Angel - Shakedown Part 15

"Wow. A demonic power that's useful instead of painful or icky. That beats Angel's whole bag of tricks."

Maureen scanned the menu. "I think I'm in the mood for the turkey ravioli . . . whatareAngel's tricks, anyway?"

"I think I just want a salad-maybe a lobster salad. Angel's what?"

"His tricks. You know, what he can do."

"Oh, the usual vamp stuff. Really strong, can only be killed by direct sunlight or a stake through the heart, that kind of thing."

"Ah." Maureen's espresso arrived. She thanked the waiter with a smile, then flicked the tip of her forked tongue out over the top of the cup. "Still too hot. I just thought that since he's a different sort of vampire, he might have different powers. Different strengths and weaknesses."

"No, he's pretty much the same as a factory model. Doesn't show up in mirrors, can't stand garlic or crosses or holy water, can't enter a house unless he's been invited in first. You know, there's an awful lot of restrictions to being a vampire, considering the few things you get in return. If I were Angel, I'd complain."

"Well, there is the whole eternal youth thing."

"I suppose-hey, don't you have that, too?"

"Sort of. We live a long time, and we know a fewtricks to keep looking young. But once a skin finally wears out, it deteriorates pretty fast."

"So you go wrinkly all at once?"

"More or less. Then we shed the skin and start over."

"You know, if you could teach people how to do that? You'd put every plastic surgeon in this town out of business."

Maureen chuckled. "Well, it's not as glamorous as it sounds. It itches like you wouldn't believe, for one thing. I'm not looking forward to the next time."

The waiter came back and took their orders. Maureen ordered another double espresso.

"So-if you don't mind me asking-how oldareyou?" Cordelia said.

"Seven hundred," Maureen said.

And then burst out laughing at the look on Cordelia's face. "I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm twenty-eight-this is only my second skin. It's about three years old."

"Snake humor. Right," Cordelia said with an embarra.s.sed grin.

"No, just humor," Maureen said. "We're not really that different from you, you know."

"No, you're not-exceptyouknow people at Paramount. I can't thank you enough for getting me that audition."

"No problem. When people help us, we help them. . . ."

"This is not helping," a.s.sociate Rome said.

He was talking to the man seated on the other side of his desk. The man was small, round, and nervous.

His hairless brown head glistened with perspiration, even in the air-conditioned office. He had a habit of rubbing his mustache when he talked that Rome found extremely annoying. His name was Emilio Maldonado.

"Look," Maldonado said. "Seismology isn't an exact science. I can't tell you the exact effects of a large-scale quake, because we haven'thada really big one yet. What Icando is tell you what we learned from the '94 quake, and make some projections."

Rome stared at Maldonado. He had an imposing stare; deep-set, intense black eyes under a heavy, overhanging brow. It was the only heavy thing about him. The rest was as sharp as the suit he wore: a thin, sharp face, sharp cheekbones, a sharp widow's peak of glossy black hair on a high forehead. A sharp nose and chin above a body as strong and slender as a scimitar. The fingers he steepled together in front of him could have been a concert pianist's.

"I suppose that will have to do," Rome said quietly. His voice rasped like a nail file on prison bars.

There was a large map of the Los Angeles area spread out on the expanse of Rome's desk. Maldonado pointed to the San Fernando Valley with a chubby finger. "On January nineteenth, at 4:31A.M.,there was a seismic event approximately nineteen kilometers below Northridge, around thirty-two kilometers from downtown L.A. It had a moment magnitude of 6.7, as compared to the 6.9 of the one that struck San Franciso in 1989."

Maldonado tapped a spot at the edge of the map. "Now, this was a thrust-fault earthquake. That means that where the tectonic plates meet, one suddenly shifts up and the other shifts down. This type of quake can be the most destructive, generating extremely strong ground motion. The Armenian quake in '88 was a thrust-fault, and it killed 80,000."

"Tell me about property damage."

