Virtual Light

No, he told himself, they were. They had to be. Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky. And out of it, fed in from wherever God-eater and his friends were, were coming these packages, no, packets, of signals. Packets, God-eater called them.

And somewhere, high above the Blob, up over the whole L.A. Basin, was the Death Star.

Rydell dodged past a silver-haired man in te

“Shit” he said, knowing it hadn’t worked, that God-eater had fucked him, that he’d doomed Chevette Washington and Sublett and even Karen Mendelsohn and it was one more time he’d just gone for it, been wrong, and the last fucking time at that.

And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were, and he hadn’t ever seen anything like them. There were a bunch of them, maybe ten or a dozen, and they were black. They hardly made any sound at all, and they were sort of floating. Just skimming along. The players on the courts stopped to watch them.

They were helicopters, but too small to carry anybody. Smaller than the smallest micro-light. Kind of dish-shaped. French Aerospatiale gun-platforms, the kind you saw on the news from Mexico City, and he guessed they were under the control of ECCCS, the Emergency Command Control Communications System, who ran the Death Star. One of them swung by, about twenty feet over his head, and he saw the clustered tubes of some kind of gun or rocket-launcher.

“Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.

“POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.”

A woman started screaming, from somewhere over by the mall, over and over, like something mechanical.

“REMAIN CALM.”

And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.

Rydell started ru

He ran past Svobodov and Orlovsky, who were looking at the three helicopters that were much lower now, and so clearly edging in on them. The Russians’ mouths were open and Orlovsky’s half-frame glasses looked like they were about to fall off.

“ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.”

But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands, or dark glossy paper bags from the mall. Watching the helicopters. Watching Rydell as he ran past them, their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard.

He ran past Freddie, who was flat down on the granite pavers, doing what the helicopters said, his hands above his head and his laptop between them.

“REMAIN CALM.”

Then he saw Warbaby, slouched back on a cast-iron bench like he’d been sitting there forever, just watching life go by. Warbaby saw him, too.

“POLICE EMERGENCY.”

His cane was beside him, propped on the bench. He picked it up, lazy and deliberate, and Rydell was sure he was about to get blown away.

“REMAIN CALM.”

But Warbaby, looking sad as ever, just brought the cane up to the brim of his Stetson, like some kind of salute.

“DROP THAT CANE.”

The amplified voice of a SWAT cop, bunkered down in the hardened sublevels of City Hall East, working his little Aerospatiale through a telepresence rig. Warbaby shrugged, slowly, and tossed the cane away.

Rydell kept ru

“Inside!” he yelled.

They just gaped at him.

“Get inside!”

There were a bunch of big plants beside the door, in a terracotta pot about as high as his waist. He saw Loveless step around it, raising his little gun; Loveless had on a silvery sportscoat and his left arm was in a sling; his face was studded with micropore dressings that weren’t quite the right shade, so he looked like he had leprosy or something. He was smiling that smile.

“No!” Chevette Washington screamed, “you murdering little fuck!”

Loveless brought the gun around, about a foot from her head, and Rydell saw the smile vanish. Without it, he noticed, Loveless sort of looked like he didn’t have any lips.

“REMAIN CALM” the helicopters reminded them all, as Rydell brought up Wally’s flashlight.

Loveless never even managed to pull the trigger, which you had to admit was kind of impressive. What that capsicum did, it was kind of like when Sublett got an allergic reaction, but a lot worse, and a lot quicker.

“You crazy, crazy motherfucker” Karen Mendelsohn kept saying, her eyes swollen up like she’d walked through a swarm of hornets. She and Chevette had both caught the edges of that pepper-spray, and Sublett was so worried about the residue that he’d gone into a closet in Karen’s bedroom and wouldn’t come out. “You crazy, outrageous motherfucker. Do you know what you’ve done?”

Rydell just sat there, in one of her white Retro Aggressive armchairs, listening to those helicopters yelling outside. Later on, when it all came out, they’d find out that the Republic of Desire had set Warbaby and them up as these bomb-building mercenaries working for the Sonoran Separatist Front, with enough high explosives stored in Karen’s place to blow that nipple off the tit and clear to Malibu. And they’d also worked in this hostage-taking scenario, to guarantee the SWAT guys made a soft entry, if they had to. But when the real live Counterterrorism Squad got in there, it would’ve been pretty hairy, at least if Karen hadn’t been a lawyer for Cops in Trouble. Those were some angry cops, and getting angrier, at first, but then Pursley’s people seemed to have their ways to calm them down.

But the fu

But when he was sitting there, listening to Karen, and gradually getting the idea that, yeah, he was the kind of crazy motherfucker she liked, he kept thinking about Nightmare Folk Art, and whatever that woman’s name was, over there, and hoping she was coping okay, because God-eater had needed an L.A. number to stick into his fake data-packet, a number where the tip-off was supposed to have come from. And Rydell hadn’t wanted to give them Kevin’s number, and then he’d found the Nightmare number in his wallet, on part of a People cover, so he’d given God-eater that.

And then Chevette came over, with her face all swollen from the capsicum, and asked him if it was working or were they totally fucked? And he said it was, and they weren’t, and then the cops came in and it wasn’t okay, but then Aaron Pursley turned up with about as many other lawyers as there were cops, and then Wellington Ma, in a navy blazer with gold buttons.

So Rydell finally got to meet him.

“Always a pleasure to meet a client in person” Wellington Ma said, shaking his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ma” Rydell said.

“I won’t ask you what you did to my voice-mail” Wellington Ma said, “but I hope you won’t do it again. Your story, though, is fascinating.”

Rydell remembered God-eater and that fifty thousand, and hoped Ma and Karen and them weren’t going to be pissed about that. But he didn’t think so, because Aaron Pursley had already said, twice, how it was going to be bigger than the Pookey Bear thing, and Karen kept saying how telegenic Chevette was, and about the youth angle, and how Chrome Koran would fall all over themselves to do the music.