Dusk moved in stealthally, as did Thakkett. He was surveying one of the large citiblocks inside the Circle of LowTol. ``LowTol'' stood for Low Tolerance, pertaining to the law. Thakkett and some of the younger officers referred to it as the Circle of NoTol, which was a lot more accurate. Some of the older officers, Vietnam veterans mostly, referred to it as ``Downtown,'' believing it to be nicely applicable; thusly the Park Street Hilton had been nicknamed the ``Hanoi Hilton'' until two years before, when a massed shell barrage turned the Hilton into downtown rubble.
LowTol/NoTol/Downtown was basically a large circle with a radius of about nine square blocks. During the previous decades the inner city had been so literally torn up by gang wars and organized riots that the Military cum Police force decided just to contain instead of exterminate. So now the Circle of LowTol was holding pen for gangs and organized crime; they could duke it out all they wanted in there, the military didn't care what they did to each other at that point. The Circle of LowTol had long since been unofficially annexed from the rest of the state, which made the military's job easier since they suddenly weren't responsible for the lives of the people in there. If you went Downtown, you were on your own for the most part, unless someone outside really wanted to get their hands on you.
The situation was static for a few months, until it became apparent that
the occupants of LowTol had a grander scheme in mind than just most of
Boston. This became most apparent when truckloads of weapons were found
entering LowTol. Entering, in fact, forcefully; as in not stopping to
try to drive around blockades of military/police cars. The trucks were
big. And full.
Devirek stepped automatically around the pressure mines set under the asphalt of the lot in front of his home. ``Home'' was an old apartment building he had staked out as his own the year before when his previous home had been rigged with a thermite charge to go off when he unlocked his door. Luckily he noticed the scraped lock before he turned the tumblers. Unfortunately he had acted too impulsively and nearly killed himself. He had taken a shot at the lock and fired the detonator. No more home.
Now he worked his way to his front door. He didn't bother with locks; there was a thermite/plastique detector over the entrance to this building. There was no other way to get in: he had laid a wall of concrete all the way around the inside of the building against the old wall, and he hadn't bothered to stop for windows or doors. No one was going to blow him up. All he had to worry about was being shot.
As he stepped up from the first step to the fourth (the second and third steps were completely mined) he pulled a small plastic cylinder about the size and shape of a hockey puck out of his pocket. Sphincter valves covered each side. Had he looked up at that moment he would have noticed the Harrier Jumpjet and the strange insectile plane dogfighting about five-hundred meters above. The incendiaries being fired lit the two ships up nicely.
He opened one sphincter valve on the cylinder and passed it closely over the surface of the door. Nothing showed up to the small metal detector. To check the batteries he turned the valve toward himself. As the cone of detection reached the bulge in his chest of his gun, the detector beeped four times in quick succession. Good. Something in this shithole works, he thought.
The two ships continued to fight high overhead.
DeVirek opened his front door, the metal detector focused on the hallway in front. No signal. He opened the second sphincter valve and heard the momentary signal of his own gun being detected. Then, holding the detector so that each side was facing one of the walls, he tossed it, rolling, down the ten meter hallway. It bounced off the far corner of the hallway without making a signal. No one was there. He quietly entered the hallway and walked down to the corner. He picked up the detector, brushing it off, turned right, and rolled it down the second hallway. Still no signal. A quiet, uneventful night.
Outside, the two ships were still attacking each other.
DeVirek Walked down the second hallway. The walls of both hallways were bare and plain; he had felt no need to decorate the concrete. Further up the hallway was a particularly large patch of sandblasted concrete. One bad night about two months before, in a fit of agony and rage, he had stormed down to this hallway and had written ``I WISH I HAD BEEN STILLBORN'' in red spraypaint. Later he had sandblasted it off, as things like that were not good for morale.
He passed the sandblasted patch without a second glance. He picked up the detector from in front of the door to the stairs, and very casually walked into the stairwell.
The stairwell was always lit. He did not use the detector in this part because there was nowhere he could be ambushed without seeing the person first. He tramped up the stairs, past the second floor door (the second floor belonged to a self-sufficient world of cats and rats), and up to the third floor.
