by Jean Rabe
She didn’t have far to look. The troll was upstairs in the hallway, the wide-shouldered thug from the second floor close behind him. Concern, shock, ire playing on both men’s wide faces. Ninn was fast to recount her tale, pointing to her injuries, coughing to clear the last of the smoke. The size of the Cross Slayer, the hole in the wall where he’d maybe come up from some sewer, the heater, the words tumbling out so fast and furious that Cadi and the muscle couldn’t get a question in. The entertainers filled the hall behind them, and Gertie tromped up, muttering: “Pigs. Where’s the hose?”
“The Slayer…. Should probably tell AISE,” Ninn said. She tried to move her arm, twitch her fingers, anything…nothing, still useless. Needed to get to a doc. “He was big, Cadi. Friggin’ big, almost troll big. But he didn’t sound like a troll, didn’t feel like it. And he felt…evil. Your girls should go home in bunches.” A pause: “Make sure they’re armed.”
Mordred intruded in her head: “Geezer’s moving fast, Keebs…well, for someone his age. I’d probably hear him gasping for breath if there weren’t all these sirens. Gonna be out of your range soon, its feeling like. I think we’re just about—”
The connection broke.
“Elf looks like hell.” This from the wide-shouldered thug.
She could hear sirens, too, the building muffling some of the sound. Cadi started asking questions, but she whirled, pushed open the back door with her good arm.
“And put in a sprinkler system,” she sneered over her shoulder.
She stepped into the alley, the door banging closed behind her. For once she considered the rain a blessing. Ninn had a level one adrenal pump, and that gave her a boost to kick off the fatigue and effects of the smoke; it didn’t help her wounds, though. It didn’t make her left arm work. The sirens were louder out here, and she followed the racket, feet slapping in a rhythm through the alley and right arm swinging. She needed a doc, but she wanted to regain Mordred first. Ninn rounded the corner and headed up the sidewalk.
Frag, but she’d dropped her comm in the basement, and her spare guns, leaving her weaponless. Her longcoat, credstick in the pocket. Frag and back again. She’d return to Cadi’s basement, after she caught up to Barega and got Mordred back. The gun was irreplaceable. An old man like that, he couldn’t have gotten too far. She’d get Mordred first. Then she’d see a doc, a street doc nearby if she had to, cut as badly as she’d been it would be a good idea to get checked out as soon as possible. At least she knew she wasn’t bleeding; the heater had cauterized the wounds it made.
She still couldn’t feel her left arm.
Frag! She’d had the Cross Slayer! Or rather, he’d had her. So close! If she’d been more alert…if she hadn’t been fragging jittery for another slip…but who the hell would’ve thought he’d be caving it in Cadi’s basement?
Get a shovel, that’s what she’d do. Pick and a shovel and wail away at the wall until she found the tunnel the Slayer used. Maybe no one had gotten a look at him before because he traveled in tunnels, maybe lived in the sewer. Ninn shuddered. There were bad things in sewers. Too bad she couldn’t’ve gotten a real good look. She’d recorded him, maybe the image could be enhanced into something recognizeable.
Two blocks and she swung left, seeing a crowd at the end of next block, fire trucks, and a building wholly engulfed—the building her office was in. The sirens stopped, but the lights on all the vehicles danced and spun and bounced off the restaurants, bars, and trendy shops.
“Oh God.” Ninn froze.
The fire was a thing of special effects—bursts of bright white erupting from windows, flames dancing up the exterior walls, the rain doing nothing, the water from the fire trucks doing nothing. Rather, the jets of water and the persistent rain seemed to somehow encourage it.
She could feel the heat from a block away, and the sounds were a crashing wave: people shouting, crying, cheering, music blaring from somewhere, an ork fireman standing on a truck bellowing orders through an amplifier, the hum of aerial drones working to keep the crowd back, the blare of everything so confusing that she couldn’t make anything out. The air smelled of sulfur, and overhead lightning flickered.
Drenched, Ninn shuffled forward, mesmerized and horrified, Mordred, the Cross Slayer, and her dead arm temporarily forgotten.
