Gunwitch: Rebirth

A Gunwitch Novel

By Niall Teasdale

Copyright 2016 Niall Teasdale

Amazon Kindle Edition

Contents

Foreword

Part One: Utopia

Part Two: Rotten Apple

Part Three: Dead Tomorrow

Part Four: Damnation

Epilogue

Foreword

Manchester, UK, December 2016.

Long, long ago, long enough that it really does seem like a galaxy far, far away, there was an online multiplayer game called City of Heroes. It was the best MMO ever made! Okay, so I may be exaggerating a little. Like every game, it had its problems, but out of all the online games I’ve played, CoH was the one I would keep coming back to and that was down to one thing: the role-playing community.

One of the European servers, Union, quickly developed a nightly, public RP forum. Each evening, people would meet at the foot of a huge statue, the Galaxy Girl statue, in the Galaxy City area and just pretend that they really were superheroes (or their alter egos) gathering to provide support for each other in a city full of crime. People created plots around their characters and others interacted in those plots. To support the role play, people would post material on the game’s forums, including stories about their characters. A lot of good writing came out of that group. At least two published authors emerged from it, that I know of.

I have used elements of several of my characters from the Galaxy Girl meets in my books. Twilight from the Ultrahumans series is heavily based on Nitoichi from CoH, including her boyfriend, Jacob. Aneka borrows from stories I wrote about a future version of Nitoichi, and Anastasia the pirate queen from the Aneka stories was a direct lift of another character.

However, Nitoichi had a ‘sister’ who was developed when the Going Rogue supplement came out, Gunwitch. I’ve used tiny bits of Gunwitch in other characters, but I was recently reminded of her and I thought it would be interesting to give her a makeover. She was always one of my favourites, her and Nitoichi. The original character was very much a child of the world she was created for. I can’t use her exactly as she was, but I’ve taken the essential elements and transposed her over into a new world where I can tell her story to a broader audience. Hopefully, new readers will find her as interesting as I always did back in the day.

I don’t normally do dedications, and no change here, but for once I’m going to acknowledge a few people without whom this book wouldn’t exist. The Galaxy Girl Roleplayers, all of them, helped to shape Gunwitch in numerous ways. The creators, programmers, and community support team for City of Heroes obviously helped: there would be no Gunwitch without them. More, without all those people, I probably wouldn’t be writing books for a living. Thank you, all of you.

Now, on with the story…

Part One: Utopia

Utopia City, North-West Enclave, 22/10/83.

A figure, tall, muscular, and dressed in a dark-blue boiler suit, appeared from behind a dumpster, the shotgun in his hands rising to take aim. An immediate threat, unarmoured, range two point one metres, direct fire required, expanding warhead recommended. Annette raised her right arm, barely seeming to aim, before she fired off two rounds which reduced the man’s face to bloody pulp.

As she took a step forward, a second man emerged further down the alley. His threat assessment was lower since his shotgun was less effective at four point five metres, but he was wearing body armour. At this range, Annette hardly lifted her left-hand pistol before firing. Each round began trailing a white mist as it flew, curling up from its low initial track to strike the gunman’s chest. High-density penetrators punched through the man’s vest and he fell backward.

Annette’s eyes scanned the environment as she continued down the alley. Thermographic imaging detected a humanoid heat signature behind a large cardboard box, and Annette put three rounds through it before moving on. A figure appeared in a window above her, and she put one of her bullets through his eye. As she stepped out of the alley and onto a more open street, a squad of four gunmen broke cover from behind some parked vehicles. Annette lifted her weapons and swung them in a wide arc in front of her. A hail of bullets streaming white smoke fanned out to take down the entire group.

As the last of them hit the tarmac, a horn sounded and the lights came up, and Utopia City at night became a set, part of the Utopia Defence Force’s urban combat training facility. Clapping sounded from Annette’s right as the blare of the horn died, and she turned to smile at her father and Captain Latham.

‘Did I not say this was something you had to see, James?’ Charles Barrington said, enthusiasm ringing in his voice. ‘Annette designed the entire system, had the installation done herself, and she’s even quite effective at demonstrating it. If I do say so myself, obviously.’

Latham laughed. ‘You’ve a right to play the proud father. The system seems to work exceptionally well, Annette. How easily can it be fitted to others?’

‘Well,’ Annette said, lifting one of her pistols, ‘the weapons themselves have some novel features which could be utilised in more or less any projectile weapon, but for the whole thing… The cybernetics need to be customised to the individual user, especially the nanotech components. It’s not something that can be used as standard issue. I was thinking of it as more like an addition to the packages you deploy to Special Actions Unit officers.’

‘Which is why I came to you, James,’ Charles said.

Latham nodded. ‘It looks like something we could use.’ His eyes scanned over Annette appreciatively. ‘Have you considered joining the SAU yourself, Annette?’

Charles was speaking before Annette could give her own answer. ‘Oh, Annette’s more of a backroom girl. Let’s head back to your office and talk deployment.’

Latham allowed himself to be led away and neither man noticed the frown on Annette’s face. She did not see herself as a ‘backroom girl.’ Her brother was out there fighting the good fight. Why should she be forced to stay out of it?

Turning and starting for the beginning of the course, Annette swept her arms to her back and the streamlined pod she was wearing. Robot limbs extended quickly, replacing the spent magazines with full ones.

‘Can we reset?’ she called out to the range technicians. ‘I’d like to go again.’ She was not entirely happy with target acquisition and she only had one more day to perfect things. The lights dimmed in the room and she turned, waiting for her first target.

24/10/83.

Annette slid her shades down her nose and watched her would-be suitor’s expression shift. The changes were subtle and complex, but she had software assistance in detecting and analysing them: mild revulsion, more surprise, and a sharp spike of fear. She always forgot to turn the analysis off when she went out for an evening, and she always regretted not doing so before the night was out.

‘Uh, sorry,’ the young man said. ‘I, uh, thought you were someone else.’

Annette had heard that one a lot in the last six months. Imagination was not a strong point in the minds of modern horny twenty-somethings. ‘That’s okay,’ she said and turned her head away.

In the mirrored surface at the back of the bar where she was sitting, her reflection looked back at her through eyes which were a uniform white across their entire surface. That was what had caused the sudden change of heart in the boy. Annette pushed her glasses back up to hide her eyes. There were no obvious outward signs that she was a cyborg, until someone saw her eyes. Cyborgs in general got the same reaction, but Annette had a suspicion that her particular implants made it a little worse. Someone had once told her that the eyes are the windows of the soul, in which case Annette figured she had lost both.

Except that that was wrong: she had lost nothing, she had traded them away, done it on purpose. Six months earlier, she had voluntarily gone into hospital and had the cybernetics fitted so that she could test out the combat system she had designed. And she had been so happy when the bandages came off…

12/4/83.

Annette sat up in bed, waiting patiently for… No, that was a lie. Her patience had long since dried up and it was a good thing that Doctor Camberwell would be along soon to remove the bandages, because if he had not been, she was getting to the point of ripping the things off herself.

Except that that was not entirely true either. She was confident of her design, confident of the job she had done manufacturing the components, but there was still an edge of nervousness tickling at her stomach. Something could have gone wrong and, if that was the case, she was going to be blind until the problem was fixed. Fixing it was going to be difficult if she could not see. The problem would almost certainly be in the nanotech she had used to do the nerve splices. She had modelled it, tested it on animal nerve tissue, done everything she could to be sure there would be no problems, but she might have overlooked something…

Further descent into disaster speculation was stopped by the opening of the door to her room and Camberwell’s voice. ‘Are we ready to see again, Miss Barrington?’ The fact that he was using her last name suggested that he was not alone: Annette thought they were past that, but probably not in front of…

‘I certainly hope so.’ Her father’s voice, carrying something of a menacing edge. Her father had always been a little overprotective. That edge probably explained the slightly forced joviality she had heard in the doctor’s voice.

‘A little impatient, to be honest,’ Annette said.

‘Then we won’t keep you waiting,’ Camberwell said. ‘Nurse, if you would…’ There was a slight pause and then Annette felt scissors being applied over her right temple. ‘Now remember,’ Camberwell went on, ‘like any cybernetic replacement, there is likely to be a period of adjustment.’

‘I know, Doctor,’ Annette replied. She did know. Just as she knew that the statement was more a reminder for her father.

‘Much of the image we see is constructed in the brain. It will take a short time for your brain to adjust to the new input.’

‘The research I did suggested five to six days to fully adjust to the normal spectrum vision. Up to a month for the full range of features.’

Camberwell forced out a chuckle. ‘I’m sure you’ve researched it thoroughly.’

‘A lot of research in the neurology of vision was done before the war,’ Annette explained as the thick bandages were wound off her face. ‘There were some particularly interesting studies using volunteers fitted with goggles that inverted the image coming into their eyes. Generally, they saw everything the right way up after five days of constant use.’

‘You won’t be able to see for another four days?’ Charles asked.

‘I’ll be able to see,’ Annette corrected, ‘but there might be some anomalies. Uh, I might get a little dizzy because the image I’m seeing doesn’t quite match what I expect to see. Or there might be some weird synchronisation problems with my other senses. It’s quite possible that I’ve changed the timing for visual signal transmission to my brain and that could throw a few things off. But brains are adaptable. Mine will work it out.’ The pressure around Annette’s head slackened entirely: the bandages were gone.

‘Quite so,’ Camberwell agreed. ‘Now, open your eyes.’

For long enough that Annette’s stomach was starting to sink, there was nothing. The darkness continued and she forced herself to wait, knowing that the processors in her new eyeballs would take a second or two to fire up for the first time.

‘Annette?’ Charles asked. There was concern in his voice this time, which was better than menace.

Pinpricks of light appeared, spreading until she was seeing a greyscale blur. Annette’s eyes narrowed as she tried to make out shapes in the snow.

‘Annette?’ Charles repeated, and the menace was back.

Colours appeared. Bright flares of blue, green, and red, blending at the edges and entirely not what Annette expected to see in the room. ‘Uh,’ Annette said. But the colours were still shifting, normalising. ‘I think…’ With a lurch, everything seemed to resolve into normality and Annette leaned back. ‘Woah!’ She grinned, looking around at the three people in the room. Turning her head made the image ripple and she giggled.

‘Annette?’ Charles said again, but his lips were starting to turn up at the corners.

‘I can see!’ Annette exclaimed. ‘I can see all of you, and the room.’ She lifted her hand, spreading her fingers and turning it over. Again, the motion caused some ripples at the edges, but that effect was already diminishing. ‘I can see my hand. The processors are still trying to fully integrate all the receptors, but I expected that.’ She looked at her father. ‘It’s working. So far anyway.’

‘That’s good,’ Charles said, and then frowned as Annette giggled again.

‘Sorry. I was right about the synchronisation thing. Your lips are moving just ahead of me hearing the words. Unless that’s normal and I’ve never noticed before.’

‘I should imagine not,’ Camberwell said. He smirked and nodded as Annette let out another giggle. ‘But that will be a temporary issue.’

‘And in the meantime,’ Annette said, ‘I’ll just have to learn not to giggle at everyone who talks to me. Uh, Poppa, why don’t you go grab a coffee or something. I’d just like a few minutes to get used to this and let the electronics settle.’ With a judder, a window opened in her visual field, a semi-transparent overlay with text scrolling through it: her implanted computer system was working through its boot sequence. ‘Yeah, just a few minutes.’

‘I… can do that,’ Charles said. His smile looked a little forced.

‘The nurse can keep an eye on me for a while, I’m sure.’

Camberwell nodded. ‘I’ll let you settle and come back to run a few tests in an hour.’

The nurse – her name badge, which Annette could now see, said her name was Phelps – adjusted Annette’s pillows. ‘Your father is a little intense, isn’t he?’ she said.

‘He’s… just a little overprotective,’ Annette said.

‘Something high up in DoPI, isn’t he?’

The Department of Public Information was one of the more important bureaus in the enclave’s government and Annette’s father was indeed placed quite highly in it. ‘He heads up the UDF information unit. People tend to be a little scared of him, but he’s been no end of help in getting all this organised. I’d still have normal eyes without him.’

‘Well… How are the new ones doing? They look… unusual.’

‘They’re designed to increase the amount of surface area accepting photons. You collect light through your pupil, but I collect it across the whole surface. And I collect a lot more wavelengths. I can see pretty much everything from infrared to gamma rays. Not that I’m doing that now because I’m not used to the normal spectrum, but it’s getting there. I was getting some distortion at the edges of moving objects. That’s gone. Everything looks… Well, how I remember it looking.’

‘What about details?’ Phelps held up a magazine.

Annette’s eyes flicked over it. It was a week-old copy of a fashion magazine she had never once opened in her life. ‘Looks fine, but… Could you take it over to the corner by the door and hold it up?’ Phelps raised an eyebrow, but she did as she was asked. Annette focused on the magazine cover, digital zoom engaged, and brought the image into sharp, close-up focus. She fixed her eyes on the corner and grinned. ‘I can read the numbers over the barcode.’ Lifting her head, she wavered a little as the zoom wound back. ‘It’s really working.’

Phelps smiled. ‘Should I give your father the good news?’

‘Uh… Let’s let him finish his coffee. A few more minutes of peace would be kind of nice.’

24/10/83.

No one had mentioned that people would look at her differently. On some level, she had been aware that it would happen. People had been distrustful of cyborgs since before the city was built. There were reports of bandits outside the walls, some with obvious cybernetics. Inside, the cyborgs in the SAU were nothing like those mad, diseased berserkers, but they went places others feared to go, fighting things no one else dared to fight, and normal folks were just a little scared of them.

Now, when people saw Annette’s eyes, they assumed she was SAU, which was a double blow. Her father would not even let her apply for the unit. She got the fear, even if it came with a hint of respect she did not deserve, without any of the other benefits, like a chance to do some good with what she had created.

Annette turned on her stool and looked out across the floor of the club. She had come out to celebrate the success of her test runs in the UDF simulator. But she had forgotten how lonely it was out in the real world when everyone was scared of you. The only person who was not scared of her was her friend Mariel, but Mariel did not do clubs. Well, there was Mariel and her father, but… no. And there were people who were actually in the SAU, but she did not know any of them and to them she would be a pretender, a fake.

The club catered to the younger set, eighteen to no more than thirty. It was dimly lit, kind of nihilistic in a way, but with bright neons and a large, open floor over which coloured spotlights danced along with the people. Annette had found the place exciting six months ago. She was an attractive girl. She knew this and had occasionally been known to use it. Her father had the good sense to realise that a woman her age needed to let off a little steam now and then, and since she was usually too involved with her project to fix on any particular boy for too long, Charles had never objected when she spent a night away from home.

From the age of six, Annette’s passion had been gymnastics. This had continued into her teens, trailing off as she sought to spend more and more time on her studies, but she had never given up on the exercise because you needed to be fit if you were going to fight the Insurgency and other enemies of the enclave.

The other reason for her change of pastime had been her shifting body. She had been something of a late developer, always pretty, but slow to get going, and then she had shot up, developing long legs and a respectable bust. The combination had thrown her balance off in ways she had found discouraging at the time. Combined with her desire to read physics books, gymnastics had taken the hit. She was still fit, still pretty. Some had said she was beautiful though she thought her jawline and nose were too long, her features too angular. She also considered her hair uninteresting. It was long and a slightly red shade of brown. She generally kept it pulled back into a ponytail, out of her way. She had had brown eyes with a rather exotic tilt to them, but no one looked at the angles of her eyes as exotic now. She had not had a date in six months.

Sinking her drink in one go, Annette got to her feet and started for the exit. Her path took her around the dance floor and past some tables hidden away under the mezzanine and in perpetual semi-darkness. Her eyes turned the gloom into little more than an inconvenience, even through her shades, and it was as she walked past one of the tables that she heard someone talking.

‘…crazy sheep logos all over. I’m telling you, the Insurgency is all over the old docks in Tacoma.’

Annette kept walking, but she filed the comment away. A silent command brought up a map display of Utopia City and she was examining it when she heard another voice, louder, and apparently calling out in her direction. ‘Hey, babe, you going so soon? Why don’t you stay and have a dr–’ The suggestion cut off in a strangling sound as Annette turned on her heel, pulled off her glasses, and fixed the clubber with a blank stare. He opened his mouth, readying some dumb excuse or other.

‘Just… don’t. Don’t say whatever fatuous thing is floating into your head or I swear I will shoot you in the face.’ Annette turned, pushing her glasses back on and stalking away from the recoiling, more or less terrified man. Could this night get any better?

25/10/83.

Pain seared through Annette’s skull like a burning railroad spike. She fumbled blindly for the injector on her nightstand, found it, and jabbed it into her shoulder. Then she lay there and whimpered until she could no longer feel anything. The drug killed the pain, but it had the slight disadvantage of effectively shutting down her sense of touch along with her pain receptors.

She was on an array of drugs for the attacks. That was the emergency one, for when it came on at night. During the day, she could take a pill which increased her tolerance to pain, and that turned the agony into something bearable if it came while she was awake, and then there was another pill she could take to drown it further, but those tended to make her drowsy pretty much all the time and she did not like taking them. Then again, being unable to feel anything was hardly much better…

With her vision stabilised enough for her to make out her computer displays, she called up a diagnostic. Protein build-up around the optic nerve to her right eye. Her body, it seemed, did not like synthetic implants. She had a good immune system. Too good. Part of her cybernetics package was a nanomachine colony in her blood which had been designed to manage her healing process, accelerating it some. Her body could repair itself at least twice as fast as a typical human, but the colony was spending far too much of its time locating and dissolving her immune system’s attempts to neutralise the foreign material in her body.

A thought brought up the public instant messaging system and, sure enough, Mariel was awake and online. At three in the morning, Mariel was awake and using the net, but then Mariel often was. Annette selected her friend from the list and thought at the messaging app.

‘Hey, Mar. Burning it at both ends?’

Mariel: Aren’t I always? Another headache?

‘Another headache, yeah. They’re not going to go away until I get this rejection problem sorted out.’

Mariel: Did you check out those papers I found on neutral coatings?

‘I checked them. I need to look into getting the nanites to resurface my implants. What are you up to?’

Mariel: Cruising the net, seeing what’s out there.

Mariel was a consummate mistress of computers and networking. She had helped Annette with the software for her system. In fact, Mariel had written the entire AI behind the user interface. She claimed the publicly available ones were just not up to the task. Being stuck in a wheelchair with nothing to keep her occupied apart from the net, what she got up to sometimes worried Annette quite a lot.

‘You’re not looking in places you shouldn’t, are you? The UDF is–’

Mariel: There’s plenty to look at in public servers without digging around private ones. That’s where I found those articles on cybernetic rejection for you. I know what I’m doing, Annette.

‘Okay. I should try to get back to sleep while the painkiller is still working.’

Mariel: Night, Net.

Annette giggled at the nickname; Mariel loved that particular shortening of Annette’s name and she was the only person Annette allowed to shorten her name at all. ‘Goodnight, Mar.’

Closing all the windows in her vision field, Annette turned onto her side and closed her eyes.

~~~

Mariel Edmonton closed the chat window to Annette and turned to another open one. She typed: Another headache. Her implants are amazing, but they’re going to kill her if she doesn’t find a solution.

The person on the other end of the second window was not an entirely known entity, but she had expressed interest in Annette’s status.

FallenAngel: She’s resourceful and you’ve helped. I’m sure she’ll be okay. You’re sure you’re willing to continue the project?

They always referred to it as ‘the project’ on IM. You never knew who might be monitoring. Or, to be more precise, you had a damn good idea who and that they almost certainly were. Yes. I’ll start tomorrow.

FallenAngel: Be careful.

Mariel smiled. I’m always careful.

~~~

26/10/83.

Maybe it was not the best plan she had ever formulated, but it was a plan and she was going to go through with it. There were not actually that many buildings in the old docks, but there were a lot of containers, all stacked in rows where they had been left when the plagues had taken out so much of the world’s population. Doctor White had saved as many as he could from the war of diseases and the wars of guns which had come after; Annette could not understand why the Insurgency wanted to bring down a man like that, but there it was.

She had already found three of the ‘sheep’ graffiti. She had never seen a sheep in person, but she was fairly certain that the artist had been going for a stylised representation. That or he had never even seen a picture of a sheep. Whatever, each had come with a different slogan. The most obvious of those had been ‘Down with White!’ There had also been ‘Wake up, Sheep!’ and, more perplexingly, ‘Aries Has You!’ Annette was not sure what that last one was referring to and she was out of range of any of the city’s wireless networks to run a query. She seemed to be in the right place, however.

Reaching back, Annette felt her pistols slapped into her palms by her arming pod and ran diagnostic checks. Everything came back green. Time for some action. She started deeper into the container park.

The thought had occurred that she maybe should have dressed more appropriately. She had gone for basic black, a bodysuit she had bought for a costume party in university, and sneakers. Body armour might have been an idea. She had defences, but if it came down to close combat, she was going to be dodging. Still, if it came down to close combat, she had done something wrong. Her aim was to take down anyone she met before they could fight back. Her pistols were loaded with cryogenic rounds since she wanted them down, but not dead. The cryo rounds could kill someone – they were just less likely to than kinetic penetrators. Annette was rather proud of the chemistry behind the cryo warheads.

Infrared was, sadly, of little use. The big containers would block body heat and they were at ambient temperature. There was no moon. Thankfully, Annette’s eyes worked well at very low light levels. She worked her way through the rows of containers slowly, being careful to make as little noise as possible. That was how she made out the voices on the other side of one of the stacks.

‘Neither of you were followed?’ A woman’s voice which Annette had the weirdest feeling she knew, though it sounded as though it was muffled by something.

‘No one follows me.’ A young man, brash and overconfident.

‘You’re not invisible.’

‘I wasn’t followed, Angel. I know what I’m doing.’

‘I don’t believe anyone was following me either.’ Another woman, this one younger than the one called Angel.

‘Good,’ Angel said. ‘Reports?’

‘Reconnaissance is going pretty well,’ the male said. ‘It’s going to take a few more trips to be sure of the way in, but… I’m confident.’

‘I am less confident,’ the female said. ‘We have yet to find a way through the main security barriers that will not raise alarms across the entire facility.’

Well, they certainly sounded like they were Insurgency operatives. They were talking about some sort of attack on a secure facility. Annette almost giggled at the thought. Why did they even bother to try? Not one of their attacks had succeeded since Annette had started paying attention to the news. After a decade or more, you would think they would give up…

‘We’ll get in,’ the male said, his confidence showing. ‘We got into the power plant in May, didn’t we?’

‘Not that anyone was told about it,’ the female replied. ‘It’s discouraging, Angel. Their media management is too good.’

‘Don’t give up, Cheetah,’ Angel said. ‘This strike is important. If we can eliminate their supplies for just a week, we can turn thousands.’

So, the younger woman was Cheetah, and Annette had heard enough. These three needed to go down. There was a gap in the containers about ten metres ahead of her, so she headed for that. It was a little narrower than she might have liked, but she slipped through and emerged on the other side, checking down the row to be sure her targets were still there.

Two things hit her at the same time and neither seemed especially good. The trio had gone quiet. In fact, now she thought about it, she had not heard their voices for the last several seconds but had assumed that the distance was cutting out the sound. Then there was the fact that she could only see two of the three. The two women were there, but not the man. Well, two was better than none. Annette stepped clear of the containers and raised her pistols.

Something very solid and fairly heavy slammed into the back of Annette’s head. She saw stars and the ground rushing toward her face, but all she could think was that this was not a great way to demonstrate how she could fight the Insurgency.

‘You want me to slit her throat?’ The male’s voice. It sounded really far away.

‘No, Ghost.’ That was Angel. ‘Not this one.’

