The Mongol took off, running.

I vaulted the roof of the ground car and went after him without thinking. The concrete jarred my feet as I landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but the neurachem damped it down instantly and I was only a dozen metres behind. I threw out my chest and sprinted.

Ahead of me, the Mongol bounced around in my field of vision like a combat jet trying to elude pursuing fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a good twenty metres ahead now. I put on speed, wincing at the sharp pains in my chest. Rain slapped at my face.

Fucking cigarettes.

We came out from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing, as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at me. Cross now. Cross now. Cross now. I already had. The echoes followed me beseechingly up the street.

Past the derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn’t moved from their kerbside resting places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rising from a grate in the side of the street like something alive. The paving under my feet was slick with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The shoes that had come with Bancroft’s summer suit were thin-soled and devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept me upright.

The Mongol cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks, saw I was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared the last vehicle. I tried to adjust my trajectory and cut him off, crossing the street at an angle before I reached the wrecked cars, but my quarry had timed the trap too well. I was already on the first wreck, and I skidded trying to stop in time. I bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge stung my hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between us by another ten metres.

A wayward speck of traffic moved in the sky above me.

I spotted the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the kerb, cursing the impulse that had made me turn down Bancroft’s offer of armaments. At this range a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol’s legs out from under him easily. Instead, I tucked in behind him and tried to find the lung capacity from somewhere to close up the gap again. Maybe I could panic him into tripping.

That wasn’t what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to our left gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. I grinned and followed. Finally, I had the advantage.

Perhaps he was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting me to twist an ankle over the uneven ground. But the Envoy conditioning squeezed my pupils into instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped my steps over the uneven surface with lightning speed, and the neurachem put my feet there with a rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath Jimmy de Soto in my dream. Given a hundred metres of this I was going to overtake my Mongol friend, unless he too had augmented vision.

In the event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the original dozen metres between us when we both hit the fence on the far side. He scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while I was still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. I cleared the top of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard me drop though, because he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with clipping together the thing in his hands. The muzzle came up and I dived for the street.

I hit hard, skinning my hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where I had been. The stink of ozone washed over me and the crackle of disrupted air curled in my ears. I kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past my shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. I scrambled for cover that wasn’t there.

“LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”

A cluster of pulsating lights dropped vertically from above and the tannoy barked down the night like the voice of a robot god. A searchlight exploded in the street and flooded us with white fire. From where I lay, I screwed up my eyes and could just make out the police transport, a regulation crowd-control five metres off the street, lights flashing. The soft storm of its turbines swept flapping wings of paper and plastic up against the walls of nearby buildings and pinned them there like dying moths.

“STAND WHERE YOU ARE!” the tannoy thundered again. “LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”

The Mongol brought his particle blaster round in a searing arc and the transport bucked as its pilot tried to avoid the beam. Sparks showered off one turbine where the weapon found its mark and the transport sideslipped badly. Machine-rifle fire answered from a mounting somewhere below the vessel’s nose, but by that time the Mongol was across the street, had torched down a door and was gone through the smoking gap.

Screams from somewhere within.

I picked myself slowly up off the ground and watched as the transport settled to within a metre of the ground. An extinguisher canister fumed into life on the smouldering engine canopy and dripped white foam onto the street. Just behind the pilot’s window, a hatch whined up and Kristin Ortega stood framed in the opening.

CHAPTER TEN

The transport was a stripped-down version of the one that had given me the ride out to Suntouch House, and it was noisy in the cabin. Ortega had to shout to make herself heard above the engines.

“We’ll put in a sniffer squad, but if he’s connected he can get stuff that’ll change his body’s chemical signature before dawn. After that, we’re down to witness sightings. Stone Age stuff. And in this part of town…”

The transport banked and she gestured down at the warren of streets below. “Look at it. Licktown, they call it. Used to be called Potrero way back. They say it was a nice area.”

“So what happened?”

Ortega shrugged in her steel lattice seat. “Economic crisis. You know how it is. One day you own a house, your sleeve policy’s paid up, the next you’re on the street looking at a single lifespan.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah, isn’t it,” said the detective dismissively. “Kovacs, what the fuck were you doing at Jerry’s?”

“Getting an itch scratched,” I growled. “Any laws against it?”

She looked at me. “You weren’t getting greased in Jerry’s. You were barely in there ten minutes.”

I lifted my own shoulders and made an apologetic face. “You ever been downloaded into a male body straight out of the tank, you’ll know what it’s like. Hormones. Things get rushed. Places like Jerry’s, performance isn’t an issue.”

Ortega’s lips curved in something approximating a smile. She leaned forward across the space between us.

“Bullshit, Kovacs. Bull. Shit. I accessed what they’ve got on you at Millsport. Psychological profile. They call it the Kemmerich gradient, and yours is so steep you’d need pitons and rope to get up it. Everything you do, performance is going to be an issue.”

“Well.” I fed myself a cigarette and ignited it as I spoke. “You know there’s a lot you can do for some women in ten minutes.”

Ortega rolled her eyes and waved the comment away as if it was a fly buzzing around her face.

“Right. And you’re telling me with the credit you have from Bancroft, Jerry’s is the best you can afford?”