Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “Check it out.” Standing behind her, McNihil pointed toward the scene surrounding the hotel. “That’s what’s causing it all.”

  It took a moment for November to see what he was talking about. A wave larger than all the others had slammed in slow motion against the building; a section of the hotel’s brick facing, charred and weakened by the long-ago fire, sheared away from the structure and crashed across the sea’s membrane. The impact vibrating through the hotel’s fragile structure threw November against the wall beside the window; her knuckles snapped out a splinter of smoke-darkened glass as she grabbed the frame for balance.

  She held on and saw what McNihil had meant. The surface of the gel was being peppered with fiery bits of metal, white-hot shrapnel raining down from the skies above. The pieces hit the gel’s surface like incendiary bullets, sending sharper ripples across the membrane from the partially melted impact scars. Underneath, the exposed, intertwined nervous systems of the poly-orgynism visibly responded, overloaded synapses sparking and neurons writhing in excitement both painful and pleasurable. The swarms of free-swimming tattoos darted about, as though the shadows of the heated metal bits had struck and passed through the membrane, taking on a new life of their own.

  November leaned out the window, turning her head to see where the shrapnel was coming from. A jagged bit, trailing fire, tumbled within inches, its momentary heat perceptible against her face. Up above the urban zone’s buildings, and beneath the churning, dark-bellied clouds mirroring the sea below, the air was filled with the darting forms of Noh-flies. November heard now their keening, nasally whining shrieks; their demon faces, like a European’s nightmare remembrance of a bad night at the Peking Opera, flashed across her vision. “Jeez…” The sight appalled her. “I’ve never seen so many of them at once…”

  “That’s because you’ve never seen them down this low before.” Standing behind her, McNihil sounded calm enough. “Usually, they make their attacks higher up in the atmosphere. They must’ve been tracking a low-flying jet, something with a state-of-the-art margin control system, so it can zip among the buildings and do all the necessary evasive maneuvers.”

  “Plus-it’s got drones.” November spotted the other shapes, bigger and slower than the Noh-flies. “Decoys.” Most of the hot metal fragments were coming from those, as the little terrors screamed and swarmed over them. As she watched, a couple of the drones came apart under the aerial siege, engines and ragged wing sections arcing toward the ground. “Those must cost.”

  “Yeah, they don’t come cheap. So you know it’s a high-level exec appearance. Just the kind that Harrisch likes to make. He should be showing up any second, now that his flying defense systems have cleared a path for him.”

  There wasn’t time to watch for the approach of any DynaZauber corporate jet. The rain of hot metal had whipped the gelatinous sea around the bases of the buildings to a greater frenzy. November was thrown backward from the window, toppling against McNihil, as another swell hit the End Zone Hotel, the wave’s bone- and nerve-filled mass coming several stories up the side of the charred structure. The exterior wall collapsed completely, taking the window frame and a good portion of the hotel room with it. McNihil pulled her back from the tilting precipice that had suddenly appeared beneath her feet, as the dresser toppled over onto the buckling floor with a crash of glass and splintering wood. The bed slammed against November’s legs as it came sliding away from the farther wall, winding up dangling halfway out the opened face of the building.

  “Come on-” McNihil shoved past her and grabbed the thick cable dangling from the back of the silent radio. With his thumbnail, he split the metallic sheath near the exposed brass tip, then ripped the cable further open. With his crooked forefinger, McNihil dug out what looked like a set of miniature batteries and other small electronic components. A set of LED’s on the cable’s surface blinked and died as McNihil snapped the hard, metallic bits away from something wetter and softer inside. “The guy earned a reprieve,” said McNihil in response to November’s puzzled glance. He gave no further explanation, but threw the dead cable across the bed’s upturned edge, just before it toppled and fell out the window. The dingy mattress was pelted with the hot shrapnel rain as it turned end over end, sheets fluttering and catching fire. McNihil pushed November toward the door. “Time to move.”

