Evi walked across the crumbling bridge, weaving through the stray burnt-out cars, and left the human world. She passed under a rust-shot green sign reading, “I-95, Cross-Bronx Expressway.” Under it was an ancient grime-coated detour sign saying the expressway was closed for repairs. More of the NY Urban Infrastructure Renewal Project. It was supposed to open the summer of 2045. Someone had spraypainted “abandon all hope” over “your tax dollars at work.”
The first thing to hit her as she set foot in the Bronx was the smell. Even a fresh layer of gray snow, which muted odor as much as it did sound, could not hide the smell of animal musk. She was enveloped by the overlapping mélange of the three million moreaus who owned the Bronx.
She stepped off the end of a crumbling off ramp.
The view down the street belonged to another continent. Even at this early hour, the street was lined by hawkers at makeshift stalls. A Peruvian rabbit sold gold jewelry out of a white plastic shipping crate. Three leather-clad rats chittering lightning Spanish were selling electronics using a burnt-out Chevy Caldera as a base of operations. Behind a rank of orange cones and old traffic sawhorses, a blind Pakistani canine with only one arm was being helped by a young female vulpine, running skewered meat over a coal pit in the asphalt . . .
People were everywhere, the highest concentration of moreaus in the world. In any direction she looked there was an undulating ocean of fur. Short dirty white for most of the Latin rodents, rabbits, and rats. Spotted brown for some rabbits and dead black for some rats. Red to spotlight the British vulpines. Gray, brown, and black for the Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian canines. Brownish black for the slow-moving ursoid mountains and the subliminal flashes of otters and ferrets. Yellow and black for the big cats . . .
She waded into the sea of nonhumans, not bothering to hide the Uzi. The crowd parted around her as the population turned to stare. A barely audible growl followed her like the sound of crashing surf. She got a half-block before she met a portion of the crowd that didn’t break before her.
Upon seeing the creature, her first impulse was to file it in her knowledge of moreau strains. He was Russian, ursoid combat strain, Vyshniy ’33, first generation.
The bear was a wall of fur reaching up for nearly four meters. The individual muscles that snaked through his forearm were the size of Evi’s thigh. Dozens of scars picked through the bear’s brown fur; most looked like bullet holes. A diagonal slash originated under one eye and snaked across his muzzle, revealing a slice of raw pink across his nose. The only thing the bear wore was a pair of khaki shorts.
It snarled at her. “Pink.”
She leveled the Uzi at the bear. Around her she could hear weapons clearing holsters, guns being cocked. The bear raised his hand and she knew a solid contact from that arm would break her neck.
She tensed to duck and roll to the side. “Look at me! I’m no more human than you are.”
The bear’s brows knit as it stared at her. It took a few seconds for him to lock eyes, a few more to realize what the eyes meant. His arm remained raised. “You’re a frank?”
Those words seemed to ignite something in the crowd. What had been a frozen tableau around the periphery of Evi’s vision melted back into motion. Motion away from her and the bear. What had been something of universal concern now seemed to be a personal matter between the two of them.
The bear was still looking for an excuse. “Not pink, but you can’t talk like that to—”
She saw a quiver of motion along the bear’s forearm. “Don’t.” She shook the Uzi for emphasis.
“But—”
“Your backup’s gone.”
The bear lowered his arm and grumbled, “Thought you were fucking human.”
Evi sighed. “Done?”
The bear gave an all-too-human shrug and limped away. For the first time she noticed that the bear’s left foot was a makeshift prosthetic.
She continued down the street, keeping an eye out for other potential conflicts. For the first time she saw her nearly human form as a handicap. Everyone eyed her with suspicion, some with outright contempt, but no one else opted for a direct confrontation. With the exception of some yelled obscenities, growls, and one thrown brick that missed her, she passed through unmolested.
But this deep in the Bronx, the only thing that would molest her would be the locals. Humans, cops or Feds, wouldn’t come down here. The only people she’d have to worry about would be Nyogi’s. And then only if they sent the Afghanis down after her. However, there was a good chance that no one knew where she was.
Not an aircar in sight. Not too surprising, since the FAA restricted the airspace above Moreytown. Allegedly because it was too dangerous, but Evi knew better. Both local and federal policy since ’42 was to restrict physical access to concentrations of moreau population.
She needed to find a comm. She wove through main streets between modular mass-produced housing, burnt-out ruins, and old unfinished housing projects, looking. It soon became obvious that there was not going to be any operational public comms out on the street. The few kiosks she passed, whether they’d originally been a comm, a bank machine, a trash depository, or a city directory, had all been gutted long ago.
