K Jeter - Noir

The area around the train’s wreckage grew brighter, as though McNihil’s unvoiced notion had been the cue for a theatrical dawn. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright, blue-white glare of generator-driven worklights flickering on, turning the tracks and displaced machinery into color-drained ghosts of themselves. Big shadows wavered into the darkness of the surrounding rubbish dunes; McNihil could see other figures, presumably fully alive, stationing themselves along the shattered metal. The sparks of an arc-welding torch hissed in the farther distance, accompanied by the deeper groans of heavy-equipment jacks being levered into place.

He turned and looked back up at the suspended figure. “I suppose it’s your funeral,” said McNihil. “If the Rail Amalgam comes back and wants its property returned, or if Ouroboros shows up and kicks your ass…” He shrugged. “Not my problem.”

“Funerals?” Something amused Harrisch, enough for a quick laugh. “You know, I’m not worried about them, either. There’s a psychological advantage to taking a posture like this.” He rocked his head back against the cross on which he was bound. “You figure, whatever’s the worst that can happen to you-three days later, they roll away the stone and you’re as good as new.”

“As long as you’re feeling that way…” McNihil tilted his head toward the unconscious girl on the ground. He hadn’t forgotten, even during the whole conversation with Harrisch. “I’m a little concerned about her.”

“Really?” The other man appeared both wondering and somehow pleased. “I’m surprised. Doesn’t seem to be your style.”

“I’m trying to cultivate a sympathetic attitude these days.”

“Is it working?”

“Not in your case,” said McNihil.

Another muted groan, as though from the midst of troubled sleep, sounded from the body laid out on the ground. McNihil nodded toward the girl. “How about doing something for her?”

“I’m touched by your concern. That speaks of some innate kindness in you that I wouldn’t have otherwise suspected.” Harrisch called over his shoulder to the DZ flunky at the controls of the crane. “Get some medical attention for this unfortunate person. Find out if she’s going to live or die, at least.” He glanced again toward McNihil. “There’s nothing you or I can do for her. Not right now. Why don’t we get out of the way? There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you.” With a nod of his head, Harrisch signaled to the crane’s operator, who kept his bored expression as he put the equipment into gear.

McNihil followed alongside the crane, its caterpillar treads moving parallel to the railroad tracks and the wreckage of the train. “I don’t,” he said, “feel much like talking now.”

“Really?” The other’s smile glistened in the worklights’ bright radiation. “But there’s so much we need to talk about.”

McNihil rubbed his brow with the butt of one palm, smearing the blood from the minor wound. The sting nudged him back toward full consciousness; for a moment, from the effort of walking, he’d felt somewhat woozy. It’s not her , the thought came to him, that’s having the bad dreams. It’s me . The train, turned over on its side, emitting ghostlike billows of smoke and the hisses of small creatures writhing in damnation, rolled past the corner of his vision as though it were the painted backdrop for some elaborate hallucination. The glare from the suspended worklights and the DynaZauber crews’ welding torches bounced around inside McNihil’s eyes like raw electricity converted to some kind of straight optical feed.

“Don’t worry about the girl.” As they continued alongside the steaming wreckage, Harrisch had the circled cross brought down closer to McNihil, the better to impart confidences. “I’ve got an emergency medical crew here on the scene. My people will do whatever’s possible for her. And if there isn’t anything that can be done…” He shrugged. “Then you needn’t have wasted your time worrying.”

“Thanks.” The exec’s presence repelled McNihil like a magnetic pole constructed of razor blazes. “I appreciate that.”

The smile eased into place again. “All part of the job.”

“Maybe you should look for another job.”

“Ah.” With mock ruefulness, Harrisch gave a slow shake of the head. “But I think I’m getting pretty good at this. And with the Rail Amalgam out of commission, who else is going to take care of the trains?”

McNihil glanced past the toppled cars. “You call this ‘taking care’?” It’d been obvious to him, as soon as the other man had popped up in front of him like some kind of Kristallnacht jack-in-the-box, that Harrisch had been responsible for the derailing explosions. “No wonder I’m concerned about the girl.”

“All minor and easily fixed. Readily assimilated into the overall plan.” The crane moved past McNihil and started up one of the nearby rubbish dunes. “Come up here where you can get a better view.”

As he followed the dangling exec out of the illuminated zone, McNihil’s footsteps ground into shards of ancient circuit boards and the softer detritus of empty gum wrappers. At the hill’s crest, he stopped and turned around, looking where the other’s nod directed his attention.

“You see?” Harrisch’s gaze swept across the vista. “All rubber-or might as well be.” A smirk of self-satisfaction moved over Harrisch’s leanly angled face. “We use the same SCARF weapons technology that the Noh -flies do, but in a noncatastrophic way. If you rein it in, it can be really quite benign.”

He saw what Harrisch meant. From here, McNihil could see that the explosions hadn’t ripped apart the railroad tracks. The rails themselves, where they weren’t obscured by the toppled engine and cars, seemed like a demonstration of wave activity frozen at one moment in time. Ripples in the lines of rusted iron, the largest extending higher than any of the surrounding work crews, had turned the tracks into ribbons of vertical S-curves, tapering down into progressively smaller hillocks and bumps. Beyond the last car, the tracks smoothed back down into level, undisrupted parallel lines.

“Very clever.” McNihil didn’t care much, what exact techniques might have been used. He supposed that DynaZauber had found some way of ramping down the SCARF transmutation effects, the narrow-beamed quasi-alchemy that turned aircraft parts into metallic forms too soft to function. That plus enough explosive charges to deform the resulting elasticity, and they could have all the remediable train crashes they wanted. “But you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of devising these methods, if you weren’t going to use them on a regular basis.”

“Regular enough,” conceded Harrisch. “It’s not just an issue of managing the corporation; you have to manage the customers as well. Which in our case is the world. Or at least the Gloss-not that there’s any other part of the world that matters. What some people at DynaZauber believe, is that if it isn’t L.A., it ain’t shit. That language is a little more colorful than what I’d use. But the agreed-upon principle is the same: the Pacific is the new Mediterranean. The omphalos, the middle of the earth. It has been for a long time. The great middle ocean, the navel, the solar plexus. Who cares what goes on in Kansas or Ulan Bator? I mean, if there is a Kansas or an Ulan Bator any longer.”

“There’d have to be.” McNihil watched the crews bashing away at the deformed rails. Under the worklights’ glare, the lengths of iron reddened as the welding torches and SCARF invectors continued their assault. “All that flesh on the streets comes from somewhere.”