It was a four-level building, an old one, like most of the structures in the Cross, each story with twelve-foot ceilings. It was one of the stumpier buildings in the block, but the flames made it appear much higher. White-hot eruptions pulsed skyward in defiance of the rain. The stench was awful. Despite its age, Ninn knew the building had state-of-the-art sprinkler systems in all the halls and offices; one hung above her desk. Had state-of-the-art. She’d had a desk. And it had her spare slips and that chip with RighteousRight goodies on it.
A fire had brought her to Australia…her sister Kalin burned so severely in Chicago, in a conflagration where the building did not have state-of-the-art extinguishers. It had been a dance club down by the lakefront, a converted warehouse with a large stage that often coaxed in popular techno-metal-fugue groups on the cusp of “making it big.” Once the concert started, the doors had been electronically locked to prevent gatecrashers from getting in—that was the normal practice.
The fire had been arson, Chicago Lone Star confirmed, carefully planned by the lead singer’s jilted lover, the firebomb going off as he appropriately started belting out their fast-rising hit “My Heart Burns for You.”
Ninn’s sister had been right up front, pressed against the stage, waving her arms, fingers brushing the singer’s shoes. Ninn had watched it unfold hours later on the security cam’s footage she’d managed to get a copy of—she was still with Lone Star then. The firebomb had been planted under the stage, and so the band, stagehands, and the lucky fans in the front rows got the brunt of the blast.
In the maddening seconds that followed, people were trampled as the hysterical attendees rushed for the doors, which took three minutes for the press of bodies to force open. The sprinklers had eventually kicked in, and coupled with the fire department saved some of the structure, but the initial burst did the damage the arsonist had hoped for. In the three minutes it took for the doors to open, the fire took lives…everyone in the band, ninety-eight fans, and eventually claiming Kalin Tossinn when the biotech efforts failed.
Ninn was afraid of fire not just because of what it could do, but because of the memories and loss it evoked.
The ork on the fire truck continued issuing orders. The firemen were in silver bodysuits and full-face breathers designed to protect against high temperatures—but that didn’t make the wearer immune; even the latest technology wasn’t that advanced. They worked with precision, the firelight reflecting off their shiny bodysuits and adding to the colorful, horrid tableau.
As she pushed through the crowd, Ninn could tell the majority of the firemen were concentrating on the nearby buildings, wetting them down in an effort to keep the inferno from taking the block; her building had obviously already been declared a loss—none of the firemen were going inside it, and no hoses led in through the front doors. She started recording everything, reflex. There were five ambulances, lumpers holding back the crowd; she spotted the AISE Draye, and for some reason worked around in the opposite direction.
“So hot,” she whispered, noting sweat beaded up on all the lookieloos’ faces.
“Keeb, that’s your place flaming.” It was Mordred in her head; he was seeing through her eyes, the smartlink connection reestablished. She heard other voices, too, dissonant and making no sense, people with British accents. “Towering Inferno, 1974, Paul Newman. ’Cept your building’s not that tall.”
Barega must be near, but a quick glance around didn’t reveal him. She’d home in on the smartlinked gun when she was done taking in the carnage and the gawkers. There were mostly humans in the crowd, the bulk of them locals by their clothes and speech. But there were tourists, too: a half-dozen Asian orks chatted in an unfamiliar languag
e. Some gangers in the mix, a few wired gutterpunks, dataslaves on their way home from work, a cybered-out razorguy with a sword strapped to his back. She watched a young man with blue hair pluck something from a woman’s shoulder bag and ease away. Should do something about that, Ninn thought, but instead she edged all the way to the front, the heat keeping people at bay as effectively as the barricade did.
“Your place is a bonfire. The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990, Tom Hanks.”
“It was my place, Mordred,” she said. It hurt to breathe, the air so blistering and her chest so tight. It might have been more tolerable had she not stayed so long in Cadi’s burning basement and already toasted her lungs, if she hadn’t gotten wounded by the Slayer’s heater. Still couldn’t move her left arm.
“Hey, Miss, were you in there? Did everyone get out?” A human nudged her injured shoulder. “You all right?”