‘She’s SAU! She’ll–’

‘Does she really look like SAU to you? Have you ever seen an SAU operative work alone? No. We’ll put her out and take her somewhere she’ll be found. If you would stop tagging things in our meeting areas, we wouldn’t have problems like this.’ Something cold was pressed against Annette’s neck and there was a sharp hiss. ‘Now, I’ll take care of…’

The voices drifted away into oblivion along with Annette’s conscious mind.

~~~

Her father, of course, went ballistic. ‘What were you thinking of, Annette?! These people are killers! Murderers! You’ve no training. No idea what–’

‘So you do agree I should join the SAU,’ Annette interjected. ‘I thought it would take way more persuasion.’

‘I did not say that. I don’t want you out there. You could have been killed!’

‘But I wasn’t.’

‘You could have been.’

‘Then let me join the SAU so I’ll have training and backup.’

Charles frowned at his daughter, sitting there on an emergency room gurney with an ice pack pressed to the back of her skull. ‘You get this side of your personality from your mother,’ he said.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m determined. It’s not a bad trait.’

‘It can be… Very well, I’ll speak to Latham and see when the next induction course is happening.’

Annette grinned. ‘Thank you. I’m going to make myself some armour. I do learn from my mistakes.’

‘And that is something you do not get from your mother.’

27/10/83.

Annette had a headache in the morning, but it was the result of getting hit in the head, not anything to do with her implants. That made her unaccountably happy as she swallowed a pill, which would not make her drowsy or numb, and got on with the tasks of the day.

This included checking her mail and there was a surprise waiting in her mailbox. The message had no originating address and the backtrace of relays looked suspiciously false. That kind of thing was supposed to be impossible, but there it was. She ran a virus checker on it and got back a report indicating that it was plain text, no attachments, no danger. She opened it and found a single line of text.

Are you sure about the people you are fighting for?

Frowning, Annette read the line twice and then deleted the message. Yes, she was sure. Quite sure. Except…

Pulling up a search window, Annette ran a query for issues with the power grid in May. The top line gave her what she wanted. There had been a coolant issue with one of the fusion reactors in Tacoma in May. Three engineers had been commended for their quick thinking by Doctor White himself. Their actions had prevented a potentially dangerous incident, though there had been problems with supply in the region for a week.

But the conversation she had overheard implied that the Insurgency was responsible. They had no reason to lie. They had not known anyone else was listening. Annette shrugged: insurgents were deluded at the best of times.

Annette trashed the query results and pulled up a design app she had used before. She would get the basic design down and then consider materials. The bodysuit was a good basic idea, but maybe if she could make it up with a monocrystalline sublayer…

2/11/83.

There were Inquisitors lining the entrance hall of the White Tower complex, but Annette had expected that. Perhaps not so many of them, but she had expected them. They watched everyone entering the building, paying particular attention to the ones heading toward the large sign which proclaimed that UDFSAU induction was to be found beyond it. Inquisitors were generally more feared than any other type of cyborg, but so long as you did nothing wrong, you had nothing to fear from them.

Still, Annette kept her head down and walked through to the reception desk to present her ID card. The reception officer raised an eyebrow when he saw the result of the ID check, which made Annette wonder what he was seeing.

‘You’re Charles Barrington’s daughter?’ the man asked.

‘Yes, I am,’ Annette replied. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘Not at all. You’re flagged for immediate progression to basic training. Down the corridor, last door on the right.’

Annette took her ID back and set off in the direction he had indicated. She scanned around the others in the room as she went and realised that there were no obvious cyborgs among them. These were citizens coming in to volunteer for the SAU. If accepted, they would progress on to evaluation and then surgery for whatever role the UDF felt suited them. Annette had skipped that phase by putting in the cyborg parts herself.

There were already people in the room she had been sent to. Six people, all cyborgs of one form or another. There were four standard SAU builds, though Annette figured they might add a fifth if her own system worked well in combat. In the room, there were examples of each: two strength-enhanced Tanks, two weapon-equipped Gunners, a Speeder with his strangely designed digitigrade legs, and an Infiltrator. The last was a slim girl, difficult to tell from a normal human, though Annette’s enhanced vision showed her synthetic eyes by the variation in temperature.

Several of them looked at Annette as she walked in, probably wondering what an Infiltrator was doing in body armour and carrying a pair of pistols. Annette slipped her shades off and the looks of mild confusion continued. She figured she was going to get a lot of that, but the induction officer arrived right behind her so no one got a chance to ask her anything.

‘Right, settle down,’ the officer said, and Annette quickly took a seat behind everyone else. The room was far larger than it needed to be for the group. ‘I’m Sergeant Hobbs and I have the unfortunate duty of briefing you on the UDF’s Special Actions Unit, which you are joining, and making sure you’ve filled in all the appropriate forms.’ He dropped a bundle of papers on one of the desks. ‘Hand them out. Make sure everyone gets a copy. There should be a pen on everyone’s desk. Don’t leave with it.’

Annette leaned across to the next desk and picked up the pen from there. That was at least one person who had not listened.

‘While you’re filling in the forms,’ Hobbs went on, ‘I’ll be telling you what’s going to happen to you next. With one exception, you’ve all been through preselection and cybernetic enhancement. The exception is at the back there. She had the work done herself. Once we have all the pertinent details on those forms and you’ve had your basic briefing, you’ll be driven out to Camp Brinnon. That’s the main UDF training centre on the edge of the beautiful and panoramic Olympic range. There you will enjoy the fresh air, the fantastic vistas, the ten-mile runs, and the sound of live ammunition being fired at your head.’

The man sitting in front of Annette and, thankfully, to her right chuckled at the ‘joke.’ She was thankful he was not right in front of her because he was well over two metres tall and she doubted that she could have wrapped her arms around his chest. And that was before they had grafted on fully cybernetic limbs and a reinforced skeleton. The chuckle sounded as though it had begun somewhere five miles below him and rumbled its way up to the surface.

Hobbs ignored him. ‘Basic training and evaluation is three weeks. You will not get weekends off. Some of you will almost certainly wash out of the programme. It’s a tough course. It’s tough because the people you are going up against out there are tougher and, unlike our instructors, they will be trying to kill you. You will be fully familiarised with the factions you are likely to meet. To fill in time, I’ll give you a basic overview now.’

A screen lit up behind the sergeant showing a rag-tag bunch of people in street clothes, some of them fitted with cybernetics. ‘The Insurgency are our prime concern. These people have, for whatever reason, rejected the utopia Doctor White has built for us. They hide out in the Below and on farms outside the city. Their main pastime is attempting to disrupt city infrastructure, something they are very bad at, but their repeated attempts are an annoyance. They are armed with whatever cybernetics they can scrape together and pre-war caseless projectile weapons. Do not let this fool you: they can be dangerous, especially in the confined spaces you’ll find in the Below. They know those tunnels as well as the service robots and you do not. They will set traps and they may outnumber you in any given encounter. Policy is to capture for re-education where possible, terminate where not.’

The image changed to show another group of people in street clothes. The clothes tended to darker colours and more of a distressed style, and there seemed to be no cybernetics, but otherwise there was little difference. ‘This lot are called Zeroes, though not all these madmen are actually followers of Zero Sum. He’s the even madder man who gave them their name. If the insurgents want to disrupt, the Zeroes are all about destruction. All they want to do is destroy. There have been attempts to re-educate them, all resulting in failure. There is something fundamentally wrong with their brains. Orders are to terminate on sight.’

Another image, now of a mixture of civilians in street and business clothes. ‘Lastly, we have a group we have taken to calling the Cabal. We don’t know what they call themselves. We aren’t even sure how organised they are. They represent the truly criminal element in Utopia City. The Insurgency and the Zeroes mostly keep to the Below, but the Cabal hide in plain sight. They operate through legitimate businesses and private homes. They will steal anything worth stealing. Medical supplies and food shipments are a particular favourite. Again, capture if possible, but don’t be too sorry if you have to put them down. These people give scum a bad name. Questions?’

‘How do we find them to take them out?’ the big man in front of Annette asked.

‘Intelligence as received by the UDF will be passed to SAU operatives when available. Otherwise, use whatever sources you may have. Patrol the tunnels, grab an insurgent, and beat more information out of him. You look as though you would do well at that, Mister Cranfield.’ Cranfield gave another rumbling chuckle and Hobbs waited a beat to see whether anyone else would ask anything. ‘All right then. Finish up those forms and– You’ve finished yours, Miss Barrington?’

‘There wasn’t anything especially difficult on it,’ Annette replied, ‘and I write fast.’

Cranfield turned around to look at her. ‘Well, can you help me with mine then? I’m stuck on question two.’

Annette raised one of her already arched eyebrows. ‘That’s date of birth.’

‘Yeah, well, me and numbers have never really got on…’

Camp Brinnon.

Annette walked into her room, located her bunk, and collapsed face first onto the thin mattress. Kenya followed her in, made a grumbling noise, and then hoisted herself onto the upper bunk to do more or less the same. Kenya was the only other girl in their induction group so they had been given a room together.

‘I am right, aren’t I?’ Annette said. ‘That was incredibly boring.’

‘You are right,’ Kenya replied. Kenya was an odd sort of girl. Certainly one who limited herself to the minimum of words.

Annette rolled onto her back, the better to expound her frustration. ‘I mean, I’m going to go over my notes, but I think they told us more or less exactly what Sergeant Hobbs did, over and over again, adding “as far as we know” periodically. You’d think after all the time they’ve spent fighting these people, they would know more about them.’

‘You would.’

‘They didn’t mention the sheep or anything.’

Kenya’s sharply angular face appeared over the side of the bunk. ‘Sheep?’

‘They have this sort of logo thing. A sheep, and then they paint a slogan under it. I got the impression that they think we’re the sheep.’

‘Perhaps you should be giving the lectures.’

‘Huh. I don’t think so. Well… I’m not so sure about the “cobbled together cybernetics” thing either. The ones I saw–’

‘You have actually seen insurgents?’

‘Well, mostly heard, but I saw two and there was another with them. One of the two I saw had legs like a Speeder, and from the way they were talking, one of the others had the chameleon skin you’ve got. That’s two out of three with fairly advanced components.’

Kenya frowned. ‘Odd. Infiltrator cyberskin is supposed to be only used in SAU operatives. I think the same is true of Speeder legs.’

‘Well, I can think of one pretty gruesome solution for the legs. They could’ve taken them from a dead Speeder. Though it wouldn’t take much to build those legs just from observation. I think I could do it. The skin would be harder…’

‘Oh, so you actually designed your own cybernetics?’

‘Uh-huh. I had some help from a friend with the AI interface to the computer, but I did almost all the work. Designed it, built it. I didn’t actually install it, obviously. Then I designed my guns and the robot that reloads them for me. All the ammo is mine too.’

‘Then, what are you doing here?’

Annette grinned. ‘You mean I should be getting paid a lot by the UDF or something to design stuff for them? I hope they’ll adopt this system for the SAU. I wanted to serve. My brother’s in the UDF. He’s been out fighting to keep the enclave safe for… a while now.’ Nate had been gone for a long time. There were security considerations, but they had never heard from him. Not once. They would have been notified if he had been killed…

‘I also want to serve,’ Kenya said. ‘Tomorrow should be different.’

‘Oh yeah, fitness assessment. That should be a barrel of laughs.’

Olympic Mountains, 7/11/83.

‘I wonder when they’re going to teach us something,’ Annette mused as she picked her way through the forest.

‘Isn’t this teaching us something?’ Cranfield asked.

‘No, this is airdropping us in the middle of nowhere with a map and a compass and expecting us to get back to camp.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Baltry said. ‘I think it’s team building. We’re learning valuable things here. Like Cran makes a great pack mule.’

‘Oh, ha ha,’ Cranfield grumbled, but he had volunteered to carry most of the gear they had been supplied with and he was showing no sign of the load bothering him.

‘If this was supposed to teach us teamwork,’ Annette countered, ‘I think losing three of our party right at the start was a bit of a fail.’

Cranfield gave a shrug, which was particularly impressive in a man his size. ‘They wanted to go the direct route–’

‘Over two mountains,’ Baltry put in.

‘–and we agreed with Annette that the lowland route was better. We’ll have water down here. We can maybe catch something to eat so we don’t have to deal with the rations. Camping should be easy.’

‘Speak for yourself, Cran.’ Baltry grumbled. ‘I’m a city boy.’

‘Fresh air and all this walking, you’ll sleep.’

‘Okay, so how do we catch some of this wildlife that probably wants to eat us.’

‘Says the man with built-in electrolaser weapons. We’ve all got guns.’

‘Well,’ Annette said, ‘whatever, we’re going to be out here for one night and we should make as much distance as we can today. The forecast for tomorrow is for rain and that’ll slow us down as much as the terrain.’

‘Best foot forward then,’ Cranfield said, grinning. ‘Assuming you’ve got a best foot, Baltry.’

‘Both of my feet are best, Cran,’ Baltry replied. ‘All of me is awesome.’

~~~

Two of Annette’s rocket-propelled bullets hissed through the air and found their target, reducing the skull of a mountain goat to a bloody mess. ‘Those things have been looking at us funny all the way across the hill,’ she said.

‘It’s a goat,’ Baltry said. ‘All they can do is look at you funny. It’s the eyes. What do we do with it now?’

‘I go get us some useful meat,’ Cranfield said, taking his pack off. ‘We’ll leave the rest. We’re only going to be out here one night and the cougars will probably clean up the rest.’

Baltry’s eyes widened. ‘There are cougars?’

Kenya smirked at him and slapped one of his metallic arms. ‘They would not want you. Too crunchy.’

‘Most of me is chewy and delicious.’

‘A fact I have no plans to check.’

‘At least we’ve got something fresh to eat tonight,’ Annette said. She watched Cranfield setting off with a large knife. The corpse was a good sixty metres away and, since the goats had been watching them with what she considered malign intent, she kept her pistols at the ready just in case.

‘Why headshots?’ Baltry asked. ‘I mean, it’s a fairly long shot for a pistol. Why not go for the body?’

‘Two reasons. First, range is not an issue with these because I command-guide the bullets. They steer to the target. Second, expanding slugs make a horrible mess of whatever they hit and we wanted something to eat.’

‘You use hollow points?’ Kenya asked.

Annette shook her head. ‘Programmable penetrator. I can select for three densities mimicking everything from hollow-point to armour-piercing rounds, selected just prior to firing.’

‘You’ve got all the bases covered,’ Baltry said.

‘Well, I’m not entirely happy with the penetration on the armour-piercing setting.’

Baltry smirked. ‘I never have problems with penetration.’

Kenya rolled her eyes at Annette. ‘He means well.’

~~~

‘Best estimate,’ Annette said, examining the topographical map she had stored away in her computer before leaving camp, ‘we have around fifteen kilometres to go.’

‘We could make that,’ Baltry said. He sounded rather eager about it, actually.

Cranfield looked up at the sky, sniffed once, and then shook his head. ‘No, we’ll camp here. We’ve got the river just below us for water and we can make a fire here no trouble. We’d be walking the last part in the dark and we don’t know the terrain. Annette and Kenya may be able to see in the dark, but we’d be struggling.’

Baltry let out a grumbling noise. ‘I guess there’s some fairly soft ground here…’

Despite his complaints, Baltry got on with making camp as well as everyone else, at least until the light beneath the trees was getting too dim to see effectively. Even then, the laser weapons in his arms proved highly effective at lighting the fire he had helped gather the wood for.

Annette had no trouble with the light and continued gathering wood along with a few of the berries Cranfield had indicated were edible for half an hour or so after dark. Kenya’s cybernetic eyes gave her infrared vision, which was not so much use under the conditions, but she kept watch while Annette searched.

‘Should we set a watch or something?’ Annette asked when they returned to their small camp. ‘You said there were cougars.’

‘Cougars,’ Cranfield agreed, ‘coyotes, and maybe some grey wolves. Some people say they’ve seen wolves in the area, some say they never made it in here before the wall went up. I doubt any of them would attack a healthy human, but it might be an idea to keep a watch. Means there’s someone keeping the fire alight too.’

‘How come you know this stuff, Cran?’ Baltry asked.

‘I grew up on a farm down near Salem. It’s all farmland around there, open plains, but we’d go out for hunting trips and stuff like that from time to time. You pick stuff up, you know?’

‘So that’s why you’re a reasonable shot?’

‘With a rifle, yeah. Maybe could’ve bagged us a deer around here, but it’d have meant taking time to stalk one.’ He flashed Annette a grin. ‘And we got free goat meat without any trouble.’

‘I would not have let you shoot a deer,’ Annette replied. ‘If we were relying on it to eat, maybe. Deer are too cute to kill without good reason. Those goats had it coming.’

‘Well, if we cook the meat up with one of the ration packs and those berries, we might get something vaguely edible in the way of a stew.’

‘Sounds great.’ Baltry was poking at the edge of the fire with a stick. ‘I wonder if the others got back before dark.’

‘I’m going to guess at no,’ Cranfield replied. ‘I don’t think they realised how hard it would be going over the mountains.’

‘Hey, Kenya, are you in radio range? You could call up and ask whether they beat us.’

Kenya looked around and then shook her head. ‘In these hills, I doubt it.’ Kenya had a built-in radio transceiver, a little like Annette, but Kenya’s was meant for longer-range voice communications rather than networking.

‘I think they’d mark us down for doing it anyway,’ Annette said.

‘You think we’re being… What? Graded?’ Baltry asked.

‘Like I said earlier, it’s not like they’re teaching us anything. I think we’re here to make sure they haven’t wasted their expensive cybernetics on people who’ll get killed in the Below where the parts will be hard to retrieve.’

‘Kind of cynical.’

‘Yeah… Maybe camping does that to me.’

‘Anyway, if that’s right, you wouldn’t need to be here. They didn’t pay for your implants.’

Annette grinned. ‘No, but if I can’t make the grade, it’ll be an excuse for Poppa to get me out of here and into some cushy R and D job. Make no mistake, they’ll be trying extra hard to fail me out of this course.’

8/11/83.

Annette took the last shift on guard duty because her eyes were the most adaptable. They had decided that they would get up as soon as the sun was up, heat up the leftover stew for breakfast, and make a start as soon as the air was warming up a little. Right now, Annette was huddled in a blanket because the temperature was only getting cooler. The fire was still going and giving some comfort, but the night air was beginning to bite.

The conditions made for introspection. Her comment earlier about the reasons for the course had been cynical, but she suspected that she was not wrong. The thing that troubled her was that a thought like that would occur to her at all. She had always been so sure of her path: get her system working and fight the enemies of Utopia City, Doctor White’s enemies. She had always been quite sure that what Doctor White and his people told her, and everyone else, was the truth. In the past two weeks – had it really been less than two weeks since her failed field trial? – things had changed.

There had been the insurgents she overheard. Thinking about it, that had started it all. They had made claims about a downed power plant and the official version had been at odds with what they had said. And the thing was that she would have discounted that, but there was the simple fact of the existence of the Insurgency. Would there still be insurgents if nothing they ever did succeeded? And the UDF claimed that the Insurgency was poorly equipped, badly organised, but that was not what Annette had seen…

The anonymous emails were another thing. She had had a couple more and, now she thought about it, the right thing to do would have been to report them. Anonymous, untraceable messages were supposed to be impossible. Except that, now she thought about it, they were not. She could imagine how it was done. Why had she never thought about it before? Why had she not reported them? Well, that at least she knew: if she had reported them, someone would have wanted to know why someone was sending her anonymous emails.

Something moving among the trees pulled her out of her reverie. There was a shape, unidentified but there, and she focused in on it. Her vision field narrowed and zoomed in. She could only guess that it was a cougar: it was large and more or less cat-shaped, but she was only seeing it in the infrared. Annette’s hand closed around the grip of one of her pistols and her combat HUD lit up showing approximate range to target and potential threat. If she was forced to fire, her system was quite sure she could shred the animal before it got close… And Annette was pleased when the big cat appeared to decide that the humans and their fire should be given a wide berth. She watched it until she could no longer make out its heat signature and then set her pistol down.

Camp Brinnon.

The rain had come soon after sunrise, turning the rest of the journey from a casual walk into a slog. It took almost five hours to make it to the training facility and they rolled in just after midday, hoping for a shower and some food, but that turned out to be wishful thinking.

Annette sat in a dingy interview room answering questions from one of the instructors, Sergeant Barnes. Barnes did not seem to like her much, and Annette had tried hard to believe that he was just doing his job, but she had finally decided that she did not like him at all. The debriefing seemed to be a lengthy process where Annette gave her account of the hike and Barnes questioned every decision she had made. Particularly irksome was that Barnes disapproved of the break-up of the team and seemed determined to blame Annette for it. There were a lot of implications that the choice had been dangerous and that it had resulted in her party arriving late, except that the analysis software Annette perpetually ran was indicating that Barnes was lying about something.

She finally figured out what was going on when a man in UDF uniform came in and handed Barnes a note which Barnes read before saying, ‘It seems that your buddy Baltry is saying that you badgered them into going with you and then did nothing useful the entire time you were out there. He thinks you were only useful as eye candy.’

Annette watched the analysis unfold in front of her, her eyes fixed on Barnes. ‘Well, if he did say that, he would by lying.’ She waited a beat to allow Barnes to open his mouth and then said, ‘But he didn’t say any of that, did he?’

Barnes faltered and then said, ‘Are you calling a superior officer a liar?’

Attempted intimidation, faked affront. Calling himself a superior officer was pushing it just a little bit too. ‘I am suggesting that this exercise is attempting to get a negative reaction from me. You want anger, or perhaps you expect me to burst into tears. The other three aren’t back yet, are they? I selected the right route given the operational parameters and you want me to think I’m a massive failure.’

‘You allowed your team to break up–’

‘They aren’t my team. No one was assigned a leadership role. There was no requirement for anyone to take the lead in the mission briefing, what little briefing there was. Everyone used the talents they had to get us through the mission. There was no need for a leader. Sergeant, my father got the same software the Inquisitors use for me to install on my implant. I know when you’re lying so your mind games aren’t going to work on me. Can we cut it out now so I can take a shower?’

Barnes glowered at her for a second, but it was hard to get much purchase on a good glare when you were looking into blank, white eyes. ‘You’re dismissed.’

~~~

The others were all in the mess when Annette got out of the shower. Cranfield looked as though a rather large, black cloud was hanging over him and no one looked happy.

‘You took a while,’ Baltry said. ‘We all got here fifteen minutes ago.’

‘I think Barnes wanted to have an especially valiant try at making me think I was a failure,’ Annette replied.

‘Just to be clear,’ Cranfield said, ‘you didn’t bad-mouth me to Barnes?’

‘No, that was one of their tactics. They told me that Baltry said I was worthless eye candy.’

‘Good. That means I didn’t threaten to punch out a superior officer without a good reason.’

Annette grinned. ‘There was really no need to defend my honour quite so enthusiastically, Cran, but thank you anyway.’

‘Perhaps there was,’ Kenya said. ‘They told all of us that you said bad things about us.’

‘Of course,’ Baltry said, ‘when we compared notes, we realised this was part of what you said about trying hard to fail you. They want to break up the gang.’

‘It’s just done the opposite,’ Cranfield growled.

‘Well…’ Annette was not sure what to say to that so she went for, ‘Thanks, guys. Um, the other three aren’t back yet, are they?’

Kenya shook her head. ‘They should be, but they aren’t.’

‘Do you think something happened to them?’

Baltry shrugged. ‘They were trying to march over a place called Mount Mystery.’

11/11/83.

The mystery had been solved when the last three of the group had limped into camp just before dark. Mount Deception had proved their undoing, not Mount Mystery. They had found the going too tough and doubled back into the valley below, which had meant they ended up travelling further than Annette’s little team. Then they had pushed ahead into the night to try to make up ground and their Gunner had taken a fall, badly twisting his ankle. The Tank had had to carry him out of the hills in the morning.

The Gunner had been taken away from the camp by ambulance. His career in the SAU looked doubtful. The other two refused to even speak to Annette. This Annette could cope with, because it seemed to push Cranfield, Baltry, and Kenya closer, as though they were gathering around a victimised friend. The instructors, Barnes in particular, were not letting up, however.

The camp’s firing range was a fairly advanced one. Each firing position had a computer terminal beside it and the range itself was fitted out with a battery of sensors. For every shot, your personal computer would give you ballistic statistics and target statistics, and generally anything you might want to know. Annette rather wished she had known about this place when she had been doing her testing. She had, to Barnes’s annoyance, aced the indoor target range the day before: it was basically the same as the one in the city. The outdoor range was proving more difficult, but then she was being handicapped.

Lying on her stomach with a braced semi-automatic rifle, Annette was firing at a man-shaped target one hundred and twenty metres away. She aimed, her eyes zooming in to cut down the effective sighting range, and fired.

‘Hit,’ the computer announced. ‘Torso, four centimetres high of centre. Range is one hundred and twenty metres.’

‘You’re going to have to do better than that, Barrington.’ Barnes’s voice came from behind her. She was not sure how long he had been standing there, but that had been her second-worst score on this clip and she had not missed a single shot.

‘A kill shot every time isn’t good enough, Sergeant?’ she asked. ‘At twice the range you’re asking anyone else to shoot at?’

‘You need to do better.’

Annette cleared her rifle and got to her feet, turning to face Barnes. ‘Do you have a problem with me, Sergeant?’

‘Are you implying some form of reverse favouritism, Barrington?’

‘Well, you’re riding me for shooting perfectly well with a weapon I’ve never trained on. You have everyone else shooting at closer targets and I’m doing as well or better than anyone. It seems that you want me to fail.’

‘You’re a weapons specialist. You need to be competent firing at range.’

‘Which I am, however…’ Annette reached behind her back with her left hand and her arming pod slapped one of her pistols into her palm. She raised it, sighted down the range and fired.

‘Hit,’ said the computer. ‘Head shot, centre. Range is one hundred and twenty metres.’

Annette turned slightly and fired off more rounds, putting each one through the head target area of her colleagues’ targets. Then she aimed at her own target again and fired off three more rounds which curled out, quickly passing her target.

Barnes’s lips curled into a malicious grin. ‘You missed.’

‘Three hits,’ the computer announced. ‘Two centimetre grouping around centre of head. Range is five hundred metres.’

‘Did I?’ Annette asked.

Barnes made a rumbling sound somewhere in his throat. ‘You have an attitude problem, Barrington.’

‘Yes, sir! I want to be the best SAU operative I can possibly be and, by any objective measure I can come up with, I seem to be doing just fine at the moment. I am motivated. I am determined. You seem to have a problem with that attitude, sir.’

