Hell on High

by Holly Lisle

  "Last time I didn't was a big mess," Jack said, remembering Carol.

  "Have it your way," Jan said. "Maybe it's just as well. If this all falls through, then you'll only be losing a job." She sat back up again. "So, would you like your mail?"

  "Uh, sure," Jack said, off balance again.

  "Here," she stood and handed him a scraggly pile of paper. "Three copies of Circuit Week, each with a different spelling of your name, five companies trying to sell you test equipment, two calls for papers, three faxes that came in for you last night, and—for reasons which I can't pretend to fathom, but which I'm sure make perfect sense, one copy for 'Jake Hanloran' of Frederick's of Hollywood's latest catalog. Do be sure to check page thirty-four."

  Jack checked page thirty-four. "That's certainly, um, inspiring, Jan," he admitted.

  "Look at the price though," she cautioned. "To get that much money for that little fabric, they must be charging by the molecule."

  He winked at her. "Yes, but those are very happy molecules."

  Jan laughed. "Off with you then, before you corrupt my virgin ears. And Jack—" she said as he turned to go, "think about what I said, hmm?"

  Jack did think about it all the way back to his office. Certainly Rhea had never shown anything other than a friendly interest in him. Had she? He was certainly going to look a lot more sharply in the future.

  Chapter 20

  Rhea was coming up the stairs as Jack went down. She looked great, just like the after segment of a coffee commercial, and Jack would have sworn she was a morning person, despite the fact that he knew she looked just as good at two a.m.

  "Good morning," she said. "In a bit early today, aren't you?"

  "Couldn't sleep," Jack admitted. "This thing is still driving me crazy."

  Rhea leaned back against the stair railing. "Still the same symptoms?" she asked.

  "Yeah, about. I've got to the point where I can blow the lights now, too, sometimes."

  "Well, now, that is progress," she said. "If you can scale that up towards stopping the whole world around it, the drive ought to move by virtue of inertia."

  "I won't rule it out," Jack said. He shifted his grip on his mail. "What about you? Any word on our funding?"

  Rhea looked down, and explored the crack between two concrete blocks with her toes. Not a good sign, Jack thought.

  "I'm working it," she said finally. "I'll make an announcement to the whole company when I have something definitive to say."

  Meaning she wasn't going to say anything else about it to him, now. Well, he shouldn't really expect her to. "Hang in there," he told her. "We're all pulling for you."

  "Thanks," Rhea said. "That means more than you know."

  She paused and glanced at his armload of paper. "Interesting technical manual there," she commented.

  Jack had forgotten exactly what he was carrying. "Um, research," he said. "Definitely research material. In fact, I'd better get it down to my office and get started right away. See you!" He passed Rhea and headed down the stairs.

  "Remember, I can't use you if you go blind," Rhea called down to him as he reached the second floor, and then, as the stairwell door closed behind him, he thought he heard something else that sounded a lot like, "But I do a great page thirty-four!"

  Chapter 21

  Glibspet was smiling. He'd just paid for a box of Bugles with a two-party check drawn on a Venezuelan bank, and he'd held the line up for thirty-five minutes. He'd even gotten change. Now he was sitting at his desk eating the little cornucopias and planning his next move on several cases.

  He'd found the runaway kid he'd been looking for and he'd like to close the books on that one, but if he waited a few more days before telling her parents, she would probably have turned her first trick. Wait, he decided. He didn't need the money yet. If it came to that, he could break her in and still make a profit.

  The lost dog case? Well, he'd never collect on that one, and he'd carefully worded the contract so that he wouldn't have to. He closed out the file. For a poodle that juicy and tender, it had been worth it.

  The Averial case, though, was definitely still open. The past few weeks had been unpleasant, with the Three Stooges popping into his office at odd times and making life miserable for him. So far, though, they'd been careful not to do anything that would blow his cover with Mindenhall—they were catching enough hell in Hell for Averial's continued absence that they weren't doing anything that might make him fail. He'd never seen three Fallen so scared.

