The Lucifer desk

3

Pita sat in an alley in the shadow of a rotted-out chesterfield. She’d tried sleeping on it the night before, hut the springs had dug into her back. Now she leaned against its padded arn, ignoring the musty smell of moldy fabric. She took a bite of a Sweetnut Puff and washed it down with some steaming soykaf. The doughy pastry made her teeth ache, so she tossed it aside. Then she dug inside her pocket.

The alley was only faintly illuminated by the sodium light up the street. Tilting her hand to catch its dim yellow glow, Pita looked at the capsules that lay on her palm. Three pale white ovals that promised an end to the flip-flops that wrenched her stomach and the nightmares that plagued her sleep. They’d cost her plenty-an unpleasant favor for the off-duty DocWagon attendant she’d met at the local bar. She grimaced, still feeling his sloppy kisses on her shoulders and neck. It hadn’t been anything like what she’d had with Chen.

Blinking away the sudden sting in her eyes, Pita tossed the capsules into her mouth and took a gulp of her soykaf. It was still hot enough to burn her lips, but she drank it anyway, not wanting the capsules to get stuck in her throat. Then she waited.

She heard a rustling noise somewhere to her left and turned her head. A cat with a matted coat and torn ears emerged from a recessed doorway and began to nibble at the piece of Sweetnut Puff she’d tossed. It paused as it sensed her movement, then turned to stare at her. Its eyes were twin red moons, reflections of the streetlights at the end of the alley. Pita felt suddenly uneasy, as if the cat were looking into her soul. Somehow, the cat shared the hunger that burned inside her. Then the animal turned and scuttled back to cover, favoring one leg in an ambling limp.

A wave of warm fuzziness washed over Pita. The Mindease capsules were kicking in. Her hand drifted out in a gesture of goodwill to the cat, willing it to return and share the bounty she’d offered. Her head felt like a balloon attached to a string, floating high above her body. Something hot flowed over her other hand, trickled down her arm to her elbow. The soykaf. It must have been burning her skin. Pita laughed, and raised the cup to her lips to take a drink. The dark liquid sloshed out over her chin. Her wide grin made it impossible to shape her lips around the cup. so she dropped it and watched the kaf splash in slo-mo across the cement.

The bang of a metal door brought her head around. She frowned, peering deeper into the alley. The office buildings in this part of town had been closed for hours. Lights still burned in some of the upper stories, but only for the benefit of the cleaning crews. Were they coming out into the alley to empty the trash? Pita hunched down in the shadow of the chesterfield and giggled. This was just like playing Hide and Search, the virtual reality game she’d enjoyed so much as a kid. She even felt like a computer icon, all thin and transparent.

A man staggered up the three steps leading to street level. He emerged from the doorway clutching his shirtfront. gasping as if he couldn’t catch his breath. Even though the drug blurred her vision somewhat, Pita’s low-light sensitivity allowed her to pick out details. The man was sweating profusely; the under-arms of his expensive-looking suit jacket were heavily stained. His tie had been jerked loose and sweat plastered his dark hair to his head and trickled down his neck.

The man took one staggering step, two, then collapsed on the cement in front of Pita. He landed face-first with a solid smack. When he turned his head, she could see blood trickling from his nose. His mouth gaped open wide and his eyes rolled back in his head. A strange burning smell rose from him.

The Mindease stripped all of her fears from Pita’s conscious mind, burying them deep in the back of her brain. She sat forward, intrigued. Giggling, she reached out a finger and poked the man’s cheek. it was hotter than her soykaf had been.

A dim red light appeared in his mouth and nose. Pita knelt forward, lowering her head to the cool cement to peer closer. The smell of burning meat filled her nostrils. Then a steady rush of smoke began pouring out of the man’s mouth and nose. Sweat steamed off his body.

“Mega wiz,” she whispered, wondering if it was only some crazy effect of the Mindease. Then her street instincts took over. She flipped the man over and patted down his suit pockets. The way he was dressed, this guy had to be a corporate executive, his pockets full of goodies.

The first suit pocket held a smog filter and a melted Growliebar. Pita tossed them aside. The next held a folded hardcopy printout and an optical memory chip, which she palmed. It just might have a simsense game on it. The only other thing the guy had on him was a credstick. But even if it had a million nuyen on it, she wouldn’t be able to access a single credit of it. To do that, you had to give a thumbprint, retinal scan, or voice sample. And Pita didn’t have the technical knowhow to fake any of that stuff. She was just about to throw the credstick away when she spotted the magnetic keystrip on the side of the stick. Maybe, just maybe, it opened a locked door with something worth boosting on the other side. She slipped the credstick into her pocket.

The man was flopping now like someone hooked up to an electric current and his skin was nearly too hot to touch. And something else weird was happening. White light was now pouring out of his mouth and nostrils, the beams straight as lasers. His movements jerked the light around in jittering arcs. As it did, Pita glimpsed a flash of gold around the man’s neck. It was a gold chain, hung with a tiny pendant shaped like an angel with outstretched wings. She reached for it.

“Ouch!” One of the light beams brushed her arm. Even through the dulling effects of the Mindease, she felt it burn. A bright red line now creased the inside of her wrist. She jerked her arm back, afraid the burning light would catch it again, but the man had already stopped flopping and lay still, his bead to one side. The beams now focused on the wall beside her, slowly charring the cement. Still giggling. Pita experimentally held the hardcopy she’d pulled from his pocket in the path of the beam and watched it burst into flame.

