Fearful Symmetries

Nohar took a ramcard out of his wallet, his record of The Necron Avenger’s public net activity. He felt okay overwriting it; he didn’t need that information anymore. He slipped the card into the comm’s data slot and tried to call up a directory, a database, or some sort of menu.

Nohar managed to back up from the financial information he was looking at until he hit a menu listing the databases he could open. There were the typical titles, “Accounting,” “Inventory,” and “Personnel.”

Nohar entered the Bangkok database and was confronted with a history of the Drips. Vectors, case studies, maps of outbreaks, pathology, demographics. Everything that anyone could possibly want to know about Herpes Bangkok, down to its genetic structure.

He already knew that they were tracking the Drips from the information Necron had given him, so he only scanned the information before backing up and trying another heading. His next try was “Tangier.”

What he saw was a hepatitis variant. This wasn’t a disease that was making the news. According to the database it was confined to the canines inhabiting the Hollywood Hills. Nohar thought back to one-eyed Elijah, and the other dogs, the ones who were falling to some sickness. The people here were tracking that disease. Looking at the information gathered here, it was obvious that something odd was happening. Their reports on transmission vectors were as detailed as the ones for the Drips. The case studies of the disease’s progress were as complete—and this was for a community of moreaus that never saw the inside of a hospital.

The genetic information was here, too. This time Nohar paid a little more attention. He wasn’t a scientist, but he was beginning to get an ominous feeling from the databases. They didn’t seem to be the product of doctors interested in curing, or even attempting to learn about a disease. The database seemed more a critique of the virus. Scattered throughout were words like “effective transmission,” “efficient progression,” and “optimum prognosis.” As if they were rating the virus on how well it spread.

He scanned through the Tangier database, becoming more and more alarmed, until he came to a list of concluding comments, one of which was absolutely chilling.

Nohar started downloading the database to his ramcard. The comm flashed a warning to him, the comm’s voice lost under the sounds of the fire alarms. “This is a secure database. Use is being logged. Do you still wish to complete this operation?”

He had begun to realize that he wasn’t looking through a medical database. He was looking at a military one. He was looking at an analysis of biological warfare agents.

He looked back at the Bangkok file, and found what he had missed before. All the signs that he was looking at something someone had engineered in a lab. More acceptable because the transmission rate to humans was nil. . . .

“Good lord,” Nohar whispered to himself. He had expected to find some signs of a dark experiment, someone testing propagation of the herpes virus. He had never expected to find out someone had engineered the disease in the first place.

“Congo,” was a flu virus. It had apparently ripped through the moreau population in The States about two years ago. There had been a few fatalities, among the very old and very young. Nohar skipped to the conclusions—Congo had been abandoned because it was unstable, prone to mutate.

The last one, “Niger,” was the most recent file. They had just completed the engineering of the organism. There were only two case studies, and there was no question that the victims had been purposely infected. Both had died within a week of infection.

The virus attacked the connective tissue of the body, and caused the internal organs to die off one by one. The victims bled from every orifice, the blood filled every cavity in their bodies. It refused to clot. And near the end, the rabbit that had been infected was vomiting up a black bloody mess that included the lining of his stomach, throat, and tongue. By then the file said the virus had undergone “extreme amplification,” which meant that every drop of that rabbit’s blood had enough virus in it to infect most of Compton.

The bastards had engineered a variant of Ebola Zaire. A variant that only affected moreaus. Somehow they had found a common thread in the genetics of all the moreaus that they could base their diseases on. Nohar thought of Elijah again—

Suddenly, his concerns for his own safety, even that of his son, seemed petty. He was suddenly looking at the possibility of a genocidal plague in the hands of people who might actually use it. Not just that, but in the hands of people who could use it most effectively. They had been doing these studies for years, studying the propagation of these viruses. If they wanted to use their Ebola Niger, they would introduce it at multiple points, in victims who would assure the maximum spread of the virus. No quarantine would be able to stop it. . . .

Nohar reached up for the card, looking up as he suddenly sensed another presence moving toward the office. The smell of humans was drifting toward him, and he could almost make out the sound of footsteps beneath the noise of the klaxons.

The owner of the footsteps knew exactly where he was going. A pink in a black uniform turned the corner of the office. He was armed with an M-303 caseless assault rifle. He leveled the oversized weapon at Nohar.

Nohar was already diving behind the desk as the guy let loose. The jackhammer of the rifle upstaged the klaxon as the office began shedding debris around Nohar. Paneling splintered, acoustical tile fell from the ceiling, fluorescent tubes shattered, and the comm exploded into a hundred fragments.

Nohar felt a surge of adrenaline as he pulled out the Vind. He didn’t have much time. His only advantage was the guy was firing wildly into the room, and had taken out the only light sources.