Maldonado cleared his throat. "Uh, yes, I was getting to that. The Northridge quake, even though it only killed 57 people, was the most expensive disaster in U.S. history-the final toll was in the neighborhood of 40 billion dollars. The severe shaking characteristic of a thrust-fault quake caused ma.s.sive destruction to the insides of buildings-especially plumbing and gas pipes. Many buildings that survived structurally intact were still rendered unusable by internal damage."

"You don't have to break someone's back to incapacitatethem," Rome said. "Soft tissues are much more vulnerable."

"Yes, I-I see the a.n.a.logy," Maldonado managed. "Uh-" he consulted his notes. "Of the 66,546 buildings inspected afterward, 6 percent were severely damaged, and 17 percent moderately damaged.

There was, of course, major damage to many roads and freeways as well. I suppose you could view that as injuries to arteries and veins." He gave Rome a quick, nervous smile.

"I suppose you could."

"Now, despite all this, we were extremely lucky. It was early in the morning on a holiday, so most of the big concrete structures that collapsed-like parking garages-were empty. The death toll could have been in the hundreds, easily."

Rome smiled at that, but said nothing. The smile made Maldonado feel more nervous, not less.

"Unfortunately, this quake did little to relieve the seismic pressure that's been building up for the last hundred years. Chances are good that a major shaker will strike in the next three decades-one that'll make this look like a child's tantrum."

"Details."

"A quake of at least an 8 magnitude is likely. That's the same strength as the one that hit San Francisco in 1906. Chances of such an occurrence are in the-"

"I don't care about probabilities. I need to know about effects."

"Effects, yes. Well, most of the damage in a large quake-especially in a coastal city-can happen indirectly.

"Let's start with broken gas mains. Fires begin to rage. They can't be reported because the alarm system works on underground conduits that have ruptured. The electrical grid is down, and so are the phones. Fire trucks can't get to the fires anyway, because the roads are blocked with rubble and shattered gla.s.s. If one does get through, they'll find there's no water-the pipes will have broken. But the fires aren't a problem for too long, because the flooding from the dams that have given way will put them out. It's even conceivable that there could be a tsunami, though that would indicate an offsh.o.r.e epicenter.

"As far as individual structures go, there are three significant failures we can predict. The first is concrete frame buildings: older government buildings, multi-story parking garages. The second is ' softstory'

buildings, apartment buildings constructed primarily from wood-especially the kind built on pillars to accommodate parking on the bottom floor.

"Steel-frame buildings would fare the best-at least, that's what people used to think. Tests done on steel-frame high-rises that survived the Northridgequake were found to have cracks in their welds. These buildings will almost certainly fail, and probably be the most costly."

"Do you have a list of such buildings?"

"Uh . . . yes. Right here." Maldonado fumbled through his briefcase and pulled out a report. Rome took it and began to read it.

Maldonado waited.

"You can go now," Rome said. He didn't look up.

Maldonado left.

What are we going to do now?Feldspaar thought. He desperately wanted an answer,anyanswer. He felt as if all stability had fled from his existence.

The answer he got didn't make him feel any better.

We are going to do more research,Baasalt replied.

Research? I don't understand. Did you not already discover that . . . that which you needed to know?Feldspaar couldn't bring himself to actually mention the stone-hurtling-through-Void incident; he'd rather never think of it again.

They were in a sewer tunnel beneath the city. Baasalt had destroyed some of the cables that ran along the top of the tunnel; he'd told Feldspaar that the Skin-Dwellers would send someone to repair it.

Feldspaar didn't know how the Skin-Dwellers would do this, or how they would even know about the damage.

Baasalt's explanation had made him dizzy; it had to do with the world of the Skin-Dwellers being interconnected in a huge variety of ways, something Baasalt extrapolated from their chaotic and varied nature. Tremblors were connected through mental pathways or tunnels, and that was it.

There are other things I must know,Baasalt thought,if I am to convince our race of the need for change.

But the Grounding said they would consider your proposal.

The Grounding will never accept my recommendations. My plans are too radical, too far-reaching. In order to facilitate my ideas, I will have to convince the general population.

And how will you do that?Feldspaar asked weakly.