He tossed the detector around the corner down the hall towards the door to his apartment. Nothing. It went off as he walked over to pick it up, but he knew it was only him. If it wasn't, he would be dead by now.
He looked at a panel of lights beside the door of his apartment. It was just a group of ten small, red leds, lined up horizontally. There were no labels for the leds. No one led stood for anything, it was what they all stood for together that made sense. They were connected to the system of motion and metal detectors in his apartment. They overlooked every single room, doorway, and surface in the entire apartment.
Now they were all lit. Nothing was wrong.
The leds were set up in his own special way; binary in reverse. A zero was indicated by a lit led, and a one was indicated by an unlit led. The one's place was all the way to the left, followed by the two's place, the four's place, the eight's place, and so on. Now the leds represented zero. Nothing wrong. One unlit led all the way to the left represented one, which meant that the motion detector in the front hallway had been set of. Three unlit leds on the left would represent seven, which meant that the metal and motion detector in the hallway to his bedroom had been set off. Long ago he had memorized what every number stood for. No one but a hacker/electrician who had had the chance to examine the wiring in the walls and the program in his computer would be able to understand what the leds meant. He felt safe entering his home.
He switched off the detectors as soon as he walked through the door. He was happy to see that, out in the hall, the leds read three, which meant that he had set off the metal and motion detectors by the door just before he shut the system down. He closed and locked the door.
He walked over to an old wood table with a scratched surface. He took off his windbreaker, hanging it on the back of a chair, then his holster, which he dropped indifferently onto the table, and finally his kevlar/titanium honeycomb jacket, which hugged his middle and shoulders. It would stop any conventional bullet that wasn't fired from a twometer rifle. It would prevent an armor-piercing round from killing him, but it would do some damage. It would not stand up the the big Vostok 40mm guns they had at the main building. Nothing less than four inches thick could stop a round from one of those.
He had a .45 tucked into his pants. He pulled it out. He grinned. There were kids running around the streets with stuff on that could stop a regular .45. The thing was, he never loaded the gun with anything regular. Now it was loaded with Pinheads: Nasty things that looked like Philips Head screwdriver tips. They could split a block of concrete into four neat pieces. They could penetrate up to half an inch of steel. Nasty things for a nasty life.
He dropped the .45 on the table after also hanging the jacket on the back of the chair. After a moment he picked up the holster and removed the gun from it. It was a Rhiktre .726, one of the few majorly used guns that still used English calibrations. The gun was more like a cannon than a pistol. DeVirek had seen it in the Army storage facility and had felt an instant feeling of desire, almost lust. It was his gun now.
It fired shells that were about two and a half times as long as .45 shells, and almost twice as wide. Halfway down the barrel was a second handhold. DeVirek had once made the mistake of firing it one-handed. He broke his thumb and forefinger, and if not for corrective surgery, he would never have been able to fire a gun again. The Rhiktre was easily the most powerful handgun ever made. Anything stronger had to be attached to a pivoting base. Because of it's high power, the Rhiktre only had a life span of about one hundred shots, one hundred and twenty with proper care, but that involved clamping the barrel immediately after firing, and in the real world that was impossible. If you were firing the Rhiktre, you had other things to worry about.
DeVirek had fired the Rhiktre a total of thirty-seven times, and he was reasonably sure that it had not been used before he found it. He had had someone at the lab check it over recently, and there were signs of microscopic deformation in the barrel. He smiled. His favorite gun was only about ten shots away from a mid-life crisis.
He had only used the Rhiktre on vehicles and buildings. Firing the Rhiktre at people was a waste of ammo and lifespan; there were easier ways of killing people. The Rhiktre could knock a car's transmission into it's back seat. DeVirek had once fired a round at an armored six-wheel tank, and it had bounced around inside the cab, killing all five people inside.
The shells he had now in the .726's feed clip had special tips like the ``Pinheads'' in his .45, only much more intricate. Sixteen tiny grooves tapered up to a tempered carbon-steel point, which was sharpened with an industrial diamond cutter. Since the .726 was not a very widely used gun, any special shells had to be custom made. Josephine Morey, a woman who worked in the ballistics lab, had made the shells for him out of interest of the somewhat rare gun. He hoped that that was all she was interested in. Since the shells were basically experimental, they had no official name. Josephine had dubbed them ``Can Openers,'' which he had found slightly amusing, though had not shown it. She had been right, though; when filling the magazine he had cut himself twice on the sharp tips of the shells.