  Scared was the way he liked them.

  He pulled a list of ideas he'd been considering from his drawer and called in Mindenhall. He handed him the list. "These are some directions I've been considering for the Avi Baker case," he said. He'd come up with the name Avi Baker for Averial because he didn't think good Catholic Craig would take much of a fancy to hunting Fallen angels for Fallen clients. "Run these down, will you? I'm going to chase a few maybe-leads of my own."

  Craig studied the list for a moment, then nodded. "I'll get right on it."

  Mindenhall headed for the door, and Glibspet watched his retreating ass. The longer he didn't have it, the more attractive it got. Still, it wouldn't do to hurry; Mindenhall was a long-term project, and in the meantime, he was doing good footwork on the search for Averial. No leads yet, but every negative result narrowed the possibilities. And he'd gotten information for Glibspet that had broken a few other cases.

  Glibspet heard the outer door shut. Good. Now he could eliminate some more possibilities. He opened a desk drawer and took out a small, bright red modem, which he hooked to the serial port on the back of his PC. There was no place on the modem for a phone jack or power cord. That didn't matter. He was calling up Hell Online. It was one edge the Hellraised had over Heaven—Hell had all the best programmers. Heaven had who? Grace Hopper, and that was about it.

  Glibspet entered his user ID and password, and cursed as the welcome screen slowly and painfully crawled across his display: The red modem was only three hundred baud. It was, after all, a product of Hell.

  Finally the message of the day appeared:

  /usr/local/hell filled up again last night. I deleted all home directories and expired all Usenet groups except alt.flame. If you had important data on that partition: tough shit. I've got better things to do than keep backups, and don't bother coming to me with tapes. Restoring your pathetic little files isn't on my list of top ten million things to do—Cron.

  Glibspet thought of all his favorite poodle recipe files and sighed. Hell's sysops got to wreak havoc out of all proportion to their rank. At least they had finally replaced the mainframe and thrown out JCL. Satan himself had decreed that some things even Hell couldn't tolerate.

  When he got the main menu, he keyed for access to the damnedsouls database.

  Hell had always kept good records on its human occupants. It had to. But in the old days, an exhaustive search through the damnedsouls files would have taken weeks, and would have required stroking a half dozen different bureaucrats and archivists just to get into the file room. Now Glibspet could formulate a very restrictive query and have it answered within minutes. Probably the longest part of the process would be downloading the query hits over the three hundred-baud link.

  He thought carefully and typed in an SQL (Satan's Query Language) statement to pull all the female damnedsouls who had died in North Carolina within six months in either direction of the Unchaining who were residents but who had lived there for less than ninety days: two hundred and forty-seven hits. He punched download and dug in for a wait. He'd have to spend more time after downloading, too, because he was going to have to go through every single hit. Most could probably be eliminated out of hand. He didn't think it was too likely that Averial would have taken the identity of a damnedsoul. Although the information would have been readily available to her, she would have known that all Hell had access to it, too. On the other hand, she might think that they might think she would never do it, and so do it anyway. So he
had to check, and he couldn't just skim. He was going to have to do this right.

  Glibspet paced while the slow process continued. His silk boxers rubbed against the tender spot at the base of his spine, which started to itch ferociously. The spot had been driving him crazy for days, ever since he got the last of his tail demanifested. He scratched gingerly and looked at his screen. The download was only forty percent complete—he had a little time. He walked into the bathroom, dropped his trousers and rubbed baby oil on the afflicted patch of skin. It didn't help much, but thinking about the baby-rendering factory cheered him up a bit, and when he got back to his office, his PC was flashing ready.