I will adapt the Skin-Dwellers' methods to my own uses.

A light bobbed toward them out of the darkness, followed by the sound of splashing feet. A Skin-Dweller, the fur-faced kind called a male. Baasalt and Feldspaar were both concealed inside a recess in the tunnel, a recess the Skin-Dweller headed straight for.

When the light fell upon them, Feldspaar froze, blinded. "What the h.e.l.l-" the Skin-Dweller blurted out, and then Baasalt knocked him down with his tail. The light spun out of his hands and dropped beneath the murky water. It continued to shine, though much more dimly.

Baasalt seized the Skin-Dweller by one wrist and hauled him back to his feet. The male was sputtering and thrashing, but stopped when Baasalt reached out to his mind.

Warrior-priests were trained in making mental contact with other species, but Feldspaar had never seen telepathy used in quite this way before. Baasalt simply forced his way into the male's mind and began to root around.

Feldspaar withdrew his thoughts, shocked. This was like . . . it was like- That was the problem. It wasn't like anything, at least not anything Feldspaar had experienced. He wished he could just lie down for a few years.

Abruptly, Baasalt withdrew. He released the Skin-Dweller, who slumped down against the tunnel wall in a daze. Baasalt nodded to himself.Yes, yes, that will do nicely. Just as I suspected.

He turned suddenly and trudged off down the tunnel.

After a moment, Feldspaar followed him.

He wasn't sure why.

"This is my daughter Fiona," Maureen said.

"Oh, she's sosweet,"Cordelia said. "And she looks sonormal. Uh-you know what I mean."

The Serpentene child looked at Cordelia doubtfully. She was hardly more than a toddler, with wispy blond hair and big blue eyes. She balanced unsteadily on two chubby legs, clutching the edge of the coffee table for stability.

"You mean she looks human," Maureen said. "But she isn't. For one thing, she spent nine months in an egg instead of in my belly."

"An egg? Hmmm-you know, at first I was going to say 'Euuw,' but actually, that sounds like a lot less trouble than the regular way. The human way, I mean."

"Oh, it is. No morning sickness, no backaches, no mood swings-just make sure the incubator's plugged in."

"Not to mention no maternity clothes or excess cellulite," Cordelia said. "It sounds too good to be true."

"Well, it's not all wine and roses. I still have to balance my job with being a mother, and I can't send her to a regular day-care. Of course, since most of the other Serpentene women are in the same situation, we have a communal day-care center here in the building that the parents take turns overseeing."

"The fathers, too?"

"Oh, yes. Serpentene men are very involved in raising their children."

Cordelia looked around her at the opulent apartment and sighed. "You get all this, babies and responsible dadstoo? Okay-where do I sign up?"

Fiona giggled.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Backat the office, Doyle finished filling in Angel on what he'd learned from Graedeker. "So Wolfram and Hart are definitely involved. The question is, how?"

"Let's run it down," Angel said. He was doing Tai Chi exercises with a sword he held in two hands. He swept the blade slowly through the air. "First, we know that someone asked the Tremblors to attack the Serpentene."

"Check. Second, we know that Wolfram and Hart had a connection to some-maybe all-of the victims."

Angel parried an invisible opponent in slowmotion. "Third, we know someone is feeding information about potential victims to the Tremblors."

Doyle nodded. "Fourth, the obvious conclusion:Wolfram and Hart are feedin' the Tremblors sacrifices, in return for which they lean on the Serpentene."

Angel brought the sword back to center, then relaxed and dropped the point. "Right. The question is, what are Wolfram and Hart after? If it was just the building, they wouldn't risk destroying it with an earthquake."

"Maybe it's straight blackmail," Doyle suggested. "The Serpentene have a lot of money."

"Maybe. Whatever it is, there's something our employer isn't telling us. I think it's time I had a little talk with Galvin."

"Before or after your dinner with Kate? Speakin' of which, aren't you gonna be late?"

Angel ran for the door, then remembered he had a sword in his hand. He hung the sword on the wall quickly, grabbed his trenchcoat and left.