K Jeter - Noir

McNihil rolled up his tools and picked up the key. “Thanks,” he said as he dragged the kid away from the counter.

The elevator, an antique cage, was out of commission; the kid’s head bounced against each stair as McNihil hauled him two floors up.

He slammed the hotel room’s door shut and turned the lock; leaving the kid squirming in the middle of the floor, McNihil pulled up the dirt-smeared window and looked out. The bonfire permeating the skeletal 747 had grown larger, the flames leaping as high as the surrounding rooftops. The crowd had grown larger as well, having gone well beyond the critical-mass point; McNihil could see the eddies and ripples running through the closely pressed bodies. At the edges of the open space, the street levels of the empty buildings had been broken into, with flames and smoke pouring out of the shattered windows and plywood barriers.

Get to work , McNihil told himself. Fortunately, this part always went fast. Other asp-heads had always admired his speed with the knives.

McNihil knelt down with his tool pack. He rolled the kid facedown, turning the gel-encased head to one side so the exposed nostrils could still draw in some breath; the kid’s lungs weren’t superfluous yet. An agonized scream managed to pierce the clear mask, coming out as a muffled, distant wail, as McNihil jabbed the first sharp-edged tool into the vertebrae between the kid’s shoulder blades. Using anesthetics had never been part of an asp-head’s job description; he had a few bee-sting syringes and quick-dispersion epidermals in the pack, and had used them on occasion, but there was no present need. The shouts and excited cries coming through the window drowned out whatever noises the kid would make.

Blood had started soaking into the T-shirt, as though the white fabric had been wounded rather than cut. McNihil grabbed the edges on either side of the knife and tore the shirt to either side, exposing the kid’s skinny torso. There was no need to look as he reached over to the pack for more of the glittering tools; years of practice in the field had put his hands on autopilot.

From kneeling, he raised himself onto his haunches, to keep the pooling blood from getting on his trousers. The wet red seeped through the worn carpet and beneath the soles of McNihil’s shoes. He balanced himself with one hand against the kid’s bare shoulder, leaning over the torso and guiding the tools as they worked. At one time, when he’d first started out as an asp-head, McNihil had dispensed with any of the autonomic surgical tools, preferring to do everything manually-he’d wanted to get the feel of cracking bone and neatly shearing flesh right into his hands. But, just as the older asp-heads had warned him, he’d started getting twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome in his wrists, and he’d gone to using the clever little machines.

At the back of the kid’s neck, the retractor device had expanded itself crabwise, flaring the gristle and muscle sheathing the spinal column. The miniature plow of the auto-incision knife had worked its way down toward the kid’s waist, steered by a few correcting taps of McNihil’s fingers and the machine’s internal terrain-recognition program. Following behind came the mantislike bone saw, stopping in position over each vertebra and mapping the projected depth and angle of its blade with quick ultrasound pulses. The saw needed a confirm signal before each cut; McNihil checked the grid on a handheld monitor before thumbing the proceed button; a fine spray of blood and bone dust drifted up as the tiny whirling blade descended.

As the devices inched their way farther apart, from nape to buttock, they set up a focused irradiation field, keeping the incision free of contamination. From micropore nozzles in the metal, a yellowish haze of nitromersol spread over the violated flesh, the mercuric compound acting as a backup disinfectant. Even if there hadn’t been a personal element in the favor McNihil was doing, asp-head professionalism would have ensured a neat, antiseptic job.

He glanced up at the room’s open window. Flames higher, shouts louder; glass shattered and rained across the mob-filled streets-McNihil could see, in his mind’s eye, the razorlike fragments nicking the oblivious, upturned faces. The people below would be lapping their own blood as it trickled into the corners of their mouths. Which would, he knew, only make them thirstier for someone else’s. His, mainly.

“Let’s wrap it up.” McNihil spoke aloud, as though the surgical devices were not only clever but sentient. He’d had this set a long time; they were almost to the status of pets, cared for and maintained. As if it could sense the controlled urgency in his voice, the tractor knife gave a last surge, opening up the kid’s back to the base of the spine. The kid had lost all consciousness, as McNihil had expected; there was a limit to what fear could keep awake, before pain temporarily annihilated it. For McNihil, that was just as well; the last segments of the procedure were tricky and delicate enough that he didn’t need the body quivering and jerking around.

He’d already brought out and inserted another pair of retractors like the first, up by the kid’s head. The second one, positioned halfway down the back, pushed its curved claws outward, exposing not just the spine but the viscera clustered below the ribs. Those were of no importance now; the kid had no further use for them. McNihil picked up the auto-incision knife and set it aside, so the last retractor could settle into place and force the bleeding flesh apart.

In a few more seconds, the bone saw had finished its work; McNihil removed it as well. The spider-clawed feet penetrated the blood-soaked carpet as the bright opticals and other sensors faded to empty black.

From the pack of tools, McNihil’s quick hand extracted an inert polymer ring. One pull telescoped it into a flexible tube, open at one end, a tapered bulletlike seal at the other, the whole thing longer than the kid’s split torso. The retractors and saw had exposed the protective meninges encasing the spinal cord, the bundled nerves running through the core of the kid’s torso. The machines went to work again, slicing through the dura mater, then the tangled arachnoid layer beneath. Using their finest, tweezerlike implements, the retractors peeled back the fragile pia mater, revealing raw and naked nerve tissue. With one of the smaller, nonautomated knives, McNihil made a series of cuts, freeing the spine from its elongated nest. He lifted and compressed the blood-specked sacral plexus and slipped it into the open end of the polymer tube. Cutting with one hand and drawing the ring opening up with the other, in less than a minute he had the tender spinal material encased in the tube. The ring rested against the back of the kid’s neck; McNihil pulled the tab inside, releasing another hydro-gel inside the tube. This one had a mesh structure woven into the substance; as it expanded and protectively encased the spine, oxygenated microfilaments formed a temporary life-support for the human tissue. The tube’s outside shell turned stiffer and harder, responding to the gel’s precisely calibrated lowering of temperature. McNihil knew he had a few hours, just time enough to get the trophy to where it needed to be.

The cerebral matter was the last that had to be taken care of. A judgment call for McNihil: he could either do a quick-and-dirty extraction, pulling the entire brain out of the skull and packing it with him, or he could take the time to let the cleverest of his tools pare away the unnecessary segments. The easiest and fastest would have been to just lop off the kid’s head guillotine-style and wrap it in a freezer pack, carry it out of here like a bowling ball in a bag-he’d done that before, in situations less time-pressured than this. It was considered bad form in asp-head circles, though; the microsurgery that was needed to reattach the brain portion to the top of the spine was a lot of work for the agency techs-McNihil still had enough favors to call in that he could get it done, but he didn’t want to deplete his account. Plus, the results were never as good, trophy-wise, as an original, unsevered connection. I may be getting old , thought McNihil, but I’ve still got pride issues to deal with .