'Julius believes his problem is racism?' I asked.
Gimlet-Hector-pursed his lips. I made a mental note to scale back the sarcasm.
'If ork separatists are sabotaging his project,' I went on, infusing my voice with professional analysis, 'He needs street enforcers, not an occult investigator.'
'The sabotage has relied on magic in every case,' Rachel said. A dozen sad blue dots appeared along the happy golden corridor of vVR revitalization. 'Either direct assault with damaging spells or obscuring spells shielding saboteurs.'
Data windows blossomed beside the blue dots. A quick read told me a couple of the 'shielding spells' had been sloppy security. But in other cases the spellwork was very sophisticated-performed by someone with skill and long periods of uninterrupted proximity to the target.
'You're still framing the central skeleton of the elevated causeway,' I said. 'Are the buildings underneath occupied?'
'The refugees and squatters near the camps have not been evacuated, and there are no doubt squatters in the rubblefield,' Rachel said. 'The buildings will not be leveled until phase two, when their construction materials are recycled to build the walls enclosing the ground-level cargo concourse.'
'Good,' I said, rising. 'Are my quarters in this building?'
'Excuse me?'
'First I need to feed Dog,' I explained. 'Then I need to rest. Come midnight, Dog and I will stroll the length of this project of yours and see what we can find.' • • •
Sight is not my forte. I've been told my visual illusions stink out loud and I never have much luck penetrating visual effects thrown my way. It's a limitation, but I've learned to deal with it. Case in point, flat in a two-AM puddle staring over the sights of my pistol, I was not surprised my eyes couldn't pierce the dark nothing filling the alley.
Giving up, I canted my ears-listening to the alley. A rustle without weight-a dried leaf or scrap of paper in the breeze. A drip. No life-not even rodents. At least nothing moving.
Cold seeped into my chest and belly. I hoped the water I was lying in was only leaching away my body heat and not soaking through my jacket. Ballistic should be waterproof, right?
Still not willing to get to my feet, I lifted my chin a little, focusing my canid olfactories on the alley. Scents of garbage, mostly vegetable; urine from a few hundred rats-all of which were still not moving; something remarkably soapy-clean; and a lingering trace of gunsmoke.
That last one surprised me by being a recipe I recognized. Lone Star custom, the rent-a-cop corp's trademark homebrew for the Ruger Thunderbolt. As far as I knew it didn't increase the effectiveness of their favorite sidearm-but the sinus-stabbing jolt of cordite was their way of making sure everyone knew they were the ones pulling the trigger.
Which made no sense. Fun City had their own gunsels. There was no reason for a Lone Star or a Knight Errant or even a Pueblo Corporate Council constable to be within a dozen klicks of my puddle. Of course, the fact the shooter had missed me at forty meters implied there wasn't. And since when did Thunderbolts fire flechettes?
Guerilla saboteurs using disposable assets and disinformative clues? Unheard of.
Dog, evidently certain nothing was happening, found a dry piece of pavement and sat. I lay prone and soaked in an empty street with my gun lined up on blackness. After six slow breaths during which nothing at all moved, I decided Dog might have been on to something.
The darkness began fading. Either my inaccurate assailant was towing the spell directly away from me as he made his escape or he was long gone and the blackness was dying a natural death.
The normal dark revealed the alley wasn't exactly an alley. Light from the sodium lamps mounted high on the skeleton of the vanVijrk causeway washed over the front half of what looked like some sort of delivery area: A space just deep enough to let long-haul trucks get off the street and broad enough to let them back up to a pair loading docks barely discernable in the far wall. The back of some no-doubt once fancy establishment facing the next street.
A fading thermal glow emanating from a person-sized metal doorframe between the docks implied it had just been flash-welded shut. I had a momentary hope my incompetent shooter had melted himself into the door, but there was no scent of seared flesh. The quartz-glass security window that had given him line of sight on me was too small even for my narrow frame and carving through the metal would take time. It looked like my shooter had made his escape and sealed off pursuit.
If it weren't for that soapy-clean smell from somewhere inside the blind alley, I might have believed I was alone.
Abandoning the illusionary safety of lying prone in a puddle, I got to my feet. The ice in my knee had turned to fire and the damn thing nearly buckled on me. I stood a moment, letting my knee adjust to the weight. Opening my long coat, I flapped the heavy fabric to circulate air. A stupid move when going into potential combat, but I wanted my shirt to dry.
Besides, if anyone in the alley wanted me dead, the first shot would have passed to the left of my right ear.
Trying not to limp, I moved toward the alley and the soapy-scented witness who might have some answers. Dog kept pace. The tick of his trotting toenails against the pavement brought home the fact that the world around us was absolutely silent. This near the refugee camps the street should have been alive with late-night entrepreneurs and their clientele. Either the jungle drums had warned the natives to stay away or something was persuading folk to take their business elsewhere.
By the time I reached mid-street, the part of my brain that understood the vagaries of breezes and the wafting of scents had narrowed her location down to three or four square meters of deeper shadow between an overflowing dust bin and the right-hand loading dock. And there was no doubt it was a her. Mixed with the soapy cleanness was the unmistakable musk of a young human female.
Human-ish, I amended, with an acrid tang I couldn't place. I'd never smelled anyone quite like her.
Once my nose told me where to focus my ears, I found her breath-slow and shallow as she tried to be silent- and her heart hammering like she was on the last leg of a marathon. I didn't swing the muzzle of my Manhunter toward her-let her think I was still trying to puzzle out an empty alley as I cut off her escape.
Truth was, I was ignoring the alley and casting my senses wide to search out who else might be about. I counted seventeen whos else at the very edge of my senses, none moving in our direction. Dog moved a little away from me, following a path that made sense to him. I didn't bother turning my head to follow.
Three entertainment drones in loose formation whirred overhead, ignoring me as they searched the sprawl for exciting footage to pipe back to their masters in Fun City or Hollywood. Evidently one guy with a gun leveled into an alley did not constitute exciting footage.
Solidly between the very clean girl and her only chance to escape, I lowered my gun. I wasn't quite trusting enough to put it away, but muzzle to the ground was a pretty universal sign of nonaggression. I let her know I knew where she was by pointing my face directly at her hiding place.
The breathing stopped.
'Come on out,' I said, putting no power behind the words. Just basic, civil communication. 'I don't intend to harm you.'
I stood silent through the long pause that followed.
Finally the girl shape rose from behind a busted crate of junk beside an overflowing dust bin. She stood, not moving, until I holstered my Manhunter. Then she stepped hesitantly into the open.
I saw immediately why she had a human-ish scent-one of the few cases of sight trumping scent. She was mid-Expression.
Sometimes when an ork and a human got together a kid resulted. If dad was human and mom an ork, she'd have a litter of orks with maybe a human thrown in. If dad was the ork and mom human, the kid looked human until puberty. Then it was a fifty-fifty crap shoot; emphasis on the crap. At an age when most humans were getting sweaty-palmed over the idea of their first date, hormones hit the poor kid with seventy-two hours of metamorphing hell.
By the time the process was fully done, there'd be no sign she'd ever been human. But mid-process…
Mid-process she should be writhing in ungodly agony as her bones grew and shifted and her muscle mass
