Forests of the Night

CHAPTER 26

The storm that had been threatening all night finally came as Nohar crossed Mayfield. It was a sudden deluge that washed some of the blood off of him. His makeshift cane was thumping an erratic counterpoint to the click of his claws. It was slow progress, but it was nearly three in the morning and there wasn't any traffic. The street was dead.

He made it across. To his right was the prison hiding behind its electrified chain link. Its yard was bathed in arc lights.

To his left was a line of shrubs and trees that almost hid an old, low slung, office complex from the street. Ahead of him, between the overgrown shrubs and the five-meter-tall electric chain link, was a dirty-gravel driveway. It looked like a landscaping afterthought.

He began worrying about the pink guards at the prison. They weren't involved in this, but it wouldn't be good if they noticed a morey with a shotgun skulking just outside their grounds.

He limped a dozen meters down the gravel path, all the while cursing his knee and wishing he could move faster. He made it to a point where the hedges got sickly. He turned away from the prison and pushed through a small gap between the bushes. He immediately tripped over a rusted "No Trespassing" sign. He managed to land on his left side, but the fall still hurt his knee.

He was sprawled on a shaggy, uncut lawn, looking across at a parking lot of

broken asphalt. The only

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light came from the arcs of the prison behind him. Half the NuFood complex was wrapped in glaring blue light, the other half in the matte-black shadows of the surrounding trees.

Two remote vans were parked in the lot, the only vehicles there. There were two buildings in NuFood's complex, both old two-story studies in metal, glass, and dark tile. The tiles had been falling off hi clumps, helped by ill-looking ivy. The glass was sealed shut from the inside. A few panes were cracked and broken—real glass—allowing Nohar a good look at the white plastic that covered the windows from the inside.

Between the two buildings were an overgrown lawn and a crumbling driveway. A fountain was choked by an advancing rosebush—and even in the rain, he could smell the stagnant water filling it.

These guys weren't big on maintenance.

Nohar pushed himself up and got unsteadily to his feet. The makeshift cane sank about half a meter into the sod when he put his weight on it. He squished to the asphalt parking lot.

The remotes were parked next to each other. Nohar hobbled between them. He decided if the guards back at the prison started hearing gunfire, the worst thing they could do was call the cops.

He eased himself down on the ground and looked under the chassis of one of the vans. The inductor housing was nestled in front of the rear axle. Nohar leveled the shotgun at it, the barrel a few centimeters from the housing. He turned his face away, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

The blast popped the pressurized housing, and the air was filled with the smell of freon, ozone, and the dust from a shattered ceramic superconductor. There was a wave of heat as the housing sparked and began to melt.

He did the same to the other one.

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There went their transport. If they were still here, they'd stay here.

The guards back at the prison had heard the gunfire. Sirens began sounding behind him.

Nohar hauled himself upright and limped up the circular driveway to the first NuFood building. The door was glass and black enamel. Gold leaf on the glass announced this was indeed NuFood. Its slick modern logo was flaking off. A chain was padlocked around the handle, the one thing that looked new and well maintained.

Locks on glass doors made about as much sense as an armored door in a wooden door frame.

Nohar hunched up against the wall for support and raised the curtain rod. He put the end of the rod through the logo, shattering the glass—real glass again. There was another plastic sheet sealing the window. It tore away from the frame, loosing the bile-ammonia smell Nohar associated with Smith.

Bingo.

There was a crash bar on the inside of the door, halfway up. The plastic caught and bent over it. Nohar had to lean the curtain rod up next to the doorjamb so he had a hand free to knock the plastic out of the way. In response to Nohar's break-in, an alarm inside the building did an anemic imitation of the sirens at the prison.

Because of his leg, Nohar put down the shotgun and scrambled under the crash bar on both hands and his good leg. He sliced open his right palm on a stray piece of glass.

Once he pulled the cane and the gun after him, he pushed himself up to a standing position.

Inside, the place was much better maintained—and strange. He could smell their odor, as well as the odors of chemicals—there was a strong hint of sulfur and sulfur dioxide—and disinfectant that had a fake pine odor. The hall he was in was brightly lit with sodium lamps. They cast an unnatural yellow glow over the

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hallway. There were filters on the lamps that seemed to increase the effect. The floor he was hobbling along had been stripped to the concrete. It had been polished and felt slightly moist under his feet. Not water. It was damp with something more viscous that made it hard to keep his footing.