  He set the list to printing and unplugged the red modem. It was hot to his touch, and the insulation on the serial cable was a bit singed. That was to be expected; he had yet to find a cable that was fully Hell-compatible. Glibspet let the cable cool for a minute while he put the modem away. The next step would require only his PC's standard internal modem. That, a bit of bribery, some blackmail and probably some plain old-fashioned hacking should get him logged into the databases at the regional insurance agencies. It wasn't hard, really. There had always been a lot of insurance salesmen pledged to Hell, and the agencies had eagerly hired the Hellborn after the Unchaining. Glibspet always had favors he could call in from both crowds. He popped the top off a can of Vienna sausages and started dialing.

  Half an hour and two cans later, he had been in half a dozen systems and had about four hundred possibles. He sucked the gelatin off another Vienna appreciatively (one of the few foods whose ingredient list didn't disappoint) and considered his finds. He'd been digging through the companies' "nest prospecting" files. Many insurance agents kept files on paid-out claims so that they could go back later and hit up friends and relatives to buy insurance from them. "Remember your old pal, Joey Feinmeister? We paid out $200,000 smackeroos to the little missus... and I know you've seen her new Cadillac. Just think, you too can cash in big..."

  Glibspet could hardly think of a tackier practice. He figured insurance sales was where used-car dealers went when they couldn't meet the ethical standards anymore. He loved it. More to the point, sometimes the follow-ups found anomalies, and he had a whole list of them now to investigate.

  He couldn't afford to neglect the more straightforward approaches, either. Averial was passing as human. One day she was bound to slip and call on Hell for something. All he needed was a single Hellawatt expended to her account; he could backtrace that and discover, if not her exact location, then at least a place where she had been recently. Odds were, it would be someplace where she was known. Where someone, shown a picture of Averial, would recognize a face. Unlike Linufel, Kellubrae, and Venifar, Glibspet wasn't in a major hurry—due to a little point in the contract that the three Fallen had overlooked, he didn't have any deadline for producing his results.

  He smiled at that thought.

  The three of them were already nearing their deadline. The Unholy Head of State wasn't dealing directly with him, so he could make things as miserable as he chose for the Three Stooges, knowing that the only repercussions he would face would be from them—and knowing that they didn't dare do much to him, because if they did, he'd screw them worse than he already was.

  He ought to tell them he needed more money for expenses, too. That would thrill them no end.

  Meanwhile, Averial would wait. She had nowhere else to go.

  Chapter 22

  Postal Clerk Slays Self in Shooting Melee

  Winston-Salem—The Associated Press

  Violence erupted at the main post office in Winston-Salem Tuesday as long-time U.S. Postal Service employee Waddel Fuller pulled a semi-automatic rifle from beneath the customer service counter and fired point-blank at a waiting postal patron. Fuller was killed instantly when the bullet ricocheted off of a chain securing a ballpoint pen to a writing counter and hit him in the temple.

  The patron, a devil, was killed but instantly reconstituted. Other patrons, and Postal Service employees, who dived behind sorting racks and postal scales, were unharmed.

  Co-workers say that Fuller was distraught at repeated, unreasonable requests from the patron on whom he fired. These apparently included multiple daily hold-mail/start-mail orders and odd stamp requests. Said colleague Mark Snyder, "This time the guy wanted six hundred sixty-six one-cent stamps, and wanted to pay for them with pennies. Wade had just had it."

  Postmaster Bob Stern said that Fuller "was a quiet man, and a darn good counter agent. I just can't believe it."

  Asked for comment, the devil, who declined to be identified would say only, "This unfortunate incident should not discourage anyone from stamp collecting as only fifteen stamp collectors have been killed by post office employees during the last year."

  Following the incident, a bill materialized in the air over Fuller's body. The bill, for $24,371.35, demanded payment for the destruction of the Hellraised body, but was charged, not to Fuller, but to the Postal Service. Postal officials are forwarding the bill to Washington, DC.

  "Dear Steve," Rhea typed. "Thanks for letting me look at your paper. It's brilliant as always, but I think you could derive that tensor sequence on page three a bit more cleanly." She pulled down the math editing menu and keyed in a bristly, frightening-looking equation. "That should eliminate steps five through twelve," she continued. "I look forward to reading the finished version! Take care of yourself."