  Outside the hotel room, the corridor whiplashed around them, the floor rolling in exact echo of the next wave that hit the building; the numbered doors swung open or ripped free of their hinges as the blackened walls came apart like a cheap film set being struck, shooting over. McNihil’s shoulder broke through water-soaked plaster as he was thrown against the baseboards; a distorting web of burnt timbers and beams opened around him. November grabbed his forearm and yanked him to his feet. Keeping her head down against the clouds of dust and ash, she shoved him toward the unseen stairway.

  TWENTY-THREE

  FURTHER, TO THE NUCLEUS ACCUMBEMS

  There they are.”

  The pilot, one of the best in the DynaZauber transport pool, nodded toward the cockpit’s windshield. He took one hand from the controls and pointed.

  Harrisch followed the direction of the gesture, leaning forward from the seat behind the pilot’s. The interior of the jet was a cylindrical coffin, cramped and unluxurious; the craft was built for speed and low detectability, not comfort. “I don’t see anybody…”

  “Right there.” The pilot pointed again, indicating the roof of the burnt-out End Zone Hotel. “By the stairwell exit.” Large sections of the roof were gone, caved downward into the building’s ruined floors below; the remaining areas were being pelted with new fire, debris from the jet’s accompanying drones as they were shredded by the Noh-flies. “They just came up.”

  Coming out of a banking turn, the jet avoided an ugly-faced contingent of the antiaircraft devices. Harrisch looked through the side of the cockpit at the tilting urban scene, this time spotting the two human figures on the hotel’s roof. They hung back in the small sloping structure with the sprung door, peering out at the bits of fiery metal coming from the sky, as though waiting for the storm to pass.

  That’s a relief, thought Harrisch. He would’ve hated to have come all this way, and under such hazardous conditions, for nothing. To get here and find that McNihil hadn’t made it all the way through, finished his job and survived, would’ve been somewhat depressing. Not that it would’ve changed anything; McNihil had been connected as soon as he’d taken the job, and if he’d died in the performance of it, the results would have been the same for DynaZauber. Because that’s the way we like it-Harrisch didn’t have to remind himself of that. He’d constructed the operation, the whole TOAW project, that way. Other people had to deal with win-or-lose situations; he’d made sure that his own contained no possibilities other than winning.

  “So you can put me down there?” Harrisch nodded to indicate the rooftop, now swung back toward the front of the jet. “There’s enough room?”

  “Not a problem.” The pilot pushed the jet’s rudder forward. “I can do a vertical drop, and then hover long enough for you to get out. As long as I don’t actually touch down, it should be okay.” The ruins of the End Zone Hotel were fast approaching. “But I won’t be able to hang around. These little connectors-” He meant the Noh-flies swarming in the air around them. “They’ve already latched on to me. I’ll have to swing out and pick up another fleet of drones. Just hit my pager number when you’re ready, and I’ll be back for you.”

  The wash from the jet’s flow-directed nozzles was enough to bend the roof of the hotel ruins; Harrisch felt the structure flexing upward again as the jet ascended from where it’d deposited him. Beneath his feet, the burnt-out building continued to shift even after the corporate jet moved off horizontally, dragging the remaining drones and the shrieking Noh-flies along with it. The hotel trembled as though from a giant hammer, the impact stretching through a few seconds. It’s the sea, realized Harrisch. For a disoriented moment,
he’d thought he’d missed something when he’d been up in the jet, that the actual Pacific had somehow gone tsunami, a tidal wave thundering this far inland and inundating the streets. Then he’d remembered the poly-orgynism that had been established in the zone; he’d seen the network ratings on the DynaZauber morning balance sheet, the viewer figures and advertising revenues. That was as much of the creation as he was interested in.

  Another wave hit, almost knocking Harrisch from his feet on the hotel roof, smelling of tar heated up by the bits of molten metal strewn around. If the mess of gel and interconnected human tissue down below was getting agitated-and the last wave had been bigger than the first one he’d felt-he supposed that would be good for the corporation’s numbers. Just what the Gloss-wide audience liked. Maybe not so good for me, thought Harrisch. Not at the moment. He was starting to entertain some misgivings about having gotten out of the jet.