There was another rumbling noise. ‘Continue shooting, Barrington,’ Barnes said, and then he turned on his heel and started down the line of shooting bays. His voice rose. ‘Why am I not hearing weapons firing?!’

~~~

Annette knocked once and then opened the door of the camp commandant’s office. Lieutenant Colonel Bridger was greying at the temples and his nose tended to the bulbous. His right arm was artificial, the plastic skin fairly obvious. He was a hero, having lost that arm fighting a large skirmish against the bandits which infested the wasteland outside the enclave. Annette was not sure why she had been summoned to his office, but she did not like it.

‘Recruit Barrington,’ Bridger said on looking up. ‘Come in. Take a seat.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Closing the door behind her, Annette crossed to one of two straight-backed chairs and sat down. And waited.

After a second or two of silence, Bridger said, ‘I assume you’re wondering why I asked you to see me?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Bridger frowned and Annette decided to relent a little. ‘I could hazard a guess, sir. I may have spoken out of turn to Sergeant Barnes this morning.’

‘Yes… and no. SAU operatives are given… let’s call it “some latitude” in their dealings with regular UDF officers. We recruit for a certain personality type. It’s needed to function under the conditions such agents regularly encounter. Good ones can become heroes of the city, but a lot of them fall. A relatively poor attitude is to be expected.’

‘Still, I may have overstepped the mark, sir.’

‘Barnes would agree,’ Bridger said, and Annette’s heart sank. ‘However, he came to me along with a couple of other instructors because he feels you may have been justified.’

‘Uh…’

‘As you rightly stated, Miss Barrington, they have been especially hard on you. They have been looking for ways to fail you out of this course. You have given them nothing to work with and you refuse to take their “hints.” Your outburst may have been out of line, but it was also insightful.’

Annette considered for a second. ‘May I speak freely, sir?’

‘Please do.’

‘My father is in charge of media control for the UDF through DoPI. He has connections. He got me onto this course, yes, but I’m sure he had a few words to a few people to make it as difficult as possible for…’ She trailed off because Bridger was shaking his head.

‘Your father did not ask anyone to fail you out of the course. However, it is common knowledge that he pulled strings to get you onto the course.’

Light dawned and Annette’s eyes widened. ‘Oh! Oh… damn. They all think I’m some rich princess playing soldier.’ Her father was in information management and advertising: influencing people was what he did, often in ways they were not even aware of.

‘Quite. However, your rather eloquent defence to Sergeant Barnes and your quite impressive test scores don’t seem to fit with that picture. This leaves the sergeant and his colleagues with an issue since apologising is obviously out of the question. Essentially then, nothing will be said by anyone and you will get a clean slate. Is that agreeable?’

‘All I really want is a fair trial, sir.’

Bridger gave a nod. ‘Very well. Dismissed and good luck with the rest of the course.’

Utopia City Below, 23/11/83.

‘How did your father take you passing basic training?’ Baltry asked.

‘About as well as I expected,’ Annette replied, picking her way through the detritus which covered the floor of the storm sewer they were negotiating. ‘Outwardly happy and inwardly stewing, and he tried a couple of times over the weekend to suggest it was too dangerous and I should back out before the first mission.’

‘Obviously,’ Kenya said, ‘you did not.’

Annette grinned. ‘I did not. Though if I’d known they were going to send us down here straight away, I might have reconsidered.’

The Below was a maze of tunnels under the city, most of them left over from the construction work Doctor White had initiated when he took control of the area and saved it from the chaos. Under Old Seattle, where the university and government centres were located, the Below linked into the old subway system. The huge, vaulted stations had been used as marshalling yards for Doctor White’s robots. They had tunnelled all over the region, making the city’s services and the machines which maintained them invisible to the citizens. Some people said that the tunnels went down, layer upon layer, for a mile or more. Some said that there were shafts with lifting mechanisms which connected Mercer Island to the network and that there were tunnels beneath Lake Washington.

No one knew for sure the extent of the Below, except maybe for Doctor White and the robots which had built the place. Up near the surface, where the various entrances were located and there was some overhead lighting, the tunnels had good, solid concrete lining them. They were, almost, good enough to be called streets and the workmanship almost matched the glory of the buildings above. The dry tunnels were kept pristine by the service robots, but the same could not be said of the storm sewers. At least they were not running with sewage.

‘At least my boots are waterproof,’ Annette said. ‘Do we have any real clue about where these insurgents are supposed to be?’

‘No,’ Baltry replied, ‘that’s why we’re searching for them.’

‘Have you any idea how many kilometres of tunnels there are down here?’

‘No. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t anyone who does.’

‘So, it would be a great idea to have some way of, you know, narrowing the search.’

Baltry shrugged. ‘No more information in the briefing. But they won’t be too far down.’

Cranfield frowned at that. ‘Why wouldn’t they be? They can’t be too close to the surface, can they? Someone would’ve found them already. The service robots if no one else.’

‘Get too deep in the Below,’ Baltry said with a slight grin on his face, ‘and you run into… Well, no one’s quite sure what it is down there. Only the service robots ever come back up.’

‘Those are fairy stories,’ Kenya stated flatly.

‘I’ve never heard them,’ Annette said.

‘Oh well,’ Baltry began, warming to his subject, ‘there have been rumours for a while. Some of the maintenance workers for the service robots have seen damage to machines they can’t explain. Big dents that look like impacts from fists. Limbs broken, bent, or ripped off. Bite marks! No one knows what’s doing it, but it would have to be big, strong.’

‘Or insurgents with cybernetics,’ Cranfield said. ‘I could leave a dent in a service robot.’

‘You wouldn’t eat people.’

‘Well, no, but–’

‘They find… parts in some of the sewer gratings sometimes after a big storm. Human body parts. Not much, usually. A hand, a foot. One time, someone found a head, but the skull had been cracked open like something was trying to get at the brains.’

‘The brains?’ Annette asked. ‘Like in those terrible pre-war horror videos? You’re saying there are zombies down there?’

‘No one knows,’ Baltry said, grinning.

‘Well…’ Cranfield said, rather as though he did not want to agree with Baltry. ‘If there was something down there that could take on a human, there’s plenty of meaty soft tissue in a skull. Most animals don’t go there because it’s hard to get out. Uh, and… um.’

‘Out with it, Cran,’ Annette said.

‘There are a few rumours of cannibal monsters out in the enclave. It’s all “a friend of my cousin’s second cousin” stuff. You can never find anyone who’s claimed to see one themselves. The bodies are probably animal kills.’

‘But?’

‘But opinion is split between them somehow getting in from outside the enclave and them escaping to the surface through some of the service tunnels that come out beyond the wall.’

‘See?’ Baltry said. ‘It’s not even just city rumour. Then there’s the lost battalion.’

Annette peered through the dim light at him. ‘The lost battalion?’

‘Yeah. They say that Doctor White became concerned about some of the damage to the robots and wanted to get to the bottom of it, so he ordered a UDF deployment to end the problem. They sent a battalion of troops down there… And they vanished.’

‘Uh-huh… Right.’

‘Then, about two years later, this guy crawled into one of the robot maintenance areas dressed in the remains of a UDF uniform. Gibbering mad, totally off his little red wagon. All he could talk about was “the monsters in the dark.” They took him to hospital and more or less fixed him up, but his mind was never the same. Thing is, they managed to identify him as one of the men from the lost battalion. He’d been down in the deep tunnels two years… and he wasn’t malnourished.’

There was silence for a second. Annette’s eyes were picking up more small warm bodies than she wished to think about scurrying around in the debris. Maybe not quite as many as she would have expected… ‘It’s not like there isn’t anything to eat down here,’ she said. ‘If you’re desperate enough.’

‘Fairy stories,’ Kenya said. ‘The only things down here are rats, robots, and unlucky SAU agents.’

‘Hopefully there are some insurgents too,’ Cranfield said. ‘Otherwise the unlucky SAU agents are really wasting their time.’

~~~

‘Another heat signature,’ Annette reported as her vision system highlighted a warm body in the tunnel ahead.

After a couple of hours, they had discovered that they were not the only humans in the tunnels, but that there did not seem to be any cannibal-zombie-mutants either. And the humans they were finding showed little sign of being insurgents.

When the first of them had appeared in Annette’s infrared view, the team had slowed down and taken a cautious approach. Kenya had stripped down so that her chameleon skin could work to its full effect and snuck up on the figure. Then she had radioed through to the team saying that they should come up and not to worry.

The man they had found seemed almost catatonic. He was curled up on the floor of the tunnel, dressed in the remains of ordinary street clothes, and he whimpered when Cranfield turned a light on him. The only person he was a danger to was himself and they were close enough to the surface that Kenya’s radio could reach the telephone network. She had reported the find and suggested that service robots be sent to retrieve the man, and then the party had moved on.

The latest target was the fifth and they were getting less cautious. They were also starting to categorise them. When Cranfield and Baltry shone their flashlights down the tunnel, and Annette saw the figure startle and bolt, she said, ‘Looks like it’s a paranoid one.’

‘Can’t see him,’ Baltry said.

‘Okay, I got him.’ Annette took a pistol from behind her back, pointed the weapon down the tunnel, and fired. ‘Got him.’ In her vision field, the infrared image began to cool.

‘Do you ever miss?’

‘No system is perfect. He’s still making progress, but he’s slowing.’

When they found the fallen man, he was huddled on the floor of the tunnel, unconscious and shivering. A shallow puddle of water he had fallen into had a sheen of ice over it and, at first sight, so did his exposed skin. However, he was alive.

‘Better see if you can get some robots down for this one too,’ Annette suggested.

‘What is that stuff anyway?’ Baltry asked, waving a hand over the man.

‘It’s a type of quantum superfluid,’ Annette replied. ‘Basically, it sticks to whatever it touches and then sucks the heat out of it so that it can expand. And, of course, as it expands, it covers more area and sucks the heat out of that…’

‘So, you end up covered in a layer of freezing liquid.’

‘Fluid. There’s a difference.’ Already, the white sheen was beginning to evaporate from the man’s skin. ‘With the amount I use, it’s reached saturation after about a minute and it sublimes right off the skin. Not such a good idea to touch them before that happens.’

‘And it’s non-lethal?’

‘Well… For most people, one round should put them to sleep, but two or three would probably freeze them to death. One round might kill a child or an old person. It’s more “not very lethal.”’ Annette frowned. ‘You know, they’ve all been quite young. I wouldn’t say any of them have been older than twenty-five.’

‘No one’s going to survive down here for too long,’ Cranfield said. ‘Even if they’re catching rats, or even eating other people.’

‘So, what are they doing down here? Why would anyone voluntarily come down here?’

‘We’re down here,’ Baltry pointed out.

‘Precisely my point. We were sent. The insurgents we’re hunting were sent to do something. These people are down here because…’

‘They’re nuts?’

‘No one goes mad these days. Education ensures the stability of your mental processes.’

‘If that is true,’ Kenya said, looking pointedly at Annette, ‘why are we down here? If that is true, there can be no insurgents.’

Utopia City.

Annette sank thankfully into a bath with hot water and some bubbles. One of the great things about the SAU was that its operatives mostly worked within the city, or under it, so they got to live at home. Home had a bath you could stretch out in and soak all the aches out of your muscles. The bathroom had the added advantage that she could lock the door and be away from her father’s queries about her safety. Win-win.

After ten minutes with her eyes closed, she kept them closed but opened up a connection to the house network. First task was a query window to request information on aberrant psychological conditions broken down by age group. Next was a local news window. Then she stopped to answer Mariel’s IM ping.

Mariel: So how were the sewers?

‘They aren’t exactly sewers, you know? Or I wasn’t in the ones which have sewage in them.’

Mariel: Sure. And what are you doing right now?

‘Taking a bath. But that’s for the aches in my legs and back, not because I smell bad.’

Mariel: Okay. I believe you. Find what you were looking for?

‘No. We found… mad people. Lost, insane citizens who seemed to have given up and found their way down Below.’

Mariel: Just remember, mad people can be violently insane. You be careful.

‘Right back at you, Mar.’

Mariel: I’ll leave you to soak. Have a good night, Net.

‘Night, Mar.’ Annette closed the connection and pulled her query window into view. She was almost surprised to see results, but there they were… with a note at the top indicating that the information was classified for UDF and administrative eyes only. Okay, she could get the information because she had joined the SAU.

Acknowledged deviant behaviours, their words, leading to violent behavioural patterns tended to manifest between the ages of fourteen and eighteen with some outliers, primarily in older people. It was, however, a curve. Deviancy tended to increase sharply around sixteen and again at eighteen prior to a sharp drop-off. There were also cases of nonviolent aberrancy, primarily manifesting in paranoia and depression, and focused in the sixteen to nineteen age range.

Annette let the news play in front of her eyelids and considered the data. Formal education ended at eighteen, unless you were approved for higher learning. The spike at eighteen could be explained as a reaction to the loss of structured learning. But what about the rise in numbers before then?

None of the absolute figures were high. It was a percentage rise in numbers from near zero to not far above zero, to a little higher, to almost nothing. What happened at sixteen? Sex became legal, if discouraged until eighteen. You took elective subjects in education at sixteen; if the idea of a lack of structure at eighteen had validity, perhaps the reduced structure at sixteen was causing the rise then.

A break in the news stream caught her eye and she found herself watching a short advert for Nutopium. She grinned. Nutopium, the drink of champions! And she saw the reminder that Nutopium was for consumption by those aged sixteen years and over at the end. So, at sixteen you were allowed to drink Nutopium. Annette remembered trying a little from her brother’s bottle when she was fourteen and knew a lot of people started on the stuff before they were really allowed to. Annette disliked the taste for some reason and rarely drank it. Her father appeared to be the same: there was never any in the apartment. But that was something else that started at sixteen… In fact, Nutopium fitted rather well with the pattern: a slow start at around fourteen with a surge at sixteen when just about everyone tried it. If you were going to react badly to the stuff, you would have done so by eighteen, so the numbers fell sharply away…

As a hypothesis, it needed work. The drop-off was too sharp. A bell curve would have made more sense, perhaps skewed to sixteen-year-olds. She was not going to go to anyone in the Department of Public Health with this unless she could explain the entire thing. Anyway, surely the DoPH would have spotted something like that already. If there was a problem with Nutopium, it would have been banned. Wouldn’t it?

~~~

Another anonymous message arrived in Annette’s mailbox midevening.

Be careful of what lurks in the darkness Below.

Cryptic warnings now. Great. She deleted the message and decided to forget all about it.

Utopia City Below, 24/11/83.

‘We’re out of radio range with the surface,’ Kenya announced.

They were also out of light and the men were relying on their flashlights to pick their way through the darkness. The service robots operated down here using ladar scanners to image the tunnels, and humans simply did not stray this far down, unless they had been told to by UDF Command.

‘I’m finding it really hard to believe that the Insurgency operates down here,’ Annette commented. Among her tasks for the day, she had been given ‘finding our way out’ duty since no one seemed to have a map of the tunnels. She had an application running which recorded the way they had come so that they could retrace their steps. Without it, they would be entirely lost within an hour, so how did anyone else do it?

‘Ours is not to reason why,’ Baltry said. ‘Ours is but to wade through muck in search of insurgents.’

‘Or get eaten by cannibal super-zombies.’

‘I think they’re deeper down.’ Baltry did not sound too confident. ‘I’m pretty sure they are.’

Annette grinned. ‘Fairy stories, remember.’

‘Fine, but you won’t be saying that when one of them’s eating your face.’

With a shrug, Annette set off further down the tunnel. ‘Never going to happen. No one’s wanted to eat any part of my anatomy since I had my eyes done.’

~~~

‘This is… unexpected,’ Baltry said. He was keeping his voice low because, well, no one had spoken much above a whisper for the last couple of hours. Raised voices just seemed wrong in the dark silence of the tunnels.

They had come upon a cavern in the tunnel system. The tunnel they had been walking along ended in a ramp that led down to the floor of something which had to be over a hundred metres long and fifty high. And there was light, just not that much of it. Panels in the high ceiling and along the walls glowed with a dim, blue light.

‘There’s power down here?’ Cranfield asked, straining to see anything in the chamber.

‘No,’ Annette said. ‘I think it’s radioluminescent. I’m sensing very low levels of gamma radiation from the panels.’

‘Radiation?’ Baltry asked, his voice rising a little.

‘Must be a radium source. It’s only going to be dangerous after long exposure.’ Annette took a step down the ramp and then added, ‘You are wearing your lead underwear, right?’

‘There’s lead underwear?’

‘Hush,’ Kenya said. ‘Annette, do you see something down there?’

Annette scanned the floor below them, widening the frequency spread as she did so. ‘Heat signatures. I make… six of them. One’s a lot bigger than the others.’

‘And one is at the bottom of the ramp.’

Baltry turned his light down the ramp and something appeared in it. At first it was unrecognisable, a distorted, vaguely humanoid figure with mottled skin and lank hair. Then it uncurled, raising a hand to shield its eyes from the brighter light, and it became more obvious that what they were looking at was a man, naked and dirty, and clearly unused to the light. He bared his teeth and growled, like a wild animal in human form.

‘I got this one,’ Baltry said, raising his right arm and cocking his wrist.

‘Wait,’ Annette said, but it was too late.

What looked like directed lightning burned through the air between Baltry’s palm and the man-thing’s chest. There was a smell of burned flesh and ozone, and the man collapsed onto the concrete, twitching as he tried to recover his senses.

‘One down,’ Baltry began, and stopped at the sounds of growling from the other residents of the chamber. ‘Uh…’

‘I think you pissed them off,’ Cranfield said, taking up a position a little way down the ramp.

‘Drop them,’ Annette said. Her pod swapped magazines on her pistols and then swung the weapons out for her to draw. The men were already moving toward the bottom of the ramp when she locked target markers on the nearest pair and fired. Chests torn open by hollow-point rounds, the two creatures fell. That just seemed to make matters worse.

The remaining figures let out howls of rage and started sprinting for the ramp. Baltry caught one of them in his flashlight beam and fired, but the fast-moving target threw his aim off. Annette was having no such problems, but this time when her bullets found their marks, the men seemed to just shrug off the damage and keep coming. They were slower, but they were still moving.

‘Shit!’ Baltry snapped. The biggest of the men was at the bottom of the ramp and charging up it toward Cranfield. He was big, not quite up to Cranfield’s stature, but a large, heavily built man with a wild, malign look in his eyes. Baltry lined up his shot and fired, and this time the lightning flared against his target’s chest.

The creature let out a roar of pain, but just kept on charging at Cranfield. The collision was impressively loud and, even if Cranfield was bigger and had cybernetic limbs, the fact that the hulking SAU agent remained on his feet was impressive. Cranfield shifted his footing and drove his fist into his opponent’s chest. The thing was looking battered, but it was as if he was on drugs: he just kept going.

Annette’s pistols spoke again and this time the expanding bullets tore so much of her targets’ bodies apart that they simply could not keep moving. They collapsed at the foot of the ramp, two bloody rags which had once been some sort of human. But now the one Baltry had stunned was back on its feet and running toward the team. Kenya intercepted him, driving her fist into his guts, and he turned on her, swinging wildly and catching her on the side of the neck. Kenya was a slight girl who looked as though she might fall down in a strong wind, but she had an advantage in combat: the skin which gave her the ability to blend in with her surroundings was also far tougher than normal flesh. Grinning, she took a step back and threw in another punch.

Cranfield and his massive opponent were trading punches as well, but neither were making much progress. The man-thing was not the most skilled of pugilists, apparently relying on brute power over precision, and Cranfield had more of both. Cranfield also had armoured skin while his opponent was dressed in a pair of tatty jeans, but the latter seemed oblivious to actual damage. Annette decided to end the matter, lifted her pistols, and fired. Two mutant heads exploded like watermelons. Two bodies folded onto the concrete. Silence fell.

‘Is there a reason the rest of us are here?’ Baltry asked after a second. ‘All we need is a few dozen Annettes and we could take over the world.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Annette replied, handing her pistols back to her pack. ‘I need someone to keep the bad guys off me long enough to shoot them. What are these things?’

‘Humans,’ Kenya said, crouching down to examine the nearest corpse. ‘They’re just humans, but I think they’re probably Zeroes.’

‘They just shrugged off my shocks,’ Baltry said.

‘And look how much damage I had to do to put them down,’ Annette added. ‘I practically had to blow them apart to stop them.’

‘Berserk rage,’ Cranfield said.

‘Huh?’ Baltry responded.

‘They went berserk. It was supposed to be something these ancient warriors called Vikings did sometimes. They were so pumped up that they would keep going, ignoring pain and injury, until you hacked them apart. When they were describing the Zeroes, that’s what I thought of.’ The big man frowned and opened his mouth to speak, hesitating.

Annette watched emotions light up in her visual display: confusion, shame. Shame? ‘What is it, Cran? There’s something else and we’re friends here, aren’t we? Nothing to worry about.’

‘It happens to me sometimes,’ Cranfield blurted out. ‘If I get hurt or really angry… I can wig out like that. One of the reasons I wanted to have the Tank implants is that… Well, it’s really hard to hurt me badly now.’

‘Normally you’re okay?’ Baltry asked.

‘Yeah. I don’t–’

‘Well, these guys clearly aren’t so don’t go comparing yourself to them, okay? You’re the guy that stands between… monsters like that and me, Cran. You’re nothing like them.’

Cranfield smiled, a little weakly, but it was there. ‘Thanks. You know, I figure we’ll run into more of these things from now on, and so would the insurgents. We’ll get nowhere much going further.’

‘Agreed. The Insurgency doesn’t have an Annette to turn these things into soup.’

‘Also agreed,’ Kenya said.

‘Okay,’ Annette said. ‘Backtrack and ask for further instructions?’ There were nods from her companions and she turned to start back up the ramp. ‘Hey, Cran, if you don’t mind me asking… When did you first notice this “berserk” thing?’

‘Uh, I was fifteen. Someone was picking on my younger brother, hit him in the face, broke his nose… I just saw red. It took four guys to hold me down while one of my sisters and my brother, with blood all over his face, talked me down. I put the guy in the hospital, but no one said much about it. Seems he had a reputation I hadn’t heard about.’

‘How many brothers and sisters do you have, Cran?’ Baltry asked.

‘Three brothers, two sisters. Mom really likes kids.’

‘Huh.’

‘Okay,’ Annette said. ‘Um, had you tried Nutopium before then?’

‘Uh… Well, yeah. I know you’re not supposed to, but Dad offered me some of his one day. I didn’t like it. Made me feel a bit weird, kind of dopy, so I don’t drink it as a rule. Maybe that’s why you’re not supposed to drink it too young.’

‘Maybe,’ Annette said, but her thoughts were on her research of the night before.

Utopia City, 25/11/83.

There was light in the sky and that was about the best you could say about it. Annette looked around at the scene she had been woken up before dawn to come to. It looked bad.

Tacoma was the home of most of the ‘industrial’ structures in Utopia City. There were robotic factories assembling various large machines, and there were the fabricator plants which provided components to the factories, among other things. The fabricators were based around nanotech assembler systems and Annette knew more than a little about the way they functioned. They required carefully controlled conditions to operate, and someone had gone to some trouble to disrupt those conditions.

The evidence of the attack, and who had perpetrated it, was still very evident. There was still smoke rising from one coolant plant, though there were service robots working hard to smother it. Doors had been smashed open, machines of various types reduced to little more than scrap metal. And there were bodies, a lot of bodies, all of them dressed in the more distinctive kind of clothing Zeroes wore. The UDF had slammed down hard on the attackers, but not before a considerable amount of damage had been done.

However, it all appeared to be over, so why were Annette and the rest of her team there at all?

‘A small group of Zeroes escaped,’ Major Raythorn explained to them. Though ‘explained’ was possibly the wrong word, Annette thought. Raythorn did not like having SAU operatives there and his eyes stayed fixed on his surroundings. It was more like he was describing events for a disinterested and absent third party. ‘They ran into one of the entrances to the Below and we need SAU agents to follow them. Service robots have sealed off the tunnel they accessed at both ends. It’s just a matter of finding them and eliminating them.’

If it was that easy, why had they called in the SAU? ‘Were any of them wearing body armour?’ Annette asked.

‘There were no indications of body armour. Weaponry was makeshift. Baseball bats, crowbars, sledgehammers. Nothing ranged.’

Annette instructed her pod to load kinetic warheads and looked around at her friends. ‘Anyone else?’

‘Where’s this Below entrance?’ Cranfield asked. ‘Might as well get on with this.’

Utopia City Below.

Cranfield looked in either direction down the tunnel and then began to cast around on the ground for any signs of people passing through recently. ‘Anyone want to make a guess about which way they went?’ he asked.

‘South,’ Annette said, pointing down the tunnel. ‘They went that way.’

‘Impressive tracking skills there,’ Baltry commented.

‘Deduction, not tracking. This is a service tunnel for the robots, but thirty metres that way there’s an access corridor to the storm drains running under this level. I’m betting they went deeper.’

‘Great. But, yeah, that sounds like a good bet. Think we can catch them?’

‘All we can do is set off and see where we get to. They have a good head start on us…’

‘Then we should get moving,’ Kenya suggested.

They found the access way easily enough, an alcove at the side of the service tunnel with a ramp leading down from it, but there, things got difficult. The main service tunnels, the top-level ones, were mapped, but the drains in this area were not.

‘You’d think something like where all the drains went would be a useful thing to know,’ Baltry commented as they looked both ways down the storm drain.

‘The service robots take care of all that,’ Annette replied. ‘They survey for damage or obstruction on a regular basis, just cycle through everything. I guess no one’s ever thought it necessary to map the network out for humans.’

‘Huh. Which way?’

No one answered immediately and, coming to a decision, Kenya began to unzip her jumpsuit. ‘I will scout to the north. If I don’t find anything in five hundred metres, we will try the south.’ Her skin was shifting to a mottled, dark-grey colour even as she spoke. There were lights running along the roof of the sewer, but not bright ones. Stripped down to bare skin, the cyborg girl blended effectively into the concrete walls.

‘Stay in contact,’ Annette said as Kenya darted off into the gloom.

‘At all times,’ Kenya replied over her radio.

‘I guess we wait,’ Annette said to the two men.

Cranfield looked at the pair of boots and jumpsuit he was holding and sighed. ‘I hate it when she does this. She’s naked and unarmed out there.’

‘Her skin’s not quite as tough as yours, Cran, but she’s built for this kind of work. It’s what she was made for.’

‘I know… But I never know where to look.’

Baltry chuckled and slapped Cranfield on the arm, plastic and metal striking plastic and metal. ‘I know exactly where to look, Cran.’

~~~

Kenya paused as she saw the tunnel widening out ahead of her. It looked as though she had found some form of junction in the drainage system. She could see at least three tunnel entrances on the other side, all a little narrower than the one she was in. Water came in from multiple points here and would then flow out down the wider pipe, she guessed.

Something seemed a little off about the chamber, however. Slowly, she scanned the room, looking for whatever it was that had caught her attention and was giving her pause. The room was more or less circular. Water had managed to wash piles of detritus against the walls at various points. Water was falling from somewhere in the ceiling and there was a shallow puddle in the centre of the room. She would need to avoid that, but the light diffracting through the water droplets suggested a reason for another anomaly: the chamber seemed better lit than Kenya might have expected. She moved in closer and, sure enough, there was a vertical pipe coming in through the centre of the ceiling which appeared to go all the way up to ground level. Some light was making its way down from above, brightening the centre of the chamber while it cast the outer walls into deeper shadow.

There was something wrong here, something she could not put her finger on. She activated her internal radio, subvocalising her words. ‘Annette, I’ve found a junction about three hundred metres out. I’m not sure which way to go from here.’

Annette’s voice sounded in her head almost immediately. ‘You want us to come up and join you?’

‘I’m not sure. There’s something a little off about this place. I–’ She cut off as something stung her side, two sharp pinpricks, and then her nerves were on fire.

~~~

‘Kenya?’ Annette frowned as her friend’s voice cut off suddenly. ‘Kenya, do you read me?’ There was only static over the radio now. Annette started walking briskly in the direction Kenya had taken and she spoke aloud. ‘Come on. Something’s wrong.’

‘What happened?’ Cranfield asked.

‘Kenya found a junction in the drains, or something like that. She was saying something seemed off, then she was cut off.’

Cranfield’s body tensed. ‘Then shouldn’t we hurry?’

‘It’s three hundred metres and a possible fight at the end. Pace yourself.’

They more or less jogged and it took under a minute before they could see the widened area ahead of them. Annette could see one heat source before she could figure out what was causing it. Kenya was lying on the ground just beyond a pool of light which was coming in from above somewhere. Her camouflage was gone, a fairly good sign that she was unconscious, or worse.

Cranfield apparently spotted her too as they got closer. ‘Kenya!’ he snapped and started to bolt in.

‘Wait!’ Annette hissed, bringing her big friend to a halt. ‘If something took her down, it could still be there. Given she’s tougher than she looks, they could still be there.’

‘So, we– Okay, okay, so you and Baltry cover me while I check her. There’s no one visible in there so they’ve got to come in from the tunnels or something, right?’

Annette scanned over the chamber. Nothing showed up on infrared except Kenya, but then Kenya could see in that band and had clearly detected nothing. The entire situation stank of being a trap, but they had to get to their friend…

They edged into the room, moving carefully with Baltry and Annette watching the tunnels. Cranfield got to Kenya and crouched down. ‘She’s breathing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a pulse. She’s alive, but I think someone hit her on the head.’

Annette glanced down. There was some indication of blood on Kenya’s neck through her short, dark hair. ‘I can fix that.’

Scraping noises sounded from around the chamber and a voice said, ‘You won’t get the chance.’ Annette looked up to find men in the scruffy outfits favoured by Zeroes emerging from behind the piles of garbage, which were not piles of garbage. It had to have taken quite some effort to build hollow mounds like that and make them screen out infrared radiation. And there were more than the handful of Zeroes Raythorn had said escaped into the Below. It was a trap all right and they had fallen right into it.

‘Get them!’ the man who appeared to be the leader shouted, and the assembled nihilists charged inward. They had baseball bats, lengths of wood with nails in, metal pipes, nothing complex or ranged, but lethal once they began using them. Every one of them had a wild gleam in their eyes and a grin on their faces.