Josephine claimed that the shells would probably be able to penetrate up to an inch of steel, an inch and a quarter of Plexiglass, or half an inch of carbon-steel. He wondered when the next opportunity to test that claim would be.
He was about to return the Rhiktre to the holster when, on an impulse he slipped into the front of his pants where the $.45$ had until recently taken residence.
He moved from the front hall to the kitchen, running his right hand through his hair. It came out greasy and wet. He instinctively wiped it on the front of his shirt, which was wet also.
He rinsed both his hands in the sink, and dried them on a wad of paper towels. His hands had to be dry at all times. Guns slip from wet hands. Greasy hands. He needed to get something inside him.
He opened the refrigerator and looked in. Orange juice caught his eye quickly, and he grabbed it. He needed something acidic in him.
He looked for the largest clean glass around, and ended up washing out a quarter-full glass of milk in the sink, running first cold, then hot, then cold water in it. He shook it dry.
He filled the glass to the top, and drained a third of it in one gulp. It was good, cool and acidic going into him.
He opened a cabinet above the sink. He reached behind a jar of honey to bring out a bottle of vinegar. He left the cabinet open and screwed off the bottle top. The volatile smell reached his nose.
I need this, he thought, I need something acid to eat away at the shit inside of me.
He poured about five tablespoons into the glass, then put the bottle down on the counter. He threw the lid into the sink. He took the glass out of the kitchen.
He entered the ``Family Room,'' and walked over to his desk, passing his two sofas. He closed the blinds on the window and turned on the light. No use looking outside. It made him angry. He sat down heavily in the office chair, it rolling backwards slightly by his weight.
He looked at the stereo he had set up on the desk. It had stopped working once, and he had Mike Norwood from Ultrasonics come over to look at it. After fixing it, he had told DeVirek that the speakers should be set further apart than just opposite ends of the desk like they had been before. He talked about maximum sound efficiency with the speakers. Then after he had left DeVirek had moved the speakers even closer to each other.
He put down the glass and reached over to retrieve a compact disc from the desk's surface. It was Pink Floyd's ``The Delicate Sound of Thunder.'' He put it into the stereo and turned the power on. He skipped to the sixth track, then sat back and picked up the glass, taken another strong sip.
The first bursts of guitar emptied from the stereo's speakers, not two feet away from his head. The distortion was beautiful. It always was.
``Dogs of War, men of hate,With no cause, we don't discriminate...''
He turned the chair on it's swivel to his left until he could rest his right arm on the desk. He put the glass down after taking another sip.
``Discovery is to be disowned,Come and see this flesh and bone...''
He could see the distortion guitar's steady rhythm on the surface of the orange juice. He admired the mathematical simplicity of the wave formation from the air to the glass to the liquid inside; how each beat echoed into the glass, forming a wave which came from all the way around the glass and became a point in the middle of the liquid's surface.
``Hell opened up and put on sale,Gather 'round and haggle...''
He was hypnotized. He could analyze the quality of sound and the structure of the music by watching the way waves formed in his glass. His whole focus was the same as each wave coming from the glass. His awareness slowly receded. He suddenly noticed the taste of vinegar.
``For hard cash we will lie and deceive,Even our masters don't know the webs we weave...''
His legs were hot. He slowly reached down and tried to locate the zipper to his pants with his left hand, his weak hand. A finger brushed the rubber grip of the .726 and froze. Then, slowly, the finger moved again, caressed the rubber grip, slowly up and down. He resisted the slight desire to hold it his hand, to grip it tightly, to fire it. It was a desire he felt every time his fingers touched the strangely smooth polyeurythane grip, a surface which sent the taction nerves in his fingertips berserk. A cold tickling ran up his neck, and he tensed his shoulder and neck muscles to ward it off. He knew that it was his reaction to the gun.
