What you got there?

Kalashnikov electromag. One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.

Wonder where he stole it from.

Who says it had to be stolen?

I do. These guys are pirates.

Abruptly, my palm is full of the rounded, voluptuous weight of the Kalashnikov butt. It gleams up at me in the low light of the corridor, and it’s begging to be squeezed.

Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No meth-head pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun.

I thrash forward another couple of steps, as an awful sense of my own failure to grasp the facts soaks into me. It’s as if I’m sucking up the viscous stuff in the corridor through tap roots in my legs and waterlogged boots, and I know that when I’m full it’s going to clog me to a violent stop.

And then I’ll swell and explode with it, like a bag of blood squeezed too hard.

You come in here again, boy, and I’ll crush you ‘til you fucking pop.

I feel my own eyes widen with shock. I peer through the sniperscope again and this time it’s not the woman with the hardware, and it’s not the cabin aboard Impaler.

It’s the kitchen.

And it’s my mother.

She’s standing, one foot in a bowl of soapy water, and leaning over to swab her leg with a blob of cheap farm-cultured hygisponge. She’s wearing a thigh-length wrap-around weed-gatherer’s skirt that’s split down one side and she’s naked to the waist, and she’s young, younger than I can normally remember her. Her breasts hang long and smooth, like fruit, and my mouth aches with a trace memory of tasting them. She looks sideways and down at me then, and smiles.

And he slams into the room from another door that fleeting recall tells me leads out onto the wharf. Slams into the room, and slams into her like something elemental.

You cunt, you conniving fucking cunt.

With the shock of it, again, my eyes crank, and I’m suddenly standing at the threshold. The sniperscope veil is gone, this is now and real. It takes me the first three blows to move. Backhander with full swing, it’s a blow we’ve all had from him at one time or another, but this time he’s really letting go—she’s catapulted back across the kitchen into the table and falls, she gets up and he punches her down again and there’s blood, bright from her nose in a stray beam of sunlight through the blind, she struggles to get up, from the floor this time, and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out towards me, over the threshold, over my bare feet, and then it’s as if a ghost of myself stays at the door while the rest of me runs into the room and tries to get between them.

I’m small, probably not much more than five, and he’s drunk so the blow falls inaccurately. But it’s enough to knock me back out the door. Then he comes and stands over me, hands braced clumsily on his knees, breathing heavily through a slack mouth.

You come in here again boy, and I’ll crush you ‘til you fucking pop.

He doesn’t even bother to close the door as he goes back to her.

But as I sit there in a useless heap, beginning to cry, she reaches out across the floor and shoves at the doorjamb with her hand, so it swings closed on what’s about to happen.

Then only the sound of blows, and the closed door receding.

I flounder through the canted corridor, chasing the door as the last light squeezes through the crack, and the weeping in my throat modulates upward towards a ripwing scream. A tidal rage is rising in me, and I’m growing with it,

I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door,

I’ll get there before he finally walks out on us all, disappears out of our lives and

I’ll make him disappear, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands are weapons, and the viscous slop is draining away and I hit the door like a swamp panther, but it makes no difference, it’s been closed too long, it’s solid and the impact reverberates through me like a stunblast and—

Oh, yeah. Stunblast.

So it’s not a door it’s—

—the dockside, and my face was crushed against it, sticky in a little pool of spittle and blood where I’d apparently bitten my tongue as I went down.

It’s not an uncommon outcome with stunners.

I coughed and choked on a throatful of mucus. Spat it out, took a rapid damage inventory and wished I hadn’t. My whole body was a jarring assemblage of trembling and ache from the stunblast. Nausea clawed at my bowels and the pit of my stomach, my head felt light and filled with starry air. The side of my face throbbed where the rifle butt had hit me. I lay for a moment getting it all back under some kind of control, then peeled my face away from the dock and heaved my neck up like a seal. It was a short, abortive movement. My hands were locked behind my back with some kind of webbing, and I couldn’t see much above ankle height.

Warm throb of active bioweld around my wrists. It gave so as not to maim hands held cuffed for long periods, it would dissolve like warm wax when you poured the right enzyme on it, but you could no more wriggle out of it than you could pull your own fingers off.

Pressure on my pocket brought home an expected truth. They’d taken the Tebbit knife. I was unarmed.

I retched and brought up the thin leavings of an empty stomach. Fell back and tried hard not to get my face in it. I could hear blaster fire from a long way off, and, faintly, what sounded like laughter.

A pair of boots splashed past in the wet. Stopped and came back.

“He’s coming right back round,” someone said, and whistled. “Tough little motherfucker. Hey, Vidaura, did you say you trained this guy?”

No reply. I heaved up again and succeeded in rolling onto my side.

Blinked dazedly up at the form standing over me. Vlad Tepes looked down out of a clearing sky that had almost given up on rain. The look on his face was serious and admiring, and he stood absolutely still as he watched me.

No trace of his former meth-head twitchiness to be seen.

“Good performance,” I croaked at him.

“Liked it, huh?” He grinned. “Had you fooled, right?”

I ran my tongue around my teeth and spat out some blood mingled with vomit. “Yeah, I thought Murakami had to be fucking cracked to use you. So what happened to the original Vlad?”

“Ah, well.” He made a wry face. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I know. How many more of you are there? Apart from your gorgeous-breasted psychosurgical specialist, that is.”

He laughed easily. “Yeah, she said she caught you looking. Beautiful piece of meat, isn’t it. You know, the last thing Liebeck wore before that was a Limon cable athlete’s sleeve. Flat as a board. A year down the line and she still can’t make up her mind if she’s pleased or pissed off about the change.”

“Limon, huh? Limon, Latimer.”

“That’s right.”

“Home of cutting-edge deCom.”

He grinned. “All starting to make sense, is it?”

It isn’t easy to shrug when you’re cuffed behind your back and flat to the floor. I did my best. “I saw the Tseng gear in her cabin.”

“Damn, so you weren’t looking at her tits.”

“No, I was,” I admitted. “But you know how it is. Nothing peripheral is ever lost.”

“That is the racking truth.”

“Mallory.”

We both looked towards the shout. Todor Murakami was striding along the dock from the direction of the wet bunker. He was unarmed apart from the Kalashnikov at his hip and the knife on his chest. Soft rain fell around him with a sparkle in it from the brightening sky.

“Our renegade’s sitting up and spitting,” said Mallory, gesturing at me.

“Good. Now, since you’re the only one who can get that crew of yours to do anything in a co-ordinated fashion, why don’t you go and sort them out. There are still bodies at the brothel end with stacks intact, I saw them on my way through. There may even be living witnesses hiding down there for all I know. I want a final sweep, no one left alive, and I want every stack melted to slag.” Murakami gestured disgustedly. “Jesus fuck, they’re pirates, you’d think they could manage that. Instead of which, most of them are playing at setting the panthers loose and using them for target practice. Just listen to it.”