42

The sodium vapor lamps on the buildings cast a harsh flat light. Trapped in their glare, various big and small objects sent their shadows stretching deep into the surrounding night. Light and dark made two separate worlds.

Sam crouched in the darkness, staring with trepidation at the pools of light. Once he had lived in the other world where light represented safety. How many times had he shaken his head dolefully at the predations of the terrorists and criminals who disrupted safe, corporate life. Now he was a part of the other world, the land of shadows that survived on corporate leavings or what could be taken from the corporations’ arrogant waste. Once he had been secure in his armor of scientific rationality, believing that if magic were not a sham, some obscure physical or biological principle could explain it away. Now others were telling him that be was a magician, just as did his own weird experiences. The notion still frightened him, but seemed to beckon and fascinate as well.

The allure and alarm of magic were akin to what he felt toward Sally. Last night she had shown him uses of magic he could never have imagined, and his heart raced at the sudden memory. Sally was unlike any woman he had ever known. She was as beautiful, vibrant, and exciting as she was terrifying.

What had he gotten into?

The United Oil dockyard, a part of his mind reminded him sardonically. Here, in the shadow of one of the many squat mushroom shapes that made up the tank farm. Now, waiting for Ghost Who Walks inside to return from his reconnaissance. Everything was quiet and had been ever since they’d crossed the perimeter fence. Sam didn’t know whether to be relieved at fully passing the outer security or worried that United Oil’s security teams lay in wait for them, laughing at the foolish confidence of the intruders.

Dodger had been certain he had nullified the perimeter security. It was easy, he said when he gave them the go-ahead over a telecom on the street outside. He sounded so confident, which was all well and good for him. He was not going inside physically with Sam and Ghost.

Once inside the job got tougher. United Oil’s site security strategy did not emphasize an impenetrable perimeter. Instead, it concentrated security assets in the buildings themselves. Each structure had its own level of countermeasures, the extent and complexity varying according to the value of the contents of the structure and the ease with which an intruder might affect or remove those contents. Dodger was expecting difficulties in slipping past the Intrusion Countermeasures of the target building. They were counting on him to take control of the alarms, but they wouldn’t know if he had succeeded until the moment they tried to enter the building. They had been unable to agree on a form of signal that would not alert United Oil security. Once inside the building, they could communicate relatively safely through the site’s computer system. But by then, Ghost and Sam would have set off any still functional alarms as they crossed the building’s security barrier.

Sam knew that Dodger was good at this sort of thing, but he couldn’t relax. He wiped his sweaty palms against the rough fabric of his dark coveralls.

The target building stood on the other side of the vehicle park, its face no different from the other warehouses in the row. With its weathered brick, dirty glass, and rusted window screening, the only distinguishing features were the faded numerals of its building number. No sign proclaimed it as the security field office.

They expected its physical security measures to be light, but the plans they got from Cog showed an alarm at every entrance but one. That door could be opened freely at any time of day or night without sounding an alarm. The door was the connector between a fenced enclosure running the length of the building’s southern side and a series of pens inside the building’s walls. Those pens were the nests for he company’s cockatrices, terrifying paranimals that could calcify flesh with a touch.

Sam thought about trying an astral walk to see how many cockatrices there were and to make sure they were all outside. He dreaded what might happen if any were not. Met in the narrow confines of the nesting pens, the paranimals would have all the advantages. The men would be crowding one another, the distances would be too short for effective gunfire, and the beasts were very fast.

Staring at the door, Sam stayed where he was, firmly in the grip of his mundane senses. Sally had warned him that the creatures could see astral presences and could affect his astral body as fatally as his flesh body. Maybe she had just been trying to scare him out of doing the run, but if Sally spoke true, the creatures presented an even greater menace to his astral self than to his physical being. He had leaned that the astral body was somehow a reflection of a person essence. Could a person’s essence be other than his soul? If one of those things touched him during astral projection, what would happen to his soul?

Ghost was suddenly at Sam’s side, almost startling a yelp from him. The Indian waited a few seconds while Sam’s breathing returned to normal, then tugged on his arm.

“Let’s go. The roving patrol just started their round. Won’t be back here for another ten.”

They moved quickly and quietly across the lot, keeping to the cover of the vehicles. They stopped downwind, several meters from the fenced area. Sam licked his lips, tasting the greasy, ashy flavor of the face-darkening makeup he wore to eliminate reflections. “Maybe you should do the shooting.”

“Your gun, your run.” Ghost’s face was unreadable. “You shoot.”

“Right.” Resigned Sam reached into the pouch at his belt and removed a magazine. Fumbling a little in the dark, he ejected the clip in his pistol and replaced it with the one from his pouch. He was careful to slip the currently unwanted clip into a pocket.

“Got the right one, Paleface?”

“Should be,” Sam whispered in annoyance, lithe Indian was expecting Sam to do it, he could at least have the decency to expect he’d do it right. “You’re the one with the cybereyes. Couldn’t you read the label?”

“Thirty-two cee-cee’s of Somulin cut with ten grains of Alpha-dexoryladrin,” Ghost recited. “Make sure you put the other clip back in before we run into any guards. Any Human that takes that dosage ain’t going to see morning.”

“I know, I know.” The Indian was treating him like a child. “You want to get touched by one of those things?”

The Indian’s gap-toothed, crooked smile glinted in a fugitive beam of light. “You think they’re fast enough to touch a ghost?”

“I don’t know. You want to find out that they can by getting stoned the hard way?”

“No,” Ghost said seriously.

“Right.” Sam was satisfied that he had scored a point. “I’ll change magazines when we’re through the pens.” Gun ready, Sam took aim at the nearest sleeping cockatrice, which looked like no more than a dark mound. The pistol bucked a little in his hand, accompanying the soft huff of the shell’s compressed air propulsion. The target’s feathers quivered slightly before the mound resumed its previous slight, measured motion.