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 Way of the Warrior  (20 ratings)by Igor Raffaele Page 8 of 10 Wondering wether the most famous assassin sect in the world is getting careless, or perhaps wether I am getting good at this with time, I enter the waiting darkness, giving one last glance to my vehicle and the shapes behind it. Shuffling mouths of madness, the maintenance crews are moving into place, with their power tools and demented expressions, waiting for the chance to restore the peace we have broken. Once inside, I power up my arm mouted blaster, and switch on my helmet's night vision filters. My helmet obligingly diplays a head up overlay map of the building, with the quickest access routes to Jokonosa's private quarters traced in yellow, harsh against the greenish hues the night vision colours everything with. I move quickly along the silent hallways, following the obvious traces of the assassin's passage. Those black fetish maniacs at the Shadow headquarters like to mainain a reputation for invisibility, but walking on a floor covered with the dust of twenty years or more without leaving footprints would be a neat trick for anything but a ghost. The well defined steps the assassin took lie clearly in the dust before me, and reassure me. I press press onwards and upwards. It is not easy going, and my invisible friend obviously is very agile: he can squeeze through gaps in the rubble I have to force my way through, and the cracks wounding the floors do not make walking any easier. The Shadow was also probably not burdened with several hundred kilograms of reinforced metal armour, and so he had to be less careful as to where he put his feet. More than once I feel the vibrations of the floor giving in from under me just on time to step back and avoid falling to bloody death all the way to the next platform's ground, a thousand and more meters below. Gradually, the state of disrepair and the omnipresent dust start to fade. Just as if I was walking backwards in a time tunnel, the cracks progressively become less prominent on the floor, and the rubble mounds get smaller and smaller. The walls start getting their colours back and lose all their wrinkling and peeling pain, fading in to the original hues as I get to the parts of the building still obviously patrolled by Jokonosa's henchmen. Just as I was getting my hopes up, I am suddenly faced with a very solid and modern looking double steel door, in a red carpeted corridor with very light greenish walls. There is no indication of how my prey got through it, but it certainly does not look forced. I start meticulously examining the walls and ceiling around the door, until a blinking light on its controls panel attracts my eye, and I almost laugh out loud. Obviously planning to come back through here in a hurry, and not wanting to waste time opening it again, my cunning but careless friend left the door open, but forgot to mask the controls panel. I cannot really berate him since I only just spent some ten minutes looking for a way to get past an open door. Not being the nicest person ever, I make sure the door is firmly locked and secured when I leave it behind me. After a few minutes of careful creeping around and flattening myself against the walls, I finally find a security terminal. It is only a low level screen, very restricted in its systems access, it should serve my purpose admirably. I fiddle with the controls until I manage to bring up a generalized status report. The slightly luminous display informs me that everything checks out as normal, and that all patrols are just on standard standby alert, which means that Jokonosa is still alive. Skilled as the Demon Shadow hackers might be, I rather doubt they managed to isolate the whole internal security system, and when Jokonosa dies, the whole building is going straight to red alert, and even if the outlying barracks won't be notified, that still is enough firepower and men to make even the most reckless cowboys in town very nervous. It is time to stop and think for a second again. I cannot continue following the assassin's traces: he will certainly choose the shortest possible route to his victim's private quarters, and wait for him there at the end of the long day filled with business meetings. If I remember well what I know of Jokonosa's daily schedule, he will still be in his offices right now, but he should be getting ready to retire for the night. A grin splits my face as I think of the way to make sure he does not get killed, and the more I turn it in my mind, the more I like its outrageous cheek. I have tailed people before, but never in their own homes, and never dodging platoons of security guards. It is however getting very late at night, and I should have been in bed a long time ago. To counteract some of the less welcome side effects of age, I switch on my suit's body augmentation system just before I start moving again. I immediately feel refreshed as it starts pumping awareness heightening and strength building chemicals into my veins. There will be a terrible price to pay later on, when the chemical's effects finally wear out. My abused muscles will complain very loudly of the treatment they are about to receive, but I really do not want to risk falling over myself in exhaustion as I creep around Jokonosa's bodyguard, looking for traces of traps laid in by the assassin, or perhaps the assassin himself. Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 Igor Raffaele, sffworld.com. All rights reserved. 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