The first door to his right was open. He looked in and saw a storage area. The room must have filled half the building, both floors. It was stacked with white plastic delivery crates. It was lit with normal fluores-cents, and to the rear was a rolling metal door that must open onto a truck-loading bay. Nohar could smell the flush—even through the packaging, there was so much of it—a rotten, artificial fruit smell, like spoiled cherries.

Nohar continued to limp down the hallway. The doors he passed on his left were new, solid, air lock doors. He looked through the round porthole windows, and saw clean rooms containing glass laboratory equipment filled with bubbling fluids. Here was the damn flush lab the DBA wanted. Nice sterile environment. The stuff must be real pure.

He kept walking, following the ammonia smell. They were here. He could feel it. He kept going down the corridor. It took a right turn near the far wall. More labs, older, not behind air lock doors. Nohar noticed familiar items that matched the genetics lab at Metro General. Especially the hulking form of the chemical analyzer. This had to be part of the food production, R&D anyway. Any real volume processing must happen in the other building.

Nohar rounded the corner and faced a stairwell, up and down. Same slick polished concrete. The sulfur and the ammonia were worse going down. That's where he went.

The steps went slowly, one at a time. Each step felt like he was going to slip and break his neck. As he descended, the atmosphere became thicker, denser.

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was beginning to feel the heat—the temperature down here must be around 35 or 40. The atmosphere was heavy with moisture that clung to his fur.

The heat and the heavy atmosphere were making his head throb.

He could feel his pulse in his temple.

Down, he was in the basement. Here, there was no pretense at normal construction. The hall was concrete that had been polished to a marblelike sheen. All the right angles had been filled in and polished smooth, giving an ovoid cross section. The walls were weeping moisture that had the viscosity of silicone lubricant.

There were pipes and other basement equipment, but all had been molded into the walls. Nohar looked up and saw a length of white PVC pipe just above his head. Concrete had been molded around the ends where it came in through the wall so the wall's lines melded smoothly with the length of pipe. It looked like some organic growth. Nohar looked at one wall, and from the discoloration he could make out where the lines of the old cinder block wall used to be. There was only one way to go. He followed the hall. He hobbled down and left the last of the yellow sodium lights, and entered the world of green-tinted red. The ammonia smell was very close now.

He rounded a very gradual turn in the hall. It felt like he was hobbling through a wormhole in the bowels of the earth. He completed the turn, and saw a perfectly round door. Out the door was pouring an evil bluish-green light and that bile-ammonia smell.

Nohar stumbled through the opening and covered the room with a shotgun held, clumsily, in his left hand. He didn't realize the floor was a half-meter lower man the floor in the hall until it was too late. His good foot slipped away.

He tried to catch himself with the cane in his right hand, but the pipe was slick with blood from his palm and slid off into the room, beyond his reach.

He slid down a steep concrete curve sitting on his bad leg. He heard a crack.

A shiver of agony

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told him he was not going to walk again for a long time.

He did manage to keep a grip on the shotgun.

Through his pain-blurred vision, he realized that if there had been any doubt Smith wasn't the product of some pink engineer, one look at this room put all doubts to rest. The room was a squashed sphere nearly ten meters in diameter. Eight, evenly spaced, round holes were in the wall, doors like the one he had come through. In the center of the room was a two-meter-tall cone, molded of concrete, shooting up a jet of blue-green flame. From it came most of the oppressive heat in the room, and the smell of burning methane.

The wall had niches carved into it. Hundreds of them, all the same size, a meter long by half a meter high. They were concave, oval pits that angled down into the wall slightly. From nearly half of them came the glitter of MLI's wealth, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of stones—

And, of course, there were Smith's kinsmen. The creatures that ran Midwest Lapidary. Four, in all, were facing him. They were wearing pink clothing, like Smith had. They all had the same blubbery white hu-manoid form that Smith wore.