Slowly, his fingers moved reluctantly from the grip down to the top of his pants. He undid the snap, then moved down to the zipper. He got hold of the zipper and carefully began sliding it down, notch by notch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven... he counted the notches all the way to the fortieth. The back end of the Rhiktre slipped down until it was about to fall out of his waistband. He slowly, patiently, slid his hand into his pants through the zipper and grabbed hold of the barrel of the Rhiktre. The butt of the gun rubbed against his lower abdomen. He pulled the barrel up through the opening in his pants, at the same time pushing the butt down further to his groin. He began to feel the rubber grip against the skin of his groin. It's presence was made very obvious against the sensitive patch of skin just above his scrotum.
DeVirek thought back on his meeting with Josephine. He recalled how, at one point in the past, she had tried to be much more than friendly with him. It disgusted him. Any emotion associated with sex had a dangerously large amount of control over the mind and body. He knew that he was blessed, twice blessed, with protection against these mind and body controlling agents.
DeVirek's first blessing would fascinate any physchologist and provide a completely new direction of studies in sexuality. He was neither homosexual, nor heterosexual, nor bisexual. He was simply sexually neutral; asexual, as a biologist might refer to him. Most psychologists would say this was an impossible case. It could probably never be totally proved, that is if DeVirek ever consented to being studied, which would be considered equally as impossible. Whether or not it would ever be proven was beside the point. The point was, as far as he could tell (and that was only what counted), he was sexually neutral. He had done some reading early and life, and he had convinced himself. It was simple, really; an existence unplagued with what looked to him to be a complete waste of energy anyway. It didn't make him happy, but any other way would make him only more unhappy with the things around him. He didn't think he would ever be happy, but he had come to terms with that, also.
Almost.
His second blessing was simple in itself. DeVirek had been born without a penis. His ureter ended at the surface of his skin, and the angle was perfect to accomodate normal urinary functions. He had no testicles, and as a result his groin was completely devoid of pubic hairs. His scrotum was an empty sack of wrinkled, hairless skin. Not once in his entire life had DeVirek ejaculated. Puberty meant nothing to him. It was just another word that meant nothing to him, like libido, masturbation, foreplay, or a hundred others that applied to a completely alien aspect of humankind. It was better.
Simple.
Almost.
He gripped the end of the Rhiktre's barrel and pushed down. The butt worked down between his legs. He didn't realize how phallic the gun's position had become. He didn't realize how suggestive his reflexive actions were. He never did.
He took another sip of orange juice. He had just about gotten to the point where he felt like the lining of his stomach was stripping away, like a giant bag to wrap everything up inside of him and be taken out. It was a clean feeling.
He put the glass down on the table, watching the random vibration move through the glass, the liquid; then the music taking up its rhythm again.
His left thumb ran over the barrel hole. It almost fit in.
``One world; 'is a battleground...''
He ran his left index over the barrel hole. It slipped in. He moved it around, feeling the barrel grooves, the nerves in his finger screaming in near-ecstacy...
``One world...''
The quality of the waves in the glass began to change slightly. He was shaking, that was it...
``...and we will smash it down-''
DeVirek's hand jerked once smasmotically and his index finger pulled out of the gun's barrel. The Rhiktre fell out of his pants. It toppled onto the front of the chair, fell off, hit a leg of the desk, and hit the floor with a noise he felt, heard, and saw.
The orange juice ripples fluttered in time with the sound, becoming momentarily chaotic, then began returning to the smoother motion of the music. But the interference didn't go away. It remained steady with the music. DeVirek wasn't shaking.
The floor was vibrating slightly. His attention finally moved away from the glass. The soles of his feet were itching.
A tiny noise, like wind blowing through past small openings, caught in his ears. Then a tapping noise from the desk demanded his attention. He looked over, keeping his head still. The stereo was vibrating on the desk's surface.
``One worrrrrrrrllllld...''
The tiny noise was getting more and more apparent. His entire body seemed to be shaking. He ripped his mind away from the desk and the glass and his feet and stumbled up off the chair, sending it backwards. He rubbed his right hand viciously against his pants thigh and grabbed the Rhiktre off the floor.
There was something happening outside his window. The shades were shaking, and he could see light around the edges of the window, brighter than moonlight could ever be. The whistling noise was very definite.
The light was shifting around outside the window. DeVirek knew the windows could stand up to a lot; they were Plexiglass, three inches thick. He had put them in himself. Still, he was frightened.