  She added her digitized signature, and hit send. The message disappeared from her screen, and Rhea sat back and smiled. It was good to keep her hand in—she didn't get much time nowadays, especially the way things were going.

  It had been a long week today. Jan had been on another line every time Rhea had buzzed her, and Rhea strongly suspected she was lining up interviews. It would be easy to check, and she knew Jan would own up to it if asked, but there wouldn't be any point. What was Rhea going to do—ask her people not to look after their own futures? If she couldn't guarantee their jobs, they had every right to look elsewhere, and those who weren't already looking would be soon; she'd seen the black mood during her walk-through this morning. The worst thing was that several people had tried to cheer her up. They were a good bunch, and she was letting them down.

  Things had been a lot simpler in Heaven, where money was never an issue and everything worked more or less the way it was supposed to, and a whole lot easier in Hell—there you were supposed to let people down if at all possible.

  She was worried about Jack too. Not about his job; he would have people calling him if he ever hinted he was ready to leave, but about his well-being. She knew he wasn't getting enough sleep, and she could almost feel the waves of frustration rolling from his office every time she walked in. She wished she could tell him to work on something else for a while, but the MULE drive was the heart of her program. With it, she would have investors. Without it, she had speculators.

  She had her own work to do too to keep the ball rolling. It was time she got back to it. She kept three baskets on her desk. One said in, one said out, and one said too hard. The in basket was empty, so she had no excuse to keep her away from the too hard basket. She sighed, and picked a random sheaf of papers from midway down in the stack. After the first couple of pages, she was seriously considering establishing a too boring basket, but she made herself read through the memo to the end, then drafted a short e-mail note to Jan for action.

  Outside the sky was black with low-hanging clouds, and in the distance Rhea could see flashes of lightning. It wasn't raining yet, but the stage was set for a lollapalooza of a spring thunderstorm, and she had a front row seat. Maybe the too hard basket would take a direct hit, but Rhea doubted it. He wasn't going to do her any favors.

  She pulled another sheaf. This one was a government form with thirteen attachments, all written in Old High Federalese. She started parsing the first paragraph, got sucked down into a dependent clause and didn't come up for air until half a page later—and she still wasn't sure what it
said. Rhea frowned. The words were all clear enough, but they didn't seem to get along well together. She pulled a pencil from her desk drawer and diagrammed the sentence. It fell neatly into place, and confirmed her original impression; the second clause completely nullified the first clause for a net meaning of zero. Your tax dollars at work, she thought and took a guess at what the government probably meant for it to mean. She filled out the rest of the form, then tagged it with a Post-It for Jan to mail.

  She was debating the merits of trying another too hard versus going skunk wrestling when the phone rang. It was her private line, the one that didn't go through Jan's switchboard. She let it ring three times, then picked it up. "Hello," she said, "Rhea Samuels."

  "Ms. Samuels," the voice on the other end said, "this is Al Roberts, TRITEL. Figured you might still be there. Have you eaten?"

  "No," Rhea said cautiously, "I haven't."

  "Well, can you meet me at the Angus Barn at eight? You can bring the contracts we discussed—I don't think you'll be disappointed."

  Rhea looked at her too hard box and laughed. "I'm filling out government forms. A disappointment would be a step up right now. Something good would be beyond belief. So I'll see you at eight."

  "Great."

  Rhea hung up, smiling. Outside, fat, heavy drops of rain were starting to fall. But maybe, just maybe, she could see a rainbow.

  Chapter 23

  The evening roads were slippery when the worst of the rain hit, and Rhea came around a corner too fast and the Triumph started to hydroplane. She came perilously close to expending Hellawatts to stop it. Only quick reflexes and physical strength let her tap the brakes, steer into the spin, and straighten out before she went into the side of the house built right on the corner. From that point onward, she drove at a much slower pace.