She nodded at the door. “Get them anywhere on Kompcho wharf for a couple of hundred a crate.”

“Tempting. Bit rough on the other guests, though.”

A shrug. I grinned.

“Man, wearing that thing’s really pissing you off, isn’t it. Come on, we’ll break the trail somewhere else. Let’s get out of here.”

We went down canted plastic stairs, found a side exit and slipped into the street without checking out. Back into the pulsing flow of deCom commerce and stroll. Groups of sprogs clowning around on corners for attention, crew packs ambling along in the subtly integrated fashion I’d started to notice at Drava. Men, women and machines carrying hardware. Command heads. Dealers of knocked-off chemicals and small novelty devices working from laid-out plastic sheets that shimmered in the sun. The odd religious maniac declaiming to passing jeers. Street entertainers aping the local trends for laughs, running cheap holo storytell and cheaper puppet shows, collection trays out for the sparse shower of near-exhausted credit chips and the hope that not too many spectators would fling the totally exhausted variety. We cut back and forth in it for a while, surveillance evasion habit on my part and a vague interest in some of the acts.

“—the blood curdling story of Mad Ludmila and the Patchwork Man—”

“—hardcore footage from the deCom clinics! See the latest in surgery and body testing to the limits, ladies and gentlemen, to the very limits—”

“—the taking of Drava by heroic deCom teams in full colour—”

“—God—”

“—pirated full sense repro. One hundred per cent guaranteed genuine! Josefina Hikari, Mitzi Harlan, Ito Marriott and many more. Get wet with the most beautiful First Family bodies in surroundings that—”

“—deCom souvenirs. Karakuri fragments—”

On one corner, a listing illuminum sign said weapons in kanjified Amanglic lettering. We pushed through curtaining strung with thousands of minute shells and into the air-conditioned warmth of the emporium.

Heavy-duty slug throwers and power blasters were mounted on walls alongside blown-up holo schematics and looping footage of battle joined with mimints in the bleak landscapes of New Hok. Reefdive ambient music bumped softly from hidden speakers.

Behind a high counter near the entrance, a gaunt-faced woman with command head hair nodded briefly at us and went back to stripping down an ageing plasmafrag carbine for the sprog who seemed to want to buy it.

“Look, you yank this back as far as it’ll go and the reserve load drops. Right? Then you’ve got about a dozen shots before you have to reload. Very handy in a firefight. You go up against those New Hok karakuri swarms, you’re going to be grateful you’ve got that to fall back on.”

The sprog muttered something inaudible. I wandered about, looking for weapons you could conceal easily while Sylvie stood and scratched irritably at her headscarf. Finally the sprog paid up and left with his purchase slung under one arm. The woman turned her attention to us.

“See anything you like?”

“Not really, no.” I went up to the counter. “I’m not shipping out. Looking for something that’ll do organic damage. Something I can wear to parties, you know.”

“Oho. Fleshkiller, huh.” The woman winked. “Well, that’s not as unusual as you’d think round here. Let’s see now.”

She swung out a terminal from the wall behind the counter and punched up the datacoil. Now that I looked closely, I saw that her hair was lacking the central cord and some of the thicker associated tresses. The rest hung lank and motionless against her pallid skin, not quite hiding a long, looping scar across one corner of her forehead. The scar tissue gleamed in the light from the terminal display. Her movements were stiff and stripped of the deCom grace I’d seen in Sylvie and the others.

She felt me looking and chuckled without turning from the screen.

“Don’t see many like me, eh? Like the song says—see the deCom stepping lightly. Or not stepping at all, right? Thing is, the ones like me, I guess we don’t generally like to hang around Tek’to and be reminded what it was like to be whole. Got family, you go back to them, got a hometown you go back to it. And if I could remember if I had either or where it was, then I’d go.” She laughed again, quietly, like water burbling in a pipe. Her fingers worked the datacoil. “Fleshkillers. Here we go. How about a shredder? Ronin MM86. Snub-barrelled shard blaster, turn a man to porridge at twenty metres.”

“I said something I could wear.”

“So you did. So you did. Well, Ronin don’t make much smaller than the 86 in the monomol range. You want a slug gun maybe?”

“No, the shredder’s good, but it’s got to be smaller than that. What else have you got?”

The woman sucked at her upper lip. It made her look like a crone.

“Well, there are some of the Old Home brands as well—H&K, Kalashnikov, General Systems. It’s mostly pre-owned, see. Sprog trade-ins for mimint smasher gear. Look. Do you a GS Rapsodia. Scan resistant and very slim, straps flat under clothing but the butt’s automould. Reacts to body heat, swells to fit your grip. How’s that?”

“What’s it ranged at?”

“Depends on dispersal. Tightened up I’d say you could take down a target at forty, fifty metres if your hands don’t shake. On widespread, you don’t get much range at all, but it’ll clean out a room for you.”

I nodded. “How much?”

“Oh, we can come to some arrangement on that.” The woman winked clumsily. “Is your friend buying too?”

Sylvie was on the other side of the emporium, a half dozen metres away.

She heard and glanced across at the datacoil.

“Yeah, I’ll take that Szeged squeeze gun you’re listing there. Is that all the ammunition you’ve got for it?”

“Ah … yes.” The older woman blinked at her, then back at the display.

“But it’ll take a Ronin SPo load too, they made them compatible. I can throw in two or three clips if you—”

“Do that.” Sylvie met my eyes with something in her face I couldn’t read.

“I’ll wait outside.”

“Good idea.”

No one spoke again until Sylvie had brushed through the shell curtains and out. We both stared after her for a couple of moments.

“Knows her datacode,” chirped the woman finally.

I looked at the lined face and wondered if there was anything behind the words. As a blatant demonstration of the deCom power her head had been scarfed to disguise, Sylvie reading detail off the datacoil at distance pretty much screamed for attention. But it wasn’t clear what capacity this other woman’s mind was running on, or if she cared about anything much beyond a quick sale. Or if she’d even remember us in a couple of hours time.

“It’s a trick,” I said weakly. “Shall we, um, talk about price?”

Out in the street, I found Sylvie stood at the edges of a crowd that had gathered in front of a holoshow storyteller. He was an old man, but his hands were nimble on the display controls and a synth-system taped to his throat modulated his voice to fit the different characters of his tale. The holo was a pale orb full of indistinct shapes at his feet. I heard the name Quell as I tugged at Sylvie’s arm.

“Jesus, you think you could have been a bit more fucking obvious in there?”

“Ssh, shut up. Listen.”

“Then Quell came out of the house of the belaweed merchant and she saw a crowd had gathered on the wharfside and were shouting and gesturing furiously. She couldn’t see very clearly what was happening. Remember, my friends, this was on Sharya where the sun is a violent actinic glare and—”

“And where there’s no such thing as belaweed,” I muttered in Sylvie’s ear.

“Sssh.”

“—so she squinted and squinted but, well.” The storyteller set aside his controls and blew on his fingers. In the holodisplay, his Quell figure froze and the scene around her began to dim. “Perhaps I will end here today. It is very cold and I am no longer a young man, my bones—”