Annette saw it all in a fraction of a second, took a step away from Kenya, lifted her arms, and began to fire. She had developed her weapons system to be effective under a variety of circumstances, and it allowed her to do things normal people and even the cyborgs normally assigned to the SAU could not do. She normally employed her pistols in a semi-automatic mode: burst fire was a notoriously inefficient use of ammo, suitable primarily for suppression. Now she opened them up to full speed, focusing all her attention on targets and unleashing a bullet as each target marker indicated she was in line. She turned, selecting new targets and firing. There were twenty of them when she started, and when she swept her arms back to have the magazines replaced, all but three of them were down and they still had a couple of metres to cover.

Baltry hit one of them in the chest, his invisible beam scoring through cloth and the flesh beneath while the jolt of electricity leaped down the ionised channel. His target lurched to a stop, body straining, before falling to the ground, twitching briefly.

Cranfield took a step forward and met one of the thugs head-on. The big man’s cybernetic fist smashed into the man’s face. Bone splintered and the Zero went down like a sack of potatoes.

And that left the one man charging at Annette, a piece of two-by-four in his hands which had had nails driven through it at various angles. It would likely do some damage if it connected with her head, but she was not going to give him the chance. Her right-hand pistol lifted to line up with his chest and she fired at more or less point-blank range, ripping his torso open and spewing blood, flesh, and internal organs over the concrete floor behind him. His body kept moving and she caught him as he fell against her, his club flying uselessly over her head. His eyes were dead before she looked into them and she let him slide out of her arms, leaving a trail of blood down the front of her suit.

‘You okay, Annette?’ Cranfield asked.

Annette blinked and looked around at him. ‘I will be.’ She handed her pistols back to her arming pod and accepted something else from the robot: a short metallic cylinder. ‘Uh, could you check them for signs of life? I’ll take care of Kenya.’ She twisted the top of the cylinder and then dropped it to the ground beside the fallen Infiltrator. A second later, a cloud of greenish vapour burst out of the cylinder, scattering out in the metre or two around it, which included Kenya.

‘What is that stuff?’ Cranfield asked.

‘Medical nanobot swarm. It’s like an overclocked version of what I have in my body. It takes a bit out of you, but it heals you really fast. She’ll be up and about in a minute, maybe less.’

‘Why are they green?’ Baltry asked.

‘Uh… Well, they had to be some colour and green seemed like the right one for some reason. Does it matter?’

‘Not so long as they work.’

It was, in fact, maybe forty-five seconds before Kenya let out a groan and rolled onto her back. Cranfield heard her, turned to check, and then averted his eyes hurriedly. ‘Uh,’ Kenya mumbled, ‘did you get them?’

‘Look around,’ Baltry suggested.

‘Not sure I want to. Feel a little nauseous. And hot.’

‘That’ll be the nanites,’ Annette said. ‘It’ll stop in a couple of minutes. We’re just glad we’re not carrying your corpse out of here. Though Cran would probably be happier if you got dressed.’

‘He’s got my clothes.’

‘Right,’ Cranfield said, and began trying to hand them over without looking. ‘The one I hit is still breathing. Maybe not through his nose, but he’s breathing.’

‘I can fix that,’ Baltry said.

Annette shook her head. ‘No. I think we take him back with us.’

‘Orders are–’

‘I know what the orders are, but these were Zeroes, and they set up an elaborate plan to ambush and kill the SAU team they knew were going to be coming down after them.’

‘They weren’t counting on you and your magic pistols.’ Baltry was grinning, but Annette could tell she had given him pause. Zeroes were not supposed to plan. ‘Okay, so Cran carries him out and we leave it up to the regulars to decide what to do with him.’

Annette gave a nod. ‘If I were them, I’d want to question this guy as much as possible. This group of supposedly anarchist madmen did a lot of damage up on the surface, and then set up a trap in the Below. That’s not how Zeroes are supposed to behave. If they’re changing their tactics, if they’re getting tactics, I think someone should be concerned about it.’

Utopia City.

Somehow, Annette was getting the impression that no one was concerned about it. She had had her internal computer filter every news stream throughout the day and nothing had come up about the Zero attack on the fabricator facilities. She had also put in a request to interrogate the Zero they had captured, only to discover that he had been executed more or less as soon as her and her team were gone. It was as if the administration wanted it swept under a rug as quickly and quietly as possible.

Lying in the bath before bed, Annette considered the situation and what, if anything, she could do about it. The logical person to talk to was her father. He was part of the Department of Public Information and it was information to the public which seemed to be wrong. Strike that. Information was being withheld and that had to be purposeful. Her father was, almost certainly given his position, aware of the manipulations. Why?

Obviously, given everything Annette had seen in just a short time with the SAU, things were not quite as idyllic in Utopia as the administration wanted everyone to think. And that seemed like the likely reason: living in a utopia meant not worrying about things. The administration was handling the situation and keeping the public out of the loop so that they did not have to worry about terrorist attacks. Except that the threat of terrorism was there in the form of posters and advids for the Vigilance campaign. No one was exactly afraid, because the Insurgency and the Zeroes never managed to do anything, but there was always that push to be watchful, to keep an eye on those around you, especially strangers. Meanwhile, the city’s terrorist element was actually succeeding to some extent, but their successes were being hidden behind a wall of silence.

The populace of Utopia City were being treated like… ‘Sheep,’ Annette said to the empty room. The Insurgency tagging made a sort of sense now, and she supposed the line about waking up fitted with that, sort of.

The start of a headache persuaded Annette that it was time to get out of the bath. She would pop some pills which would hopefully suppress the pain and the drowsiness would work for her now… And her computer signalled the arrival of another anonymous email as she was reaching for a towel.

There is no free media.

Don’t believe the lies.

Be careful who you talk to.

Well, that just about capped it. It was like her mysterious correspondent was reading her thoughts, but the last line… Be careful who you talk to… She would talk to no one. Something was wrong and it was better if she mentioned her worries to no one else until she knew where they were leading.

27/11/83.

‘You know, that’s two nights of not sleeping so good,’ Cranfield said.

Annette shrugged. ‘I have problems.’ They had all met up at the White Tower, the administrative centre of Utopia City and the main UDF offices, to see whether there were any assignments needing their talents and, once again, there was nothing. Annette had suggested coffee in the park.

‘Well, we’re all friends, right?’

‘Right.’ Annette flashed him a grin and lied to him. ‘I get headaches, which wouldn’t be such a problem if I didn’t keep seeing that guy I shot when I close my eyes. The one that ended up falling onto me.’

‘Never killed someone up close like that before?’

‘No, not like that.’

‘He was a bad guy, and he was trying to kill you,’ Baltry pointed out.

‘That does not help wash his blood off,’ Kenya countered. ‘It is good that you feel this way, Annette. It makes you more than the men you’ve killed.’

‘Yeah,’ Cranfield said, nodding. ‘You’re not a Zero. You care. Even about them. That’s not a bad thing.’

‘Tell that to the bags under my eyes,’ Annette replied.

‘Huh, there aren’t any. Bags wouldn’t dare form under your eyes. You’re just a bit paler than usual.’

‘Well, it feels like there are bags.’ She sank half her cup of coffee and looked out across Community Park. And decided to shift the subject off her problems. ‘Did you know this place used to be called Volunteer Park? The north end was a cemetery, but down here it was Volunteer Park. They changed the name when they put up White Tower and the war memorial.’

‘That,’ Baltry said, ‘was a while ago. You a history buff as well as a genius engineer, computer wizard and weapons manufacturer?’

Annette giggled. ‘I studied the history of the city and the North-West Enclave, sure. It was interesting to know how we got to where we are.’ Though, now she thought about it, she could not be sure of more or less anything she had learned. ‘Uh, this whole area, what was Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, all the way down to Tacoma, this was one of the big technology centres of the old world. That’s why Doctor White came here.’

‘It’s also kind of isolated from the rest of the continent.’

‘True, defence was considered too, but there was also infrastructure. Everything needed some fixing up, but there was everything he needed to make Utopia City here, waiting for him. Hell, even the old reactor at Snohomish had been shut down cleanly. It just needed someone who knew what they were doing to restart it.’

Baltry shook his head sadly. ‘I still don’t know how they could resort to nuclear fission for power. That place is still a radioactive hellhole and it’s been offline for decades.’

‘No choice,’ Annette replied. ‘There was a war.’

‘Yeah well, that was how they did things back then.’

‘This one happened where a lot of their oil was dug up. Supplies were reduced, prices rose. Renewable sources were not up to the task so they built more nuclear plants.’

‘And when everything collapsed, a lot of those reactors melted down. We’re still paying for their mistakes.’

Annette gave Baltry a grin. ‘You’re not so bad on history yourself.’

‘If it’s crazy or gruesome, I usually remember it. And conspiracy theories. You know, they say that some of the things down in the deeper tunnels Below, those are experiments the Insurgency did to make crazier Zeroes, then they let them loose in the tunnels.’

‘“They” say?’ Kenya asked.

‘Yeah, you know, word on the street.’

‘Hmm, “they” say a lot of things, but you never seem to meet anyone who knows.’

‘True,’ Baltry said, leaning back in his chair and stretching out his legs, ‘but I’m philosophical about it. My philosophy is that if it makes a good story, I don’t much care if it’s true. The truth is overrated, and kind of boring.’

~~~

A chime from her computer attracted Mariel’s attention and she turned her chair, pushing it forward with the joystick control. Her pulse quickened along with her breathing, and she reached out to click the window with both dread and anticipation rising in her mind.

A worm she had released into the network over a week earlier, her third attempt to crack the administration’s firewalls, had returned data, dribbling it over the course of several hours to reduce the chances of anyone noticing. Now that data was reassembled and waiting to be examined.

Mariel scanned over the list of files. ‘Jackpot,’ she muttered. There were reports, audio files, videos… One of the videos caught her attention and she selected it, running it on-screen and putting the audio through headphones. She frowned as the images appeared, her eyes widening as they played on. ‘Oh… Oh damn…’ The video stopped and she quickly moved to an audio file, then a report. ‘Oh, Annette.’

Turning, Mariel activated another program and waited. While she waited, she dumped the new files out onto a memory stick and then ran a cryptographic deletion routine on her local storage. A ping brought her attention back to her screen.

FallenAngel: You have something?

Mariel would have grinned if her heart was not hammering. Everything you wanted, maybe more.

FallenAngel: I need that data.

Of course, but I can’t send it. I’ve dumped it to a stick, but there’s something else. I think they might have detected something. The action report I got back suggests they’re hunting.

There was a short pause and then, FallenAngel: I’ll have an extraction team there in fifteen minutes. Be ready. The connection cut off and Mariel turned away from the screen.

Extraction… Leaving everything behind, leaving the city. Well, if it had to be done, it had to be done. Mariel turned to her computers and activated a command script she had hoped she would never have to use.

28/11/83.

Annette walked up to the apartment building in Kirkland with a frown on her face. It was after one in the afternoon and Mariel was still not online. Annette had never been sure when her friend slept, but Mariel was always online. Usually.

Hitting the button for Mariel’s apartment yielded nothing. No response at all, not even an automated one. Mariel lived alone, but if she was, by some chance, asleep or out, she generally had one of her computers respond to the door. Well, okay, Annette had one thing going for her most visitors did not.

She hit the building security intercom button. ‘Annette Louise Barrington, UDF ID nine four six two six nine beta. I need access to Mariel Edmonton’s apartment.’ There was a buzz and the door clicked open. The UDF could override any private security system in the city. Annette opened the door, headed inside, and took the elevator up to Mariel’s floor.

The apartment door was already open and waiting for her. The apartment was, however, very quiet. It was not the largest place in the city, but Mariel had always loved it, ever since moving out of her parents’ place. She had set it up to make life easy for her. Mariel needed her chair to get around, but preferred fending for herself to having a servitor do it. So, the kitchen had lowered work surfaces, and the lounge had a sofa for guests and an open space for her chair when she was entertaining. There was ample space in her bedroom for her chair to manoeuvre around the bed and her clothes were all in drawers where she could access them easily. When Annette found no one in the bedroom, she checked and could not really see much in the way of missing clothes.

The computer room, the converted second bedroom, was Mariel’s pride and joy, but there was no sign of Mariel there. What Annette did find was something far more unexpected. All the computers were on, all the screens were lit up, and all the screens were displaying the same message, blinking on and off in a manner Annette found almost plaintive.

NO BOOT DISK DETECTED: PLEASE INSERT VALID BOOT DISK.

There was only one conclusion Annette could come to: Mariel was gone and someone, possibly Mariel herself, had erased her computers. Annette was considering whether to call Mariel’s parents or the UDF when her computer signalled a call coming in from Cranfield.

‘Hey, Cran, what’s up?’ Annette said once the connection was made.

‘We’ve got an urgent one,’ Cranfield replied. ‘The UDF needs an SAU assault team to go into a Cabal safe house they think they’ve located out Redmond way.’

Annette frowned. She really wanted to chase up the Mariel problem, but… ‘I’m already in Kirkland. Send me the details and I’ll meet you there.’

~~~

‘Word is that this lot stole several cases of medical supplies from the local clinic two days ago,’ Cranfield explained. ‘A citizen called in a report of seeing boxes being carried in here in the dead of night, thought it looked suspicious. Regular UDF have been keeping an eye on the place since and they’re convinced.’ The others had arrived first in an unmarked UDF van, which Annette had joined them in. Well, joined the boys there.

‘But they want us to go in and kick butt,’ Baltry added. ‘Kenya’s taking a closer look at the surroundings and the building entry points.’

‘Carefully, I hope,’ Annette commented and requested a radio connection to her friend. ‘Kenya? I’ve arrived. How’s it looking?’

‘No problems,’ Kenya’s voice came back. ‘There are people inside. I can’t give numbers because the blinds are down, but I can see heat shadows moving. It’s not going to be too easy. It’s a small industrial building. There’s one access door and one fire door. Two storeys. Number of occupants unknown. Defensive capabilities unknown.’

‘Just another day in Utopia City. At least it’s not Below.’

‘Small mercies. I’m coming back.’

‘She’s coming back in,’ Annette said aloud and then turned to the UDF officer in the van with them. ‘We’re going to need stun grenades launched through all the ground-floor windows when we make our run. Your people can capture anyone who tries to run out. We’ll go in and mop up the ones inside. And we’re going to need a breaching charge.’ She turned back to Cranfield and Baltry. ‘Kenya can set that on the door and we can blow it by remote on the way in. How about Cran in the lead with Baltry and me providing the firepower?’

‘Sounds good,’ Cranfield agreed.

The back door of the van opened and Kenya stepped inside, still wearing urban camouflage colours largely to spare Cranfield’s blushes. ‘Someone hand me my suit.’

‘Not yet,’ Annette replied, grinning. ‘You’re going to go deliver a present, and when that’s ready, we can knock.’

‘Knock really hard,’ Baltry said with a grin.

~~~

Glass shattered as the stun grenades detonated in every room of the ground floor with a window and then the breaching charge detonated, reducing the front door of the building to splinters. And Cranfield charged in, decking a man with a submachine gun who was standing in the lobby blinking and trying to stop his ears from ringing. Someone emerged from a side room and Baltry, right at Cranfield’s back, dropped him with a caged lightning bolt. They were in.

They moved from room to room, Cranfield acting as a shield as they moved, Baltry and Annette either stunning or freezing anyone who seemed capable of firing back. The criminals were well armed, but they were using low-calibre assault carbines, useful in a tight environment, but without sufficient power to penetrate Cranfield’s dermal armour. The big man was going to come away with a few bruises, but that was about all.

Meanwhile, Kenya was scouting, her skin assuming the colour scheme of the wall paint as she moved through the corridors. She paused when she located a flight of stairs. ‘I’ve found the upstairs access,’ she called out over her radio. ‘Holding here until you’re finished. No sign of anyone coming down.’

‘We’ll be clear in a minute,’ Annette replied. ‘Have you seen any sign of these drugs they took?’

‘No, but I haven’t exactly been looking for them.’

A couple of minutes later, the team regrouped at the stairs. ‘No sign of opposition?’ Cranfield asked.

‘No sign of anyone,’ Kenya replied.

‘Okay then, I’ll go see if anyone’s home.’ Cranfield started up the steps and got to a small landing without trouble. It was when he turned the corner and started up the next flight that he was hit by a burst of fire from above which had him staggering back and throwing himself out of the line of fire. ‘Shit! Pardon my language, but that stung. They’ve got an automated minigun turret on the top landing.’

‘Are you okay?’ Annette asked.

‘I’ve felt a lot better.’

‘Huh.’ Annette took one of her nanite grenades from behind her back. ‘If I use this on all of us, we’ll all heal fast, but it could tire us a little.’

‘Do it,’ Baltry replied. ‘These guys are a lot better equipped than the briefings made out. Anyone got an explosive grenade?’

Annette set her medical grenade down. ‘No…’ She reached back and collected her pistol from her pod just as the cloud of green robots began to settle on them. ‘However, I might have something that’ll work.’ Moving up to the top of the stairs, she ducked her head quickly around the corner and back, pulling up an image of the gun from what she had captured. ‘Doesn’t look like it’s exactly armoured. This should work.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Cranfield asked.

‘This,’ Annette replied, and she ducked around the wall, exposing as little of herself as possible as she aimed vaguely at the turret and fired off three rounds. There were three loud bangs and a horrible whining noise from the gun, and burning fragments of metal embedded themselves in the walls, floor, and ceiling where they continued to smoke. Annette paused, waiting for the minigun to do anything, but all it did was begin to smoke.

‘What,’ Cranfield said, ‘was that?’

‘Incendiary rounds. Be careful of those fragments – they’ll be hot for a while. There’s no carpet to catch fire, thankfully. The warheads have a fairly small explosive charge to propel the fragments, but it looks like it was enough to cripple the gun.’

‘What would they do to a human?’

Annette handed her pistol back to her pod to have the magazine swapped out. ‘Nothing good. To be honest, I don’t really want to find out. Shall we finish this?’

‘Sure. I’m sweating like a pig, but the bruising’s almost gone. Those nano-things really work.’

Annette flashed him a grin. ‘Hey, when I make something to do a job, it does the job.’

2/12/83.

Of course, Annette using her UDF authority to access Mariel’s apartment had been on record so she had to report the fact that her friend was missing. The UDF had investigated and found no evidence of a struggle. A missing person bulletin had been issued, but Annette got the distinct impression that the investigating officer suspected that they were looking for an insurgent.

Annette had been unable to relax and her teammates had noticed. She was twitchy on the three search missions they had run, even though there had been no sign of anyone they were looking for. Annette had explained about her missing friend. Help had been offered, but Annette had no idea what help they could give.

Then a message had arrived. Another anonymous one, received while she was asleep. Annette frowned at the display even though, technically, the window was not actually in front of her to frown at.

Tacoma. Nutopium Plant 1. Today @ 20:00. You might do well to be there and bring friends.

Great, just what she needed. What the Hell was her mysterious correspondent doing? Or was it the same person sending all the messages? Maybe this was from someone else. Maybe…

~~~

‘I’ve no proof, but I think this may have come from Mariel,’ Annette said.

‘Your missing friend?’ Baltry asked.

‘Yeah. I think she’s got her hands on some information, somehow, and she’s hiding, maybe from the Insurgency, but she got this to me.’

Baltry looked down from the gantry they were standing on toward the Nutopium plant in Tacoma mentioned in the message. ‘You know the UDF thinks she is an insurgent, right?’

‘I suspected they did.’ Annette checked the time. ‘I guess we’ll know in a few minutes. Are the UDF in place?’

‘They’re reporting ready,’ Kenya replied.

‘Then we just wait and keep our eyes open.’

‘Yes. I’m going down with Cran. I’ll camouflage myself and take up a position inside the plant.’

‘Okay. Keep in touch.’

~~~

Fifteen minutes passed without any sign of anyone showing up. Annette listened to the chatter from the UDF units situated around the plant. There were four snipers armed with laser rifles and four vans of men in power armour waiting to take on whatever happened. But they were starting to think that nothing was going to happen.

Then Kenya’s voice came in over the radio. ‘I think I’ve got something. I’m not sure. I think someone’s in here.’

The UDF commander on site answered. ‘Inside the plant? There’s no way they could get inside without us spotting them.’ They had assigned a lieutenant to the role, which showed how much they thought of Annette’s tip.

‘It may be nothing. Moving in to check.’

And that was when something blew up in the yard outside the loading docks. Annette’s head turned and her eyes were zooming in a second later. ‘One of the main power transformers just blew out. Something is happening.’

‘All units,’ the commander said, ‘prepare to move in.’

‘There!’ Baltry said, pointing, and Annette shifted her gaze. Men and women in leather and scruffy denim were charging out of what looked a lot like a Below access point.

‘Never mind preparing, Lieutenant,’ Annette said across the radio links, ‘you’ve got upwards of twenty Zeroes coming up on the north-east side of the compound.’

‘All units deploy!’ the lieutenant yelped. Probably his first major operation and he was about to have a horde of Zeroes trash an important industrial facility.

‘We need to get down there,’ Baltry said.

Annette nodded and headed for the stairs down the side of one of the buildings. ‘Just be careful. You’re not going to like getting hit with a club.’

‘Neither will you.’

‘At least I have body armour. When we get out of here, I’ll see about getting some fabricated for you.’

They were halfway down, and already hearing the sounds of people attacking machinery with makeshift weapons, when Annette heard Kenya’s voice over the radio. ‘There’s definitely someone here, but he’s good. All I’m getting is flashes of heat signature. I need your help here, Annette.’

There was a door into the structure right beside them and Annette put her hand on the handle. ‘Kenya needs me inside. You go down and help the regulars.’

‘Right,’ Baltry replied. ‘If you see Cran, send him out.’

‘Will do.’ Annette opened the door as quietly as she could and engaged her transmitter. ‘I’m coming in, Kenya. Second floor. I’ll see what I can see.’

The door opened onto a gantry above the main factory floor. Below her, Annette could see a lot of heavy machinery: thick pipes connecting tanks and machines which presumably had something to do with making Utopia City’s favourite drink. She also spotted the bulky form of Cranfield crouching behind a stack of crates near one of the doors. Waving at him drew his attention and she signalled to him what she hoped he would interpret as ‘go outside now.’ The sound of conflict was starting to come through the walls and, apparently, Cranfield understood. Standing, he slipped out through the door.

Kenya was on an upper walkway. Some of the machines were very tall. Annette guessed at some form of fractionating apparatus, but whatever, there was a need for high walkways to get to part of them. Kenya was using that as a vantage point.

‘I see you,’ Annette subvocalised. ‘I’m not seeing anyone else yet. I’ve sent Cran out to help Baltry.’

‘Okay,’ Kenya replied. ‘I think he’s down below. I’m sure I spotted something moving.’

Annette widened her spectrum reception to include ultraviolet light. The overheads were probably putting enough out to be useful. Edges leaped into sharp contrast and a couple of the pipes, transparent ones, began to glow a dull blue which was a little alarming. Then she saw it: a figure darted out from between two machines, vanishing into cover again before she could take aim. It was enough, however.

‘Kenya, I spotted him. You’re right, he’s on the ground, but there’s something else. He’s got the same sort of camouflage as you. Identical. I think he’s ex-SAU. That means he has your vision. He can see you as well as you can see him.’

‘Cat-and-mouse game then,’ Kenya replied. ‘I’ll move down and start from this side.’

‘Okay. I’ll come from this side, but be careful. He was carrying something, a bag. Given something blew up outside, he’s almost certainly planting bombs, but he may have other weaponry.’

‘Yes, Mom.’ Annette thought that might have been the first joke she had ever heard Kenya make. ‘I’ll meet you when we corner him.’

~~~

Outside, things were not going entirely the UDF’s way. They had brought heavy-duty powered armour carrying high-powered laser weaponry, but the Zeroes seemed to have expected that. The courtyard was now filled with smoke which seemed to glisten before your eyes and did a good job of making laser weaponry less effective, and the Zeroes were using limpet mines and at least one rocket launcher.

Cranfield found Baltry outside the building, looking frustrated. ‘This is turning into a real mess,’ Cranfield commented.

‘Tell me about it. I can’t see a damn thing and my weaponry is next to useless. I think we’ve lost at least one suit.’

The sound of a fairly large missile tore through the air and Cranfield turned his head toward the sound. ‘We need–’ He stopped as the projectile found a target and exploded, drowning out everything else. ‘We need to find that launcher.’

Baltry nodded. ‘It sounds like it’s over at the entrance they used to come up from Below. We should probably avoid the middle of this. We might get shot by our own side.’

