Fearful Symmetries

The first sensation that Nohar was aware of was agonizing pain in his left arm. His awareness filled out, cataloging each pain as it came to him. His neck, the base of his tail, every joint in his legs, even the muscles in his jaw ached.

Water splashed across his face. He sneezed and opened his eyes. He expected to see the wreckage of the Pegasus around him. The last thing he remembered was the airbag deploying.

He didn’t see the Pegasus when he opened his eyes. His upper body was taped to a heavy chair. He couldn’t see much, because a bright light was focused on his eyes. What he could see of the room was a concrete floor, and he could smell the must and damp, as though they were in a basement. There were two people here. He could smell their confidence. The fear and tension he smelled was his own.

“Time to finish.” The voice had a faint accent. It took a while before Nohar recognized it as Afrikaans. The speaker moved near Nohar, close enough for Nohar to make out his face past the light. He was a light-skinned black man, with a large scar on his right cheek.

The man reached out and grabbed his face, clenching Nohar’s jaw shut. Nohar was too weak to resist, and his neck hurt too much for him to turn away. Krisoijn’s muscles stood out like steel cables on his arm.

“You’ll only speak now to answer my questions.” Krisoijn leaned in. “You fancy yourself a hunter—but man is still the most dangerous predator on this planet. Your ancestors only survived because man permitted them to live. Your kind exists now only because man permits them to live. You only live now because I permit you to live. Do we understand each other?” He withdrew his hand.

Nohar wanted to rage at the man, but he knew that there was little point in antagonizing him. He consoled himself with the thought that Gilbertez was talking to some reporters even as Krisoijn was talking to him.

“Too bad about Ortega, but we all have to make sacrifices when the species is at stake.” With every word Gilbertez spoke, Nohar felt his gut sink. Gilbertez held up a ramcard that shimmered like a rainbow in the spotlight. “You saved us a lot of trouble tracking this down. The session was logged, so we knew you copied the databases. They’d been tearing the Pasadena building apart looking for where you stashed it.” Gilbertez placed the card on a cart on top of its twin.

They both lay next to a makeshift electronic device covered with silver-gray duct tape. It took Nohar a moment to realize that it was Elijah’s voicebox. Gilbertez noticed Nohar looking. “Too bad we had to deal with them like that, but you had to let slip about Tangier, didn’t you? That’s one of the keys to the whole project, you know, engineer a virus that twigs on just the few proteins that are common to all moreaus, on the genes you inherited from the first few dogs. Had to start with them. If that tidbit got out, it could unravel everything. The rumors about the Drips are bad enough.”

Krisoijn reached out and pulled Nohar’s head to face him. “I am leaving you in Gilbertez’s capable hands. I know you’re thinking that you’re strong enough to stay quiet—or maybe you’re hoping that you’ll die before you tell us anything more. I know that’s what you’ll be hoping for. It’s a vain hope.”

“Surprised? I find that gratifying.” Gilbertez walked over to another cart and rolled it near Nohar’s chair. Nohar saw the spotlight glint off the metal of surgical knives and a set of needles. “It’s nice that we’re not going to be pressed for time here, like we were with Royd. You’ve been a pain in the ass, and I’m going to enjoy this.”

“That’s what you first suspected, wasn’t it? I had to bring all my talents to bear to get you over that first impression. That was work. Trying to sympathize with a moreau, that was effort. My first hope was to talk out of you what we wanted. You were a little too cagey, so we absconded with you. When you led us to a dead end, Ortega pulled his trump. Between us we were supposed to overpower him, and do it a bit too late. The dogs were a bit of a wildcard that almost screwed everything up.”

“Yes, that was the idea. But that’s sort of moot now.” Gilbertez picked up an air hypo and checked the charge in it. “You see, we managed to piece it together, once we knew that we didn’t have the real Necron Avenger. You told us our quarry was still at large, and with Manuel and the data. We just had to press on Oswald Samson a little to get him to talk about his adopted son—”

“Don’t. No one can hold up under a professional interrogation.” Gilbertez turned to face Nohar, his expression telling him that he was enjoying the process of revelation. “We got enough from him before he died to get a picture of The Necron Avenger. From there it was just a short step to double-check the Government net and find old INS sites that’ve seen recent net activity. Krisoijn’s on his way to clean that up now.”

Gilbertez pushed up Nohar’s right sleeve and pressed the hypo into the exposed part of his uninjured arm. Nohar started to struggle. It seemed useless. The chair was steel and anchored to the concrete floor. He was held down to the chair by straps across his chest and upper arms. His forearms were strapped to the arms of the chair. Even his thighs were held down by a belt strapping him down to the seat. Only his lower legs had any freedom of movement.