Automatically he pulled the slide back, injecting a shell into the breach. He held the Rhiktre with both hands, watching the light at the window.
He had to pull the blinds back. He edged toward the window, taking his left hand off the Rhiktre and stretching it out in front of him, effectively making it impossible for him to fire his weapon. For once he wished the gun was not so powerful; It's need for control restricted his actions.
Then DeVirek heard something that made his heart stop. It was a sound he was slightly familiar with, but was unmistakable in it's uniquiness. A snapping clacking noise of metal engaging with metal, powered by emense servos. It was a sound he remembered from the first time he had seen the action which produced it; the frenetic motions of parts which he had realized was a presence of death. A thing so close to himself, so automated, so controlled. Indeed, it was a thing which made him envious.
``One worrrrrrrrllllld...''
The stereos output was rapidly decreasing in clarity. The desk was shaking visibly all over.
DeVirek leapt forward, grabbed a handful of blinds and fairly ripped the entire window covering from its frame, hurling it behind him. What met his gaze, though he knew what it would be before he even saw it, still paralized him for an instant.
Hovering outside his window, bathing him and his apartment with bright, blaring light, was the Harrier Jumpjet.
The beautiful machine's nose was a scant eight inches away from the window's outside surface. The noises he had heard had been the hovering giant's double weapon gantry reconfiguring and rearming. The gantries were thirteen-barreled cannons, hydraulically positioned on universal joints, able to fire in any direction in the hemisphere of the underside of the Harrier. Normal, infrared, and ultraviolet cameras completed the six-sided-star pattern on each gantry. The cannon barrels ranged from half an inch to two inches in diameter, capable of delivering fire of most necessary types. Missile gantries occupied the underside of both wings, but were empty now.
The cannons. The huge powerful deliverances of Death, with their thirteen mouths and three eyes, with one purpose which was to send a barage of choas in the form of metal and chemical wherever the gunner needed it. In events of almost pure meditation during firefights DeVirek thought of himself as a comparable weapon; a weapon which saw all and obeyed it's order to fire. DeVirek obeyed himself, however; He was the gun and the gunner.
DeVirek was looking right into the cockpit, right into the eyes of a person he knew well; Jessica Weiss.
Even with her helmet on, DeVirek could see the tension in her expression. She was jerking around in her harness, looking around frantically through the Plexiglas of the cockpit outside the plane. They had locked eyes for an instant, then she had begun searching for something that was out of sight. For her to be as freaked as she looked, DeVirek guessed there was something extremely serious going on outside of his window. There wasn't much of anything in the air that could be that much of a threat to that Harrier, especially with Jessica flying it.
The vibration was so intense now that the stereo began to skip spasmodically.
The lights from the Harrier were nearly blinding. He almost didn't see the insectile silhouette suddenly appear behind the Harrier because of them. But he did see it, and began gesturing frantically to Jessica that there was something behind her.
She saw him motioning and didn't bother looking back to confirm. She did the only thing she really could in the split second she had; she threw the throttle to 100% and tapped the afterburner switch. The Harrier shot straight up at over 150 miles per hour.
The dodge was clean, as in the two shells the other airship fired at the Harrier did not hit it. They hit DeVirek's window.
DeVirek's sense of sight and sound shut off for an instant in self -presevation as the shells hit the plexiglass and he felt them detonate. Whatever they were, they had to have been big. The shock moved everything in his apartment and shifted the structure of the building.
DeVirek hadn't even been able to react fast enough to scream.
An instant after the detonation DeVirek felt the shockwave traveling through the air hit him, then an instant later the plexiglass. As the Harrier had shot upward, the whine of its engines faded quickly, replaced by what he heard now; a lower, rumbling groan.
It was a sound which belonged to an underwater vehicle, yet there he was, barely hearing it but hearing it nonetheless with his slightly impaired hearing. It had to be the other airship.
He couldn't tell if it was a 'copter or a jet, but it was hovering, whatever it was. The sound it made just didn't fit. It wasn't props, and it was a completely different sound from turbines. It was a sound like a huge mass of metal being slowly deformed.
He blinked repeatedly and looked at the window, hoping to catch another glimpse of the airship.