‘Lead the way,’ Cranfield suggested.

~~~

Annette moved smoothly into position at the end of one row of machinery and glanced down the row. She picked out the male form, highlighted in infrared and ultraviolet, ten metres away and very busy attaching something to a control panel.

‘I see him,’ she said over the airwaves. ‘I’m going for the shot.’

‘Take it,’ Kenya replied.

Annette swung out into the aisle, one of her pistols swinging around to line up the shot. And that was when something slammed into her side, throwing her aim off and making a lot of noise, but doing no damage through her suit.

‘Run, Ghost!’ Annette’s attacker yelled before twisting through a leaping turn and bolting off across the factory floor.

Ghost. Annette knew the name from her first abortive attempt at fighting insurgents. That meant that the other one, now fleeing as fast as her cybernetic legs could carry her, was Cheetah. Annette glanced back, but the elusive Ghost had vanished.

‘I see him,’ Kenya’s voice said in Annette’s head. ‘Get the other one.’

It seemed like an unlikely option, but Annette ran after Cheetah, catching a glimpse of her as she jinked right between a pair of machines. The girl definitely had the full SAU Speeder package, including enhanced balance and jumping capability. Annette took a fast turn right and caught sight of her quarry running down the next aisle. Target lock and fire. The cryo round sped after its target even as Annette continued to run after Cheetah, but then the Speeder dodged left and Annette lost sight of her. A command drove the rocket round into the floor as Annette followed Cheetah just in time to see her slam a door open and rush outside.

Six valuable seconds passed before Annette made it to the door, pushed through, and spotted Cheetah again. She lifted her pistol. Range ninety-one metres, estimated speed twelve point eight metres per second. Fire. Annette watched the first bullet for a fraction of a second and then launched a second. Both smacked into Cheetah’s back and immediately burst, spreading a white fluid from their points of impact. As she turned the corner of the building, Cheetah was already slowing as the cold bit into her.

‘Annette!’ The voice in her head was urgent: Kenya was in trouble.

Ignoring the fleeing Cheetah, Annette ducked back inside and dashed across the machine room in the direction she hoped she would find Kenya. ‘I’m coming. Hold on.’

There was no reply, but Annette spotted them a second later. Kenya was on the ground, backed against a machine of some kind. Ghost was advancing on her with a large knife in his hand. Annette raised her pistol and fired even before she had taken in the range. The tiny rocket made barely any sound and that was drowned out by the machinery. It caught Ghost in the side and he flinched at the impact. The freezing fluid began to spread, but, to Annette’s eyes, it looked sluggish: his dermal armour, the same as Kenya’s, was slowing the heat transfer. Annette reached back to swap her load to kinetic rounds, but Ghost had, apparently, guessed her next move. He bolted and all Annette could do was run to Kenya and hope she might get a shot before the Infiltrator was too well hidden.

No such luck, but Annette forgot all about the man as soon as she saw Kenya. There were two deep slashes in her neck and chest, and from the way the blood was pooling behind her, there was a wound in her back too.

‘He got… behind me,’ Kenya said as Annette grabbed for the grenade her pack was handing her.

‘Don’t talk,’ Annette said. ‘This’ll have you on your feet in no time.’

‘St-stabbed me in the back. Knife… knife cut through… through me like–’

‘I said shut up, idiot,’ Annette told her as the grenade burst, spreading green dust over both of them.

‘You get… get the other?’

‘Yes, I got her. Damn it, girl, we normally can’t get you to say more than two words!’

‘Okay… okay… Gonna pass out now.’ Kenya’s eyes closed and her body relaxed entirely, slipping onto her side on the concrete floor.

Annette checked her pulse, weak but there, and then the wound on her back which looked nasty but was already starting to knit together under the ministrations of the tiny medics. ‘Hold on, Kenya,’ Annette whispered and then, because there were still probably bombs in the building, she hoisted Kenya over her shoulder and started for the back door Cheetah had used.

She activated her radio as she went. ‘Lieutenant, this is Annette Barrington. I’ve got one of ours down and there are explosive devices in here. We’re going to need ordnance disposal.’

‘What about the saboteur?’ the lieutenant asked in reply.

‘There were two. I think I got one, but the other may have got away.’

‘Let’s hope we can mop up this lot and get the bombs cleared then.’

Annette cut the connection and continued moving as fast as she could toward the door. ‘Damn, girl, you are heavier than you look,’ she muttered. ‘Of course, if I’d had to do this with Cran…’

She finally made it to the door, pushed through it, turned, and came to a sudden stop. Her left arm, the free one, came up automatically and she prepared to fire, zooming in to identify her targets. There was a heat source with little in the way of visible body, and that had to be Ghost, but there was a second figure, a far more visible one. As Annette caught sight of Ghost’s companion, her finger froze on the trigger. A tall woman with long auburn hair and dusky skin. Brown eyes, angular features Annette had not seen in years.

‘Mom?’ Annette said, knowing she would not be heard.

Patricia Barrington smiled sadly at her daughter, apparently confident that the expression would be seen, and then she raised her hand. Annette saw the small box in it and worked out what was about to happen just before Patricia pressed the firing button. Behind Annette, the building shook as the bombs Ghost had planted detonated. The door blew out, tossing Annette to the ground, desperately trying to avoid dropping Kenya on her head.

By the time Annette got herself together and looked around, there was no sign of either Ghost or her mother.

~~~

They had found Cheetah not far around the corner of the building while servitor robots set about the process of putting out fires in the Nutopium plant and disposing of the bodies of the Zeroes. To Annette’s annoyance, the Speeder was dead. The cold had gone too far and her heart had stopped, and Annette had kicked herself for using two rounds when one would probably have done.

Kenya had been more or less fine by the time the paramedics got to checking her, but the team had insisted that she go to hospital. Annette had suggested that Kenya’s cybernetics might need checking out, which was what had finally pushed the Infiltrator into going along with it, and Cranfield had gone along in the ambulance with her, leaving Annette and Baltry to take care of the final parts of the operation at the plant.

And then Annette had gone home to lie in a hot bath and contemplate the niggling something which had been gnawing away at her since she had seen Kenya lying there in a pool of blood.

Routinely, Annette recorded everything that happened on their operations and she lay in the steaming water replaying everything from shooting at Cheetah through to picking up Kenya. She had been through the entire sequence five times before she noticed the panel on the machine Kenya had been leaning against. She had passed it on the way to check her friend’s wounds and ignored it completely. Her implants had, however, recorded it and now she could check it out at her leisure. Stepping through the frames, she found the best image of it and the thing which had caught her attention and then wafted away when she had seen Kenya properly.

The panel seemed to be a flow-control display. Three feeds were being fed into the machine where what Annette assumed were ingredients for Nutopium were mixed. One of those ingredients was labelled ‘Aries-07B.’

Aries has you. Aries was a component of Nutopium.

On the off-chance, Annette opened a window and ran a search query for ‘aries.’ She got back a lot of entries for an archaic form of fortune telling known as ‘astrology.’ Then there was the constellation of Aries in astronomy, Aries the Ram. Which was interesting and led her to look up ‘sheep.’ The taxonomic binomial name for sheep was Ovis aries. Another sheep reference then, but what did the stuff do?

Annette ran the recorded sensory data through, pausing on the image of her mother holding the detonator. She looked sad, regretful, but there she was blowing up a drinks factory. It came to Annette that this was who ‘Angel’ was. Back at the beginning when she had found Ghost, Cheetah, and Angel discussing getting into some facility or other, they had been talking about the Nutopium plant, and Annette had been listening to her mother planning an act of terrorism. It had been her mother who had stopped Ghost from killing her that night!

Climbing out of the bath, her head buzzing, Annette reached for a towel. She would go to bed and try to get some sleep. Sleep was probably the best thing for her right now.

3/12/83.

Annette lay in bed, wondering what had made her wake up. It was four in the morning, or just after, and her systems were detecting no rejection problems or other alerts which might have woken her. Something had. A sound? A feeling?

Then she knew. Heat source. Arm. Holding– She rolled sideways just in time for the knife to slam into her mattress, tumbling to the floor in a flurry of duvet. She managed to struggle to her feet just in time to see Ghost yanking his blade free.

‘I can see you,’ Annette said. ‘There’s no point in the camouflage.’ He knew what he was doing: his skin was not entirely black, but patterned with blotches of dark grey to break up the lines. That did nothing for his body heat or his visibility in ultraviolet light.

‘You killed Cheetah,’ Ghost said.

Annette backed up against the dresser behind her, the one with the brushed aluminium case on it. ‘That wasn’t my intention.’ Keep him talking. ‘I wanted to take her alive.’

‘I bet you think that’s better.’ He moved forward, onto the bed, his weight leaving obvious depressions in the mattress and his skin showing up quite obviously against the pale fabric.

‘Alive is better than dead.’ Annette eased the case open behind her, hoping he would not hear it.

‘Not when they get you into the re-education programme. You’ve seen them, some of them, down Below. Those are the failures.’ He raised his knife. Annette saw the sudden burst of heat as his muscles tensed to spring. ‘It doesn’t matter. Time to die, sheep.’

Annette swept one of her pistols around from behind her back. ‘So not a sheep.’ She pulled the trigger and held it down until the magazine ran dry. High-density penetrators punched through Ghost’s synthetic skin and into the organs beneath. He fell back, the knife slipping from his fingers, but, by some form of miracle, he was still alive. Annette grabbed her second pistol and aimed it at his head. ‘Stay down,’ she said. ‘Just… stay where you are.’

‘Some… chance.’ Ghost, his skin fading into a normal flesh tone, reached out for his knife again.

‘Don’t,’ Annette said. ‘You don’t have to die.’

‘You… you or me, bitch.’

Annette fired. Two three-round bursts punched into Ghost’s head, blasting bone fragments and grey matter over the bed. He stopped moving and Annette lowered her arm. There was blood everywhere, blood and the remains of something which had once been a living human.

The lights suddenly going on came as something of a surprise even though her eyes adjusted seamlessly. Annette looked up to see her father standing in the bedroom door, a robe flapping around him over his pyjamas. He looked shocked, maybe more than she did.

‘He was an insurgent,’ Annette said, her voice sounding hollow. ‘His name was Ghost. I killed his friend this evening.’

‘Annette…’

‘Never mind, Poppa. Would you call the UDF? I…’ There was blood soaking into her mattress, darkening the sheet to a deep, wine colour. ‘I’m going to need to sleep somewhere else.’

~~~

Sleep was not something which came easily. The UDF were gone by five thirty, but then Annette changed the sheets in the spare room, her brother’s old room, before climbing into bed. She could hear the apartment’s servitor robot at work cleaning up the mess in her own room, and she lay, staring up into the darkness, thinking.

Ghost had implied that the wild, strikingly insane Zeroes they had encountered deep in the Below were some sort of failure of the re-education programme. There was not much known, outside of administrative circles, about what they did to turn aberrant citizens into normal ones. Now Annette thought about it, normal was not quite the right term for the one and only person she had ever met who had undergone the process. A student at the university with some… unusual views had vanished for about a month. When they returned, they had been a different person, fiercely loyal to Doctor White and the city, but somehow… empty. Their grades had fallen and, a couple of months later, they had left to join the SAU.

Insurgents, it seemed, would rather die than be re-educated. Well, given their beliefs, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable reaction. They might be insane… Might be. They might be insane, but there was a rational core to their insanity. She could see it, see how they would come to believe it. They believed Doctor White was some sort of monster, a tyrant. They believed that Utopia City was no kind of utopia and everyone in it was under the control of a cynical, malign administration. And there it was, the media control, the constant stream of… Annette decided that if she was going to get into Ghost’s mind, she should imagine the world from his point of view. In which case, all the posters and advids, even the portrayal of Doctor White and his administration in the history books, all that was propaganda.

Annette’s mother had come to believe that. Why? How? Patricia had been a doctor. She had saved lives. Then, after her son had vanished into the UDF, she had turned from her work and her family…

It all seemed to come back to Nate. Big, strong Nate who had always been there for his little sister. Right up until the last few weeks before he left. In those last few weeks, he had been a little strange, distant, and then he had gone without so much as a farewell. Annette’s father had explained that he was fighting for Doctor White beyond the walls. Patricia had said nothing and then become more and more distant herself. She had argued with Charles. Annette had heard them when she was supposed to be asleep in bed, though never quite heard what the arguments were about, but now she suspected they were about Nate.

Annette turned onto her side and closed her eyes. She needed to sleep. She needed it all to go away and, eventually, for a while, it did.

~~~

‘You’re quiet,’ Charles said over dinner.

Annette flashed him what was probably a weak grin. ‘I’m getting that a lot today.’ Kenya had been out of hospital and the team had met up at White Tower, but they had been told to take a day after the damage Kenya had taken and the attack on Annette. Everyone had been worried about her, but there was nothing much they could do.

‘Are you okay?’

It had to be the dumbest question her father had ever asked, but Annette tried to keep her thoughts out of her voice. ‘Well, no, not really. Kenya was almost killed yesterday and then I killed the man who attacked her when he attacked me.’

‘You did a good thing, Annette. Men like that, foreign insurgents, they need to be put down.’

‘Yeah.’

The attack on the Nutopium plant had, unsurprisingly, never appeared on any news service, but Annette had made the news. Not by name, but ‘an unnamed for security reasons’ SAU agent had eliminated an insurgent who had infiltrated her home. The insurgent had been equipped with advanced cybernetics and the official line was that he had been sent in from outside the walls, a foreign agent working with the Insurgency to undermine the city’s administration. The public were urged to report any behaviour which seemed out of place from anyone they knew or met.

With her new-found ability to view both sides, Annette could see the possibility that this was a rather cynical attempt to make people afraid of foreign spies infiltrating the city. She figured that opportunity would have been ignored if it had not been for the rather public nature of Ghost’s attack. It would have taken just one person getting a picture of the body bag leaving the building to blow a cover-up out of the water. Better to admit to some of it and make use of it. Given Ghost’s cybernetics, and Cheetah’s, it was clear to Annette that they had both been ex-SAU, not foreign spies. It was getting hard to view things from the official side, from her father’s side.

‘Any plans for tonight?’ Charles asked, his voice soothing.

‘Uh… not really.’ As she said it, her computer flagged a new message, an anonymous one. She opened it.

He was working alone. Go to the Birdy Tree.

‘Perhaps we could just stay in, watch a vid,’ Charles said, smiling.

Annette smiled back. ‘I’m not very good company, Poppa. I think… I think maybe a walk will help clear my head. Some fresh air and time to think, you know?’

Charles nodded. ‘Whatever helps, honey.’

~~~

Whatever else came of it, the new message had confirmed that Annette’s mysterious correspondent was her mother. The Birdy Tree was an oak, getting old and gnarled now, in a botanical garden maybe a kilometre from the apartment. When Annette had been much younger, Patricia had walked there with her daughter, first in a stroller and later on foot, because Annette had loved watching the birds flitting between the tree’s branches. Annette had actually called it the ‘Bir’y Tree’ until she was four, but between the two of them, ever since, it had been the Birdy Tree.

In the dark, at this time of year, the birds were not evident. Nor was anyone else. Annette sat against the trunk and waited, lost in her thoughts. Time passed and no one came, but the cold played into her miserable state and she stayed until almost an hour had passed. Then she checked the message again. Go to the Birdy Tree. ‘Go to,’ not ‘meet me at.’ That seemed significant.

Getting to her feet, Annette walked around the thick bole, looking for anything out of the ordinary. She found it, of course, on the opposite side, pushed into a gap formed by a raised root: a plastic container which rattled when she shook it. Inside was a memory stick.

Well, given what had been happening recently, Annette had come out with her arming pod strapped around her waist and that had a number of useful features, including a data port which could handle the stick. She plugged it in, ran every security program she had on it, and then examined the contents. A text file, which contained only a set of geographical coordinates, and a video file. Annette ran the file and watched, bemused, as it began to play.

The view appeared to be from a security camera trained on one of the entrances to the Below in Tacoma and, for several seconds, there was nothing on display aside from the heavy door. Then a figure appeared, moving in from the right and approaching the door quickly. Annette’s heart skipped. It looked, from the back, like Nate. He began punching keys on the pad beside the door, but turned suddenly after entering half the code. It was definitely Nate and, as Annette’s software scanned over the image and picked out expressions, he seemed to be angry and frightened.

The reason for the fear became apparent as a UDF armoured suit stepped into frame, blocking the view. There was no sound and now Annette could not really see what was happening, but there were flares of light… The suit stepped clear and she could see her brother again, what was left of him. The suit’s laser weaponry had almost sliced Nate in half. There was little in the way of blood, but there was no doubt that she was looking at Nathanial Barrington’s corpse.

The video appeared to end, but she heard a voice report starting, probably talking about what she had just seen. The words failed to go in, passed through her like water. Annette simply sat there, not realising she had slipped to the ground, replaying the image of her dead brother in her mind.

North-West Enclave, 4/12/83.

The coordinates corresponded to a location over sixty kilometres south of the city wall, more than twice that to drive from Annette’s apartment block by road. Feeling numb from the neck up, Annette walked all the way to the White Tower complex and used her UDF authority to book out a light all-terrain vehicle she could use, heading south as soon as she had clearance.

She waited until she had passed through the checkpoint at the city wall before setting the car to autopilot and loading up the video again. This time, the weight in her chest did not seem so heavy, but it was still there. She took in more details, but they told her nothing she did not already know. Then the images cut out and she heard the voice.

‘Report filed following execution of insurgent Nathanial Barrington on six, six, seventy-seven. Time of death recorded as twenty-two sixteen. Insurgent was attempting to gain access to Below tunnels prior to formally joining the Insurgency. UDF forces responded to a report made by a member of the insurgent’s family. Name of source withheld in this report under security directive nine zero two one.’

Either Charles or Patricia had sold Nate to the UDF. Annette was finding it hard enough to believe that Nate had been joining the Insurgency, but… The obvious choice was Charles, a member of the administration, promoted to a high position soon after Nate had gone missing. Charles had always got on better with Annette… But discounting the alternative did no good. Patricia had supplied the file and she had presumably known what the audio said. If she had given Nate up, then turned around and joined the Insurgency herself, she could be using this to turn her daughter against her ex-husband. Convoluted, malicious, but how well did Annette really know her mother? How well did she know any of her family?

Parking the car four kilometres from the location she had been given, Annette walked the rest of the way there. It was still dark when she found herself climbing over fences and into fields with cattle in them. A farm, and the farmhouse was dead ahead with no signs of activity. It was now seven in the morning and the sky would start to brighten in five minutes or so. She headed in, but she could tell something was wrong before she even got to the door.

There was a body on the porch. From the look of it, a laser had scorched a line from the man’s left hip up to his right shoulder. The tissue was blackened. There was no blood, but the wound looked like it went deep into the flesh, even cutting through bone.

The door was ajar so getting inside was not a problem. The building seemed to be all one storey, the front door leading onto a hallway which ran to the back of the house. There was another body near the back door, but the bulk of the death was reserved for the lounge. Annette counted nine bodies and she was about to check them for signs of life when she noticed one particular one sitting against the outer wall.

Patricia Barrington had probably died when someone drilled through her forehead with a laser beam, but she had fallen before then. There was a deep wound seared into her left side, another almost severing her right arm at the shoulder, a glancing burn across her right cheek. Annette looked down at her mother and knew she would get no useful answers here. The mother she had not spoken to in six years would never speak to her again.

The sound of the front door of the house opening had Annette turning and bringing a pistol up to aim at the lounge door in a second. There was a short pause and then three men in UDF combat armour appeared, the one in the lead immediately swinging his rifle up to point at Annette. The armour was good and Annette was not wearing hers. Even if she hit the faceplate…

Annette lifted her pistol, raising her hands. ‘I’m SAU. Annette Barrington, ID number nine four six two six nine beta.’

The lead soldier edged in so that his colleagues could follow, all of them covering Annette with their rifles. ‘What are you doing here?’ The voice was altered electronically to be unrecognisable, and more menacing.

‘Following a lead. I got a tip that there were insurgents operating out of this area. It looks like I was right, and too late.’

‘On your own?’

‘I was just scouting. I was going to call in help if I turned up anything. Then I saw the body on the porch…’ Slowly, the leader’s rifle lowered, followed by the other two. So far so good. ‘Could I maybe see who I’m talking to? And cut the synthesised voice?’

There was a pause and then the leader reached up to unlock his helmet. ‘These things are damn claustrophobic anyway. Sergeant Jake Watson, regular UDF.’

Annette smiled and lowered her arms, hanging her pistol at her side. ‘You guys know what happened here?’ The other two, Watson’s juniors she assumed, were also taking their helmets off. Perfect.

‘Like you said, this place was being used as an Insurgency safe house,’ Watson explained. ‘Looks like a major cell too. We think they were using it to smuggle people in and out of the enclave through Gate Five.’ Annette nodded: Gate Five in the enclave wall was not too far to the north. ‘Got the word to move in here at zero one hundred, had every last one of the stinking traitors burned down in thirty minutes. No trouble.’

‘So why are you still here?’

‘Someone had to stay and see whether any more of them turned up. When we saw you sneaking in… But I remember you from some of the reports. You’ve nailed two of them yourself in the last couple of days. Up close and personal too.’ Watson grinned. He thought she was great, a hot girl in jeans and a T-shirt who killed insurgents. If not for the weird eyes, she would have been perfect.

Annette returned his grin. ‘It’s been busy lately. I wasted twenty Zeroes in the Below and a bunch of Cabal last week.’

‘Twenty Zeroes? That’s harsh.’

‘Yeah, and three dicks in UDF uniforms today.’

‘Huh?’

Annette swung her pistol up, reaching for the second one as she fired, punching a hole in Watson’s forehead, right between the eyes. The expanding round pulped his brain as it smashed its way through and rattled around inside his skull, but Annette was already locking aim on her second target and firing. The last man standing was just about getting his hands on his rifle again when a penetrator punched into him and he went down with his two colleagues.

They would likely be relieved, or at least have to check in, at eight a.m. Annette figured she had less than an hour to go through the farm and find anything that might be useful and not already taken by the UDF. She turned and looked down at her mother. Mourning would have to wait. Now she had to move.

Crouching down, Annette began going through her mother’s pockets.

~~~

There was not much left in the farmhouse and Annette had made sure that no one was going to find anything else thanks to a few incendiary grenades she had found. She had watched from a distance as the relief team arrived to find the building burning. Now she was parked fifty kilometres away to examine what else she had managed to find.

There was a portable fabricator, a suitcase-sized version of the plant the Zeroes had wrecked. To function, it needed materials to work with and power, but Annette figured it might be useful and, being relatively standard equipment, the UDF had not taken it. There were several sealed meal packs, so she was not going to go hungry while she considered her next move. She had a couple of cans of industrial-strength nanocleanser. The insurgents had likely used it to remove forensic evidence since the stuff was death to practically any organic matter it came into contact with. Annette was unsurprised to find a collection of devices for defeating security systems, but she took only the latest items, designed to help when picking electronic and physical locks. She had picked up a pair of rather elaborate electronic handcuffs because they were not heavy and you never knew, and she found a basic paramedic minibot which she figured could be worth taking. Her favourite find was a common-looking, black sports bag. Luckily, the hidden compartment built into it had been open or, even with her vision enhancements, Annette doubted she would have noticed it. She could carry a reasonable amount of gear in it, including her pistols if necessary, without it being obvious.

And then there was the memory dot she had found clasped in her mother’s hand. It appeared that no one had looked for something there, but the tiny devices were difficult to pick out anyway. Using highly efficient molecular storage technology, the submillimetre devices could store huge amounts of data. Annette figured that if her mother had been holding onto this one, there was a good reason for it, and there was a reader built into her arming pod.

True to form, this one had a lot of data on it. Annette saw the video file she had been given on the stick, and then she saw an audio file labelled ‘To Annette.’ Swallowing, she selected it and set it playing.

‘Hi, Annette, it’s Patricia.’ There was noise in the background, a lot of noise muffled by electronics which were not managing to block it all: it had been recorded during the attack on the farm. ‘I’m not sure I deserve to call myself “Mom” now and it doesn’t look like I’ll get to explain what I did so… Well, I can’t imagine that would have been a pleasant experience, so we’re both being spared that. If you’re listening to this, you found the memory stick at the tree and you know what happened to your brother. I’m going to say no more. You can make whatever judgement, take whatever action, you see fit. There’s a lot of data on this dot. Mariel Edmonton managed to worm it out from under White’s nose. Mariel’s safe. We got her out last night. Look at what she found. Decide what you want to do. Stay safe. I’m… sorry for everything, Annette. Goodbye.’

Annette lay back against her seat and sighed. Aside from the news about Mariel, that had been distinctly uninformative. Patricia had not denied being responsible for Nate’s death, neither had she implicated Charles. Both were probably plusses to her mother’s side but did nothing to make the decision easy. There was only one way Annette was going to uncover the truth, but it would have to wait and that gave her time to examine the data Mariel had dug up. Very well. Annette began working through the files one at a time.

~~~

Annette closed down her file-viewer app and turned her attention to the sky. It was somewhere to direct her attention and there was always something distracting to see there when your vision encompassed everything from infrared to gamma rays.

If you sat back and looked at some of the evidence Mariel had collected, it could be viewed in a fairly positive light. Some of it. Some fell into the category of ‘good intentions, but misguided,’ and you could maybe give Doctor White a pass there, given the circumstances. Some of the files were significantly more damning.

The Department of Public Health, which did have a remit to improve the health of the enclave’s citizens, had been engaging in eugenic and genetic programmes to achieve that goal for a while. The generation Annette belonged to were predisposed to better health, had improved immune systems, and were likely to live longer. It was when you looked at the details that things got shaky. In Utopia City, the engineering had focused on enhancing intelligence and promoting scientific skills. In the outer enclave, where Cranfield had been born, they had been pushing for a strong, placid workforce. Annette would have bet that all Cranfield’s brothers and sisters were stronger than city folk, and also more amenable to suggestion. She had noticed that a little with the big guy himself: he was fairly easy to sway with a little argument. Even when he was being decisive, you could persuade him the other way without too much trouble.

However, that kind of manipulation had taken decades to get into place and there were still people alive from before the programme had begun. The answer to the initial problem was Aries and they were still using it to control the city dwellers. Aries was an organic nanodrug which altered brain chemistry, reducing resistance to outside influences. It had a distinctive, not entirely pleasant taste, so mixing it into the water supply might have been noticed. Thus, as Annette had seen for herself, it was distributed in Nutopium.

Aries had been through several iterations since it was first introduced, primarily to attempt to eliminate a side effect. Overdoses of the stuff had been known to produce unusual effects for some time: paranoia, depression which bordered on the suicidal, and/or enhanced aggression responses. Some people were more susceptible, exhibiting brain chemistry changes at even normal doses which could not be reversed. Aries created Zeroes. Aries was responsible for turning a small fraction of the population insane, but the administration continued to feed it to as many people as would drink Nutopium.

The propaganda which Annette had noticed and let slide over her without real question was a lot more scientifically designed than she thought. There were studies of population and take-up rates. They were treating the propagation of ideas like a virus, and they had noticed increased resistance in some of their populations recently which they were unable to explain. Nutopium intake had decreased over the past twenty years or so, but the resistance was a bigger effect, so that had been rejected as the cause. To Annette, looking at the population groups and the resistance factors detected, it looked as though the generations subject to genetic manipulation were either more resistant to propaganda or, more likely, more resistant to Aries.

There were a few other things. A paper on the high deviancy rate among SAU members pointed out that far more than the average number of new SAU recruits had to be re-educated within two months of starting operations. Annette was not surprised: she had really started questioning things when she had seen how much of what she had been told was basically lies. Another document described a new medical system being installed in White Tower which promised considerable benefits over traditional surgical techniques. Annette had never heard of it. It was being kept for the higher-ups in the administration. Again, not a huge surprise now she thought about it: Doctor Darius White, father of the city, had not been a young man when he had come to the Seattle region and had to be well over a century old now, but he looked little different to the pictures taken back then.

Annette sighed. Her father would not know about all of this, she suspected, but she needed to talk to him. There was one thing he definitely knew and Annette needed to know it too.

Utopia City.

Charles Barrington let himself into his apartment and frowned. The lights were out, and they remained out as he closed the door. That meant that Annette was not home, but also that something was wrong with the computer since it should have responded to his presence by turning on the lights.

There was some light: it filtered in from outside through the windows in the lounge up ahead of him and he walked toward it, pausing in the doorway. ‘Lights,’ he said and got no response. ‘I said–’

A table lamp turned on across the room. ‘Better, Poppa?’ Annette asked. She was sitting in the chair Charles favoured, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, with one of her pistols lying in her lap.

‘What’s wrong with the computer?’ Charles asked.

‘Nothing. I wanted to talk in private. Maybe you should sit down.’

Still frowning, Charles moved around to sit on a sofa that faced Annette’s chair. ‘Is something wrong, honey? Has something happened?’

‘Yes. Mom’s dead.’

‘Uh… I… When she left, we lost touch. I don’t know where she went. I always assumed she–’

‘She joined the Insurgency. She was killed by the UDF early this morning.’

‘Oh. I’d never have believed… She always blamed me for Nate joining the UDF, going away. I think you know we argued. She said it was my “propaganda” that persuaded him to–’

‘You can stop now, Poppa. I know what happened to Nate. I’ve seen the security video.’ For once, Charles Barrington seemed to be lost for words. Annette was quite surprised by that: he always seemed to know what to say. ‘Someone in this family informed on him when he attempted to join the Insurgency. I know it wasn’t me. That leaves you, or Mom.’

Then Annette watched as her father considered his options and what his daughter might do, and made his choice. ‘I didn’t know what she’d done until afterward. Don’t think too badly of her. She thought they would capture him, take him to re-education. When they killed him, she couldn’t–’

Annette was on her feet and aiming her pistol at his head, and he stopped speaking in the face of her anger. ‘Shut up, you lying fuck,’ Annette said, her voice dangerously low.

‘No! It was–’

‘You know what’s truly ironic about this? You called in all sorts of favours and worked really hard to get me the software the Inquisitors use. I probably wouldn’t know you were lying without it.’

‘Annette…’

‘Goodbye, Poppa,’ Annette said, and then she pulled the trigger.