  “Come on-ride it out!” A voice called to him from across the rooftop. “Don’t be such a pussy.”

  He looked over and saw McNihil. The asp-head had stepped out from the small stairwall enclosure; the former burn victim and fast-forward November stood behind him. She had to keep one hand on the open doorway to keep from being knocked over by the increasingly violent shock waves running through the structure. McNihil, on the other hand, stood with his arms folded across his chest, legs slightly spread as though bracing himself like a sailor on a storm-tossed ship.

  “Well… good to see you.” Through sheer force of will, Harrisch swallowed down his own nausea and apprehension. “Glad you made it.”

  “You didn’t have to worry about me.” The dark clouds overhead let through just enough light to reveal the angles of McNihil’s face. His real one-if there had been a mask at one time, it was gone now. “You should spend your time worrying about your own ass.”

  The self-assured tone in McNihil’s voice had the opposite effect on Harrisch. Something’s up, he thought. What could’ve gone wrong? By now, the asp-head should’ve known just how badly he’d been connected over-in degree, if not in detail. But McNihil was acting like he was completely in charge of the situation; he even looked bigger, as though the skies’ dramatic backdrop were some special-effects number out of the movies, magnifying McNihil’s shadowed outline.

  “Big talk.” Harrisch felt his own pulse revving up, pushed by fear and adrenaline. “You don’t-” A section of the rooftop, inches from his feet, split open, the ancient tar paper ripping apart to show the blackened planks and beams underneath. Harrisch managed to keep back from the gaping hole, holding his arms out for balance. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “The job,” said McNihil flatly. “The job’s done.” He didn’t even sway as another deep tremor ran across the rooftop. “Now it’s payday.”

  Harrisch heard other voices, shouting in the distance. He realized that it was the cameramen and all the other network technicians, down on the equipment platforms at street level. They were shouting to each other over the basso groans of the gel and its thunderous impacts against the mired buildings. Harrisch couldn’t make out their words, but he knew what was happening: they were abandoning their posts, leaving the toppling camera derricks and booms, scrambling across the buckling catwalks to safety at the sea’s bounded perimeter.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw a section of the roof’s raised edge crumble away, the bricks and mortar sliding guillotinelike down the hotel’s shattered front. He looked back toward McNihil, who’d taken a few steps away from the stairwell enclosure, out into the center of the rooftop.

  “We pay off on performance,” said Harrisch, converting some of the adrenaline inside himself to courage. “Did you find Travelt?”

  “Oh, I found him, all right.” McNihil’s voice turned harder. “Whether you wanted me to or not.”

  “What… what’re you talking about?” Another wave hit the building, sending Harrisch sprawling onto his hands and knees. He looked up to see McNihil walking forward, stepping across the open patches of roof, until the asp-head loomed right in front of him.

  “It didn’t matter,” said McNihil, voice grating like stone on stone. “Whether I found the prowler that still had Travelt inside it. Because either way… you got what you wanted.”

  “You’re crazy.” But he knew the asp-head was fearsomely sane. Inside himself, Harrisch felt the molecules of adrenaline breaking into some other, frightened chemical, oozing out of his pores and draining into his bladder. Time to go, the still-thinking portion of his brain announced to the rest. “Maybe we should talk about this later.” Much later. “I’ll make an appointment for you.” Harrisch let his words go rattling on, unhooked from any thought processes, hoping that McNihil would be sufficiently distracted. He reached inside his coat and started punching a familiar number into his tight-cell phone. “You can tell me all about it-”

  “Not a good idea.” McNihil leaned down, his hand striking and grabbing Harrisch’s wrist. “You’re pissing me off.” Without straining, McNihil pulled the captured hand toward himself, the phone loosening in Harrisch’s grasp. McNihil took the phone, letting Harrisch fall back onto the rooftop’s rolling surface. “Looks like something on the DZ switchboard.” McNihil looked at the digits on the device’s LCD readout, then back down at Harrisch. “Calling for a ride home?”

