But a woman who fears discovery may glance about from time to time without thinking. Stacey turns suddenly, notices Janet a few steps behind, and her face turns pale.
That woman again. Is she tracking me? Eager to pry out a secret I don’t have… Does she know of the abandoned plant?
Janet does the only thing she can. She looks into her bag as if counting items and walks briskly past, paying the two not the slightest overt attention. She can hear Nagkmur scold Stacey for the delay, his futuristic ruminations diverted for the moment by more pedestrian concerns. This close, Stacey’s body language expresses the emotions her thoughts do not, and because she worries so much about it, the location of the abandoned meatpacking plant drifts through her thoughts.
But Stacey Papandreou and her sad fears are of no concern to Janet, who has the more immediate problem of a series of burglaries, national in scope, that have now apparently attracted the interest of the military.
Janet parks her SUV on Eighth Street in Passaic across from Bergtholm just as the second shift locks up and goes home. Unlike the Chicago RDC, the Passaic facility works no graveyard shift. The strip mall farther back up the street is closed for the night, but the pole lamps in its parking lot cast the warehouse in relief and she has a good view of the doors and gates. The neighborhood sits in a bow of the Passaic River so, unless the thief is an accomplished scuba diver, there is no access to the warehouse from the rear.
The parking lot empties and Janet noshes on her pastrami and rye while she watches. Her patience is rewarded a few hours later when a dark, non-descript minivan pulls up to the loading docks and a man in camouflage fatigues exits and exchanges a few words with the driver.
The driver busies himself briefly at the employee entrance and the door swings open. The driver ducks inside for a few moments. There is no alarm. Then the first man enters the building while the driver returns to the van. All this in less than a minute. Janet is impressed.
Janet gives the driver time to settle in, then she eases out of her vehicle and drifts silently through the shadows on the west side of the street before crossing to the plant’s main entrance. She studies the driver through her light-gathering binoculars and sees him reading a magazine. He must have excellent night vision because he uses no light.
With the keys Bergtholm has provided, Janet opens the main doors just a crack and slides inside. She checks the alarm panel, and notes as expected that it has already been de-activated. There are only the door and window alarms; no internal motion sensors.
A corridor leads past offices, a parts counter, locker rooms, thence into the warehouse proper. A supervisor’s prefab with pick lists already hung for the early morning, a row of forklifts in their charging stations, roll-up loading doors along the outside wall. To her right, across from the dock platform, aisles of shelving rise to the ceiling.
She quiets her mind and listens.
Gradually, she makes out the whisper of another mind. It is hard to make out because the metal racks and bulk containers muddy the signal. She glides across the floor and pauses at the employees’ entrance, where she can just barely discern the thoughts of the driver waiting outside.
…childhood fables… but the council must be taking them seriously… Then something about… ancient enemy… and… hope the colonel knows what he’s doing…
Colonel? Is this whole romp a clandestine military operation? She had gotten some hints of a black op from the Chicago police, something about an experimental drone. Are these thefts a field test for new hardware?
She turns her back on the door and tiptoes into the aisles of shelving. She doesn’t worry about her six. Because of her peculiar talent, no one can sneak up behind her.
She spots a man down Aisle Five and ducks back quickly before he can see her. He is examining a picker’s basket, apparently abandoned in mid-aisle.
…got here too late… she hears him think…. surprised it in the act… earth in deadly danger, but only apkallu realize it… why is it here… and why did it chase that Chinese guy in chicago…
This is the first she has heard about the thief chasing a Chinese guy. International industrial espionage? But that does not square with the pedestrian nature of the components stolen. The more she learns about this case, the less sense it makes.
And what the hell are apkallu?
She decides to precipitate matters and approaches the man in the military fatigues. But as she does so, a strange discordant organ music swells and an unaccountable dread grips her soul. She looks up toward its source, toward the top shelf of the rack a few columns ahead on the left. And in the weird green light of night-vision she sees a…
But it is gone, and when she turns back to the man she is looking at the business end of a Sig Sauer P228. It carries a magazine with thirteen rounds and thirteen is clearly an unlucky number.
Consider a headwalker nesting high above the earth in a cloaked vessel and perusing the world below for signs of temporal precession. He is balanced on the razor’s edge between a terror at dying alone on a strange world, far from the company of his people, and an elation at surviving despite all odds and bringing back the song of this potential new home. But her hunters are closing in. There are no wolves on her world, but she had recognized the creatures in the warehouse for what they were; and one had somehow known where she was hiding!
Its repairs are ninety percent complete, though the same might be said with considerably less enthusiasm of a leap across a chasm. Still, hope springs eternal, even in alien breasts. He has made spotty detections of temporal distortions in the large nest on the north-south landmass; and maybe, if he can locate the precessor and seize it, she can escape this world. There is nothing for it but to await the next distortion and act. Its number three manipulator hovers near the insertion port of the transport beam trigger-well, ready to send himself to the indicated nexus at an instant’s notice.
Consider, too, the android gliding up the escalator to Thirty-fourth Street at Penn Station, New York. She intends to determine whether or not Stacey Papandreou is another of her kind. She is not driven by fellow-feeling, for she possesses none. It is only a logical possibility to be resolved. “Papandreou” might be a foreign agent, or a criminal, or hiding in WITSEC—the demand for false identities makes it a seller’s market—but on the off chance, why not check her out. Two q-bit processors are better than one.
Besides, Papandreou is a companion of the Chinese man and there is the matter of the curious smudge on his pant leg. Being herself essentially a complex algorithm, Annie is bothered when things don’t add up.
Consider as well the apkallu and the telepath carpooling into Manhattan, partnered for the moment by the chance crossing of their worldines. (Convergence is less wild a coincidence when two hunters seek the same target.) It is an hour’s drive from Passaic to Manhattan at this time of night and it passes in an uncomfortable, one-sided silence. The apkallu is determined to reveal as little as possible, but in the process reveals everything. He may as well have been a chattering magpie as to sit quietly in a car with a telepath.
But to read a man’s thoughts, he must first be brought to think them. So the telepath plies him with questions and, in between his grunts, evasions, and needs-to-know, she harvests an astounding bounty in which ancient planetary cleansings, exile, lost technologies, genetic makeovers, ravaging headwalkers, intraspecific prejudice, and service career potential are indifferently mixed with flashes of lust. She would have found all of it quite unbelievable—except for the lust—had she not been herself unbelievable.