~~~

A heavy bassline throbbed through Annette’s body, driving out thought, emotion, and the images which kept flashing through her mind. She had thought she wanted to be alone, but her mind had been a whirlwind and she had decided on another plan. The team was out for a night on the town.

They had been worried about her, out of communication for a whole day. She had lied to them about her reasons for vanishing, her movements, and her reasons for wanting to get drunk and dance to wild music. It had been Baltry who had suggested a club called Pier Review, even though the place was quite near Cranfield’s apartment. It was, as Annette had requested, loud and excessively vibrant.

Right now, Baltry thought he was dancing with Annette. Annette was alone with the music, though she opened her eyes at times and flashed him a grin. It was during one of those flashes of reality that she spotted a small group of UDF officers moving through the crowd. One of them was wearing the distinctive, high-collared suit of an Inquisitor and that meant they were investigating something. Next time she looked, they had stopped at the table Cranfield and Kenya were sitting at. Cranfield was indicating the dance floor.

Annette signalled to Baltry – speaking was a pointless activity – and he looked across at the table, frowned, and then indicated that they should probably head that way. Annette gave him a nod, and prepared herself to lie to someone who had the same verification and analysis software that she did.

‘Is there a problem?’ Baltry asked as he approached the table. Carefully placed directional speakers reduced the music to bearable levels off the dance floor, though whispering was out.

‘Well, uh…’ Cranfield said, rising to his feet. He looked at Annette. His mouth worked, but nothing came out.

‘Cran?’ Annette said, putting on a confused smile.

‘Private Barrington?’ the Inquisitor said. This one was a woman: short, blonde hair, severe features, and a slim figure hidden under the straight lines of her suit.

‘Yes.’

‘It is my painful duty to inform you that your father, Charles Barrington, was killed this evening.’

Annette looked at her and… What she needed was right there when she needed it. All that she had done in the past few days, all that she had learned, all of it flooded in on her as though the music had been holding it back and now there was nothing to stop it. Her knees buckled. When she did not hit the floor, it took her several seconds to realise that Baltry had caught her. Kenya was there, hands on Annette’s cheeks and saying something. Cranfield was hovering behind Kenya, not really knowing what to do.

Then Annette was sitting down and there was a glass at her lips. The alcohol stung at her throat and she coughed before grabbing the glass and sinking more of whatever was in it.

‘How?’ she managed.

‘He was shot,’ the Inquisitor replied. ‘In the apartment you shared with him.’

‘C-can I see him?’

‘That would be… unwise.’ The woman’s tone was shifting, becoming softer. For now, Annette had got away with it. ‘The killer used a substantial amount of industrial nanocleanser on the scene.’

‘Shit!’ That was Cranfield. He had probably seen the stuff at work at some point.

‘Do you have somewhere to stay? The apartment is a crime scene.’

Annette looked up. ‘I don’t really–’

‘I have a spare room,’ Cranfield said. ‘My place is close too.’

Smiling weakly, Annette nodded. ‘Thanks, Cran. I… don’t think I want to be alone tonight.’

~~~

Hot water washed over Annette in a torrent. Cranfield did not have a bath, but his shower was very good. His apartment was not large. It had been arranged for him by the UDF when he had moved up from the family farm, which meant they had gone for something suitable for a single man but had thought of possible visits by his family. There was a spare room and Annette had dumped her bag there when they had got back. Cranfield was, of course, being a gentleman.

It had taken Annette insisting on it to have him standing outside the bathroom, with the door open. She had actually wanted him in the room with her, but that had been a step too far it seemed. She had been a little afraid that his cheeks would actually combust. But she found herself really wanting the company of someone who had no idea of what she had become.

‘I mean,’ Cranfield said, ‘I get it, I really do. First time I killed someone… I mean, I didn’t even know he was dead until after. I hit the guy, but I didn’t know how hard… I had to keep telling myself he was a bad man. He was a Zero. They can’t be cured and they’re dangerous. It still… I didn’t sleep too well for a while.’

Annette rubbed shampoo into her hair. ‘I’m an academic. I mean, I joined the SAU, but I’m really an engineer. I thought I was ready for it. I guess I was wrong. Then the guy attacked me in my bedroom.’

‘And now it looks like some of his friends came back.’

‘Yeah. I guess.’ She used the excuse of washing the soap from her hair to stay silent for a few seconds.

Cranfield, apparently, could not handle the lull. ‘Do you think they’d let us look into it? Maybe we could find them and–’

‘I kind of doubt it, Cran.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re soldiers, not investigators, and I’m a suspect.’

‘What?! No way do they–’

‘Criminology one-oh-one. The family is always suspect. Mom will be on the suspect list too, probably higher up it, but no one knows where she is. They won’t let me investigate the case until they can definitely rule me out and I don’t have an alibi. I picked exactly the wrong moment to decide I needed time to myself.’ She shut the water off and opened the door of the cubicle.

Cranfield took a step away from the door. ‘There are towels on the rail.’

Annette grinned in his direction, even if she could not see him. ‘I see them.’

‘Good. Annette, you don’t blame yourself for this, do you?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ That was true. Annette picked a towel up and began drying her hair, which would take a while.

‘You don’t know how many of them there were or what kind of weapons they had. You don’t know it would’ve been different if you’d been there.’

‘You’ve seen me take down twenty Zeroes in no more than a second, Cran. I made a choice and Poppa’s dead because of it.’ Truer words had never been said.

‘Well… Will you be okay in there for a minute? I’ll go pour a couple of drinks.’

‘Yeah, I could use one. I’ll be out when I’m dry.’

‘Great.’

Five minutes later, Annette walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Cranfield was sitting in his lounge, not a big room, but there was enough space for a couple of sofas and a smoked-glass coffee table. The big man stood up as Annette entered and she watched in technicolour as his body reacted to the sight of her in just a towel. Increased blood flow to the face and groin, an obvious reddening to the cheeks, and equally obvious reaction lower down. She wondered whether his embarrassment stemmed from her state of dress, his reaction to her state of dress, or both.

Cranfield did not look like a wine man, but there were two glasses of white on the coffee table. Annette picked the nearest one up and sipped. ‘That’s nice stuff. Crisp. Not too heavy.’

‘They, uh, sell it at a local shop,’ he replied. ‘Look, we’ll talk to that Inquisitor, get all this straightened out. Then we’ll go find the bastard who did this and–’

‘Or bitch,’ Annette said. ‘Never forget the fairer sex.’ She almost laughed at the little strangled noise he made at the mention of sex. ‘You’re sweet, Cran, but I’m not sure I want to find them.’

He moved closer, looking as though he wanted to hold her, comfort her, but not really sure how. ‘Afraid of what you’d do?’

‘Terrified.’ Again, the truth: Annette was terrified of what would happen if she was found out. She looked at Cranfield, hovering protectively, and came to a decision. She put her glass down. ‘Cran?’

‘Yes, Annette?’

Annette let the towel slip from around her body. ‘I really don’t want to be alone tonight.’

5/12/83.

‘How was he?’ Kenya fell into step beside Annette as the team walked through the lobby of White Tower.

‘What makes you think I’d know?’ Annette replied. The slight smirk was probably a giveaway, however.

‘I may not have your software, but I can see the way he looks at you. And that smug look you’ve got.’

‘Yes, well… He’s inexperienced, but he takes direction well. He kept me awake long enough that when I did go to sleep, I didn’t dream.’

‘That’s… a cure for insomnia I hadn’t considered.’

‘You should try it. Worked for me. I–’

Annette stopped as two uniformed UDF officers stepped in front of Cranfield and Baltry. The Inquisitor handling the case moved in behind them. ‘Private Barrington, we need to talk.’

‘She’s just lost her father,’ Cranfield began, stopping as Annette put her hand on his arm.

‘It’s okay, Cran. She needs to talk to me.’

The Inquisitor nodded, but it took Annette’s software to detect the slight smile. ‘If you’ll follow me, Private,’ the Inquisitor said before to turning to lead Annette away.

~~~

‘Yes, I feel guilty about my father’s death. I’m responsible for it.’

The interrogation room had been designed to disquiet the subject of the interrogation. It was small, blandly grey, and badly illuminated, though the latter made no difference to Annette. There was a single chair, bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. It had brackets for fixing restraints to it, but Annette was not restrained. This was a ‘friendly’ interview with the victim’s daughter.

‘Admitting guilt to an Inquisitor is generally not something someone does,’ the Inquisitor said from behind her. ‘Explain.’

‘I was attacked on Thursday morning. An insurgent gained access to our apartment, seeking revenge for the death of one of his compatriots, at my hand, the previous evening.’

‘I’m aware of both events. You stated in your report that you had encountered both of them before, prior to joining the SAU.’

‘Yes. I’m not a killer, Inquisitor.’ Annette looked down at her hands and frowned. ‘Well, I am a killer, that’s quite obvious to me now. I’ve killed more people than anyone else in my team, but Ghost was… different. Him and another. They were close, personal. Ghost ended up with his brains all over my bed, and the other died as he fell into my arms. I didn’t think I was capable of that kind of… Anyway, I decided I needed to clear my head, think things through, and I forgot that there was a third insurgent with Ghost and Cheetah when I saw them. They called her Angel.’

‘And you think this “Angel” came after you and killed Charles Barrington.’

‘No. I don’t think that. I think Angel was my mother.’

There was a pause. This was information the Inquisitor did not have it seemed. ‘You believe your mother was part of the Insurgency? You have evidence?’

Annette paused this time. ‘I saw her at the Nutopium plant. She detonated the bombs.’

‘That was not in your report.’

‘I didn’t want to believe it. I’ll add an addendum to my report. I’ve got sensory data showing her triggering the explosions. I should have included it, but… I’ll take whatever punishment the UDF deems necessary for the misjudgement.’

‘That isn’t for me to decide, Private. You’re free to go. Make sure that report is updated as soon as possible.’

Annette got to her feet. ‘Within the hour,’ she replied and started for the door.

7/12/83.

It appeared that, for the time being, she had got away with it. The day after the interview, Annette and her team were tasked with another raid on a Cabal safe house. Annette was glad of the choice of targets: she was not sure she had the stomach for fighting Zeroes or insurgents. Zeroes especially. The insurgents had chosen their path, but the Zeroes were victims.

Cranfield had not minded her staying at his place. Her apartment remained a crime scene and she had no desire to go there anyway. The big man’s stamina was up to a little loss of sleep too. Annette saw things behind her eyelids every time she closed them, things she did not want to see, and the only way she could sleep was exhaustion. So far, Cranfield was not minding that either. In fact, he seemed to think his ship had come in, but Annette knew it could not last.

When they were stopped in the lobby of White Tower again, it almost came as a relief, but Annette was a little confused since it was not the Inquisitor who stopped them. This was a man in UDF uniform with some fairly senior insignia on his shoulders. Annette’s software supplied a match: the guy was a major general.

Cranfield was immediately on the defensive. ‘Don’t you think she’s been through enough in the past few–’ Again he stopped as Annette placed a hand on his arm.

The general took the opportunity to get his statement in. ‘Private Barrington, I’m Major General Robert Carson. I’m with military intelligence. I’d like to speak to you.’

‘What about?’ Cranfield asked.

‘Classified. Private?’

It was not really an invitation and they all knew it. Annette nodded and followed Carson through the halls of the complex to an elevator which took them up. Annette raised an eyebrow as the car rose above the ground-level facilities and she found herself looking out through the glass side to the park. They were going all the way up.

‘If you don’t mind me making an observation, General,’ Annette said, ‘you aren’t just with military intelligence, are you?’

‘I run a very specific part of it. There’s a lieutenant general above me. Above him, there’s Doctor White.’

‘Oh.’ Asking more was not going to get her anywhere. He had told her he was important, but so had where his office was. A century ago, there had been something called the Space Needle in Old Seattle. It had collapsed following an earthquake, but Doctor White had had White Tower built to mimic and surpass it. At four hundred metres, White Tower was over twice the height of the old Space Needle, though there were three storeys of government buildings at the bottom, and another three in the disc-shaped structure at the top. The topmost floor was Doctor White’s residence and no one got up there without a very good reason, but the floors directly below it were reserved for the most important work the administration conducted.

Carson led the way to an office without a park view, but it still had a window which Annette thought denoted some prestige. Cranfield’s two guards were left outside the door and Carson waved Annette into a chair before taking his own place behind a large but fairly functional desk. He smiled at her, steepling his fingers and just watching her for a second. Was he trying to make her uncomfortable or working out how to start?

‘You are, I assume, aware that there are people living outside the walls of the enclave?’ Carson said. ‘Some are more advanced than others and have visited the city.’

‘I was taught about it in history class,’ Annette replied. ‘They were first encountered in year twenty-eight, but that was not revealed until twenty years later when they began infiltrating the enclave and started the Insurgency. Doctor White preferred to keep the initial overtures secret to avoid a panic. This was all before I was born though.’

‘Quite. Similarly, the actual influence of outside agents on the Insurgency has been somewhat downplayed. As your own recent experiences indicate, there are more of them here than we like to admit. The danger is… not inconsiderable and has been growing.’

‘Surely Doctor White has some plan to… Ah, and you are that plan.’

Carson smiled. Annette found herself not liking that smile. ‘The reports on you are, it seems, accurate. You are uncommonly perceptive. However, the plan to counteract these foreign powers is not so much me as you, and others like you. I am in charge of coordinating things, but it’s our operatives who do the real work. We want to send you to one of these foreign powers where you will gather intelligence, assist local resistance forces, and perform direct actions as required. What do you say, Private?’

Annette looked at him for a second. ‘Why me?’

‘There are a number of important criteria in our selection process. We prefer agents with no family ties left here. We’ve learned that that works far better through bitter experience. Sadly, you fall into that category. We look for people with unique skill sets and you certainly meet that one. We need people who have proven their loyalty to Utopia City.’

‘And I have done?’

‘Your work Below and against the Cabal has been exemplary. Your admission that your own mother had become an insurgent seals it.’

‘I… didn’t report my mother immediately.’

‘A factor which was taken into consideration, Private. Doctor White reviewed the case himself. He made a note. Let me…’ Carson located a file on his desk and flipped it open. ‘“Subject’s reticence in implicating her mother should be seen as a positive. Loyalty is loyalty. No one should be reprimanded for making the right choice in such a conflicting situation, even if they delay.”’

Annette blinked, dumbfounded for a second. Carson was not to know that her surprise came from learning that she had fooled Darius White himself… ‘Doctor White wrote that about me?’

‘He doesn’t review every candidate, but he showed a particular interest in your case. Positively, it seems. Will you take up his challenge, Private?’

She would leave the city, leave everything she knew. She would be shipped out to some backwoods community in the wasteland to help undermine it. She would be leaving civilisation behind her and there was every possibility that she would never see Utopia City again. How could she possibly refuse?

Part Two: Rotten Apple

Manhattan Island, 15/12/83.

Annette’s internal computer woke her at what she had been told was nine a.m. on this side of the continent. She was aware of the concept of time zones and her software was able to cope. She had never had to deal with them, however, and her body clock was still trying to work its way through the change.

The lack of structure to her new life was not helping. She was getting sick of being lied to, and it was starting to seem that Doctor White and his administration did not know how to do anything else. Having spent a little over three days getting to the other side of the continent, Annette had been met by a UDF intelligence operative who had presented her with some briefing documents, a bed for the night, and instructions to the effect that she should get on with her job and out of his hair as soon as possible.

So, that was what she had done. She had prevailed upon his ‘kindness’ for another couple of days while she checked out the area, and then she had moved to what was going to be her new home for a while.

Slipping out of her sleeping bag – she had yet to arrange a better bed – she walked over to the window and looked down at her new view. It had been a park. In fact, more or less directly below her were the remains of buildings which had been a zoo. Now the park was a farm, or a group of farms, worked by slave labour. She really had left civilisation behind her to come here, and if here had been where she was supposed to be fighting the enemies of Utopia City, that would have been fine. Instead, the island she had been told was known as Manhattan was where the ‘local resistance’ was based.

There were four main gangs controlling the streets of Manhattan. The building she had selected for her own base of operations was almost at the northern extent of Cyber-Kings territory. To the north, the largest of the groups held a significant proportion of the park and much of the northern island. They were the Spyders, and Annette assumed the misspelling was intentional, but could not be sure. Reading and writing were not high on the priorities of any of the gangs. The southern part of the island belonged largely to the Juicers, who were the major drug producers in the area, but they were also their own biggest clients which made them unstable and prone to infighting. And lastly there were the Frankies, who were not actually one gang, but they were all based around the same method of gaining resources: Frankies ran slaves and harvested organs throughout Manhattan and further afield.

Of the four, the Spyders were the least important to the UDF. The Spyders were quite happy with their local dominance and so were annoyingly difficult to influence.

The Cyber-Kings were an entirely different matter. According to Annette’s briefing, they predated the wars and plagues which had brought down the old world. They had been founded by a transhumanist group who believed that mankind should transcend the weaknesses of the human body through cybernetics. They still held the belief that progression to full cyborg was the way to go, but their high aims had been heavily curtailed by the collapse of civilisation. For years, they had been stuck with whatever random parts they could find and backroom surgeons who knew little about installing cybernetics. The UDF had bought influence with the gang by supplying modern parts and surgeons able to fit them. The Cyber-Kings were almost loyal subjects of Doctor White and they had benefitted in the local power stakes because of it. They had controlled none of the parkland a few years ago.

However, the local situation was not, precisely, Annette’s concern because the target of the UDF’s activities was not in Manhattan: it was on the Long Island. That was apparently what they had called it before and now the entire walled-off place was the Long Island Enclave. Those people who had turned up in Utopia City all those years ago had been from the Long Island. Doctor White, it seemed, held a grudge.

Annette’s job was to find ways of disrupting or destroying the Long Island Enclave. The UDF had been busy with trying to do just that for years, but there was no information available on what any other agents had found and no direction regarding where to look. The entire situation was disordered, unstructured, and essentially slipshod. The UDF was efficient, disciplined and… had failed to stop the Insurgency in over twenty years.

Whatever, Annette was fairly sure that someone would eventually come after her for the murder of her father and she needed to be out of Manhattan before then. The Long Island seemed her best chance at that for now and it needed to be investigated. Which was what she was supposed to be doing anyway, so it was time to get started.

Brooklyn District, the Long Island Enclave.

The founders of the Long Island Enclave had been cautious people, if not paranoid. Of course, with Manhattan the way it was, a little paranoia was sort of justified. One of their first acts was to cut the island off from Manhattan by demolishing the bridges and collapsing the tunnels. There was one way in over land, via Staten Island, and that was now fortified and very well guarded.

Or that was the theory. With UDF help, the Cyber-Kings had partially reopened the tunnels. They had even got some electric cars running to provide transport to the collapses, then it was a case of going on foot through the newly cut and shored-up section. Since it was supposed to be a secret, the exit point was not at the road tunnels where they had originally emerged. In the case of the one Annette was using, you surfaced through an old subway entrance and into the territory of the Tarantulas.

Street gangs seemed to be the norm through the entire region. The Tarantulas seemed like the kind of people Annette would have avoided under any normal circumstances, but the UDF was paying them to be the gatekeepers of the tunnels. The ones in the subway were heavily armed: Annette saw a lot of knives and pistols, several assault rifles, and a couple of coilguns. She was watched all the way out onto the street, but she was not sure whether it was an attempt to intimidate or simply men watching an attractive woman.

In an attempt to blend in, Annette had selected a pair of tight ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and a short jacket. Her pistols and a couple of spare magazines were hidden away in her sports bag. She figured if she needed them, she would have more to worry about than low ammunition. The fact that the Tarantulas were carrying firearms in one of their safest locations did not speak well for enclave policing, but also did not come as a shock. When she made it to the surface, she realised that the enclave was a little different from what she had expected.

The population seemed a little thin and a little threadbare. In the Tarantula-controlled area, the people also seemed depressed and fearful. Clothing was generally not that clean, and was torn or patched. Money, it seemed, was tight. Annette was used to throwing away anything she wore which became damaged, but here they obviously kept things going long past the point of collapse. However, it looked like anyone who could afford to had a weapon strapped to their body, in plain sight. She was going to have to look into how that worked, but it might make life easier.

Having started late, Annette decided that this would be an afternoon of getting a general feel for the place, so she just walked. The streets were laid out in a block pattern with a mixture of houses and short apartment buildings, all of them looking as though they had been built a long time ago and had seen only minimal maintenance in quite a while. There were some shops, mostly selling basics: bread, eggs, milk, some meat, all the kinds of things which had been provided to everyone in Utopia City. And there were gang tags on the walls on every street. The same tag, a stylised, thick-bodied spider in red paint, until Annette crossed an imaginary line and the predominant symbol changed to a large letter J in purple. She had entered someone else’s territory.

A few streets in, she found a fence upon which someone had scrawled ‘Jacksons Rule!’ and she figured the local gang was known as the Jacksons. Not exactly a name to conjure with, but at least she had an idea of what she was dealing with. The housing had been getting lower and a little better kept up for a while. This was obviously one of the better parts of the Brooklyn District, but the number of handguns being carried did not seem to diminish.

Soon enough, she came across both the reason for the increased wealth in the Jacksons’ area and her first sight of one of the barrier walls the enclave had erected around their land. The wall itself was some thirty metres high and built of solid concrete. And this thing surrounded more or less the entire island. Of course, the wall around Utopia City looked a lot better and contained an area almost as big, but this was impressive.

And set against the wall, within an enclosure formed of lower walls, was a building which Annette might have guessed the function of, even without the sign outside the gates. The Brooklyn District Fusion Plant looked small to be the area’s only power source. If that held up in the other districts, the enclave was operating on a relatively barebones electricity supply, easy enough to disrupt. Annette watched the gate for thirty minutes and then turned away, frowning.

A couple of hours in the nearest district suggested that taking the enclave down would not take a vast amount of effort. The land was flat, so water and sewerage systems almost certainly relied on electric pumps. Take out the power, take out three essential services, maybe more. The security was there, but nothing which could not be breached by a few Infiltrators. It was a lot like no one really wanted to find a way to bring the Long Island Enclave down. And the enclave was fairly lucky that Annette had no desire to either.

Manhattan.

Nights were not easy in Manhattan. The Cyber-Kings had a habit of partying late for one thing. Annette had selected the highest place to base herself from that she could find, but the sound of drunken cyborgs and would-be cyborgs still filtered up from below. She was still not sure what they might decide to get up to either, which made sleep hard to come by.

Waking with a screaming headache not long after she did get to sleep did not help in the least. She lay in her sleeping bag, waiting for the pain to subside and considering her drug supply. It was limited. She had packed as much of her various painkillers as possible, but there was a limit and she had no way of knowing whether she could get anything analogous in Manhattan or the Long Island. That was going to become a problem.

As the numbness set in, she activated her file management app and pulled up the specifications for something she called Project Omega. It was an ultimate solution to the rejection problem and the more she looked at it, the more she assured herself that it would work, but the dangers…

Closing the file, Annette turned on her side and listened to the Manhattan night as it descended into silence. Even here, there came a time when all little cyborgs needed their rest. Annette closed her eyes and tried to join them.

Brooklyn District, 16/12/83.

The southern part of Brooklyn was the domain of a faction of Cyber-Kings. They were not directly aligned with the ones in Manhattan; in fact, they were generally runaways from there. Annette had been warned to be careful down there, but she had also been told that it was perfectly legal to openly carry weapons in the enclave. Concealed carry was a different matter, but so long as everyone could see her guns, no one would question them.

There was, it turned out, one major advantage to the area. While she was walking the streets, Annette’s computer popped up a rather unexpected display: the local wireless network window. Somewhere nearby, there was an active wireless network and the protocols were the same as the ones used in Utopia City. Better yet, when she tracked it down, it was in a coffee shop and the UDF had supplied her with some local currency.

Cyber-Kings, at least these ones, appeared to take their caffeine seriously. The shop sold a couple of different varieties, with or without milk, and even with a few flavour additives. Annette had no idea where they were sourcing any of it from and the prices were a little steep, and she was going to forego the pleasure because, even if there was coffee and networking, she had no idea where to look on the local internet. Then she spotted a sign inside the shop on the wall which proclaimed that the networking service was provided, free of charge, by the Enclave Public Networking Service, and then gave a bunch of useful web addresses.

‘Done,’ she said to no one in particular and walked into the shop.

She was watched for a second or two. She was a stranger and, she suspected, the shop was generally frequented primarily by regulars. Interest was lost as she went to the counter and requested a black coffee, and her computer was accessing the shop’s network before she had the words out. A second later, she was looking at a browser window showing the website for the enclave’s government.

The woman behind the counter handed over a mug of black liquid and Annette examined her supply of bills to find one larger than the quoted price, but not too much. It was, she thought, fascinating. They still used paper money. Printed designs on sheets of paper. The coins, it seemed, were moulded plastic, but the larger denominations were paper. They called them dollars, just like in Utopia City, but there it was all done by electronic transfer and here… Didn’t they realise how much they could save by cutting out all that printing and moulding? Didn’t they realise that physical money could be stolen?

Still smiling at the absurdity of it, Annette took a seat where she could watch the street outside and settled down to see what could be found on the enclave’s official website.

Jackpot! There was a potted history of the enclave, maps of the enclave and the four districts at various levels of detail, the legal code, the immigration policy, minutes of the last ten years’ meetings of the House of Representatives… It seemed like someone had decided to take every document they could find and make it available via the site. Annette rapidly discovered that her idea about taking down the power system would work, and it would require six teams. There were six fusion plants in the enclave, and they had been put in place to take over from an old fission plant, just as was the case in Utopia City.