She walked deeper into the nonhuman city as the sun rose. The night was catching up with her. Evi had a headache that was telling her she had gotten too little sleep, and her left shoulder was a deep ache that flashed into full-blown agony whenever she tried to move her arm. She knew that all the movement last night had canceled any healing her arm had done the previous day and had probably made things worse.
She needed a place to rest.
She walked for two miles. She paralleled the valley of the dead I-95, passing abandoned earth movers and bulldozers that’d been stripped to orange metal skeletons. At eight in the morning, Evi passed an ancient brick structure that hadn’t burned. It was wedged between a lot humped with soot-scarred concrete and the girder skeleton of what had, long ago, been an attempt at low-cost housing. The framework stork of the crane still hovered over the project, leaning at an ominous angle over the brick building.
The building’s windows hid behind rolling steel doors. The way the graffiti wrapped around, ignoring the division between steel and brick, showed that the front windows had not been opened in a long time. What had stopped Evi, though, was the sign above the open door, “ROOMS.”
“ROOMS” was lit in flickering neon that, against all odds, remained intact. The front door gaped open at her, held in place by a granite lion that stood rampant about a meter high. Mortar still clung to the lion’s feet, a legacy from whatever façade he’d escaped from.
She needed a place to hole up. “ROOMS” was the best she could expect from this town. She walked in, hoping that the crane gantry would remain upright for one more day.
The lobby was sweltering, and the open door did nothing to help more than a meter into the building. The air was humid from the rust-laden steam heating system.
Behind the desk sat an old brown rabbit, obese, nose running, ears drooping. The lepus’ rheumy eyes locked with Evi’s for about a half-second of shock. She saw the rabbit’s hand moving to something concealed behind the desk. The hand stopped moving when he looked into her eyes.
The rabbit cleared his throat. “Help you?”
She walked up to the desk. “I need a room with a working comm.”
“Yeah.” The rabbit coughed a few times. “Outside line?”
She nodded.
The rabbit turned and began tapping at an old manual keyboard behind him. She leaned forward to see what the rabbit had been reaching for. In a holster behind the desk was a cheap Chinese revolver, a PR-14. Evi didn’t even want to think about fourteen-millimeter rounds. Those things were cheap for a reason. There were a lot of them, and they were just as likely to do damage to the wielder as to the target. The only people who could fire those things accurately were the Chinese ursines.
She thought it was a stupid weapon for a rabbit. That was until she noticed a bracket sunk into the desk. A bracket with a universal joint mount on it that could provide a fairly braced firing platform for the gun.
She turned and looked behind her and saw at least one very large hole in the wall by the door.
“Room 615.” The rabbit paused for a coughing fit.
“How much?”
“Twenty an hour, hundred a day, half that if you got cash.” The rabbit pulled a gray rag out from under the desk and blew his nose. “I don’t haggle.”
She reached into her pack and hoped that the Agency had left her wallet and cash in the leather. They had. She fumbled in her jacket and liberated her wallet. What remained of the roll of twenties, after the limo rental, was exactly a hundred in cash in her wallet. There was her phony ID in the wallet, but Eve’s identity was compromised now.
“I want twenty-four hours and the balance credited to the comm’s account.” She handed the rabbit five twenties.
The cash disappeared under a balding hand. The rabbit nodded and handed her a green ramcard with the room number branded into it. “Checkout’s at noon.” The rabbit glanced at the Uzi. “Any shooting’ll bring the wrath of God on you.”
She nodded and took the cardkey.
The stairs were littered with garbage, plaster, and unconscious moreaus. Room 615 was on the sixth floor, overlooking the abandoned construction next door. The thick metal door opened on a square room, four meters on a side. The disease-green paint seemed to be the only thing holding the plaster to the walls. Black-specked yellow curtains turned the frozen white sunlight the color of urine. The color matched the room’s smell. The sheets on the bed were laced with fur from the previous occupant, as was the claw-marked recliner.
Evi shut the door behind her and turned on the overhead light. The circular fluorescent pinged a few times before it lit with a nervous, vibrating blue glow. Evi pulled the recliner around in front of the comm.
The comm was anchored in a black textured plastic case. The base bore scars from cigarettes and knives but remained firmly bolted to the wall opposite the foot of the bed. She sat down in front of it and turned it on.
As it warmed up, Evi was treated to moans and heavy breathing provided by the hotel’s piped-in broadcast. When the black and white low-res display focused, Evi saw a familiar-looking Pakistani canine. It might not be the same movie that had been playing on Times Square, but it certainly was the same actor. Small world.