He waited for the gunfire to track into one corner of the room, then he sprang toward the opposite end, bringing the Vind to bear on the man silhouetted in the doorway. The guy caught the movement, and started to bring the rifle to bear, the bullets cutting a swath through the office paneling.

Nohar pumped off the two shots left in the Vind, one high, one low. The first caught the guy in the upper chest, the second in the left thigh. He wore body armor, but the first shot still knocked him backward. The second cut his leg out from under him, and he fell back into the hallway.

Nohar ran up and kicked the rifle away from the guy. He had managed to avoid killing the bastard, but Nohar couldn’t bring himself to feel good about it. The hallway was rank with the smell of the blood that was pooling under the guy’s legs, turning the blue carpet purplish-black.

“Go on,” the guy said. His teeth were clenched against pain, and he sounded short of breath. “Kill me, that’s what you’re designed to do.”

Nohar knelt over him, and saw that he was looking at a kid—at least in human terms. He wasn’t better than nineteen or twenty. Still, Nohar held the empty Vind up to the kid’s head and asked, “Who are you people? Is this a government operation?”

Nohar didn’t want to waste time. Everything was going to be converging on this office, the kid was just the first. He held the gun on the kid while he grabbed the M-303.

He was about to try another question, when he heard a door open down the hall, by the fire stairs. The elevators were back there, too. The kid smiled, and Nohar wanted to smack him.

Nohar holstered his Vind and ran in the opposite direction, toward the giant biohazard door. Before he reached it, he ducked into another office. This one had a window overlooking the parking lot. He shouldered the M-303 and picked up an office chair. He used it to smash out the window.

Below him he could see the flashers of the police and fire departments, and the crowd of people circling the building. He was in trouble. He had spent too long at the comm. He had planned to slip out with the last of the evacuees; now he was surrounded by cops and about to be hit by an assault squad with automatic rifles.

He looked out through the window. The wind whipped at his face as he looked four stories down to the pavement. Too far to jump, he’d break bones for sure. And police were already running toward the building. The crowd was all looking in his direction now.

There was a similar ledge on the floor below, and he desperately needed to make it. There were the sounds of shouting and commotion behind and below him, as he faced the wall of the building. More important right now were the sounds of running feet coming down the hall toward the office he’d just left.

There was little choice now. Nohar reached down so his hands gripped the ledge he crouched on. Then he pushed his feet off the ledge. His body fell from in front of the window, dropping from sight as the gunman reached the entrance to the office. He jerked to a stop that almost pulled his shoulders from their sockets. He held on to the ledge, feeling as if his claws would tear from his fingers. He fell against the window below. He swung a foot back to kick out the glass. He managed one solid kick, shattering the window. He let go, allowing his forward momentum to carry him into the blinds and the office beyond the broken window. Glass bit into him as he rolled across the floor at the foot of the window.

He got to his feet in a twin of the office above. He ran for the door. Even though the adrenaline was firing through his body, sharpening everything, he could feel where his body was screaming enough. His knee felt as if he had blown it out again. Every joint in both arms was on fire, especially the joints in his fingers. His claws felt as if they had locked in place.

He hobbled out of the office, through a forest of cubicles, and tried to think of an escape route. The more he thought of it, the less likely there was going to be one. He was going to have to deal with the security goons or the police. And it was looking more and more as if the police were the lesser evil.

Nohar crashed through the door to the fire stairs. He could hear a commotion a floor above. The security goons were hitting the stairs as well, trying to catch up with him.

The flights were side-by-side, with little gap between them. Nohar ran halfway down the flight and vaulted over the railing, stumbling on the concrete of the next lower flight. He almost fell headfirst into the landing, but he kept moving. He could hear the footsteps of the security goons above him.

The fire door on this floor was ajar, and Nohar pulled it open and slipped inside. He found himself in a large room, the walls piled high with packages and letters. There were several desks where packages were in the midst of being sorted.

Nohar stopped in front of one desk that was piled high with outgoing packages. He had no time, but he needed to get all the information off of him, he couldn’t risk either the security goons or the police confiscating it.

He reached in, pulled out a handful of ramcard-sized packages. He dropped all but one with an address in Culver City that he’d remember. Opened the plastic as carefully as he could, though his rush left a jagged tear in the package. He slipped the incriminating ramcards inside—his copy of Manuel’s find, and the ramcard he’d just copied—and ran the opening through the sealer mounted in the desk. The plastic fused with a hiss, sealing the ramcards inside. The package didn’t look great, but if they weren’t looking for it, it might get through.

Nohar shoved the package back into the pile and ran for the other side of the room. Behind him he could hear the security goons slip through the fire doors. For some reason, they didn’t fire at him.

Nohar crashed through the door on the other side of the mailroom, and came face-to-face with a half-dozen policemen in heavy padded body armor. They carried long rods which they were pointing at several corners of the hallway, and one held the leash for a black unengineered dog who had been busy sniffing the base of the wall until Nohar had appeared in the hallway.