McNihil stood up, knees creaking, and went over to the room’s window. The smell of burning architecture filled the night air. Now he wished he’d given the panhandling gantry a donation; his hopes of coming in here, doing the job, and getting back out with no big excitement had evaporated. Just getting out, with his baggage and trophy intact, was going to be something of a problem. The mob had improvised torches from the fire crackling through the 747 carcass; with all of the unoccupied buildings already lit, the action had spread to the others. McNihil turned from the window and inhaled, trying to detect whether the End Zone Hotel had become part of the action.
He glanced down at the prostrate form on the redly shining carpet. The spider was halfway through its procedures; the steel refrigerant needles had plunged through the brain, their course determined by the device’s initial mapping scan. The drop in temperature and simultaneous oxygen delivery from the fibers radiating out from the probes would prevent any gross cellular decay. The second, more detailed scan was under way-McNihil could tell from the pattern of LED’s flashing across the spider’s mirrorlike carapace. As he watched, the small lights blinked out; the articulated knives lowered from the device’s underside and began carving into the soft, wet tissue beneath.
Wedges of cortex, neatly sliced as though by a butcher’s knife, were expelled from the gaping skull, landing on either side, trembling and seeping into the blood-soaked carpet. From a storage bin in the spider’s thorax, delicate claws plucked out tiny cylindrical memory shunts, each with a self-branching data capacity. The little claws, precise as a watchmaker’s screwdrivers, tapped the shunts into place, soft-welding them to the brain’s neurons and synapses.
Another few minutes crept past, as the spider device continued its surgery. The hotel room was a relatively sterile and quiet environment, compared to the battlefield situations for which the technology had originally been devised. The asp-heads had made their own adaptations to it; they weren’t interested in stabilizing soldiers with head wounds as much as getting trophies reduced down to a convenient traveling size.
The twin piles of discarded brain matter had grown to mounds a couple of inches high, pinkly weeping blood. The core of the subject’s memory and personality, all that had made the kid the punk he was, had been reduced to an oblate sphere the size of a tennis ball. Almost all of the brain stem had been cut away; there was no longer any need for the stilled and equally discardable organs to be regulated. The connection between what was left of the cortex, studded with the shunts and a few other implanted devices, and the tube-encased spine, was pristine and inviolate. McNihil reached into the skull with one hand and lifted the cortical essence; with his other, he took from the pack another gel-filled casing and enveloped the exposed tissue with it. He flipped the activation tab and, as the gel inflated to protect the carved-down brain, sealed the casing to the longer tube.
On the hotel room’s wet floor were the remains of the kid, the gross, unbreathing matter of torso and limbs, the face still sheathed in the first gel that McNihil had used on him, back in the theater. Turned to one side, the kid’s face had a blank, empty gaze, mouth open but silent, as though the tongue were somehow trying to taste blood through the clear barrier. Whatever low-wattage spark had existed behind the dulling eyes had been caught in a jar like some bright, fluttering insect. Dead meat wasn’t trophy material; asp-heads brought back to their clients something a little livelier.
McNihil returned his scattered tools to their slots in the pack, folded it, and stood up. He wiped the pack off against the wall, leaving a long red hieroglyph across an ancient pattern of faded roses. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. Turning and reaching for the trophy container he’d left propped against the front of the dresser-with the spherical casing sealed to the tube, the result looked like a fatter version of a drum major’s baton-McNihil saw smoke laced with sparks rising past the window. The temperature in the room had gone up a few degrees, the heat penetrating from the floors below; much hotter, and the blood soaked into the carpet would begin to boil.
He didn’t bother saying good-bye to the corpse. Some asp-heads, he knew, were in the habit of leaving behind some indication of a mess like this being the result of an agency hit-some went so far as to sign their names and ID numbers with the point of a scalpel on the dead flesh-but McNihil had never seen the need for that. Anybody who couldn’t tell what had gone on from the evidence, the hydro-gel mask and the laid-open spinal column, was beyond educating.
Smoke, thick and black, rolled down the hallway outside the door. McNihil had drenched his jacket sleeve in the room’s tiny efficiency sink; arm raised, he held the wet cloth against his face, his eyes stinging as he made his way down the corridor.
From the landing one flight down, he could see into the lobby of the End Zone Hotel. The mob with its primitive torches had shattered the street-level windows and ripped the door from its hinges. A shrill, clanging alarm sounded above the voices and battering clamor. An iron bar had been used to tear the grille from above the counter; the desk clerk had either fled or been trampled beneath the crowd’s feet. The tethered junkies in front of the lobby’s wall-mounted television hadn’t bothered to move; through the obscuring smoke, the slumped figures on the sofa and upholstered chairs could still be seen, watching the dead screen or languidly rolling their heavy-lidded gazes toward the riot with equal interest. One of the chairs had already caught fire, the edges of the yellow-stained upholstery crawling with a charred red line, gray smoke billowing around the comatose figure sprawled there. The black hookups to the metal drug device writhed snakelike in the heat.
“There!” A voice split the laden air. The vocal cords emitting the words sounded raw with shouting and smoke inhalation. “There he is!”
McNihil recognized the voice as his recently acquired nemesis, the bearded operator of the panhandling gantry. With the encased trophy tucked under one arm, McNihil peered across his other forearm and managed to spot the mob’s leader through the thickening haze. In the face blackened with soot, the red-rimmed eyes glared with a fierce delight; the burning buildings and the excited mob were all to the bearded figure’s liking.
Torches and improvised weapons aloft, the mob surged up the bottom of the open staircase. McNihil backed up a few steps as he dug into his coat pocket, past the folded tool kit, for the hand-filling tannhäuser. He brought it out; barely having to aim, he fired into the center of the welling crowd below.
The gantry operator had the sense not to lead the charge; McNihil saw the bearded figure being toppled backward by the crowd momentarily retreating under the impact of the broken-chested corpse at their head. His fall had sent the gantry operator sprawling across the lobby’s floor, shoulders bumping up against the base of the desk clerk’s counter, the impact enough to knock the torch from his hand. He was still conscious; a shake of the head, and the gantry operator managed to refocus his gaze toward the top of the stairs. His eyes widened at what he saw.
This time, McNihil aimed. Above the heads of the crowd, toward one specific target-not from any hopes of improving the present situation, but just from the personal conviction that people shouldn’t be given extra chances to make trouble. He pulled the trigger and saw, through the smoke filling the lobby, a bright red flower substitute itself for the bearded face. The gantry operator’s body rolled shuddering onto its side.
Won’t hold ’em, figured McNihil. He’d been in crowd situations before; he knew that it would only be a few seconds before whatever panic and good sense that the tannhäuser’s shot had instilled would be overcome by the mob’s bloodlust. Seeing two of their number blown away was like gasoline thrown on the already-existing flames. Tucking the elongated trophy container tighter under his arm, McNihil turned and sprinted down the corridor, away from the stairs and the shouting below.