Sidhe-Devil

by Aaron Allston

  It looked like a photographic studio. Zeb saw tripod-mounted boxy cameras with lenses at the end of accordionated bellows, colorful backdrops, curved silvery light reflectors, positionable lights. He tore through filing cabinets filled with photos, many of them cheesecake shots. He heard Noriko committing what sounded like acts of vandalism in the darkroom. Ixyail merely walked around, nostrils flared, sniffing.

  Noriko emerged, looking frustrated. "Nothing."

  "Place is a photo studio," Zeb said. "Ixyail?"

  Ish shook her head. "Nothing."

  Noriko picked up a telephone handset and spoke into it: "Gaby Gaby Gaby Gaby Gaby Gaby . . ." She kept it up for several long moments, then her expression cleared. "Tell Harris that the cameo studio is just that. No bombs. Yes, I will." She waited. Then: "Yes, I have it."

  She hung up. "Doc reached the basement. No explosives there. He's in the building office now with Harris and Lieutenant Athelstane; they are about to ascend and look at support pillars farther up. Zeb and I are to look at specific places on the exterior walls; Ixyail, you have the liftshafts."

  Ish nodded. "Ah, good. I adore climbing greasy metal ladders above long falls."

  * * *

  Gaby kept the Outrigger high above the building, where winds whipped into dangerous jets of air by the concrete confines of Neckerdam were much less likely to reach her. Updrafts still battered her, distracted her from what she needed to do: monitor the phones, route the information to her allies.

  Doc reported in. No explosives found between ground and up six, but Harris had to chase an amorous young couple from a supply closet—in their preoccupation they'd managed to miss the noises of panic and evacuation.

  Alastair reached her. He was up thirty-seven and still descending. No sign of devisement.

  Zeb reached her. He and Noriko were checking out station after station Doc had sent them to investigate. No news. No bombs.

  Gaby could see the evacuees from the Danaan Heights Building and surrounding skyscrapers fleeing the site, a stream of ants now becoming just a trickle. The Neckerdam Guards had set up roadblocks, with their distinctive blue-and-gold wooden barricades, blocks from the building.

  She swore to herself. Maybe Harris was right and their opponents had brought ideas from the grim world—ideas like phoning in false bomb threats.

  * * *

  Far below, shadows lengthened across Neckerdam. The sun was low on the horizon. Gaby, her arms sore and weary from wrestling with the Outrigger's controls, irritably checked the clock mounted on the console.

  Two chimes short of four bells. Less than twenty minutes until the big event—assuming it wasn't a false alarm.

  In her head, she felt the insistent push of an incoming call. It didn't feel like any of the connections she'd been using, but had to be important, since it was being relayed to the Outrigger. She let it reach her. "Sidhe Foundation, Gaby Greene speaking, grace on you."

  "It's me."

  "Harris, where are you?"

  "I'm out at Lieutenant Athelstane's car. It's equipped with a talk-box. I've got Zeb, Noriko, and Ish with me."

  "Doc and Alastair?"

  "Still wrapping up. If they talk to you—"

  "I'll set their ears on fire for being slow."

  "Exactly what I was going to ask for. You stay way up there, now."

  "That's my plan. Bye." She broke connection, added a little more thrust, opened the flow of helium from tank to balloon, and began rising still more.

  * * *

  At one chime short of four bells, Doc and Alastair joined their fellows at the guardsman's car. Behind it, wooden barricades and nervous guardsmen held back crowds of the curious, many of whom had come from the endangered building.

  Ixyail, her clothes ruined and face marked by grease, wrapped her arms around Doc. "I need a bath."

  He smiled down at her. "I'll give you one."

  The Danaan Heights Building had turned nearly black in the shadows cast by taller buildings. The streets between it and the blockade were eerily empty. Suddenly, streetlights came on, illuminating the empty lane before the building and the broad park opposite it.

  Doc turned to Athelstane. "Lieutenant, the surrounding buildings?"

  "As empty as we could make them." The guardsman shrugged. "Anyone left behind is determined to die, or certain that he knows better than we that there won't be an explosion."