Gilbertez smiled. “I’ve just injected you with a synthetic drug. It doesn’t even have a street name yet. It’s a cousin to flush, it has hallucinogenic and stimulant qualities. The important thing for you is to realize that its main effect is to sharpen perceptions.”

Nohar felt as if the world were suddenly trying to tear open his brain. Gilbertez’s voice was painfully loud. The spotlight seared his eyes, even through closed lids. Worst was the pain in his arm, magnified a hundredfold.

“ ‘Why’ what, my friend? Why the project? Or why are you strapped to that chair?” Nohar didn’t answer. His jaw was clenched tight enough for his own fangs to bite into his gums. That pain, even amplified, was nothing compared to the feeling as Gilbertez unstrapped his wounded arm. “The project,” Gilbertez continued, “is the ultimate solution to a problem the government saw during the last riots here. The riots, and the nonhuman population, were becoming a threat to national security. This antiterrorist unit here—it never even had a proper name—was formed to meet that threat, and it recruited men who saw the threat. The operation grew to a point that, when our government arbitrarily decided to ignore the threat, we didn’t abandon the fight. The threat is still here, in this country, and there is only one way to eliminate it.”

Gilbertez bent his arm upward and Nohar roared. The sound tore at him as if it were ripping the skin out of his throat. “I’m afraid it’s broken. That’ll do for a start.” Gilbertez held Nohar’s arm, and Nohar could feel the adrenaline surge of combat. He could feel the chemical rush as it flowed through his system. His nerves screamed.

“As to why you’re strapped here—You were very cagey with your information. Even though we have that ramcard you copied, the ramcard stolen from Compton, and the location of Manuel Limón, we can’t be sure what else you might be hiding. So I’m going to go over it with you a few times.” Gilbertez turned Nohar’s wrist, and the broken bones in the forearm grated against each other.

Nohar roared again. The conscious part of his mind wanted to start talking, give Gilbertez what he wanted to gain some respite from the pain. But the adrenaline was in control now. The thinking part of his brain was already pushed aside by the Beast created by the gene-techs.

His good arm balled his hand into a fist, and the tension in his own muscles felt as if it could break the bones in that arm. He opened his eyes, and the world stood out in a relief so sharp that the edges of every object were painful to see. He could smell Gilbertez, smell the fleeting traces of Krisoijn and the three other men who must have strapped him here. He could hear Gilbertez’s heartbeat, and the breathing of the guard outside the door. He could feel the grain on the leather strap on his wrist, and he could feel the slight change in tension as the bolts holding the arm in place began giving way.

Gilbertez was still talking, but the part of Nohar’s brain that listened was shut off, drowned in the tide of chemicals. The Beast had always been there, but Gilbertez’s injection actually seemed to strengthen it. . . .

Gilbertez moved Nohar’s arm again. Pain shot through Nohar. He arched his back and roared again. His arm strained against the chair and the room echoed with shearing metal. Nohar’s right arm came free with a ten-kilo piece of the chair strapped to his wrist. The belt holding down his chest and forearms was anchored to that part of the chair, and it fell away as he raised his arm.

Nohar’s fist, with ten kilos of extra weight attached to it, slammed into the side of Gilbertez’s head. Gilbertez’s head snapped back, and he flew out of the spotlight. Nohar could hear him thud limply against one of the concrete walls.

He was still strapped to the chair, but now half the chair was dangling off his right arm. His left arm didn’t want to move, but he brought the buckle on his right wrist in reach of his hand so he could peel it off.

He’d just gotten it when he heard the door begin to open. He grabbed the arm of the chair with his newly freed right hand. When the guard stepped into the room, Nohar threw the jagged wreckage of the chair at about where the man’s head should be. Nohar still couldn’t see past the spotlight, but he heard the sound of a sickeningly soft impact, and of a body striking the floor.

He tore away the remaining restraints on his legs and sprang out of the chair, clutching his broken arm to his chest. Once he stood, he punched the spotlight, Glass fell into the suddenly darkened room and Nohar could smell burned fur and blood. He paid little mind; adrenaline and Gilbertez’s drug still raced through his blood, coating everything with a razored immediacy.

The room shot into monochrome focus when the light died. Gilbertez was crumpled on the ground, his neck bent at better than a forty-five-degree angle. He didn’t breathe. Nohar marked him as dead the moment he saw him.