"That's why," Nohar managed through gritted teeth. "The hit in Lakeview. Couldn't tell who he was over the comm ... "

One of them addressed him in Smith's blubbery voice. "We do not do such things lightly. We must be certain of the right when we do such irrevocable acts. A waste you must be here—"

The pain in his leg was making him dizzy. He was beginning to feel cold, clammy. In this heat, he must be going into shock. "Right? "It was a yell of pain as much as an accusation. "I talked to Smith." Nohar caught his breath. "You were breaking your own rules when you cut him out of the loop." Nohar wished he had one of Manny's air-hypos.

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"He is a traitor. He knows not that the mission is paramount. He clings to propriety as if we are in—" A word in the alien's language. "And not in this violent sewer."

Another one continued. "We do not allow ourselves to perform physical violence. The traitor does not understand our circumstance is dire and requires an exception,"

Nohar was beginning to have trouble feeling his leg. The dizziness was getting worse. "End justifies the means?"

A third one, near the cone, spoke. "It is a waste. The tiger understands."

The first one—perhaps the leader, but Nohar was having trouble keeping track of these similar creatures—continued. "The traitor, perhaps, understands or suspects our plans when he hires you. It is intended you lead the new unrest—" The one by the cone, "—like your father leads the convenient rebellion eleven years ago. The traitor anticipates us and hires you against us—"

"The traitor," one of them went on, "knows what kind of resonance there is when he hires you—"

"—Datia is a useful charismatic figure to keep unrest going, Datia's son is useful as well. A waste the traitor talks to you before us—"

The one by the cone bent—no, oozed—over to turn a valve that was recessed in a concave depression near its base. The flame sputtered out. "It doesn't matter. We go, take our supplies and begin elsewhere. We have done well to prepare for the time the plan is uncovered-"

Nohar shook his head too quickly. He felt faint.

He couldn't tell them apart. They all looked like Smith, all smelled like Smith, talked like Smith. "You guys blew it—"

"Who are you to judge? We achieve our end—"

"It was the vote to scuttle the NASA deep-probe

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project, wasn't it? It will hit the Senate after the election and you just couldn't wait ... "

All the things stopped moving. They didn't say anything, didn't move. Nohar slowly raised the shotgun.

"Enough of your pet congressmen were supposed to win Senate seats to tip the scales on the vote. Then the shit hits the fan and MLI falls apart. You designed the whole thing to be uncovered eventually. The phony identities are just too damn phony. You want the scandal and the indictments that would follow to throw the Congress into chaos—'*

Nohar paused to catch his breath. He couldn't feel his leg at all anymore.

They were regrouping to face him. He still had the shotgun covering them, and he hoped desperately it would do some good. "The Fed was about to follow up all your false trails. The DEA was about to find its flush manufacturing center. But you blew it. Forensics was not supposed to get to Smith's body that fast. There wasn't supposed to be a body. You tried to have Hassan erase that mistake. It was too late. I know, and now, the Fed knows."

That got them. They were looking at each other. One spoke, "Then we must end it—"

"End us—"

One of them headed back for the cone while another addressed Nohar. "We complete our original mission. We end ourselves. Nothing is left but speculation and pieces of paper. Without physical evidence, no probes are sent. Your violent races will not contaminate our star systems. We need those new worlds, you will not take them away—"

Nohar was leveling the shotgun at the one that was at the cone. "No, you're not getting off that easy. No suicides. And you call us violent. How many people have you managed to kill because of those probes? A tac-nuke on the moon would have done the same thing, and not killed anyone—"

"Law requires we act indirectly in covert activity."

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Nohar gagged on that one. "Law? You screwed-up bastards—no wonder the only one of you with a shred of morality ended up a 'traitor.' "

It kept moving. They were going to flood the room with methane. Nohar pumped the shotgun and shot the creature. Bile and ammonia filled the air, and the creature was knocked back to the far wall. A chunk of the creature's translucent flesh splattered against the wall. But it didn't bleed, didn't even leak. The shot had passed right through it.

It stood up, none the worse for wear.

"Unnecessary display, such things do not hurt our kind. Useless since we end now anyway."

The thing went back to the valve and started turning. "You, and others, may know we originate from a different biology. But without us to examine, your ethnocentric culture never accepts the idea of an extraterrestrial culture." Nohar lowered the shotgun.

What were they going to do, asphyxiate or ignite? Didn't matter, he was dead either way—his leg wouldn't let him move.