  * * *

  Noriko saw it first. She looked up into the eastern sky. "The goddess," she said.

  The rest looked up.

  It was a second sun, tiny and distant and in the wrong direction; the real sun was setting in the west, while this one was approaching from the east. They could see eruptions like solar flares on its surface.

  And then it wasn't so distant any more. It grew as it arced toward them.

  Harris lunged for the open window of the guardsman's car, dove halfway in, grabbed the talk-box handset from the dashboard. He shouted into it, "Gaby! Get out of there! Hard to port! Go go go go!"

  The Outrigger hung suspended almost directly in the new sun's path.

  * * *

  Gaby heard Harris's voice over the chatter on the talk-box's police bands. The panic in his voice cut through her. She shoved the throttle forward, manipulated hand and foot controls, tried to bring the Outrigger around to port. But why—

  Then, far below, she saw the late-afternoon shadows shortening, the building tops brightening.

  A roar like a forest fire passed her stern and a blinding glow struck at her eyes from the pilot's side rearview mirror. Then the Outrigger was seized as if by a giant hand and stood on its tail.

  Gaby's stomach lurched. She stared up into twilight sky . . . and her stomach coiled itself still tighter as the Outrigger continued over, turning upside down, continuing its helpless rotation. Suddenly Neckerdam was the sky—

  * * *

  Through the car window, Harris saw the sun come to earth.

  It roared down from a slight angle, directly toward the Danaan Heights Building, coming to ground at the building's base. In the moment of collision, Harris saw the building face blacken and shrink away from the awesome heat of the fireball, saw the miniature sun eat its way into the ground and the building before it.

  The fireball flattened from sphere to oval and spread out, its fiery mass filling the streets, flowing outward—and then, with a tremendous roar, burst, hurling balls and flares of fire in every direction.

  Chapter Six

  The Sidhe Foundation members ducked behind Athelstane's car as a small ball of fire with a curling tail of flame, ejected from the impact of the miniature sun against the building, roared toward them. They felt its heat pass overhead and watched the bright thing's passage. The crowd beside the barricade shrieked, ducked, pushed to get clear; flames trailing the fireball dropped among them, igniting clothes, and some of the victims yelled and slapped themselves or rolled on the street to put the fires out. The little fireball itself slammed into a skyscraper a block past the barricades, bursting across its face, raining fire down on the street below.

  Almost in unison, the Sidhe Foundation members stood to look back at the Danaan Heights Building—all but Harris, who had eyes only for the sky.

  The front of the Danaan Heights Building was gone, burned away to a height of eight stories, to a depth none of them could discern. Flames raged throughout the gaping hole and along the street below, greedily eating into building fronts, trees, and parked automobiles.

  "God, she's on fire," Harris said.

  Hundreds of feet above the ruined building, flame also licked atop the Outrigger.

  The Danaan Heights Building made a cracking, rumbling noise like a god of the earth clearing its throat. Then, slowly, barely perceptibly, it began to lean forward.

  * * *

  The Outrigger's bottom-heavy design righted it. Gaby was slapped helplessly against the doorframe, felt a blow to the side of her head, and for long moments was helpless with dizziness. But her hands a
nd feet automatically sought out the controls.

  When she could again see, she leaned out the window and banked to look below.

  Whatever fiery thing had grazed her had also eaten away the front of the Danaan Heights Building and set it and nearby buildings ablaze. Frantic, she scanned the street until she spotted police cars at barricades; it didn't look as though any of them had been destroyed by the impact or its aftermath. Good—it meant Harris was okay. It had to mean that.

  Then a glow attracted her. She looked up to where the Outrigger's gasbag blazed.

  Cold panic gripped her. In seconds, the fire would eat its way through the rubberized cloth and hit the gas—

  Helium, not hydrogen. It wouldn't explode.

  No, she wouldn't die by fire. All the gas would escape and she'd drop a thousand feet or more to a death on the streets below. She was already losing altitude.

  How many individual gas cells did the Outrigger hold? Two, she thought; but if one went, the vehicle wouldn't fly. It would just plummet more slowly.