The first thing Evi did was get on an outside line and call Diana. Diana answered the comm call immediately. “You’re where?”
“The address is right.”
Diana shook her head. “You’re in the middle of the Bronx? Are you all right?”
“Yes and yes.”
“Mind telling me what happened?”
“Brush with the cops and the Feds. Moreytown seemed a good place to disappear for a little while.”
Diana was quiet for a while, seeming to weigh what she was going to say next. “Are you going to come back?”
“There’s a lot . . .” A lot she had to do, a lot she had to think about, a lot she had to come to terms with. “I don’t know.”
There was no mistaking the disappointment that crossed Diana’s face. “I appreciate the call. Do you insist on continuing to go it alone?”
Diana had a point. Evi might be able to survive on her own, but if she ever intended to do anything about the forces arrayed against her, she needed help. Price might be an option, if she could get to him. However, if she was right and Hofstadter had taken over control of the operation, Price might be as much a solo act as she was at the moment. “You still think the moreau underground might be willing to help me?”
“You’re fighting the same forces the movement’s been fighting for the past fifteen years.”
By doing things like bombing the New York Public Library? She couldn’t help picturing them as nothing more than a group of rabid terrorists. Then again, that’s what she was supposed to be right now, wasn’t it? “Can you tell me who to contact out here?”
Diana looked a little pained. “I haven’t been close to the movement for a long time—”
Evi suddenly remembered the address Nohar had given her. It was down here in the Bronx. Maybe Nohar had had the same thoughts about the moreau underground that Diana had. And what did “G1:26” mean?
She typed it in on the battered keyboard and asked. “You know what that means?”
“7:26 Eastern Standard—”
“Other than that.”
Diana stared at the screen and shrugged. “Hmm.” After a few minutes of silence she started mumbling. “. . . after our likeness—”
“What’s that?”
“Benefits of a Catholic education. Every time I see numbers separated by a colon, I think chapter and verse.”
“You were quoting?”
“Genesis 1:26.” Diana’s voice took on a pontifical tone. “And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Evi sat back on the recliner and started laughing, inaudibly. That was one hell of a password for the moreau underground. “Does that help?” Diana asked.
Evi shook her head. “I think so, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I guess that’s it.”
“Good luck.” Diana added, “and you really look much better without the sunglasses.”
Diana cut the connection.
Evi sighed and emptied her pack. Her jumpsuit was there, clean now, as well as her leather. Most of the equipment she had started out with was trash. The magazines and extra barrel for the Mishkov were useless without the gun. All that was left was her stun rod.
She pressed the test key and a green LED winked at her.
She stripped out of the trashed exec suit and stretched. She considered sitting down, but she looked at the fur on the seat of the recliner and put the jumpsuit on first.
Since she had the comm, she tried calling David Price again. He was still locking out incoming calls. His comm was probably programmed to respond to secure transmissions from Frey’s comm.
That did her a lot of good.
She sighed and ruffled through Sukiota’s wallet. Not much of anything there beyond the standard ID, a few cardkeys, one with the NYPD logo. The only thing remotely interesting she’d gotten off of Sukiota was the blank white card.
“What’s this?” she asked herself.
Evi plopped it into the comm’s card reader. She had to hit it a few times to get it going.
The screen fuzzed in on the National Security Agency logo. After a few seconds the screen started flashing all sorts of top-secret and restricted warnings at her. She tapped on the keyboard and the database program asked for her security clearance or the card’s info would be wiped.
She debated a moment on whether she should risk her old passwords or pop the card and wait until she found a real hacker. The key word was “wait.” She did not feel like she had loads of time.
Besides, clearance passwords for these files were based on security level, not individual agents. It shouldn’t care if the Agency thought she was dead.
She typed a ten character alphanumeric.
The screen blanked.
There was a nervous few seconds as she listened to the laser head knocking around inside the card-reader. The green indicator on the front of the case flashed a few times.
Then the knocking from the reader ceased and the screen ran up a menu. Apparently her access codes were still good.
It was a database card, similar to the library’s. Only, instead of just the raw data, this one had its own shell program. And from a brief glance at the menu, the data on this card was a lot more specific and to the point. Sukiota must have DL’d the info from Langley as soon as she’d gotten a look at the peeper’s surveillance footage.
Each file was ID’d by an NSA picture. She knew the picture for Ezra Frey, David Price, Erin Hofstadter, Dr. Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Leo Davidson. A picture of the sniper was identified with the one word in quotes, “Gabriel.”