“Fine,” Ninn answered, and edged away. She probably looked like she’d come from that fire, clothes singed, shirt and leggings ripped—maybe from the heater, maybe from snagging something in Cadi’s basement. Probably looked like she’d been spit out of a food processor.
What the hell kind of a fire was this? That it defied the rain and the streams of water from the fire trucks? What could do that? More white bursts followed by more flames, everything bright white, glowing yellow, and sparks of red and orange that put the annual harbor fireworks display to shame.
“Magnesium!” shouted a fireman on the other side of the barricade. Ninn noticed that she had a handheld magnetic anomaly detector in her right hand and a low-watt mineral detector in her left. A small drone clinging to her arm manipulated the controls; the woman’s gloves were too thick to manage the keys. “It’s why the water’s not working, Lieutenant. Should’ve figured it out right away!”
“Magnesium.” Ninn accessed her encephalon and she found a reference to magnesium fires, learning that water basically made a magnesium blaze go ballistic, feeding it rather than putting it out.
“Magnesium,” Mordred repeated. “That was on the label in that big box in your office. Malden’s Finest Magnesium Powder. Remember? Think that piece of refuse on your couch tried to smoke it and caused this?”
Not possible, Ninn thought.
“Foam!” the ork on the truck bellowed. “Foam down the other buildings!” He called into his comm for another unit. “Bring a foam truck, the one with a powder vat. Now! Water’s making it all worse!”
Foam down the other buildings.
They’d truly given up on hers. Everything she owned was in the office…everything but the cyberware and bioware riding around inside her, Mordred, which was somewhere in the crowd, the opals still in her pocket. Her graypuppy slips were ashes, her real coffee gone, the chip with the RighteousRight information, her comfortable high-backed chair, her precious view of the block, her clothes, and her home. The loss made her dizzy. Fire had again taken everything.
Could that box of magnesium powder mistakenly delivered to her office been at the heart of this? Could Talon have accidentally caused it? Did he get out safely?
The top three floors had been offices, the lower floor a dance bar. What office had ordered the magnesium powder that she got by mistake? Not the dentist or the area aging council, not the attorney or the actuary.
Hypnotized by the blaze, she set her audio inscribers to flag any crucial bits.
“So much for dancing the night away at the Parrot, mate.”
“Think everyone got out?”
“You recording this, Lucy? You could sell the video.”
“News vans’re pulling up. Took ’em long enough. Look, Missy Zee is gonna cover this. That’s my sheila.”
One flag: “Arson, definitely. Magnesium,” the same fireman said again. She was talking to Draye, and there was another AISE with them, someone Ninn didn’t recognize. “But it needed an accelerant. Magnesium all by its lonesome wouldn’t’ve done that. Gas or diesel likely as a fuel line, set on the top floor and worked down so the arsonist could escape, the rain helping it spread like crazy. The setter was savvy.”
Arson. But why? Talon wouldn’t have burned her building. He got out, she told herself. He was probably somewhere in this crowd, gawking like everyone else. She’d find him later.
“Backdraft,” Mordred said. “1991, staring Kurt Russell, Robert DeNiro, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, directed by Ron Howard.”
Ninn couldn’t take her eyes off the flames. The crackling of it became white noise.
“Blaze, 1989. Paul Newman again. Vid has nothing to do with fires.”
She kept listening to the people around her, but made sure the inscriber was keying in on the fireman’s chatter to AISE.
“Best club in the block,” a thin dwarf lamented. “The Parrot served the awesomest mojitos.”
“You’d tink nothin’ could burn in da rain.” This from a troll in jeans and a strapless bustier. He tugged on his nose ring. “Must be magic fire.”
Another flag: “Had to be magnesium. Seen it burn like this before.”
That voice was ugly and familiar, and Ninn looked for that speaker, seeing Lt. Jacob Waller talking to a security guard-type, maybe a bouncer. The patch on the guard’s shirt had a galah embroidered on it. He was from her building. Ninn focused her audio inscriber on that conversation and moved so she wasn’t in the direct line of sight of either Waller or Draye. How many AISE officers were in the growing crowd?
A light flared behind her, and she turned to see a news station’s spot, hooded for the rain, aimed at Missy Zee. That wouldn’t be worth recording, Ninn decided; she detested listening to that particular insipid anchor.
