Noir

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