Last was a file on her. Her picture was a human-looking one where she was wearing her contacts. The human eyes made the picture look slightly wrong.
She spent a few hours perusing what the Agency’s computers said about the conspirators.
Ezra Frey graduated from the USMC to Defense Intel during the hottest part of the Pan-Asian war. Advocated the unpopular position that the U.S. should intervene to defend Japan and the Subcontinent. Frey was saying that in ’26, when it looked like things were going well for the Indo-Pacific affiance. A year later, New Delhi was nuked and nine bloody years followed before Tokyo suffered the same fate. In ’35 he moved to the Agency, and began making the same noises about the Islamic Axis and Israel. The U.S. remained noninterventionist, and in six years Tel Aviv was blasted into a shallow coastal lake.
Erin Hofstadter had been born in the EEC, a European army brat. Oxford was the least of the schools from which he had a doctorate. He was an Agency advisor throughout his two-decade stint in the State Department. According to the file he’d been missing, ever since a fact-finding mission to occupied Japan in late ’53. It was presumed that he had been taken hostage by nationalistic factions attached to the NLF even though no credit was ever taken or demands made.
David Price was Pol-Sci, specialist in conspiracy theories. Sent up a few memos that suggested that some unknown agency was manipulating the U.S. government into self-destructive activities. He listed a dozen specific examples, including the U.S. nonparticipation in the Pan-Asian war, the antitechnology legislation by the Congress, up to the mothballing of the NASA deep-space probes when a launch would be cheaper than maintenance.
Dr. Scott Fitzgerald was a xenobiologist. He worked for NASA on the development of sensors on the deep-probe projects, and he had been chief of NASA’s orbital ear project. That project had, Fitzgerald alleged, found evidence of intelligent signals of nonterrestrial origin. This was before Congress axed the ear and mothballed the deep-probe project in the space of four years in the early ’40s.
Leo Davidson had degrees in computer science, engineering, and physics. He ran a particle collider in the Midwest, looking for tachyons, until the funding was cut and the collider was shut down. For various West Coast companies he tried to redevelop hard-wired biointerfaces, build control systems for fusion-drive rockets, did theoretical work in nano-computers, along with a dozen other cutting-edge disciplines. Each one, close to midstream, ran into Congressional legislation that either stalled or killed the project, generally in the name of public safety.
“Gabriel” was a freelancer. He had worked for nationalists in the EEC, and the government of the EEC. He worked for a half-dozen North African countries, where he participated in three successive coups in Ethiopia alone. In South America, he worked for a number of Latin-based megacorps, removing political obstacles in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Hitman, assassin, demolition expert, sold himself to the highest bidder. The moral equivalent of the Afghani canines.
All of them were supposed to be dead.
Evi could see how a core of this conspiracy could have formed. Most of these men had been affected badly by the alien intervention. Frey and Price had seen an invisible hand at work in Asia, and Davidson and Fitzgerald were scientists whose research was being interfered with.
Hofstadter seemed to have no such personal stake, and Gabriel was simply a hired gun. A gun probably brought in by Hofstadter. Hofstadter was, born and bred, a creature of the intelligence community.
Hofstadter had taken over Frey’s operation and was trying to clean house by putting a bullet in her.
Nyogi Enterprises was after her. Nyogi’s interest was in the cadre of rogue Agency operatives. Nyogi had both her and Frey under surveillance; they’d even purchased the buildings they resided in. The veep had said it: “They want their people back.”
She was sure that Nyogi’s involvement with the NLF was only the tip of the iceberg as far as political machinations were involved. She had seen it before. The aliens insulated themselves within corporate fronts and used them as funnels to distribute massive assets to further their agenda. The agenda, broadly defined, being the technological stagnation of the planet. Nyogi Enterprises fit the profile. The creatures running Nyogi knew about Frey’s operation and wanted the four aliens that Evi had captured in Cleveland.
When she’d found that cell of aliens running Midwest Lapidary, she had initiated Frey’s conspiracy. Whatever the exact details were, a group of Agency operatives had falsified records and diverted resources to keep the aliens secret from the government. From all appearances, the conspirators still had the four aliens Evi captured, and somehow the conspiracy was exploiting them.
She sighed and turned off the comm. She was feeling the weight of events bear down on her. It seemed that every reflection brought to light a new set of players with their own agenda.
She yawned and realized how tired she was. For all the fur shed upon it, the bed looked pretty good at this point.