A long time ago—six years in the past seemed ancient history now—Angel had been living on the streets, running with the moreau gangs in Cleveland.
That little world collapsed when a gang of rodents calling themselves Zipperhead did the big ugly to most of the competition. Zipperhead had its five minutes of fame, scaring pinks across the country with their vidcast violence. In the end, Zipperhead was too big, had too many rats, and attracted too much attention to survive. But in going belly-up, Zipperhead kicked up a lot of dust, and left a lot of bodies littering the landscape.
Angel had been one of those bodies. Nohar, the tiger, had saved her life—but that had still left her in the hands of a cadre of DEA agents who had a hard-on for Zipperhead in the worst way.
Angel always thought that her subsequent cooperation with the DEA was when she’d lost her innocence. That was where she saw the lies of things like moreau solidarity and the rule that you don’t roll over on people. She’d known her street life was over, and she had managed to hand over enough on the Ziphead to guarantee her amnesty on any crap they could have charged her with.
She had ended up leaving Cleveland with the DEA—one agent in particular—owing her a very big favor.
It was about time she collected.
So, after she had retreated into the apartment Mr. K had loaned her, she made a call to Washington. Getting through to Agent Conrad—who’d just transferred and made a few upward leaps in the Justice Department in the six years since she’d talked to him—took her through a few more layers in the bureaucracy than she was used to dealing with. The Fed raised the runaround she got from the Frisco PD by an order of magnitude. Folks up there just didn’t want to talk to a morey.
One secretary put her on hold for half an hour before she cut her off.
Angel didn’t care. She wasn’t paying the long-distance charges, and the one thing she had at the moment was time.
By noon, she actually got Agent Conrad, officer in charge of something-or-other, on the screen of her comm. At first she didn’t see any recognition on the cadaverous black face. He simply answered the call. “Conrad, can I help you?”
Sounded like he thought that someone had transferred her to the wrong office. A lot of folks had told her that this was the Justice Department and the number for NonHuman Services was such-and-such. She sighed. “Don’t you remember the rabbit who got you that promotion?”
“Angel Lopez?” he said with the squint common to a lot of pinks that didn’t want to admit that they couldn’t tell moreaus apart.
“Cleveland, six years ago. I handed you a lot of rats.”
Conrad nodded. “Yes, I remember.” He wore the face of someone who didn’t like to be reminded of his own past. He’d always struck Angel as more the desk jockey than the street cop. He’d probably found his place in the Federal bureaucracy and didn’t like his cage being rattled.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“You offered to return the favor one day.”
Conrad nodded gently and rested his chin in his hand. “So I did. What do you need?”
“I need to visit an alien.”
There was a very long pause before Conrad spoke.
“That isn’t funny.”
“Do you see me laughing?”
“What makes you think I can swing that, of all things?”
Angel shrugged. “I need a visitor’s pass to Alcatraz. And I need to see one of the blobs they dug up out of VanDyne—”
“Why do you need—” He shook his head. “No, that, down to the detention facility, is a national security matter. It doesn’t even fall under Justice jurisdiction. The security agencies won’t even admit that they have a facility on Alcatraz—”
What? Now the effing dome is supposed to be invisible? “Come on. They’ve been prime-time vids about the place. I know they let scientists interview these freaks. It can’t be that hard to slip me into the next egghead study group.”
Conrad looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he shook his head. “It isn’t that easy. I don’t have the authority to pull strings like that. And, forgive me, but do you know what it would take to get a nonhuman into that facility in the current political climate?”
Angel could see the problem, but she didn’t want to let it go at that. “Do you know anyone who has that kind of pull?”
“Tell me why.”
What could she tell him? “I take it that simple curiosity won’t swing it?”
“What do you think?”
How to put it? “Conrad, I am in a fairly big mess out here. There are folks out for my furry head, and there are only two people I can think of who’d know who they are. One’s dead—”
“And the other?”
“Someone who used to be in charge of VanDyne.”
“Is that all you’re going to give me?”
“Ain’t it enough? Can you do this for me or not?”
Conrad began to shake his head, then stopped and gave Angel a shallow smile. “Okay. Like you said, I owe you. There is one person I know who might pull something like this for me. The one senator I can think of that might have a chance of sticking her head out for a nonhuman. No promises, but I’ll talk to her about it—falls into her bailiwick as Committee Chair for NHA. I’ll call you back.”
“I’ll be here, thanks.” She cut the connection, thinking that NHA stood for NonHuman Affairs and that the Chairperson of that committee was Sylvia Harper. For some reason, turning to Harper for help seemed appropriate.
• • •
Mr. K came up to visit her while she was waiting for Conrad to call back. He looked little the worse for wear after the events of the morning. The only sign that something strange had happened was a fine tracery of welts where the cyber-helmet had been sitting.
He came in alone, though she could see his guard outside in the hall.
“Angel, I thought to come and express my appreciation.”
There wasn’t any trace of sarcasm in the frank’s voice, so Angel took it at face value. “For what?”
“For talking down VanDyne’s rather unusual mainframe.” Mr. K shook his head and removed the ubiquitous sunglasses. Violet eyes looked at her. “That, hmm, machine tracked down our signal and slaved our entire system. Up to the main control terminal”—his long fingers massaged the welts on his oddly shaped skull—“and a bit beyond.”
He walked up to the bar and poured himself a drink from an unlabeled bottle of amber liquid. “Shouldn’t drink, damages the neurochemistry.” He shrugged and sipped at the glass.
Angel shook her head. “What happened?”
“As far as VanDyne’s internal machine was concerned, it was tracking down a contact—” He massaged his temple again. “To the source. After it tried to access me, the only contact left at that terminal location was you. Once it got the idea that you were its contact, it ignored all the ‘extraneous’ signals we threw at it. TECHNOMANCER seems rather single-minded.”
