“No bug.” McNihil smiled and shook his head. “Harrisch would know better than to try and hook me up with something like that. Asp-heads don’t like being followed when they’re going about their work; cramps our style. We’ve got ways of finding those little devices and getting rid of them. All you gotta do is flush ’em down the toilet and then all the people on the other end are listening to is the gas bubbles popping down in the sewer.”
“Then what?”
“You’re underestimating our mutual friend Harrisch.” McNihil still looked weary and beat-up, but he managed to keep the smile from completely fading away, as though it were some ragged medal he’d won on the battlefield. “There’s things you don’t know about this little job of his. If you had known, you wouldn’t have wanted it so badly, no matter what it payed. If Harrisch had told you, he wouldn’t have had his backup system ready, in case he wasn’t able to push me into taking it on.”
“So?” November was unimpressed. “They never tell you everything about the job. Nobody does. They always want to connect more out of you than what they pay you for.”
“This one,” said McNihil, “would’ve connected you right into the ground.”
“Really?” That pissed her off. Even with this delicate new skin of hers-I could kick your ass, she thought. “And you pulled it off, I suppose, because you’re so much connecting tougher than I am.”
“No…” The last of the smile faded as McNihil shook his head. “It nailed me into the ground, too. Even before I started the job.”
She wondered what the hell that was supposed to mean. But she didn’t get a chance to ask him. A shudder ran through the End Zone Hotel, as though the remnants of its structure were giving way at last. Ash and ancient dust sifted down from the ceiling; November could hear, out in the hallway beyond the room, a few of the beams pulling free and crashing in the darkness.
“What’s going on?” November pushed past the asp-head and looked out the single window. “Shit-” Past the jagged fragments of glass in the frame, she could see what was going on down below at street level. The gelatinous sea, which had appeared so relatively peaceful when she had traversed the catwalks over it, had changed since she had climbed up into the building’s ruins and found McNihil.
Now the slow ocean looked storm-tossed, with swells rising beneath the transparent surface membrane, high enough to rip the catwalk sections loose from each other; the sections of broken pathway tumbled down the gel’s nearly vertical flanks like the timbers of a capsized ship. Around the sea’s perimeter, just visible beyond the farthest buildings, the booms of the networks’ video equipment tilted upward, the cameramen on the platforms furiously working the position controls to stay out of the swells’ mounting reach. Scattered throughout the gel, the derricks between the buildings swayed with each ponderous roll of the surrounding element, the camera operators riding out the dizzying, nausea-producing motions at their perches; they desperately clutched their vid equipment, both for safety and to swing the lenses down toward the furious action below.
“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.”