There were some interesting links to other government agencies, and Annette made a point of following the one to the Long Island Police Department. There she found yet another rendition of the legal code and confirmed the statutes on carrying weapons, adding some clarity. Fully automatic weapons were controlled and full-on assault weapons were tightly controlled. Beam weapons were listed among the regulations, so they obviously had them. Annette figured her pistols and her weapons system as a whole probably fell into the controlled category, but no one was going to know if she stuck to semi-automatic fire.

Another interesting feature of local law enforcement was the Citizen Deputy Programme. Citizens could be deputised to supplement the police. There were lots of words dedicated to the task of claiming that this was an exercise in empowerment and bringing policing into the remit of the people, but Annette read ‘we don’t have enough resources to operate an effective police department.’ The weird thing was that the enclave budgets were available on the government site and they had a defence budget of over three hundred million dollars to play with, and no standing army. They had to spend a lot on maintaining the walls.

The coffee was adequate. Not exactly great, but drinkable. Annette had two mugs of it before leaving the shop with a better idea of the layout of the enclave. One map had shown the light rail and subway lines which had been put back into operation and she wanted to check those out. Walking let her see more, but it was not going to be viable when she started looking at the Queens District in the morning.

She had walked a couple of hundred metres when a cyborg stepped out in front of her. It was pretty obvious that he was a cyborg: his left arm was metal with a basic, three-fingered ‘grabber’ hand and a few exposed wires showing. He smiled at her in the way a shark probably smiles at a tuna. To go with the exposed metalwork, he had cropped electric-blue hair and a lot of leather clothing, but no sleeves.

‘Hey there, lady,’ the man said. ‘That’s a lot of cash you got on you.’

Annette glanced back over her shoulder and the two men trying their best to catch her unawares stopped in their tracks. She turned her attention forward again. ‘Is it?’

‘Sure is. A lot of cash.’

‘Thank you. Lesson learned.’ She needed to be more careful about counting money out in public. ‘Now, if you’ll allow me to pass, I’ll be on my way.’

The would-be mugger put his hand on the pistol he was wearing on his right hip. ‘Not until you’ve–’

Annette moved, her hands moving back so that her pod could hand her her own weapons. She turned, her arms rising as she did so. The men were moving to draw their guns, but they had apparently not expected such an immediate response. Annette fired both weapons, shifted her aim slightly on the right-hand one, and fired again. There was a lot of very unmanly screaming as the three muggers lost the use of their right arms.

‘Are we done,’ she asked, still covering them, ‘or do I have to shoot you anywhere else?’

The man with the metal arm stumbled to one side to allow her past him and the other two seemed to have decided that this was one woman who was not going to be a victim. Annette looked up and down the street, shrugged, and set off again. In Utopia City, if you shot someone, there would be UDF officers coming out of the woodwork in seconds. Here there was nothing. People were avoiding the scene and keeping their heads down, but it all seemed like it was a business as usual in Brooklyn.

Annette handed her pistols back to her pod. ‘If this place is any kind of threat to White’s little utopia, I’ll eat one of my bullets,’ she muttered. But then, that was just one more lie to add to the litany.

Queens District, 17/12/83.

They liked their walls on the Long Island. Aside from the thirty-metre boundary wall, the districts were separated by ten-metre walls, and the Queens District was cut into two uneven parts by ‘the Factory Wall’ which was three metres high and topped off with some form of wire defence system.

According to the history Annette had found, buildings had been demolished to make way for the outer wall, the Sea Wall, but the new residents had not built new homes. Existing buildings in Brooklyn and Queens which had not suffered too much damage were fixed up as well as possible, and the land further east had been turned over to cultivation. As the need and capability for industrial sites arrived, the southern part of Queens had been demolished to make way for factories, and Queens had become the main location for factory workers to live in. To the east, the cultivated area was pushed out and new houses were built, mostly for those managing the factories. A social order had begun to develop where before there had been general equality.

Then a failure in the Sea Wall had prompted the creation of the Bulkhead Walls between the districts and the Factory Wall had been put up to further subdivide Queens. With the construction had come demolition and rebuilding. Areas which had been more suburban had been replaced by tenement blocks for the workers… who had no longer been needed as automation progressed in the factories.

Brooklyn was poor; Queens was not quite as bad as its neighbour, but it was not doing a lot better, and the ultimate expression of its state seemed to be the roads which ran along the north side of the Factory Wall. They were, essentially, one roadway, but the wall had a kink in it and someone had decided that the eastern part of the roadway was Factory Drive while the western part was Industrial Avenue. There were more low-rent hotels along Factory Drive, more equally low-rent apartments along Industrial Avenue. Both of them had a roughly equal number of women who made their living servicing the requirements of the men coming out of the industrial zone. Annette was not sure what the women walking out through the gates did for entertainment. Perhaps they were less inclined to pay for it, or could get it some other way.

Annette walked along Industrial Avenue wondering how this state of affairs could exist. She was not naïve enough to think that prostitution of some kind was anathema to Utopia City, but you did not see it on the streets. No one went without; no one was this desperate. Further, the Utopia City legal code did not even include references to sex work and Annette knew that here these women were criminals. Except that they were here, in plain sight, and there were also policemen on patrol, ignoring the women.

It was the first time Annette had seen actual Long Island PD cops on duty. They wore a dark-blue cap, tunic, and slacks, no obvious body armour, and were armed with handguns and electric batons. Annette’s systems picked up basic analogue radio transmissions from them. Maybe they had powered suits available for emergencies, but they were not the combat-armour-wearing UDF. How they handled the gangs, Annette had no idea, though if Queens had a gang problem, it seemed to be well hidden.

Or it was until Annette stopped to check her maps and decide on where to go next. She had come to a stop on a corner and her purpose in coming down this far was done with since she had seen the Factory Wall and determined that she would need a reason to get beyond it. She was considering heading north again when the blonde walking down toward the avenue stopped and looked at her.

‘You must be new,’ the girl said. ‘If you’re not one of theirs, you can’t be on this corner. It belongs to the Widows.’

Annette blinked at her, though the effect was likely lost behind her shades. ‘Sorry?’

‘The Black Widows. They hold this corner for their girls. They’ll… Well, I’m not sure what they’ll do to you if they find you here, but it won’t be nice.’

‘Um… Do I honestly look like I’m here looking for work?’

The blonde looked Annette up and down, and then did the same with herself, as though she needed the comparison. She was young: Annette guessed there was an eighteen-year-old hidden under the make-up and clothes. Her face was fresh, pretty, and more or less heart-shaped with high cheekbones and a slightly upturned nose. Naturally blonde hair fell around her shoulders in a thick mass with curling twists to the ends. Her eyes were a sort of misty dark blue and very clear, almost innocent, except for the thick, pink eyeshadow pasted around them. Her full lips were painted candy pink, as were her nails, to match the boob tube she was squeezed into. Denim shorts, cut as short as they would get, complemented the top, but the dark-blue slingback pumps did not really match. She had a thin denim jacket, but she had to be cold. Yet here she was, stopping to offer advice to someone new to the avenue, even if it was not needed.

‘Well… I guess not. Which is good because we don’t need the competition. I’m Sarah.’ A hand was thrust out at Annette and Sarah smiled, almost beamed.

Annette took the offered hand. ‘Louise,’ she said, giving her middle name because… She was not exactly sure. ‘And I’m just visiting. Who are these Black Widows you mentioned?’

Sarah’s smile vanished and Annette wondered whether she had said the wrong thing. However, Sarah’s eyes were looking over Annette’s shoulder. ‘Looks like you’re about to find out.’

Annette turned to see two women approaching, both taller than average and possessed of good muscle definition, and also a penchant for leather clothing. Annette might have classified them as belonging to Sarah’s apparent profession given the brevity of their skirts, except that these two were both carrying large knives and Annette had not seen any of the other girls carrying weapons.

‘This corner belongs to us,’ one of the two said. The tone was quite menacing, but they only had close-combat weapons…

‘The whole corner?’ Annette asked. ‘I can’t stop to talk on it?’

‘If you’re not with us, you don’t get to talk here, no.’

Annette heard a tiny whimper come from behind her. Sarah was scared, but she also was not leaving. Interesting. Reaching up, Annette took her glasses off and hung them from the neck of her T-shirt. The two Widows took a step back, which was what Annette wanted. ‘I have no intention of taking business from you. Frankly, I’m insulted that you think I would, but I’ll let that slide. You let me finish my conversation and we’ll say no more about it.’

The talkative one sneered. ‘That fancy rig you’re wearing is stupid. I can gut you like a fish before you can even draw–’ She stopped as she found herself looking down the barrel of one of Annette’s pistols. ‘What the fuck are you?! Some kind of witch?’

‘I can’t turn you into a toad,’ Annette replied, ‘but I can turn you into a corpse.’ She read tension in muscles, saw the flickers of anger in the woman’s face…

‘Finish your conversation fast,’ the Widow said and then backed off, only turning to walk away when she had reversed a couple of metres.

Annette watched them walk away before handing her pistol back to her pod and turning around.

‘Oh!’ Sarah said and Annette felt a slight lurch in her stomach for some reason. Maybe she had been hoping… ‘Those are… kind of awesome.’ Sarah actually started to reach up as though to touch Annette’s eyes, and then obviously thought better of it. ‘I see why they jerked like that, but… Wow!’ Then the blonde’s expression shifted again and she asked, ‘You’re not a Cyber-King, are you?’

Annette was still trying to get over the flickers of attraction she had seen before Sarah’s mind had, once again, shifted gears. ‘I am not a Cyber-King. I would not go near their surgeons with a three-metre pole.’ She slipped her shades back on, which seemed to displease Sarah, which rather pleased Annette. ‘Which way were you going?’

‘Oh, uh, that way.’ Sarah pointed east, away from the direction the Widows had taken.

‘Mind if we walk and talk? No point in antagonising them and I’m trying to get to know the area.’

‘I don’t mind at all.’ Sarah smiled her bright, slightly brainless, smile and set off to cross the road.

‘Good. So, tell me about these Black Widows?’

‘They’re the big gang in Queens. All about the girl power. Started by a girl, run by girls.’

‘And yet they control prostitution down here?’

Sarah gave a shrug. ‘Well, they keep the best pitches for themselves. All the ones near the main gates. They have more girls over on Factory Drive, and they’ve got a couple of brothels north of here. It’s like a rite of passage thing. If you join the gang, you work the streets or the brothels to earn them cash, until you get promoted anyway.’

‘Do they have any male members?’

‘Yeah, but they keep them under their heels.’ Sarah giggled. ‘Joke is that the only men who join the Widows are foot fetishists, because they spend so much time kissing boots.’

‘Huh. I guess it takes all kinds. Aren’t you cold? I mean it’s basically winter…’

‘Mm, yes,’ Sarah said, brightening. ‘It’ll be Christmas next week.’

Annette decided not to mention that she had no idea what Christmas was. ‘Yes.’

‘It’s cold, I guess. You get used to it. It’s worse after dark. There’s Jenny, we’re almost at my stop.’

They were coming up to another junction and Annette could see a red-haired woman, slightly older than Sarah, watching them approach from across the road. ‘I’ll head up from here then,’ Annette said. ‘Thanks for the information.’

‘Oh, no problem. And, you know, if you want some company later, I’ll probably still be here.’

Annette gave Sarah a smile. ‘I’ll keep that in mind, Sarah. Thanks.’

~~~

It was a little weird. The buildings in southern Queens had been built after the Factory Wall, and yet the older structures to the north looked better and seemed to have received better maintenance. Still, you could tell that the people in this district were not exactly rolling in money. There was a sort of forgotten quality to the place. Queens had been forgotten and was trying to keep up; Brooklyn had been abandoned and did not really seem to care.

And, so far as Annette could tell, the Black Widows kept a tight lid on things here. Somehow, Annette doubted it was the police who were keeping gang violence, and obvious presence, off the streets. Knowing roughly what she was looking for, Annette could see them now, the girls with attitude who paid a little too much attention to what was going on around them. She spotted a few occasions when the patrolling cops nodded to the watching Widows. It seemed unlikely that the gang had been deputised, but there was some sort of truce in place.

Queens was definitely a better area. There were more shops open and they did not look like they had to fend off riots on a regular basis. Annette detected several wireless network hubs operating, many of them private, but the public network had several access points around the district too. There seemed to be more of those public network points in the northern areas, but there were some all over.

With the sun beginning to drop in the sky, Annette hopped the local metro toward Brooklyn. The trains were not the cleanest transportation she had ever been on, but they were operational, reasonably fast, fairly cheap, and they seemed to run on time.

Plus, there were people to observe on the trains and they behaved differently to when they were on the street. The trains were patrolled by LIPD officers, even going through Brooklyn, and the passengers seemed more relaxed. You did not see it on the street, but on the train, people were using mobile phones. Annette’s systems could detect the transmissions, but she was having no luck with the protocols. In the morning, she decided, she would check out Sky City and get her hands on a phone.

Manhattan, 18/12/83.

The stink of rotting flesh filled her nostrils. They had her. She could feel unnaturally strong arms wrapping around her and she fought to get free. Fought and struggled and…

Found herself tangled in her sleeping bag and awake, even if the images from the dream were still fresh in her mind. It took two goes before Annette managed to get the zip undone and then she stumbled to the window. There was a small balcony outside a French window and she needed the fresh air.

By the time her nerves were back to firing normally and her adrenaline levels were down, the dream had become more distant. She remembered corpses crawling after her through the tunnels of the Below, but they were vague now and the only detail she remembered was that the foremost of them had been her father, his slack face looking at her with dead, accusatory eyes and a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead.

The night had started badly and she had had to use more of her precious drug supply, and now it had ended badly, but there was light in the sky. The sun was not yet up, but going back to bed seemed like an unproductive use of her time. She would do the best she could to wash the sweat from her body and see what Sky City had to offer.

Sky City District.

The reason for the name became apparent as soon as Annette stepped off the train. Sky City had been constructed from scratch as the population grew, and it had been constructed vertically. There were parks and plazas, and some large low buildings, but the general impression was of height. Tower blocks, usually with shops at their base, formed canyons of concrete, glass, and steel through most of the district as far as Annette could tell.

Not, however, in the three- or four-kilometre stretch of land which housed the enclave’s centre of government, the Enclave Centre, and its centre of learning, the Long Island Education Centre. Between the government building and the education complex, the land had been set aside for numerous government buildings, including the official residence of the enclave’s president and a couple of embassies, several parks, and a large amphitheatre-like plaza known as the Pnyx. The last weird name was obviously something related to history, but not any history Annette had learned. Still, the most official area in the city made Annette feel more at home than anywhere else she had been.

There were no gang tags here. The concrete and glass were kept clean. Annette had access to the public network everywhere she walked. Best of all, there was a university! Well, from the looks of it, the Long Island Education Centre catered to more or less everyone from about the age of eleven upward. Though ‘everyone’ was probably an exaggeration. Annette found a bench in one of the quads and sat down to browse the net and watch the people. From the clothes, it looked as though the majority of students, even in the youngest age bracket, came from Sky City or the districts to the east. Sky City and Queens had almost the same population, but Queens was underrepresented, and Brooklyn seemed to be more or less missing. Annette decided to dig into the education system.

Up to age ten, everyone was required to attend a local elementary school which, as the name suggested, taught the basic elements of education. Students were expected to achieve basic competency in reading, writing, and mathematics. Assessment at the end of their last year allowed them to move on to the education centre for further studies. Annette found links to a couple of additional schools which took older students for further education in the poorer districts. Both were charities, one run by a local religious movement, the other via charitable donations from the companies in the Queens industrial zone. If you wanted to study past the age of eighteen at the education centre, there were fees.

Education in the enclave was below standard and tended to favour the richer elements of society. On the plus side, you did not get brainwashed into thinking the president was a demigod. The students of Sky City were ordinary people, with ordinary problems and minds free to think what they wanted. When Annette had walked past the Pnyx, there had been a man standing in it shouting about the poor conditions in Brooklyn and how the district was being forgotten by the government. He would probably have been shipped off to re-education in Utopia City before he had managed to get a sentence out.

Satisfied with her research, and further annoyed with her home town, Annette got to her feet and set off to find a phone.

~~~

‘The Kumquat netPhone seven is the ultimate in mobile communications, madam.’ Salesmen were less annoying in Utopia City. ‘I can tell that you are a technically savvy woman. The Kumquat is the phone for you.’ Salesmen in Utopia City did not tell you what you wanted; they gave you what you asked for. ‘Complete internetworking, digital call management, and an ultra-high-definition screen.’ Maybe some brainwashing was not a bad thing.

‘I really just need a phone,’ Annette said, looking between the device she had asked to see and the one the salesman was trying to force on her. The Kumquat was a datapad device with a screen about fifteen centimetres across the diagonal and, she had to admit, a fairly impressive screen. The Nokey Model 1565 she had picked as being precisely what she needed was a compact unit with just enough room for a keypad and an LCD display. It was a lot thicker than the Kumquat, which probably meant its battery life was longer than an hour, but even that feature was not something Annette required. The Kumquat was also six times the price of the Nokey and Annette was on a budget. ‘Really, just a phone.’

‘Everyone says that,’ the salesman said. He was a handsome man, blonde and blue-eyed, and dressed in a suit which looked like it was worn once between cleanings. He was used to women thinking he was something special, but Annette came from a place where no one her age was unattractive. ‘Once you start using the netPhone seven, you’ll discover a world you never knew existed. You’ll never forget another phone number. The netPhone remembers them for you and, with the new InstaSnap technology, you’ll be able to quickly grab photographs to attach to those numbers in case you need a visual reminder.’

Annette sighed. She had not wanted to do it, but he was leaving her no choice. She took her glasses off and looked around at a man who was suddenly losing his customer-friendly smile. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I have a computer at the base of my skull which is both an order of magnitude smaller than the one in that phone and also several orders of magnitude more powerful. Plus, with my new eyeball technology, I can record everything I see, in real time, including phone numbers. I really just need a phone. A phone to make phone calls. Not one to replace my brain. Okay?’

‘I-I’ll register the Nokey for you right away, madam.’

‘Great. That’ll be just great.’ She really did not need a phone to make phone calls either. What she wanted was the parts.

Manhattan.

Annette peered at the internal workings of the phone she had purchased and, she had to admit, it was a fairly elegant design. A single ASIC chip did all the work. The single, sealed package was connected up to the phone’s keypad, display, microphone, speaker, and antenna array via a few external components. It did everything and more. A little poking around with a signal-analyser probe had uncovered diagnostic contacts and an unused data channel. Annette figured they used the same chip in some of their higher-end phones, just changing the case.

She had put aside a weapons project she was working on for one evening so that she could adapt the phone to her purpose and… Well, she had to admit that the diversion was enjoyable. She was problem-solving, something she always enjoyed. Creating new devices was always interesting, but she had got very good at it. Very rarely did she need to bug-fix her inventions: she conceived of an idea, built a prototype, and it worked. Now she had to work out the function of someone else’s invention and figure out how to build it into her own kit.

She glanced over at the nanofabricator. It was in the process of building a circuit board for her and, according to the display, that would be ready in about ten minutes. Supplies for the thing had not been a big problem: there was plenty of scrap around Manhattan and the box could recycle materials quite effectively. Power had been a bigger issue, but she had got her hands on a solar charger which she could use to charge the fabricator’s batteries during the day while she was out.

Once the circuit board was done, it would be slotted into her arming pod, which she already had opened up and waiting beside her. She was going to reuse the phone’s antenna array since it seemed like a fairly optimal arrangement. Then, when she put on her pod, she would be able to access the phone functionality through her neural connections, just like her internal radio. Of course, she would not be able to test the thing until she got into the enclave, but that was just part of the thrill of building something.

‘Yeah,’ she said to the empty room, ‘this should be fun.’ Then she frowned. ‘When did I start talking to myself?’

Sky City District, 19/12/83.

With access to the diagnostic ports on the chip, Annette could get access to all sorts of things normal phone users could not. For one thing, the phone system used a burst-mode, packet-switched protocol, very difficult to hack into or snoop, which was nice to know. Well, very difficult unless you could use the diagnostic port to grab every packet you could find and assemble them manually. There was no encryption: presumably no one had thought it was needed. So, Annette could listen in on conversations the people around her were having on their phones.

Of course, once you’d heard ten people ordering pizza, another dozen having arguments with their spouses, numerous conversations which could only be described as mind-numbingly mundane, and two people planning an extra-marital affair, you began to suspect this was a feature you could live without. Though the affair call had featured some fairly juicy descriptions of what the couple planned to do to each other…

But that was not really helping her figure out the enclave. She was coming to the conclusion that Sky City was just too… controlled for her to hide in. Her aim was still to find a location within the enclave where she could disappear, hide from the UDF amid the population of another community. She would have to stay under the radar and there was just too much radar in Sky City. The LIPD ran vehicular and foot patrols. There was some gang activity. It took Annette a while to find it, but there were a few tags in back alleys: folded wings with a crown on top which gave no clue regarding the name. The fact that the gangs were that suppressed in the district suggested that the cops had fairly tight control here.

Annette doubted that the Greenland District to the east was going to be more useful, but she decided she should take a look. After lunch, since she had just spotted what looked like a really nice Italian restaurant.

Greenland District.

The reason for the name appeared to be ironic at first. As you passed through the tunnel from Sky City, you emerged into a built-up area, semi-industrial from the look of it with a few housing blocks. Annette could see further tall buildings in the distance, but she soon realised that she was getting the wrong impression.

Out beyond the buildings, the district was all farmland, what seemed like vast tracts of green; well, given the season, that was actually mostly brown. The buildings she could see in the distance, mostly to the south, were huge vertical farming platforms: layer upon layer of hydroponic gardens had been set up to supply food to the enclave. And in the normal growing season, those were supplemented by traditional growing methods in the fields.

Sure, there was housing. Annette stopped off in a built-up area in the centre of the district, a small patch of grey amid the green and brown. But this was housing for the least wealthy residents of the district. Most of the population lived in gated communities and large homes dotted around the landscape. Greenland was full of rich people, supplemented by workers from Sky City and Queens.

Within fifteen minutes of setting foot in the area, Annette felt like she was under surveillance. There were LIPD patrol cars in this area, very few foot patrols, but it appeared that they could smell a non-resident from a thousand metres. Annette headed back to the station after the same car had passed slowly by for the third time. Greenland was not a good place to disappear unless she could get her hands on a lot of money.

She headed back toward Sky City. Hamptonville, to the east, was going to be worse. Greenland had a population of around a hundred thousand, and still it was no use to her; Hamptonville had a smaller population of even wealthier people and was going to be no good at all. No, if she was going to live in the enclave, she was going to have to make a choice between Brooklyn and Queens, at least for the immediate future.

Manhattan, 20/12/83.

Annette checked her work, made sure her goggles were in place, and then poked a small probe into the device she was building. There was a hiss and the tiny rocket engine she had built began to fire. She let it go for a few seconds, nodded, and removed the probe. Okay, that was good, on to the next stage.

The motor was a component in a device she had been working on since her arrival in Manhattan. Not only were there Cyber-Kings to worry about, here and in the enclave, but the UDF had a plentiful supply of cyborgs too since they primarily shipped SAU operatives out on their abortive attempt to bring the Long Island to its knees. Annette figured there were times when she was going to need to stop cyborgs in their tracks, and her bullets were not always effective.

So, she had hit upon the idea of using an EMP weapon. If she messed up, she could be affected by it herself, but the plan was to use it before another cyborg got too close. Plus, her immediate thoughts on generating an electromagnetic pulse effect big enough to be useful had, when she had done the math, suggested that she would generate simultaneous concussive and flash effects. It was just a matter of rapidly discharging a capacitive cell of sufficient density and wham bam, general chaos. Even fully organic humans caught in the blast would be disoriented, maybe blinded.

Then she needed a delivery system since, frankly, her throwing sucked. Hence the rocket motors. Maybe she had overcomplicated the whole thing a little, but she was getting close to having a self-guided EMP grenade ready for testing.

Which was good, because she was also almost ready to leave. Another day or so of checking over Queens and Brooklyn had pretty much fixed her on Queens. Brooklyn was, theoretically, the better option. Annette doubted even the enclave’s government knew who lived there so one extra resident was not going to be noticed. However, pretty much anywhere you went in Brooklyn, the local gangs were either mugging the residents or fighting each other. If Annette moved in, she was going to end up in the middle of something bad. The last thing she needed was the kind of attention that could bring.

Queens, on the other hand, was basically home to one gang, the Black Widows, and Annette was of the opinion that they were less militant than their neighbours. If she avoided bothering them, she figured she would be left alone. There was a bigger police presence in Queens, but the district was not as heavily monitored as Sky City. Rents were higher than in Brooklyn, but nowhere near the levels in Sky City or Greenland, and Annette had looked into it and discovered that she could also rent workshop space in the industrial zone where she could get proper power and a decent network connection.

‘Oh, the luxury,’ she said to the circuit board she was working on. ‘I’m doing it again. Damn, if I don’t get people to talk to soon, I’m going to go mad. Well, madder than I clearly am. I mean, I’m talking to a circuit board.’

So, Queens. She was going to need some paperwork that would stand up to at least a basic level of inspection, and then she was going to need to find somewhere to live. That was going to need money, but she had a plan for conning some extra funds out of her UDF taskmaster. In fact, she was fairly certain that he could put her in touch with someone who could handle the paperwork requirements if she told him the right story, and she already had the story worked out.

‘A week, maybe ten days, and we’ll be living it up in a new home,’ she told her project. ‘I wonder if I can get enough cash for some psychotherapy when I get there?’

21/12/83.

‘So, that’s the plan,’ Annette said. ‘I set myself up in Sky City and get myself a job in the fusion plant down by the southern wall. I’ve got the technical skills to pull it off. Frankly, I doubt they’ve ever seen anything like me. Once I’m in, I can gather intel on their security and weak points in their design we can capitalise on. There will be weak points. Then we work out how to sabotage it. The others will be the same. We can yank the plugs on their entire infrastructure in one go.’

The UDF officer-in-charge in Manhattan was a thin man, going grey around the temples. On her last session with him, Annette had worked out pretty quickly that he was cynical, unhappy, and not there from a desire to do good work for Utopia City. He wanted, she figured, to get out of the hellhole he had been stationed in as fast as possible, and he had been there for five years. He was also no one’s fool.

‘How is it that you have come up with this idea in a week, which no one else has thought of in all our time here?’

‘Well… I’m pretty motivated.’

‘There are plenty of motivated operatives here.’

‘How many of them have two degrees and know how a fusion reactor works? SAU doesn’t generally induct academics.’

‘That’s… a valid point.’ The OiC sighed. ‘I assume that this project is going to require funding?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m going to need paperwork, a fake identity. I’m going to need to rent an apartment for at least a couple of weeks until I can get a job. There’s food and such…’

‘All right. We have a contact in the Frankies down in Hudson Yards who does good work forging identity documents. I’ll get you directions to his safe house and a budget to handle the costs. I’ll expect weekly reports sent through the Tarantulas.’