“Why thank me? It was all an accident.”
He finished the glass and set it back on the bar. “You’re responsible for bringing our attention to such a device. That information alone is priceless. You also engineered a marvelous backdoor into the system. Our business relationship has been more than profitable so far. My team already has amassed tentative specifications for this alien computer whose existence no one outside the Fed suspects—”
“What about the data I gave you?”
Mr. K smiled. “I have not forgotten.” He produced the ramcards and handed them over.
“More fake tickets?”
“No, these are the originals. The machine’s intrusion into our system left a lot of residual software. The copying algorithm was embedded in some peripheral RAM. We were able to reproduce the main body of the data for analysis now. Even if the VanDyne computer doesn’t follow through with the task you set it, we’ll be able to decode it eventually with the information we have now. Not in thirty-six hours, but eventually . . .”
“Yeah, sure.” The frank had lost her somewhere.
“As for our other arrangements.” He tossed another ramcard on top of the tickets. It was solid black with a serial number on the top edge. “A down payment.”
Angel picked up the card. There was writing on it, matte black on the reflective black surface, but she couldn’t read German. She looked up at Mr. K.
“You wanted a ‘piece of the action.’ Our feelers to the EEC have already paid off. That’s a numbered Swiss account.”
“How much?”
“Ten Million Dollars EEC—”
Angel dropped the ramcard as if it was coated in acid. She must have blacked out the world for a moment because the next thing she heard was the frank saying, “—the only one. Many wealthy governments are lining up for the specifications on VanDyne’s computer.”
“Can you leave me alone for a while?” She was still staring at the black ramcard.
He nodded and put his sunglasses back on. He walked to the door and turned, “If you want, I can have them send up some new clothes for you.”
“Yeah, sure.” Angel’s mouth felt very dry.
Mr. K left.
A long time ago, when she was teaching herself to read, Angel had come across a copy of Alice in Wonderland. She had always loved that book. Only now it occurred to her that, while Alice eventually woke up, the damn rabbit was permanently stuck in the insanity.
• • •
Conrad swung her a ride to Alcatraz. When he called her back, it looked like he couldn’t quite believe it. It was especially fortuitous as the academic visits were going to stop soon because of security considerations.
Tonight, 9:30 p.m. was to be the last shuttle to the Island for a week. The visits were going to stop for the duration of Sylvia Harper’s visit to San Francisco. It was the first indication that Angel had that Harper was actually going to stop here.
It didn’t bode well. Most of the places she spoke to were war zones.
However, Harper pulled the strings for a potential constituent even though these transports had waiting lists of years. The last shuttle out there was going to be half-empty anyway. The UCLA grad students had other problems at the moment. Conrad had said that Harper had taken remarkably little convincing.
Maybe all politicians weren’t necessarily slime.
All she had to do was beat the curfew to the Presidio. That gave her a few hours to play with, and there was something she wanted to do.
She drove a rented Chevy Caldera—the most generic-looking car she could think of, didn’t want to attract attention—into the parking lot to St. Luke’s. She sat behind the wheel of the car for a good five minutes before she got out.
She didn’t know if this was a good idea.
Fuck good idea, Lei was her friend.
Angel got out and walked into the lobby. The place was louder than she remembered, and the blood-smell was leaking into the public parts of the hospital. Angel saw a cop and turned her face away, hoping that the exec suit Mr. K had sent up was enough of a disguise. For most pinks it would be.
The androgyne suit was tailored for a rabbit, and was so incongruous for Angel that it’d probably fool folks that knew her well.
She walked up to the comm directory as if she belonged here and started running the thing through to find Lei’s room. Angel felt a little relief when she saw that Lei’d been moved out of intensive care and into a semi-private room on the third floor.
The question was how well the cops—or anyone else—were watching that room.
At least at St. Luke’s there was a lot of moreys. In fact, the place was a bit more crowded than she remembered it. The normal security at St. Luke’s was pathetic to begin with, and Angel doubted that they’d stop a well-groomed morey in a thousand-dollar suit without being given a pressing reason to do so.
Angel took the elevator up with a pink doctor, a delivery robot, two downcast-looking Pakistani canines, and a rat wearing maintenance overalls. No one paid the slightest attention to her.
Lei’s room was two nurses’ stations past the elevator, and this was where Angel began to get nervous. Since she’d sidestepped the bureaucracy, she didn’t have any right to be here. Angel stiffened her back, straightened her ears, and fixed her eyes on her destination. She tried to exude an odor that she belonged here.
No one at either station challenged her.
She passed a vending area and nearly blew the act when she saw two uniforms and a familiar looking Fedboy—a pale, white-haired guy with reddish eyes. None of them were looking in her direction and Angel managed to recover and finish the walk to room 3250.
As the door closed behind her, she saw Lei on a hospital bed. Lei was in a transparent cast from the waist down, her fur shaved so the massive bruising, abrasions, and the wounds from a compound fracture were dimly visible. Her tail was gone—
“Hello . . .” Lei mumbled, slurring her words slightly.
“Lei,” Angel barely had the strength to whisper. “Oh, Christ, Lei.”
Lei opened one watery eye and turned her head slightly. “’sou, Angel?” She was well drugged up. Angel could almost smell the painkillers wrapping the room like a fog.
She walked up and put her hand on Lei’s. Lei’s hand was hot and her nose looked dry. “It’s me. Angel. I’m so sorry.”
“Notchur fault.” Lei licked the end of her nose and seemed to focus on Angel. “Nice suit.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’ll live, maybe walk even.”
Angel tried to say something, but nothing came out.
“Thanks for coming. You’re a good friend.”
Angel leaned over and hugged Lei as best she could.
“Don’t cry,” Lei said.
“I’m not crying,” Angel whispered.