Another flag: “Yeah, I’ve seen magnesium fires before,” Waller said. “But it’s been a few years.”
“It started up top,” the security guard said. “A dentist came running into the club, hollering, said it started on his floor. Then the detectors in the club went off, and I turned off the music and shooed ’em all out and called it in. Lots o’ people were calling it in. Trucks got here fast, but not fast enough. The fire ate the building from the top on down. Floor to floor, flames like a bloody waterfall.”
“Only two places in Sydney sell magnesium. We’ll see who’s been buying, track the deliveries,” Draye said. He’d joined Waller.
Delivery. One box of Malden’s Finest Magnesium Powder delivered to her office. AISE could track that delivery to her. Talon had even forged her signature to sign for it. Wonderful. She’d been set up, and AISE would be quick to accept the frame job, lock her away.
“Yeah, tracking magnesium shipments might help if the doer was sloppy,” Draye continued. “I’ll put Henepin on that, Lieutenant. And security feeds might have caught the perp.”
The security guard laughed. “You’d think, right? Ain’t gonna be nothing left of the video equipment. “Ain’t gonna be nothing left of anything. It’s gonna take the building next to it, too.”
“Wala-lang,” Mordred offered.
Magnesium. Ninn shuddered. Who had delivered the magnesium to her office? Who was framing her?
“Maybe a clubber caught sight of something, someone. They’re always recording stuff, big into self-shots.” The guard pointed a finger at various glittery-dressed women in the crowd. “Ask them if they saw somebody suspicious.”
“Maybe they did. Someone leaving in a hurry,” Draye said.
“Get on that.” From Waller.
“Right away.” Draye headed toward a gaggle of the glittery women.
“Don’t know what I’m gonna do now,” the guard added. “That was a good job. Music and sheilas. At least I got ’em all out, the clubbers. At least the fire didn’t start in the club and kill someone. Just smoke hurtin’ some folks. Nothin’ more than singed lungs.” He pointed to the ambulances. Three had pulled away.
“Started up top so whoever torched it could get out,” Waller mused. “Double-Rs set a fire like that down by the harbor two years back, remember? Magnesium in a thunderstorm. Took down a buil
ding with a campaign headquarters in it; the Double-Rs hadn’t liked the candidate.”
“The Double-Rs, eh?” The security guard shook his head. “Just an old building with a dance club and dentist offices. Why the hell would the Double-Rs burn this down?”
“The Right has done this before, but I’m not liking them for this one,” Waller said. “I’m thinking someone else.”
Double-Rs. RighteousRight. Had they burned it down because Ninn had angered them, poking into their affairs, fighting with some of them in One Hundred & Thirty Proof? The bartender had said it would come back on her. If so, it had come back in flames.
“Think everyone got out?” a cybered-out razor guy asked. He was a bouncer from a club down the street, and now he’d moved up to take Draye’s spot next to Waller. “Think anyone burned?”
Waller shrugged. “If they didn’t get out, hope they didn’t suffer long.” He spoke into a comm: “Henepin, I’m pretty sure Tossinn had an office in this building. When I ran her financials yesterday arvo, it showed her behind in rent. Run that for me, will you?”
Great.
“Your associate did not get out, Nininiru.” This came from Barega. Still caught by the fire, Ninn hadn’t noticed him approach. “I dreamed in the flames, Nininiru Tossinn. In my dream I saw Talon Kassar die on your couch. He did not suffer long, but he did suffer.”
“And it’ll cost dearly, elf,” the Double–R bartender had said.
“Not going to be anything left of the place,” the cybered-out razor guy lamented to Waller. “Nothing.”
“Ekkert,” Mordred said. “Nothing left.”
Wala-lang, Ninn thought. Fragging wala-lang.
The heat, the realization that Waller would look at her for the arson, her injuries from the Cross Slayer’s blade—left arm still dead dead dead. Maybe she’d have to buy a new arm. And where the hell would she get the nuyen for that? The opals? A good cyberarm could run well more than that. She’d have to opt for used, from some back alley street doc. Dead dead dead. Talon dead—
