Jerry’s Closed Quarters.

Here the Hendrix had been more helpful. After a brief skirmish with some low-grade counter-intrusion systems, it laid out the biocabin club’s entrails for me on the screen in my room. Floor plan, security staffing, timetables and shifts. I slammed through it in seconds, fuelled by the latent rage from my interrogation. With the sky beginning to pale in the window behind me, I fitted the Nemex and the Philips gun in their holsters, strapped on the Tebbit knife, and went out to do some interrogating of my own.

I’d seen no sign of my tail when I let myself into the hotel, and he didn’t seem to be around when I left either. Lucky for him, I guess.

Jerry’s Closed Quarters by dawn light.

What little cheap erotic mystique had clung to the place by night was gone now. The neon and holosigns were bleached out, pinned on the building like a garish brooch on an old gown. I looked bleakly at the dancing girl, still trapped in the cocktail glass, and thought of Louise, alias Anenome, tortured to a death her religion would not let her come back from.

Make it personal.

The Nemex was in my right hand like a decision taken. As I walked towards the club, I worked the slide action on it and the metallic snap was loud in the quiet morning air. A slow, cold fury was beginning to fill me up now.

The door robot stirred as I approached and its arms came up in a warding-off gesture.

“We’re closed, friend,” the synth voice said.

I levelled the Nemex at the lintel and shot out the robot’s brain dome. The casing might have stopped smaller calibre shells, but the Nemex slugs smashed the unit to pieces. Sparks fireworked abruptly and the synth voice shrieked. The concertina octopus arms thrashed spastically, then went slack. Smoke curled from the shattered lintel housing.

Cautiously, I prodded one dangling tentacle aside with the Nemex, stepped through and met Milo coming upstairs to find out what the noise was about. His eyes widened as he saw me.

“You. What—”

I shot him through the throat, watched him flap and tumble down the steps and then, as he struggled to get back on his feet, shot him again in the face. As I went down the stairs after Milo a second heavy appeared in the dimly lit space below me, took one shocked look at Milo’s corpse and went for a clumsy-looking blaster at his belt. I nailed him twice through the chest before his ringers touched the weapon.

At the bottom of the stairs I paused, unholstered the Philips gun left-handed and stood in silence for a moment, letting the echoes of the gunfire die away in my ears. The heavy artillery rhythm that I’d come to expect of Jerry’s was still playing but the Nemex had a loud voice. On my left was the pulsing red glow of the corridor that led to the cabins, on the right a spider-web holo with a variety of pipes and bottles trapped in it and the word BAR illuminumed onto flat black doors beyond. The data in my head said a minimal security presence for the cabins—three at most, more likely down to two at this time of the morning. Milo and the nameless heavy on the stairs down, leaving one more possible. The bar was soundproofed off, wired into a separate sound system and running between two and four armed guards who doubled as bar staff.

Jerry the cheapskate.

I listened, cranking up the neurachem. From the corridor that led left I heard one of the cabin doors open stealthily and then the soft scrape of someone sliding their feet along the ground in the mistaken belief that it would make less noise than walking. Keeping my eyes fixed on the bar doors to my right, I stuck the Philips gun round the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed a silent scribble of bullets across the red lit air in the corridor. The weapon seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze. There was a strangled grunt, and then the thud and clatter of a body and weapon hitting the floor.

The doors to the bar remained closed.

I eased my head round the angle of the wall and in the stripes of red thrown by the rotating lights saw a stocky-looking woman in combat fatigues clutching at her side with one arm and clawing after a fallen handgun with the other. I stepped quickly across to the weapon and kicked it well out of her reach, then knelt beside her. I must have scored multiple hits; there was blood on her legs and her shirt was drenched in it. I laid the muzzle of the Philips gun against her forehead.

“You work security for Jerry?”

She nodded, eyes flaring white around her irises.

“One chance. Where is he?”

“Bar,” she hissed through her teeth, fighting back the pain. “Table. Back corner.”

I nodded, stood up and sighted carefully between her eyes.

“Wait, you—”

The Philips gun sighed.

Damage.

I was in the midst of the spiderweb holo, reaching for the bar doors, when they swung open and I found myself face to face with Deek. He had even less time to react to the phantom before him than Milo had. I tipped him the tiniest of formal bows, barely an inclination of my head, and then let go of the fury inside me and shot him repeatedly at waist height with both Nemex and Philips gun. He staggered back through the doors under the multiple impacts and I followed him in, still firing.

It was a wide space, dimly lit by angled spots and the subdued orange guide lights of the dancers’ runway, now abandoned. Along one wall, cool blue light shone up from behind the bar, as if it was fronting an obscure downward staircase to paradise. Behind was racked with the pipes, jack-ins and bottles on offer. The keeper of this angel’s hoard took one look at Deck, reeling backwards with his hands sunk in his ruined guts, and went for the holdout below the bar at a speed that was truly semi-divine.

I heard the dropped glass shatter, threw out the Nemex and hammered him back against the displayed wares on the wall like an impromptu crucifixion. He hung there a moment, curiously elegant, then turned and clawed down a racket of bottles and pipes on his way to the floor. Deek went down too, still moving, and a dim, bulky-looking form leaned against the edge of the runway leapt forward, clearing a handgun from the waist. I left the Nemex focused on the bar—no time to turn and aim—and snapped off a shot from the Philips gun, half-raised. The figure grunted and staggered, losing his weapon and slumping against the runway. My left arm raised, straightened and the head shot punched him back onto the dance platform.

The Nemex echoes were still dying in the corners of the room.

By now I had sight of Jerry. He was ten metres away, surging to his feet behind a flimsy table when I levelled the Nemex. He froze.

“Wise man.” The neurachem was singing like wires, and there was an adrenalin grin hanging crazily off my face. My mind rattled through the count. One shell left in the Philips gun, six in the Nemex. “Leave your hands right there, and sit the rest of you down. You twitch a finger and I’ll take it off at the wrist.”

He sank back into his seat, face working. Peripheral scan told me there was no one else moving in the room. I stepped carefully over Deek, who had rolled into a foetal ball around the damage in his gut and was giving out a deep, agonised wailing. Keeping the Nemex focused on the table in front of Jerry’s groin, I dropped my other arm until the Philips gun was pointing straight down and pulled the trigger. The noise from Deek stopped.

At this, Jerry erupted.

“Are you fucking crazy, Ryker? Stop it! You can’t—”

I jerked the Nemex barrel at him and either that or something in my face shut him up. Nothing stirred behind the curtains at the end of the runway, nothing behind the bar. The doors stayed closed. Crossing the remaining distance to Jerry’s table, I kicked one of the chairs around backwards and then straddled it, facing him.