  Gaby forced the panic back, held it at bay. She had to get down, fast. Not too fast. She pulled a lever to open the nozzle on the bottled helium to slow the vehicle's descent, then opened the engines wide and guided the Outrigger down.

  She felt the vehicle's rate of descent increase. Her stomach lurched—in spite of the extra helium being pumped into the system, her descent was too fast. At least one of the gas-bags had to have given way. The Outrigger would not survive its fall to the street.

  * * *

  "Baby, pull up," Harris said. "Up, up—oh, God." As the burning Outrigger banked west and began its last descent, he took off after it on foot, charging across the street littered with flaming debris.

  None of the others saw. Instead, they watched the Danaan Heights Building's lean become more pronounced. It teetered out toward the street; then, with a great trembling roar of noise, it sheared at the top of the crater made by the destructive sun. Upper stories leaned further as they dropped toward the street, and sheared again higher up, as the building frame, designed to hold up under the pull of gravity in its proper orientation but not in any other, gave way.

  The great mass of the building poured into the street, an enormous man-made avalanche of stone and twisted metal. What had been upper floors smashed into the park beyond, obliterating benches and fountains and statues, burying them under tons of rubble. Fragments the size of cars and trucks rebounded, sliding and bouncing along the streets toward the barricades, followed by a thick cloud of dust and smoke.

  "This is going to be bad," Zeb said, and ducked behind Athelstane's car to join the others. He found himself between Doc, who was sheltering Ixyail, and Noriko. Instinct prompted him to cover the woman of Wo, sheltering her.

  Bricks rained down around them. Something struck Zeb on the shoulder like a blow from a baseball bat. Then darkness rolled across them.

  * * *

  The street climbed toward Gaby.

  There were no parachutes on the Outrigger. She remembered Doc saying something about weight limitations, damn him.

  Maybe if she projected her mind into the Grid, she wouldn't really die when her body did . . .

  Then she saw the building ahead to starboard. It was a thirty-story skyscraper, and atop it, as with most tall buildings on Neckerdam, was a large cylinder-shaped construction made of cedar. She banked, the Outrigger responding sluggishly to the controls, and headed straight toward it.

  No, she was losing altitude too fast to aim right for it. She had to aim to overshoot it and hope that her estimates were right, that her loss of lift would drop her right onto it. But if she was wrong, if the vehicle held enough lift too long, she'd sail right over it and then plummet more than three hundred feet into the street. She wailed, a noise of fear and anger, and aimed over the cedar cylinder.

  * * *

  A blow like a negligent kick from a giant-sized place kicker rocked Athelstane's car. It hammered the car door into Zeb's head and threw him onto the street with the others; he groaned and touched his temple, which throbbed under his fingers.

  Doc was up, barely visible through the thick cloud of smoke and dust that now blanketed the area. Over the shriek of the crowds and roar of settling masonry, he shouted, "Bring the fire trucks up! Athelstane, get this car out of the way!"

  "Can't, sir! There's a girder through the engine!"

  "Well, put it in no-gear."

  Zeb saw Doc move around to the back of the car and begin pushing. Zeb stood, dizzy, and joined him, if only to prove to himself that he was still functional. Joined by Alastair, they shoved the crippled automobile aside as fire engines, parked and silent for the last few minutes, started up their sirens.

  Then the associates turned to the hours they knew lay before them of treating the injured, searching for the missing, looking for information.

  * * *

  Gaby woke up as the men in hospital white loaded her into the ambulance. Harris, his skin and clothes dark from dust and smoke, stood above her, worry in his eyes, and clambered into the ambulance with her. When she reached for him, he embraced her with tender care. "Shh, baby, you're all right. Don't talk."

  "Can't shut me up that way . . ." She couldn't seem to talk above a whisper and it annoyed her. Experimentally, she moved her arms and legs, which told her they were bruised and battered and exceedingly unhappy with such experimentation. She was also damp, head to toe.

  The rear doors slammed. A moment later, the ambulance lurched into motion.

  "How long—?"

