Lisa Smedman - The Lucifer desk

Carla took a moment to riffle through it, but found nothing of interest. The plastic container held only a soykaf mug, family holos, and other personal effects. She opened the drawers of the work station, checking them one by one. A light stylus rattled around in one drawer, and a few magnetic clips and a tiny triangle of torn hardcopy were stuck to the back of another. But otherwise they were empty.

The research lab’s data terminals and computers were state-of-the-art-Mitsuhama models, naturally. And all had been partially disassembled. Data chips had been yanked out, drives had been exposed, and diagnostic tools were scattered around. Some frantic salvage work had been done here after the lab’s computer system had crashed. Carla wondered if they’d been able to save any files.

Some technician had jury-rigged an independent lighting system for the lab-cables snaked from a compact fuel cell unit to the lighting fixtures overhead. Carla considered powering up the lights, but, instead picked up a flashlight that lay on the floor beside the power unit. Judging by the silence and stillness, there wasn’t anyone else in the lab. But just in case someone was working in a back room, she’d wait until she’d checked the place out before announcing her presence with a blaze of light.

Carla was in full investigative mode now. Gone were her earlier fears of the dangers Mitsuhama’s security systems might pose. She felt only a rising excitement at having finally achieved her goal. Now all that was left was to shoot as much trid as possible-and hopefully to find something that would make all of her efforts to get here worthwhile.

There was a door in each of the room’s side walls and one in the rear. Carla opened the door to her left and shone the flashlight inside. A washroom. She crossed to the other side of the room and tried the second door. It was a simple lunch room, with table, uncomfortable looking metal chairs, a soykaf brewer, microwave, and sink. A half-eaten bag lunch still sat on the table; a wrinkled apple and wilted-looking sandwich lay on a plate.

The door at the back of the room had a sophisticated-looking maglock but was open a crack, due to the electrical cable that snaked through it and into the hallway beyond. There were doors on either side of the hallway, all but one of them held open by the electrical cable that had been run throughout the lab. All of these rooms were dark and silent. The one door that was closed bore a warning in both black letters and Japanese characters: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. WARNING. ALARM WILL SOUND. Carla wondered if the alarm was still working. If not-and if this door did lead up to the surface-this would make a good escape route if somebody surprised her in the lab.

The most interesting door was the one at the far end of the hail. It looked as though it had been lined with a layer of fuzzy green carpet. Set into the center of the door, at eye Level, was a heavy glass window a couple of centimeters thick. The scrollwork etched into the glass reminded Carla of the wards on the windows of Aziz’s shop.

The “carpet” that covered the door was in fact a dense coating of moss. Carla scratched a little of it off with the tip of a manicured fingernail. The door underneath was made of what looked like tightly pressed wood fiber into which the moss was rooted. Carla puzzled over that a moment, but then realized she was looking at something that mages called a “living wall.” The moss formed a natural, organic barrier through which astral creatures could not pass.

She couldn’t see much through the window; the thick glass distorted the beam of her flashlight. But at least she was able to satisfy herself that nothing was moving inside the room. Even so, she felt a shiver of trepidation as she reached for the doorknob. Was the moss designed to keep something out-or to keep something in?

She swung the door open, propped it with one foot, and shone her flashlight into the room.

Paydirt! The room was completely empty-just bare plascrete walls, ceiling, and floor. But on that floor, painted in jet-black lines that glittered as if the paint had been mixed with tiny shards of crushed glass, was a circle containing a pentagram. Carla recognized it at once from the diagram on the memory chip. It was the hermetic circle used in conjuring the spirit.

She shot a ten-second take from the doorway, just to make sure she captured it on film. Then she turned and headed back for the room with the power source. This was too good a shot to pass up. She had to have some light. In a matter of minutes, she had powdered up the fuel cell. A steady hum filled the air, and the lights overhead flickered to life.

Hurrying back to the room with the hermetic circle on the floor, Carla did a wide-angle take of the entire room, then walked a slow, graceful circle, panning the painted floor from all angles. Then she dragged in a chair, climbed on top of it, and did an overhead shot.

“Perfect,” she whispered to herself, pleased with her find. “Now let’s see what other goodies the researchers left behind.”

The first door she opened led to a storeroom that was crammed with magical fetishes and thaumaturgical supplies in neatly labeled containers. These didn’t add anything to Carla’s knowledge of the story, but the clutter of unusual items would be a great visual. She could get Wayne to superimpose a shot of herself over them later, introducing what she’d found in the lab.

The second door led to a board room whose walls were lined with erasable white message boards. All had been wiped clean. But at the center of the room was a long table with inset datapads. These were nearly buried by piles of hardcopy. The entire surface of the table was covered with papers, many of them wrinkled as if they’d been crumpled up into a bail and then smoothed flat again. Waste baskets lay empty on the floor, as if their contents had been dumped onto the table. Much of the hardcopy looked like garbage; there were paper food wrappers and even a few rats’ nests of paper that had already gone through a document-shredding machine.

Carla rubbed her hands together, delighted with her find. It was obvious what had happened. Faced with the loss of their computerized files, the researchers had made a desperate search through their waste baskets, hoping to salvage some of the data on their research projects. They'd had half of yesterday and all of today to do the job, and by now had either found what they were looking for or had at last given up. But they hadn’t bothered to clean up after themselves. And there was just a chance that a dedicated snoop could find enough for a story in what they’d left behind.

Carla pulled up a chair, sat down, and started going through the hardcopy printout.

An hour and a half later, she gave up her search. She’d skimmed all of the intact papers and found nothing. The shredded documents could have been pieced together with a computer matching program, but that would require hours of scanning time and equipment she didn’t have. Her earlier optimism had faded. She realized now that Mitsuhama wouldn’t be sloppy. The corporation wouldn’t have stopped at merely shredding incriminating documents. Anything good would probably be ash by now.

Carla leaned back in the chair, stretching. She’d been through every scrap of paper in this room, but still had the nagging feeling she’d overlooked something. Getting up from the table, she walked back to the room that held the work stations. She paused, lost in thought, in front of the one where Farazad had sat. Compulsively, she tugged open the drawers once more, even though she already knew that they were empty. As she opened the last drawer, her eye fell on the magnetic clip that was stuck to the bottom of the metal drawer. It was a child’s coy, a Mighty Mites face that smiled when Carla touched it. Beside it was a torn piece of hardcopy.