  Something in the look in the other’s eyes terrified Harrisch; his spinal column contracted like a spring-driven mechanical device. It was only a momentary relief when McNihil turned and slung the phone in an underhand pitch, back to November. She caught it in both hands.

  “Hang on to that,” instructed McNihil. “Don’t hit the connect button just yet.”

  November had followed McNihil’s example, managing to let go of the stairwell enclosure’s support. Standing near the center of the rooftop, surrounded by the gaping holes that had already been torn in the structure, she rode out the building’s shuddering motions, knees slightly bent for shock absorbers. “All right-” She’d glanced at the phone before tucking it inside her jacket. “You need help with him?”

  This has all gone wrong, thought Harrisch, somewhat dazed. Control of the situation had slipped out of his grasp, or had been snatched away as easily as the tight-cell phone. I wasn’t expecting this. The notion of having a final confrontation, all by himself here with McNihil, was seeming less of a good idea by the second. Obvious now, but he still wasn’t sure how it’d come apart like this. There had only been, at best, a fifty-fifty chance that McNihil would still be alive now, let alone in any kind of functioning condition; Harrisch had actually entertained the notion that he might have to bring along some kind of medical crew, a first-aid team to scrape up whatever might’ve been left of the asp-head, inject him with whatever cardiac and cerebral stimulators were necessary to bring him to even partial consciousness. But that would’ve brought on the scene more potential witnesses than Harrisch would’ve been prepared to deal with; he’d been glad that it’d worked out that the DZ corporate pilot had had to split for the time being, leaving him here on his own. It was one thing to have somebody like that November person around as a witness; she could be eliminated if she somehow became trouble afterward. But if he’d had to take out people on the DynaZauber payroll, like pilots and med techs, the corporation’s human-resources department would’ve given him more grief than it would’ve been worth.

  “Naw-” McNihil shook his head as he called over his shoulder to November. “But thanks for asking.” He turned back to Harrisch at his feet, reached down, and pulled the DZ exec upright. “Me and this guy go back a ways. We know how much-how far-we can trust each other.”

  “You’re not scaring me-”

  November watched as Harrisch snarled at the asp-head. McNihil’s fist at his collar choked some fragment of determination through the exec’s throat. She didn’t figure that what he’d said was true, but it looked as if Harrisch was at least determined not to let McNihil walk over him without a show of struggle.

&nb
sp; “You don’t-” Harrisch gasped for breath. “You don’t even know-”

  “Know what?” McNihil lifted the exec up onto tiptoe, then back down a couple of inches, relaxing the pressure against Harrisch’s windpipe. “What is it you think I don’t know? Because by now, believe me, I know a lot of things.”

  “You idiot.” Chin thrust back by the asp-head’s knuckles, Harrisch still managed to get a sneer up and running on his own face. “You don’t know just how badly you’ve been connected over. By me. You were connected even before you took the job.”

  “What’s he talking about?” November came up beside McNihil, maneuvering her way across the bucking rooftop. The moans and shuddering low-octave noises from the street level grew in volume and intensity, like a real ocean scudding into white-topped waves, as she peered at Harrisch. “He told me the same stuff, about you and this job, back at the hospital.”

  “It’s TOAW.” McNihil didn’t look over at her as he spelled out the acronym. “That’s what it’s been all along. That’s what the job was about all along.” He let go of Harrisch, shoving him a step backward. “His big secret, that he didn’t think I’d be able to figure out.”

  “What if you did?” Rubbing his bruised throat, Harrisch glared venomously at McNihil. “Even if you did find out, there’s nothing you can do about it. Not now.” A wild sense of triumph seemed to surge up inside Harrisch’s chest. “It’s too late. And you made it happen that way, just the way I wanted it to. Just by your being here-that was all you had to do.”