  "You've been out for a couple of hours, I think. I found you an hour ago. It took a while to get the ambulance. You aimed for that water tank, didn't you?"

  "Uh-huh." Try as she wanted to stay awake, Gaby felt herself growing sleepy.

  "That's my smart, smart lady."

  " . . . Outrigger?"

  "It's a wreck."

  "Good. Won't have to fly it again." The recollection of what had set the Outrigger afire jolted her. "The building?"

  "It's gone, baby. But we got everybody out. Now we're going to figure out who did it and decide just how badly to hurt them."

  "Good." Her sense of propriety soothed, Gaby let herself be lulled into sleep.

  * * *

  Well into the wee hours of the night, freshly bathed and bandaged, Zeb lay down on the bed in the room they'd given him in the Monarch Building and stared out the window beside him.

  Below was a sea of lights, a broader rainbow of hues than the lights of Manhattan and viewed through less hazy air, but still reassuringly familiar. Beside the window, a radiator hissed and sighed, another familiar sight and sound.

  But sleep eluded him.

  The universe had become twice as big for him. Now, with heart and soul as well as intellect, he believed in the fair world, in the wonders Gaby and Harris had hinted at.

  But why hadn't he realized that with twice the wonder, twice the humanity, there would be twice the pettiness, twice the evil?

  There were no atomic bombs here. Atomic fission was still just a theory; Harris had mentioned that to him. But any place where someone could drop a giant fireball on a skyscraper with pinpoint accuracy had to have its own slate of technological horrors.

  And then there was the racist dogma that rivaled the worst armpit regions of the grim world. Of home.

  For Zeb, it had always boiled down to expectation. It was to look in someone's eye and see an expectation of laziness, of criminality, of sheer inferiority, and to feel lower, to be reduced, because of it. That was the heart of the experience.

  In the last two days, he'd had that look from more people than he could count, from more people than any time in years.

  He steeled himself against those expectations. To let their opinions matter to you, he told himself, is to take a step toward becoming what they expect you to be.

  But try as he might to keep those feelings at a distance, the constant barrage of dark and suspicious looks he'd been experiencing wore on him
, tired him. Tired him, and yet kept him from sleep.

  And then there was Noriko.

  Her comments about his—what should he call it? His blackout, his episode, his rage—at the Fairwings plant still nagged at him. Thinking and thinking about it, he couldn't be certain that he wouldn't have fired on Alastair if the doctor's autogun had been pointed at him.

  There were no friends in the ring, only enemies to beat and referees to ignore. He wasn't certain he knew how to concentrate on fighting and yet be aware enough of his allies to protect them. That was disturbing.

  And Noriko's sudden change of subject that afternoon had prevented him from telling her why he understood her exile. His family in Atlanta had expected him to grow up in their image. Yet he'd forced himself to learn to speak English with the midwestern, TV-blanded dialect that no one in the U.S. prejudged as too rural, too ethnic, too stupid—it helped keep business opportunities within his grasp, but his family said he was putting on airs, that he thought he was too good for them. Choosing to stay in New York to train and manage fighters as boss of his own business had been the final blow; his last visit home, years ago, after his father's death, had been a time of tension and unspoken recriminations. He wouldn't return until his own kin could let him be who he was.

  It was not the same, he knew, as Noriko's situation. He was not in exile from his native country, not considered a traitor in the city of his birth. But he felt for her loneliness, her vulnerability. He was certain that her mask of emotionlessness, even the fighting skills the Sidhe Foundation held in such evident regard, could not really shield her; they could only keep people at bay.

  He swore. He did not need to be getting interested in a woman from a world he hadn't even believed in a few days before. It was stupid. Soon enough, he'd go home and that would be it.

  But not before the ones who'd launched that giant ball of fire were brought down. By effort and sheer chance, no one had died today when the building fell. Yet the weapon that had caused the destruction of Danaan Heights had to be taken from the men who'd used it. He was committed now, couldn't back away from a task when Harris, whom he'd always thought of as a man light on determination or resolve, remained so effortlessly a part of the mission.