Suddenly, the light beams slid away from the man’s head. They merged into a single my of light that ricocheted off one wall and did a zigzag across the alley, bouncing back and forth from one tinted window to the next. The night was filled with strobing light as the light alternately broke apart into a scattering of laser-thin beams, each a different color, then melded again into a solid white flash that left Pita blinking. It was weirdly beautiful, and at the same time terrifying in its intensity. At last seeming to find its way out of the alley, the light shot up into the darkened sky like a reversed shooting star. Then the sky lit up with a flash of sheet lightning. Pita waited for the thunderclap, but none came.

The smell of burned meat was overwhelming. Pita couldn’t help but gag when she saw that the skin around the man’s lips and nostrils had blackened and was beginning to flake away. She glanced down at his wrist and saw a DocWagon wristband. A winking light indicated that it had been activated.

Dreck! The meatwagon could be here any second!

The artificial calm of the drug dampened her fear. She wanted to curl up and sleep. But instead she willed herself to rise to her feet. The last thing she needed was to be questioned about a corpse-especially one whose pockets she’d just rifled.

It took Pita a moment to orient herself. The Mind-ease was making her fuzzy, making it hard to think. With one hand on the wall, she staggered out of the alley. Dimly, she registered a man across the street fiddling with a trideo camera. A tiny red light glowed above its lens. Pita smiled and waved at it, remembering how the cat’s eyes had glowed red with reflected light.

The man’s head jerked up. He flattened against the wall, looking wary, tucking the trideo camera in against his body. Then he relaxed as Pita staggered past him.

“Fragging druggie,” he whispered under his breath.

Lulled by the Mindease, Pita let his comment slide away like oil down a gutter.

“Hey, Carla! Got a minute?”

Masaki grabbed Carla’s arm, jerking her to a halt in mid-stride. Angrily, she turned on him.

“No, I don’t have a minute, Masaki,” she snapped. “In just thirty minutes I’m doing an interview at the Chrysler Pacific showroom. It’s going to take me twenty-three minutes to get there-longer, if traffic is bad. I’m already cuffing it fine.” Tucking the coil of cable she carried under one arm, she used her free hand to pry Masaki’s fingers away.

“Spare me thirty seconds,” Masaki insisted. “I want to show you a trideo clip I shot last night.”

“Jack off, Masaki. I don’t have time to give you any editing tips.”

“Twenty seconds! That’s all it will take!”

Carla turned and strode away down the ball. Masaki trotted after her, speaking as rapidly as he could and wheezing with every word.

“I went out last night to shoot an interview. I had a tip from a junior exec at Mitsuhama Computer Technologies. He wanted to tell me about some top-secret project the corporation’s research and development lab was working on. Some radical new tech that he thought the public should know about. He was going to spill his guts, give me an exclusive. He promised the story would be the biggest one of my career. He was going to give me both hardcopy and a datachip with the project specs on it.”

Carla snorted. “Yeah, right. So why didn’t your source take it to the majors?”

“He owed me a favor. Before signing on with Mitsuhama as a wage mage, he owned a thaumaturgical supply shop down on Madison Street. I did a puff piece on the store that brought in a lot of business.” Masaki sighed. “He was murdered last night before I could conduct the interview. Burned to death.”

“So?” A murder was hardly unusual, considering Mitsuhama’s rumored yakuza connections.

“He was burned from the inside out.”

Despite herself, Carla was intrigued. “How? Magic?”

“Maybe.” Masaki shrugged. “But if so, it’s something I haven’t seen before, in all my twenty-eight years as a snoop. And I’ve seen some pretty weird things through the lens of my portacam, believe me.”

“And the hardcopy and datachip he was going to give you?”

“The hardcopy was nothing but ashes by the time I got there. And the chip was gone.”

Carla pushed the door open and focused in on her headclock. According to the glowing red numbers that appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of her field of vision, she had just twenty-six minutes to make it to her interview. “If you really had the goods on a hush-hush Mitsuhama research project, you’d have a big story-not to mention a tiger by the tail. But it sounds like you’ve got nothing, now that your source is dead and your proof has vanished. So why are you pestering me?” She jogged across the parking lot to her Americar XL, slid in behind its padded leather steering wheel, and voice-activated the ignition. She revved the engine and watched the seconds scroll by over her right eye. She’d give Masaki his thirty seconds.

He leaned in through the car’s open door, talking rapidly. “I was mucking about with my portacam just before I went to meet my source. I didn’t realize it was on. But it’s a good thing it was. There was a witness to the murder. Remember that ork kid who wanted to talk to you two days ago about the Humanis Policlub? I think it was her. She even waved at the camera. And guess what was in her hand?”

“The datachip,” Carla whispered. She smiled, realizing that Masaki had just handed her, on a silver platter, the story that would get her a slot at NABS. She laughed to herself. Had Masaki been a little smarter, a little more cutthroat, he’d have asked her for the name and address of the kid without revealing the reason he wanted it. Oh, well-his loss and her gain.

Carla cut the engine of her car. “Forget the Chrysler story,” she told Masaki. “It’s nothing more than a trideo op for the corporate execs. One of the junior reporters can cover it. We’ve got a real story to follow.”