I nodded, desperately trying to mop up the post-coital languor that had drenched my system. Shifting my stance slightly…

Aligning from memory…

“Good, then let’s have your arms.” He dropped his left hand to his belt and produced a contact stunner. The aim of the Sunjet never wavered in the right-hand grip. The mask flexed in an approximation of a smile. “One at a time, of course.”

I raised my left arm and held it out to him. Flexed my right hand behind me, riding out the sense of impotent fury, so the palm rippled.

The little grey device came down on my wrist, charged light winking. He had to shift the Sunjet, of course, or the dead weight of my arm was going to come down on it like a club when the stunner fired…

Now. So low even the neurachem barely picked it out. A thin whine through the conditioned air.

The stunner fired.

Painless. Cold. A localised version of what it felt like to get shot with a beam stunner. The arm flopped like a dead fish, narrowly missing the Sunjet despite its new alignment. He twitched slightly aside, but it was a relaxed move. The mask grinned.

“That’s good. Now the other one.”

I smiled and shot him—

Grav microtech—a weapons engineering breakthrough from the house of Kalashnikov.

—from the hip. Three times across the chest, hoping to drill clean through whatever armour he was wearing and into the backpack. Blood—

Across short distances, the Kalashnikov AKS91 interface gun will lift and fly direct to an implanted bioalloy home plate.

—drenched the stealth suit, tickled my face with backblown spray. He staggered, Sunjet wagging like an admonishing finger. His colleagues—

Almost silent, the generator delivers total capacity in a ten-second burst.

—hadn’t worked it out yet. I fired high at the two behind him, probably hit one of them somewhere. They rolled away, grabbing cover. Return fire crackled around me, nowhere close.

I came around, dragging the numbed arm like a shoulder bag, looking for Wardani and her captor.

“Fucking don’t, man, I’ll—”

And shot through the writhing plastic of the mask.

The slug punched him back a clean three metres, into the spidery arms of a climbing machine, where he hung, slumped and used up.

Wardani dropped to the ground, bonelessly. I threw myself down, chased by fresh Sunjet fire. We landed nose to nose.

“You OK?” I hissed.

She nodded, cheek pressed flat to the floor, shoulders twitching as she tried to move her stunned arms.

“Good. Stay there.” I flailed my own numbed limb around and searched the machine jungle for the two remaining Kempists.

No sign. Could be fucking anywhere. Waiting for a clear shot.

Fuck this.

I lined up on the crumpled form of the squad leader, on the backpack. Two shots blew it apart, fragments of hardware jumping out of the exit holes in the fabric.

Mandrake security woke up.

Lights seared. Sirens shrieked from the roof, and an insectile storm of nanocopters issued from vents on the walls. They swooped over us, blinked glass bead eyes and passed us by. A few metres over, a flight of them rained laser fire down amidst the machines.

Screams.

An abortive Sunjet blast carving wildly through the air. The nanocopters it touched flamed and spun out like burning moths. The laser fire from the others redoubled, chickling.

Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.

The nanocopter swarm broke up, drifting away disinterestedly. A couple threw down parting rays as they left. The sobbing stopped.

Silence.

Beside me, Wardani eeled her knees under her, but could not get upright. No upper body strength in her recovering body. She looked wildly across at me. I propped myself up on my working arm, then levered myself to my feet.

“Stay there. I’ll be back.”

I went reflexively to check on the corpses, ducking stray nanocopters.

The masks had frozen in rictus smiles, but faint ripples still ran through the plastic at intervals. As I watched the two the copters had killed, something fizzled under each head and smoke spiralled up.

“Oh, shit.”

I ran back to the one I’d shot in the face, the one caught upright in the machine, but it was the same story. The base of the skull had already charred black and ragged, and the head was listing slightly against one of the climbing machine’s struts. Missed in the storm of fire from the nanocopters. Below the neat hole I’d put in the centre of the mask, the mouth grinned at me with plastic insincerity.

“Fuck.”

“Kovacs.”

“Yeah, sorry.” I stowed the smart gun and pulled Wardani unceremoniously to her feet. At the end of the room, the elevator opened and spilled out a squad of armed security.

I sighed. “Here we go.”

They spotted us. The squad captain cleared her blaster.

“Remain still! Raise your hands!”

I lifted my working arm. Wardani shrugged.

“I’m not pissing about here, folks!”

“We’re injured,” I called back. “Contact stunners. And everyone else is dead, extremely. The bad guys had stack blowout failsafes. It’s all over. Go wake Hand up.”

Hand took it quite well, considering. He got them to turn over one of the corpses and crouched beside it, poking at the charred spinal chord with a metal stylus.

“Molecular acid canister,” he said thoughtfully. “Last year’s Shorn Biotech. I didn’t realise the Kempists had these yet.”

“They’ve got everything you’ve got, Hand. They’ve just got a lot less of it, that’s all. Read your Brankovitch. ‘Trickledown in War-based Markets’.”

“Yes, thank you, Kovacs.” Hand rubbed at his eyes. “I already have a doctorate in Conflict Investment. I don’t really need the gifted amateur reading list. What I would like to know, however, is what you two were doing down here at this time of the morning.”

I exchanged a look with Wardani. She shrugged.

“We were fucking,” she said.

Hand blinked.

“Oh,” he said. “Already.”

“What’s that supposed t—”

“Kovacs, please. You’re giving me a headache.” He got up and nodded at the head of the forensic squad who was hovering nearby. “OK, get them out of here. See if you can get a tissue match for those scrapes we took out of Find Alley and the canal head. File c221mh, central clearing’ll let you have the codes.”

We all watched as the dead were loaded onto ground-effect gurneys and escorted to the elevators. Hand just caught himself returning the stylus to his jacket, and handed it to the last of the retreating forensic squad. He brushed the ends of his fingers absently against each other.

“Someone wants you back, Mistress Wardani,” he said. “Someone with resources. I suppose that in itself ought to reassure me as to the value of our investment in you.”

Wardani made a faint, ironic bow.

“Someone with wires to the inside too,” I added sombrely. “Even with a backpack full of intrusion gear, there’s no way they got in here without help. You’ve got leakage.”

“Yes, so it would appear.”

“Who did you send to check out those shadows we brought back from the bar night before last?”

Wardani looked at me, alarmed.

“Someone followed us?”

I gestured at Hand. “So he says.”

“Hand?”

“Yes, Mistress Wardani, that is correct. You were followed as far as Find Alley.” He sounded very tired, and the glance he shot at me was defensive. “It was Deng, I think.”

“Deng? Are you serious? Shit, how long do you guys give line-of-duty casualties before you jam them back into a sleeve?”

“Deng had a clone on ice,” he snapped back. “That’s standard policy for security operations managers, and he got a virtual week of counselling and full-impact recreational leave before he was downloaded. He was fit for duty.”