"The fuck he won't," Vic said, looking down at her.

The punk's name was Alice Nylon, she was eight years old and wore a blue plastic rainslicker buttoned up to the neck. Cafe elec-trique rotted Alice's front teeth before she was seven, giving her an interesting speech defect. She enjoyed cookery, aquacise sessions at the local pool, and in her spare time was studying to do her own accountancy. "Vic," she told him, "you would not believe the raid we had. No, really! Right here at the Semiramide Club." She shook her head in disbelief, slowly from side to side. "Those losers from Site Crime, all over us like a cheap holo of the Kefahuchi Tract. That guy who looks like Albert Einstein? We had to be tuff, Paulie said, and not do what comes naturally. We had to keep a tight rein."

"I wish I'd seen that, Alice," Vic said politely.

Alice shrugged. She was a professional. It was nothing to her.

"We would of iced them, Vic, but what do you do?" She gave him her tired, raddled little smile. "So maybe it would be best if you waited here? For Paulie?"

Vic said OK and went over to one of the tables.

"Hey, Vic," Alice called after him. "This morning I cooked brownies on my own!"

Vic hated the Semiramide.

As a storefront it was an insult to the intelligence.

It wasn't much of a joint either.

The instant you walked in you knew Paulie DeRaad made his money elsewhere. There were forty tables, each to seat four, in a circular high-ceiling space originally the premises of a predictable alien technology scam calling itself FUGA-Orthogen. (This scam founded itself on the ownership of three mining machines parked above some unknown gamma-emitter in Radio Bay. At best guess they'd been there one million years already, and no one knew how to operate them. "What those jockeys were going to dig up was also a little unclear," Paulie used to say with a faint smile. "So we had to let them go.") When he moved in he had the walls cal-cimined white and illuminated with selected UV frequencies. Paulie liked high-end light because it reminded him of his glory days. Holograms floated about, advertising product; Monas floated about, taking commissions for the back room where people could be more comfortable. Paulie's customers could eat, they could play dice a little. He had a band so they could listen to music. Paulie's only major proviso, they should dress well: his was a weakness, he completely acknowledged, for the glitterati.

Vic bought a drink.

To pass the time, he pieced together the visiting card his ex-client had left him when he threw her out of Black Cat White Cat. It puzzled him that a tourist would keep an apartment in Saudade-a Hot Walls address was too genteel to be cheap, not gentrified enough to be corporate.

It was seven by then, and the joint was beginning to fill, mainly with couples who would get a cocktail before they went on elsewhere. Seven-ten, Vic was surprised to see Antoyne Messner walk into the Semiramide and head for the tables at the back. "Antoyne!" he called, but though the fat man acknowledged him with a nod, he didn't come over. Instead, he sat down with the gun-punks and they all threw dice together. "Well, fuck you, Fat Antoyne," Vic said to himself. Just then the office door opened, and Paulie DeRaad's voice was heard calling:

"Hey, Vic! You incompetent fuckhead! Where are you?"

Paulie DeRaad was younger than Vic Serotonin. He had a sharp nose, a shock of white-blond hair that went back in the famous

"widow's peak" of his service years, highlights of which sometimes played as holograms in the main room of the Semiramide Club.

Paulie was at Cor Caroli, fourteen years old. Later he was one of the three people who got out alive from El Rayo X after its orbital collision with the Nastic heavy cruiser Touching the Void. Since then he had been wiry and intense and bunched-up, and when he became excited the skin of his face would seem to get thinner and shinier and the blood would seem to lie too close to the surface. This was a legacy of radiation burns, and a general ablative thinning of his skin which he didn't have repaired and wore like a badge. Paulie never stopped. He liked everything. He wanted everything. That, at least, was the first impression he gave you: behind that, you sensed almost immediately, his plan was to stay alive and prosper.

"You want to take a look at this?" Paulie asked Vic.

He meant his office, which was in worse condition than his club. The air smelled of ionisation and char, the furniture was strewn about. There had been some kind of fight in there. It was a small room for that. Worse for Paulie, though, Aschemann's team had brought in equipment that went through his shadow operators as if they were a wooden filing cabinet. So now they were in the ceiling corners, folded up so tight across themselves it would take days to get them down again. They were in shock. They felt violated. They had nothing left to disclose. Paulie looked bad too. He was sweating, and his face had gone a hard, meaty colour.

"Do you know anything about this?"

Vic said he didn't.

"Well, fuck, Vic, you ought to."

Vic went and found a chair, which he tipped the right way up so he could sit down. This gesture allowed Paulie DeRaad to sit down too, and wipe his face. "Some new kind of artefact is coming out the site," he said, "this is Aschemann's story. He has us in the frame for it." He put his fingers in his mouth then took them out again and stared at them. "Look in my mouth, Vic, tell me if my gums are bleeding."

"Fuck off, Paulie."

DeRaad laughed. "I nearly got you, though, Vic. You were halfway out the seat." He was calming down, looking amused. He was enjoying his life again. He said, "You know this joint they call the Cafe Surf?"

"I never heard of it," Vic said.

"Hey, you can talk to me, Vic, I'm your friend."

If Vic was worried about nanocam coverage, he said, there was no need. Site Crime's equipment was a disgrace. It was ten years old. It was insanely expensive to run. Ninety per cent of the time it was out of service. Paulie had EMC cover anyway, he implied. "You're invisible, you go anywhere with me." Vic, who until that moment hadn't been remotely worried, stared at him, then shrugged.

"Is that why you brought me here?"

Paulie stopped looking amused.

"No," he said. "There's something I want you to see." He got to his feet. "Well, come on," he said. "Do you think I keep it here?"

"I wouldn't know, Paulie."

DeRaad called for his rickshaw girl. He winked at Vic. "We're not going far, but why should we walk?" The evening had turned chilly. Marine airs swept through midtown, condensing out on the street furniture, the rickshaw shafts. You could hear service work going on in the military yards. Every so often a K-ship fired up and went for the parking orbit at Mach 40, capturing everything from Straint to the Corniche in its brutal torch glare, varnishing the side of Paulie DeRaad's sharp face so that for a second you had the illusion you could see right down into the musculature. Paulie hung out the rickshaw. He loved all of that military stuff. "Look at the fucker, Vic! Just look at it!" You had to smile at Paulie, a bottle-rocket going off could put him in a good mood.

"Hey," he told the rickshaw girl, who was running up hard into her shafts, "you needn't kill yourself over this."

"I ain't got but the one pace, Paulie."

"Your funeral, kid," he advised her. "It's just down here," he said to Vic Serotonin.

Paulie had bolt-holes all over Saudade. This one was a bleak single room off Voigt Street in the noncorporate hinterland, no different from the rest except Paulie kept a military cot there, which he always made up himself; along with a few things he valued from his vacuum commando days. He also ran some of his communications through it, via the various FTL uplinkers and orbital routers which made him nationwide. As soon as he opened the door, a foul smell came out. It was like shit, urine and standing water.