At the first floor landing I reached for the interface guns, the bioalloy plates sewn beneath the palms of my hands already flexing, yearning.

They’d posted a single sentry on the third-floor landing, but they weren’t expecting trouble from behind. I shot him through the back of the head as I came up the last flight of stairs—splash of blood and paler tissue in clots across the wall in front of him—made the landing before he’d hit the ground and then erupted around the corner of the promoter’s office door.

The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whisky, burning…

Splinters of vision…

The promoter tries to rise from his seat where two of them have him pinned and tilted back. One arm thrashes free and points in my direction.

“That’s hi—”

The goon nearest the door, turning…

Cut him down. Three-shot burst, left-handed.

Blood splatters the air—I twist, neurachem hyperswift, to avoid it.

The squad leader—recognisable, somehow. Taller, more presence, something, yelling, “What the fu—”

Body shots. Chest and weapon arm, get that firing hand wrecked.

The right-hand Kalashnikov spurts flame and softcore anti-personnel slugs.

Two left, trying to shrug themselves free of the half-pinioned, flailing promoter, to clear weapons that…

Both hands now—head, body, anywhere.

The Kalashnikovs bark like excited dogs.

Bodies jerking, tumbling…

And done.

Silence slammed down in the tiny office. The promoter cowered under the body of one of his slain captors. Somewhere, something sparked and shorted out in the console—damage from one of my slugs that had gone wide or through. I could hear voices out on the landing.

I knelt beside the wreckage of the lead goon’s corpse and set down the smart guns. Beneath my jacket, I tugged the vibroknife from its sheath in the small of my back and activated the motor. With my free hand I pressed down hard on the dead man’s spine and started cutting.

“Ah, fuck, man.” The promoter gagged and threw up across his console. “Fuck, fuck.”

I looked up at him.

“Shut up, this isn’t easy.”

He ducked down again.

After a couple of false starts, the vibroknife took and sliced down through the spinal column a few vertebrae below the point where it met the base of the skull. I steadied the skull against the floor with one knee, then pressed down again and started a new incision. The knife slipped and slithered again on the curve of the bone.

“Shit.”

The voices out on the landing were growing in number and, it seemed, creeping closer. I stopped what I was doing, picked up one of the Kalashnikovs left-handed and fired a brace of shots out of the doorway into the wall opposite. The voices departed in a stampede of feet on stairs.

Back to the knife. I managed to get the point lodged, cut through the bone, and then used the blade to lever the severed section of spine up out of the surrounding flesh and muscle. Messy, but there wasn’t a lot of time. I stuffed the severed bone into a pocket, wiped my hands on a clean portion of the dead man’s tunic and sheathed the knife. Then I picked up the smart guns and went cautiously to the door.

Quiet.

As I was leaving, I glanced back at the promoter. He was staring at me as if I’d just sprouted a reef demon’s fangs.

“Go home,” I told him. “They’ll be back. Near as I can tell.”

I made it down the three flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though I could feel eyes peering from other doors on the landings I passed. Outside, I scanned the street in both directions, stowed the Kalashnikovs and slipped away, past the hot, smouldering carapace of the bombed-out cruiser. The pavement was empty for fifty metres in both directions and the frontages on either side of the wreck had all cranked down their security blinds. A crowd was gathering on the other side of the street, but no one seemed to know what exactly to do. The few passers-by who noticed me looked hurriedly away as I passed. Immaculate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nobody said much on the way to the hotel.

We did most of it on foot, doubling back through covered ways and malls to blind any satellite eyes the Mandrake Corporation might have access to. Breathless work, weighed down with the carryall bags. Twenty minutes of this found us under the broad eaves of a refrigerated storage facility, where I waved a transport pager at the sky and eventually succeeded in flagging down a cab. We climbed in without leaving the cover of the eaves and sank back into the seats without a word.

“It is my duty to inform you,” the machine told us prissily, “that in seventeen minutes you will be in breach of curfew.”

“Better get us home quick then,” I said and gave it the address.

“Estimated trajectory time nine minutes. Please insert payment.”

I nodded at Schneider, who produced an unused credit chip and fed it to the slot. The cab chittered and we lifted smoothly into a night sky almost devoid of traffic before sliding off westward. I rolled my head sideways on the back of the seat and watched the lights of the city pass beneath us for a while, mentally backtracking to see how well we’d covered ourselves.

When I rolled my head back again, I caught Tanya Wardani staring straight at me. She didn’t look away.

I went back to watching the lights until we started to fall back towards them.

The hotel was well chosen, the cheapest of a row built under a commercial freight overpass and used almost exclusively by prostitutes and wireheads. The desk clerk was sleeved in a cheap Syntheta body whose silicoflesh was showing signs of wear around the knuckles and had a very obvious re-upholstering graft halfway up the right arm. The desk was heavily stained in a number of places and nubbed every ten centimetres along its outer edge with shield generators. In the corners of the dimly-lit lobby, empty-faced women and boys flickered about wanly, like flames almost out.

The desk clerk’s logo-scribbled eyes passed over us like a damp cloth.

“Ten saft an hour, fifty deposit up front. Shower and screen access is another fifty.”

“We want it for the night,” Schneider told him. “Curfew just came down, case you hadn’t noticed.”

The clerk stayed expressionless, but then maybe that was the sleeve. Syntheta have been known to skimp on the smaller facial nerve/muscle interfaces.

“Then that’ll be eighty saft, plus fifty deposit. Shower and screen fifty extra.”

“No discount for long-stay guests?”

His eyes switched to me, and one hand disappeared below the counter. I felt the neurachem surge, still jumpy after the firefight.

“You want the room or not?”

“We want it,” said Schneider with a warning glance at me. “You got a chip reader?”

“That’s ten per cent extra.” He seemed to search his memory for something. “Handling surcharge.”

“Fine.”

The clerk propped himself to his feet, disappointed, and went to fetch the reader from a room in back.

“Cash,” murmured Wardani. “We should have thought of that.”

Schneider shrugged. “Can’t think of everything. When was the last time you paid for something without a chip?”

She shook her head. I thought back briefly to a time three decades gone and a place light years distant where for a while I’d used tactile currency instead of credit. I’d even got used to the quaint plastified notes with their ornate designs and holographic panels. But that was on Earth, and Earth is a place straight out of a pre-colonial period experia flick. For a while there I’d even thought I was in love and, motivated by love and hate in about equal proportions, I’d done some stupid things. A part of me had died on Earth.

Another planet, another sleeve.

I shook an unfairly well-remembered face from my mind and looked around, seeking to embed myself back in the present. Garishly painted faces looked back from the shadows, then away.