, they saw who.

There were three of them. They were moving cautiously, too, and even more slowly than Kham's crew. They were rough boys-meres or razorguys, judging by their looks. A professional team, too, judging by their stealth and the seamless coordination of the drill they used when passing doors and corridor junctions. The problem was that they were between Kham's guys and the rock and headed in the same direction.

They might have been shadowrunners, but Kham had never seen more than two runners who went for the same look. Though each of these guys was different from the others, their overall appearance showed a striking similarity. Kham thought about the twinned cyberguys they'd run with; maybe look-alike was the new style.

All of these rough boys were big-bigger even than Kham. They looked a little oddly proportioned; their heads seemed too small for their bodies, like caricatures of professional bodybuilders. They wore what looked like close-fitting helmets and their heads were protected from behind by a jutting ridge from their backpacks. Wire-thin aerials poked up past their sleek pates, and other wires protruded at irregular intervals along the sides of the backpacks. They were blatantly armored with extensive matte-finish chrome and they were dripping with weapons-from holstered pistols and knives to what looked like Ceres tribarrel machine guns. These guys were pure heavy metal from hell.

The last of the three rough boys stopped and turned slightly. His position under one of the lit ceiling panels gave Kham a good look at him. Much of what Kham had taken for armor were cybernetic replacement parts, but what struck the ork most was the guy's face. What he could see of it. The little flesh that wasn't plated over looked gray and shriveled. Tubes snaked from his nose and slithered over his shoulder to disappear into a junction on the backpack's ridge, and the light from above glinted coldly on the gleaming chrome orbs of his eyes.

"Who da hell are dese guys?" "Not security," Neko whispered. With awe in her reedy voice, The Weeze added, "They're carrying three times the ordnance we got." Ordnance was ordnance, and a single bullet could kill you just as dead as twenty. These cyberized bozos were here and interfering in Kham's run; that was all that mattered to him. "Scatter, why didn't you spot 'em?"

"They were not there," the rat shaman said, pouting.

"Well, dey're here now. You saying dey teleported in, like from da Enterprise? Drek, wouldn't dat be sweet."

Scatter gave him a withering stare. "No teleport; they have no magic."

"You sure? Dey been hiding from you." "No magic," Scatter insisted. There was a frantic note in her voice, which was also rising in volume. "None!"

"Geez," Kham hissed. "Keep it down, ya old bat." "Lay off the shaman, Kham," Ratstomper whined. "She's already saved our butts plenty."

The crew quieted down, but it was too late. With slow, machine-like precision, the heavy metal intruder swiveled his head to stare into the darkness between the light fixtures where Kham and his runners were crouched.