God-eater and his friends, if they weren’t just one person, say some demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple 283 of million dollars’ worth of equipment and a terminally bad attitude, had struck Rydell as being almost uniquely full of shit. There was nothing, if you believed them, they couldn’t do. But if they were all that powerful, how come they had to hide that way, and make money doing crimes? Rydell had gotten a couple of lectures on computer crime at the Academy, but it had been pretty dry. The history of it, how hackers used to be just these smart-ass kids dicking with the phone companies. Basically, the visiting Fed had said, any crime that was what once had been called white-collar was going to be computer crime anyway, now, because people in offices did everything with computers. But there were other crimes you could still call computer crimes in the old sense, because they usually involved professional criminals, and these criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers as some kind of romantic bullshit thing, sort of like kids moving the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn’t know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the shit. Rydell’s class laughed dutifully. But not today, the Fed said; your modern hacker was about as romantic as a hit man from some ice posse or an enforcer with a dancer combine. And a lot harder to catch, although if you could get one and lean on him, you could usually count on landing a few more. But they were set up mostly in these cells, the cells building up larger groups, so that the most you could ever pop, usually, were the members of a single cell; they just didn’t know who the members of the other cells were, and they made a point of not finding out. God-eater and his friends, however many of them there were or weren’t, must’ve been a cell like that, one of however many units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San Francisco getting rebuilt hecause they liked an infrastructure 2.84 with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good money-money he didn’t have-and they’d figured out a way to do something that nobody had ever done before. And it was that last one that had really seemed to get them going, once they’d decided to help him out. And now, climbing the escalator, up through all these kinds of people who lived or worked up here, forcing himself not to break into a run, Rydell found it hard to believe that God-eater and them were doing what they’d said they could do. And if they weren’t, well, he was just fucked. 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 tennis whites and ran up the escalator. Came out under the copper tit. People going in and out of that little mall there. A fountain with water sliding down big ragged sheets of green glass. And there went the Russians, their wide gray backs heading toward the white walls of the complex where Karen’s apartment was. He couldn’t see Warbaby or Freddie. 3:32. ‘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. 285 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 running. 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 payers, 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. Warhahy saw him, too. 2.86 ‘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 running, right through the open gates and up to Karen Mendelsohn’s door. Which was half-open, Karen and Chevette Washington both there, their eyes about to pop out of their heads. ‘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 tip Wally’s flashlight. Loveless never even managed to pull the trigger, which you had to admit was kind of impressive. What that capsicum did, 287 it was kind of like when Sublett got an allergic reaction, but a lot worse, and a lot quicker.