‘Of course, sir.’

He peered at Annette for a few seconds and then said, ‘Honestly, I rate your chances at less than fifty per cent. They may be a disorganised backwater state, but their police have an annoying habit of detecting and capturing our operatives. More than one has vanished. Be careful and come back with useful information.’

Annette nodded. ‘I’ll do my best, sir. For Doctor White.’

As she left the OiC’s office, Annette wondered how many of those missing operatives had been captured, and how many had done exactly what she was planning to do. Her best guess was that more had vanished voluntarily than had disappeared into a cell somewhere.

22/12/83.

The Hudson Yards Frankies were a pretty organised bunch operating out of an old convention centre beside the river. Their stock-in-trade was live people, rather than the parts of dead ones many of their associates handled. More often than not, that meant shipping people captured by bandit gangs on the mainland into Manhattan to service the ever-present need for more workers, but they could also be persuaded, for a fee, to smuggle people onto the Long Island. For an additional fee, they would give you identity paperwork so that you could actually live there.

They were not quite what Annette had expected, their chief forger doubly so. He was a middle-aged man with a dumpy body, a somewhat bulbous nose, and grey in his hair, and he was dressed in a three-piece suit which looked immaculate. He went by the name Inky, probably because his fingertips were stained with at least three colours of ink, though there was also a case to be made for his eyes which were an inky black colour.

‘You want the full package?’ Inky asked. ‘You get an ID card, driving licence, all the immigration paperwork.’ He was not actually looking at Annette as he spoke; his attention was fixed on a computer screen on his desk, though Annette could not see what he was watching. ‘We get your details into the immigration system over there so it all looks legit. It’ll stand up to anything the Lip will generally run on it.’

‘The Lip?’ Annette asked.

‘LIPD.’ It was kind of obvious when he said it. ‘If they check you out, they won’t generally go deeper than a quick look and most of ’em don’t know what to look for anyway.’

‘How long?’

‘Well… Christmas is coming up. A week. Ten days maybe.’

Annette frowned. ‘What if I want something faster?’

‘Huh, rush job, is it? Well, I can do you an ID card for an enclave native in a couple of days. Records of births in Brooklyn are pretty shoddy. Lips know ID cards get issued and they don’t always link back to proper records. You get more questions, but they don’t push it much.’ Now Inky looked up at her. ‘Course, there’s an extra fee for putting a rush on it.’

‘Of course,’ Annette replied. ‘It’ll do.’

‘Right then.’ Opening a drawer in his desk, Inky took out a notebook and opened it up. This was followed by a pen, which he licked before preparing to write. The tip of his tongue was stained with ink too, so maybe the eyes had nothing to do with it. ‘What name do you want on the card?’

Annette considered for a second. ‘Louise Barrington.’ If she was really leaving her old life behind, her old first name might as well go with it.

24/12/83.

‘What is this Christmas thing anyway?’ Annette asked as she examined her new ID card.

‘Christmas?’ Inky replied. ‘Oh, yeah, I forget you people don’t have religious stuff. Not that Christmas is very religious… It’s a holiday. Back before the plague, they used to give out presents on Christmas Day, which is tomorrow. Not so much these days, but it’s still a big holiday in the enclave. No one does much work, except for the Lip, and the crooks, and the hookers, and–’

‘I think I get it.’

‘Right. You might see some fireworks. Spyders sometimes shoot off rockets and stuff over the park.’

‘Sounds wonderful,’ Annette replied, wondering how much more of a party would be going on outside her house. ‘This looks good,’ she said, waving the card. It looked like a quality piece of forgery. It was a pressed-out plastic card with a hologram verification panel and a barcode of some kind. The picture they had taken had been altered to give her back her brown eyes and Annette could not spot the changed pixels from the unchanged. And they had weathered the thing, abrading the edges and scuffing the surfaces to suggest it had been around a while. Her birth date was down as ‘25/09/2095’ and the issue date was ‘Sept 2113.’ She was going to have to get used to the new calendar, or rather the old one; the enclave and Manhattan, in fact more or less everywhere except Utopia City, still used the calendar from the days before the collapse.

‘Seeing as it’s Christmas, we figured we’d do our best work, even if we had to rush it.’

Annette dumped a stack of money onto his desk. ‘And the fact that I’m paying you a small fortune had no bearing on that?’

Inky smiled. ‘Might have had a little to do with it. I might even knock off early today.’

‘Well, it is almost Christmas.’

~~~

Peering at the primary subassembly of her new gadget through a magnifying lens, Annette considered her progress.

New identity: check. She had an ID card which would be sufficient to get her an apartment in Queens, especially if she picked the right building. Down near Industrial Avenue, the landlords tended not to ask questions.

She fitted the circuit board into the lower half of the shell she had manufactured and began to screw it into place. ‘And you’re going to be ready for testing tonight.’ She considered that for a second. ‘Tomorrow would be better.’ Tomorrow would be Christmas, apparently, which led to two factors in her decision. One, no one would be concerned over some pyrotechnics if the Spyders were likely to set off their own at some point. Two, if it was really a holiday in the enclave, no one was going to be around for her to talk to about an apartment.

‘Okay then. Tomorrow I’ll find some Cyber-Kings to test you on, and then I’ll head back into the enclave the day after to hunt for an apartment. Great. Now, if I can just stop talking to inanimate objects, everything should be okay.’

The inanimate object in question did not offer a comment on the matter. Which, all things considered, was probably for the best.

25/12/83.

There did seem to be something of a festive atmosphere on the streets of Manhattan. The Cyber-Kings were drunker than usual. You could always purchase the attention of one of the cyborgs with a good bottle of booze, or even a bad bottle of booze, but it was as if the local gang leader had decided to break open his stockroom for the day. If Annette had been the leader of the Spyders, she would have been arranging for a major raid about now.

As it was, locating a trio of inebriated cyborgs gathered around an oil drum fire in an alley was not a major undertaking, but Annette was careful about it. She wanted them a little dulled, but not so drunk that they might not notice what was happening until the effect was fading. These three were laughing and joking, and passing around bottles containing liquids which ranged from clear to dirty brown. Definitely spirits, definitely inebriating.

Annette put her hand behind her back and accepted the little device her pod dropped into her palm. It was a black discus-shaped device about ten centimetres across with three angled vents around its rim. She picked her primary target, sent the image to the bomblet, got the verification back, and tossed her weapon into the alley. The motors kicked in, spinning the disc and sending it flying out toward the three men. It worked on a simple, infrared homing system; Annette supplied the target signature and sensors on the rim of the disc directed the jets. The fire in the drum would add to the test, making the target-seeking system work harder.

Annette had picked the largest of the three as her target and the weapon flew right for him. There was a surprised, ‘Hey! What–’ and then the device detonated. The explosion itself seemed to have little effect on any of them, but it was accompanied by a blaze of light and an invisible pulse of more intense electromagnetic energy. Of the three, the biggest had the most cybernetics and they were mismatched. He had a brand-new UDF-supplied right arm which fell uselessly at his side as its electronics overloaded. His left arm was older and of the grabber variety, and it obviously had faulty wiring because its owner started twitching violently and dropped to the ground with foam coming out of his mouth.

For the other two, things were a little easier. One had no cybernetics at all and he was just fumbling around, blinded by the flash of light. His compatriot had one UDF-supplied arm so he was fumbling around, blind, and only able to feel his way with his left hand.

‘What the fuck?!’ the all-natural one exclaimed.

‘What was that?’ the other asked. ‘Firework?’

‘No idea. Spyders fuckin’ about. Where’s Billy?’

‘Don’t know. Billy? Billy, where the–’ At which point, One Arm tripped over his fallen compatriot. ‘Huh? Think I found ’im.’

Annette turned and started back toward her safe house. The test had definitely been a success and she saw no point in finishing her test subjects. They had not seen her and, right now, they were not seeing anything very much. And they were probably going to be pissed off about dropping their booze so she figured it was better not to wait around.

One more thing to tick off. Cybernetic stun grenade: check. If the SAU came after her, she was going to be ready.

~~~

Annette stood on the balcony outside her apartment and looked out across the darkened park. She had, on consideration, decided to treat herself to a bottle of wine someone had stolen in the enclave and was selling rather than drinking. And there was entertainment.

The fireworks were nothing like the ones you saw over Utopia City on Founding Day, but they were loud and bright. One of the Spyders had to know what he was doing with black powder explosives. There were even a few different colours which Annette’s brain decided to reduce to ‘that’s sodium, that’s potassium…’ Sometimes she wished she could switch off the science and just appreciate the beauty. Beauty might be too strong: pretty, maybe.

The wine had been an informative find as well as a fairly tasty one. It had come from the enclave. She was sure of that because there was still a price label on it from a shop she had passed in Brooklyn. However, it had been made in the Snow Hill Vineyard which was, apparently, in the Blackwater Community. Annette was not sure where that was – somewhere to the south, she figured – but it meant that the Long Island had trade links with other areas of the country. And there were more areas of the continent with a relatively large population. Once again, Doctor White and the Utopia City administration had lied about the state of the world. If she dug into it, how many more regions would she find the Long Islanders were trading with?

Something for another day. For now, there was wine and the bang and flash of fireworks, and the potential for a future free of Utopia City ahead of her.

Queens District, 26/12/83.

Annette peered up at the grey building she had found without too much trouble. It was three hundred and fifty metres almost due north of the Factory Wall, five and a quarter kilometres east of the Brooklyn bulkhead. That seemed far enough away from Manhattan and it was in the new-build zone where the rents were low. It would probably do. She headed for the door.

The place had an intercom on the door. That seemed good. Annette stabbed the button for the supervisor’s apartment. A second later, a voice said, ‘Yes?’

‘Louise Barrington. I called about the apartment.’

The door buzzed and Annette pushed through into the lobby. There she found a woman sliding into late middle age, her grey hair wound into a tight bun. She was a little stooped, maybe from a bad back, but even fully upright, Annette doubted she would have been above chest height. She had eyes that looked through you like X-ray guns, and she used them to look Annette up and down slowly, rather like you’d examine something you were scraping off your boot. ‘I suppose I’ll show you the room then.’

Annette figured she must have passed the inspection, but the description of her possible dwelling place did not sit so well. She had been expecting an apartment, not a room. Still, she trooped up four storeys after the woman who still had not introduced herself. The apartment was at the top, right under the roof, which could have advantages. Annette had seen a fire escape running down the side of the building into an alley. She figured a newly built building would have followed some sort of regulations on construction.

The woman stopped at a door with ‘513’ on it and unlocked the door. Then she surprised Annette a little by waving her in first. ‘This is it. Room five one three. Services are in with the rent. We monitor them. You abuse it, you’re out. Laundry room is in the basement. You’re responsible for keeping your room clean. I’m Mrs Ledger.’ It all came out in a monotone, a combo package of indifference and dislike.

Annette looked around the place. It did almost seem to be one room. The bed occupied one side, and there was a single armchair and a chest of drawers, and that was about it. Something which might have been described as a kitchen took up one wall, but that was basically a counter with a small oven and hob, and a fridge. There was one door inside which opened onto a small bathroom. That had a toilet, washbasin, and shower. There was a fairly small mirror over the sink. The whole place looked… worn.

‘You want it?’ Mrs Ledger asked, still in her flat tone. She looked worn too, now that Annette thought about it.

‘I have a couple of other places to look at,’ Annette replied.

‘Well, make a decision fast. It could go at any time.’

‘Of course.’ Somehow, Annette doubted there was much chance of that and there had to be something better available.

~~~

Annette watched half a dozen tiny bodies skittering away into the corners of the room on thermal imaging. Cockroaches did not generate much heat, but there was just enough, especially when they moved. The dim lighting was probably designed to ensure no one with normal vision spotted them, but it had been described as ‘mood lighting.’

‘Thank you,’ she said to the man showing her around. He smiled far too much. ‘It’s lovely. I just have a couple more places to check out.’

‘Oh, you won’t find anything nicer or cleaner than this in Queens,’ the man said. In truth, the apartment was one of the bigger ones she had seen. It had a lounge and a bedroom. However, Annette was not so keen on being a co-tenant, especially when all the other occupants had more legs than she did.

‘I’m sure. I’ll be in touch.’

The problem was, Annette reflected as she walked out of the building, she did not have a couple more places to try. She had been around every viable option in a day. She could try further north, but that put her closer to Black Widows Central and into the higher rent regions where people were likely to ask more questions. Well, that left her with one option.

Annette dialled a number. ‘Mrs Ledger, this is Louise Barrington. I’d like to take that apartment.’

Manhattan, 28/12/83.

Annette did one last pass through her safe house before leaving for good. It was ritual more than anything; she had been through her checklist of things she was going to take and every box was ticked.

There was one other factor. This was her last goodbye to her old life. She would walk out of this place and walk away from Annette Barrington forever. This was her last chance to second-guess herself.

She had signed the contract that morning. Mrs Ledger had insisted on waiting for Monday and Annette had not wanted to antagonise the woman. That had made everything seem final, but there was one more opportunity to back out. Annette could simply stay where she was and…

Except that she knew she could not. Sooner or later, someone in Utopia City was going to figure out the truth and come looking for her. She had to be out of Manhattan before that happened. In Queens, she could be just one more anonymous person in a population of well over a million, and that was just in Queens. The UDF would be hunting through the whole enclave of three million people with no clue where to find her. She had to go.

Annette headed for the door. A new life lay ahead of her. Maybe it would even be a better one.

Part Three: Dead Tomorrow

Queens District, the Long Island Enclave, 18/2/2117.

Annette woke as her implant signalled her to wake. She needed no alarm clock, or any other kind of clock really, but she still checked the time on the glowing digits of the box beside her bed. It was midday. The clock said three minutes past, but she had never been able to get it to work right. It gained constantly, a fault in the electronics which she could probably have fixed, but…

Slipping out of bed, Annette headed for the small bathroom and started running water in the shower. She always started the water before she brushed her teeth because it took that long for the hot to come through. Calling the thing a shower was somehow more appropriate than usual. Or maybe drizzle would have been better. It got her wet and took the sweat off her body before she tried to get into her corset.

Drying herself off with one of her thin towels, Annette walked back into the main room. She had not decided whether it was a lounge or a bedroom, and it probably made no real difference. Bedroom was likely the best description since it was where she slept. She spent very little time there when she was not either trying to sleep or sleeping. Wrapping her hair in the towel, she bent to take one of her pistols from her arming pod which she kept beside the bed when she was sleeping. She preferred to have her weapons handy, just in case. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and closed her eyes.

Images flickered over the insides of her eyelids. There was her brother being cut down by laser fire. Annette raised her pistol, placing the barrel under her chin. There was her mother, her body torn and lying against a wall with accusatory eyes staring up at her daughter. Warning indicators appeared in her vision field and the safety locked on. Annette overrode it. There was her father, staring up at her as she pulled the trigger and put another hole in his skull. Annette’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Her phone rang. It was very hard to ignore since her phone was in her arming pod and it signalled a call right into her brain. Her computer identified the number as Sarah’s. The girl had amazing timing. Putting her pistol down, Annette connected the call. ‘Sarah? Problem?’

‘No.’ The blonde was, as per usual, perky. ‘I was just checking in. Uh, Jenny’s out on a call…’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

Hanging up, Annette reached for her skirt. It was time to go to work.

~~~

It had been easy enough at first. She had enough money to keep going for a while, or so she thought. She had a place to stay, if not the nicest of places. She had started looking into workshop space, and that was when things had started to go downhill.

It was going to be expensive, or expensive enough that it would drain her money supply far too fast, and getting a job was basically out of the question because she had a fake identity and no documents to prove her education. Even if she had had the documents, there was the issue of explaining how her knowledge of more or less everything was more advanced than anything she could have learned locally.

So, she was stuck trying to find a job some other way and it seemed like there was nothing she could do. To be more precise, it seemed like no one wanted a girl with artificial eyes working for them. It had taken her about two weeks in all before she ran into Sarah and Jenny on Industrial Avenue and… Well, that had been where things really went bad, but at least she had work. It was work which required a black corset, a skirt short enough to just cover her behind, and some rather great high-heeled, very strappy boots she had found – great until she realised how cold it got in New York in winter. It was work that required that she put up with… things she never believed she would have to do to make a living. But it was work.

And occasionally, just occasionally, she got to do something that made her life a little more worthwhile. Sometimes it was something moderately big, and sometimes it was something tiny that she hoped made a big difference, like giving a little cash to the old man on the corner.

She did not see him every day, because she took different routes to her pitch every day, but she saw him often enough. She guessed he was in his seventies, maybe a little younger, and if you took him at face value, he could have been a lot older. His hair was actually white, his face craggy; he was as thin as a rake and compensated by wearing as many layers as he could get. He was always accompanied by a bedraggled, grey mutt who always looked interested whenever Annette walked past. Annette dropped a twenty in the man’s hat whenever she had it spare.

The old man always responded the same way too. ‘Hey! You know I don’t need it, girly. It’s your legs keepin’ me warm these winter nights.’

And Annette followed the ritual too. ‘Dirty old man. Chasing girls at your age. You get that dog some food, okay? He’s more skin and bones than you are.’

‘Haw! Mickey’ll outlive me, no problem.’

Annette walked onto Industrial Avenue and then down to where Sarah was waiting, bouncing a little from foot to foot in the cold. She smiled brightly when she saw Annette, but Annette’s software picked up a hint of nervousness. The reason for that was probably the group of four Cyber-Kings hanging on the opposite side of the road, under the Factory Wall.

‘Hey, Louise,’ Sarah said. ‘Uh, they’ve been there for a while. They haven’t actually done anything…’

‘But they make you nervous.’

‘Who? Me? No, I mean I’m used to–’

‘That wasn’t a question. I can pick up… six different markers for nerves. Don’t worry about it. I’m here now.’ Annette scanned over the four figures. Leather jackets on three of them, denim on the last. Only one had cybernetics, an arm which looked better quality than many she had seen, but it was still obviously artificial. From the way their jackets shifted over them as they moved, all four were packing firearms. Her system classified them as a moderate threat, largely due to the numbers, but if they stayed away from her… Just to be on the safe side, she had her pod load defensive magazines.

It seemed like it was a wasted effort because, not long after, the four men wandered off down the avenue. Sarah watched them go, her jacket pulled tight around her. ‘Not saying they were actually trouble,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sorry they’re leaving.’

‘No,’ Annette agreed, ‘I’m not sorry either. If any of the Widows had seen them there, things might have got ugly.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, your eyes are kinda cool, but I don’t think cyborgs are very pretty.’

Annette grinned. ‘As long as my eyes are okay.’

Sarah giggled. ‘Your eyes are awesome.’

~~~

Some of Annette’s customers seemed to think the same. She lay in a rather narrow hotel bed watching Danny get dressed, and Danny seemed to like her eyes. Certainly, he liked missionary and that she took her glasses off. Then again, Danny was one of the better ones in general. He was a regular, every Thursday after work, and he treated Annette like a woman rather than a tool to be employed for a purpose. He was married; his ring was removed before he walked down the avenue looking for her, but she had noticed the mark it left. Whatever his reasons for seeking sex outside marriage, he felt just a little guilty about it. He never tried to offload any of that burden onto Annette and after all the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ speeches, she could really appreciate the quiet ones.

‘Uh, see you next week, Louise,’ Danny said.

Annette smiled. ‘See you then, Danny. Looking forward to it.’

She watched him drop a small bundle of bills onto the dresser and then head for the door. Then she checked the time, slipped out of bed, and headed for the bathroom. The Sedgewick was a disreputable sort of hotel – it had hourly rates posted over the reception desk – but the showers were better than the one she had in her apartment.

Today was a good day. Today she could be bothered to use the shower. Some mornings, the urge to pull the trigger was a lot stronger and it was all she could do to drag herself out to the avenue so that she could make money to keep herself going for the next day, which might be good or bad. Thursdays were often good and Danny was one of the reasons for that. Fridays and Saturdays were often not so good because you never knew what drunk was going to come looking for hired tail. Sundays could be very variable, depending largely on how badly Saturday had been, but so far, she had never actually gone all the way and pulled that trigger. So far, she had always got by with the thought that she could kill herself tomorrow.

Clean, or as clean as she was likely to get, Annette dressed and left the room. She was fairly certain that the Sedgewick had not seen a decorator since it had been put up, but that somehow seemed appropriate. Its guests rarely stayed overnight and ‘slightly dilapidated’ fitted the mood. She dropped the room key off at reception, where it was largely ignored by the bored receptionist, and headed out onto the avenue. The other reason for using the Sedgewick was proximity: it was all of a hundred metres from the pitch Annette shared with Sarah and Jenny.

Annette had taken all of two steps before she heard the voice. ‘Hey, Louise. How are things?’

Looking around, she spotted Officer Clement strolling toward her and smiled. Clement was also one of the good ones, even if he was a cop. ‘Oh, you know,’ Annette replied, ‘can’t complain too much. Still above ground.’

‘Yeah, same.’ He fell into step beside her since both were heading the same way. The cops on the Industrial Avenue beat had a fairly strict policy regarding the girls who worked there. It came down to ‘if we don’t actually see it, it isn’t happening.’ As an addendum, neither side mentioned what the cops knew the girls were doing. It was a matter of practicality: anyone trying to clean up the avenue would have had a very long and largely thankless task ahead of them. In reality, the enclave did not want to know what went on there.

‘We did have a few Cyber-Kings hanging around earlier,’ Annette said. ‘Armed ones. Haven’t seen them in a few hours though.’

‘They sometimes raid places over the wall looking for parts they can glue on. Probably just checking out the security on the gates.’

‘Maybe. They were lucky none of the Widows spotted them. Or we were. I think there might have been collateral damage if they’d got into it.’

‘Yeah… Yeah, that’ll ruin your day.’

It was dark now, but there were lights all along the Factory Wall and at least some of the streetlights on the opposite side worked. Even the darker patches were as clear as day to Annette, which was why she spotted the man in the leather jacket looking out from an alley and, pretty obviously, trying to be sneaky about it. Her visual systems locked in and pulled up a record: he was one of the four from earlier.

‘That said,’ Annette said, ‘those guys may be back.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s kind of the issue. Looks like they’re– Get down!’

Clement did not get down, because he had not been on the job for that long and had not developed the automatic reflexes many of his colleagues had. He did realise he was in trouble, because Annette had mentioned the gang members and he could see four dark shapes emerging from an alley up ahead, maybe ten metres away. He started going for his sidearm as the gunfire started, part of his brain detecting the staccato of fully automatic fire and another part telling him he was too late.

Except that Annette had her pistols in her hands and was firing too. Her bullets, launched as if at random, burst in the air a couple of metres out, becoming a hailstorm of tiny pellets which acted as a remarkably effective barrier against the incoming rounds. There was that brief second where four armed thugs realised they had just emptied their magazines and hit precisely nothing, and then they were rushing to reload. Annette’s pod had already resupplied her weapons and this time she was not firing defensively. Four men lost the use of their right arms and, by that time, Clement was gathering his wits.

‘Long Island Police! You’re under arrest. Lay your weapons down and–’

‘Their weapons are down,’ Annette pointed out. ‘You want me to stop the one that’s running?’

‘Uh… if you would…’

Annette took aim and fired, the bullet spinning out with a soft hiss and impacting the meat of the man’s thigh. With a shriek, he collapsed onto the sidewalk. ‘My civic duty,’ Annette said. ‘Do you think you could get them hauled off fairly quickly? They’re bleeding on the sidewalk.’

‘I’ll call it in. Uh, thanks, I owe you one.’

Annette smiled. Sometimes she got to do something big that made life a little better for someone. Those were the days when she really felt better about herself. ‘Not really. Believe it or not, being appreciated for something other than a short skirt is worth quite a lot.’

19/2/2117.

Annette took a different route back from the avenue to the one she had taken to it. She had picked up a late client and was cutting through alleys on the way back from the Sedgewick. Most people avoided the alleys at night since they were not always especially safe, but Annette had her multispectral eyes and her pistols, and the dark did not bother her. It was thanks to her eyes that she spotted the two bodies lying against a wall in one of those dark alleys, and thanks to their infrared capabilities that she knew who she was looking at.

Her heart sank and, when she stepped closer and heard the plaintive whine from Mickey, it tried to descend into her boots. She checked the old man’s pulse to be sure, but it only confirmed what her thermal vision was telling her anyway. His body was not more than a degree or two above ambient temperature: he had been dead for a few hours now with Mickey huddled against him, trying against all logic to keep his master warm and probably knowing he had failed.

Annette reached out and scratched the dog between the ears. ‘I’m sorry, Mickey. He’s gone. There’s nothing much you or I can do for him.’

Mickey whined a reply as Annette placed a call to the local LIPD office. She doubted the local Frankies would bother with a body as old as this one, but she was not going to give them a chance to decide there might be something they could salvage.

~~~

There had been questions. Quite a lot of them, considering, but the paramedics were putting the death down to natural causes, almost certainly just exposure. Annette was off the hook and, as with most cops in south Queens, the ones who had turned out to check on the body she had reported were disinclined to ask what she was doing in an alley at that time of night. No crime, no problem.

Annette watched the old man’s body, encased in a black bag, being loaded onto an ambulance. She did not really know the man, but somehow she felt she was going to miss seeing him on the corner when she passed.

Mickey had been tied to a downpipe and was now yanking as hard as his skinny body could manage on the cord. He wanted to go with his master. Almost certainly the dog knew his master was dead, but he wanted to go with him, to whatever fate awaited him at the end.

‘What happens to the dog?’ Annette asked.

The cop she had been talking to seemed to have more or less forgotten she was there, but he looked up at her and then at Mickey. ‘We’ll call animal control. They’ll deal with him.’

Annette frowned, her eyes on the grey mutt with the tangled hair. She really did not like the way that had sounded.

22/2/2117.

Annette woke as her implant signalled her to wake. She needed no alarm clock, or any other kind of clock really, but she still checked the time on the glowing digits of the box beside her bed. It was ten a.m. She would frequently get up a little earlier on Monday because there was usually less work on Sunday. The clock said it was three minutes past, but she had never been able to get it to work right. It gained constantly, a fault in the electronics which she could probably have fixed, but…

Slipping out of bed, Annette headed for the small bathroom and started running water in the shower. She always started the water before she brushed her teeth because it took that long for the hot to come through. Calling the thing a shower was somehow more appropriate than usual. Or maybe drizzle would have been better. It got her wet and took the sweat off her body before she tried to get into her corset.

Drying herself off with one of her thin towels, Annette walked back into the main room. She had not decided whether it was a lounge or a bedroom, and it probably made no real difference. Bedroom was likely the best description since it was where she slept. She spent very little time there when she was not either trying to sleep or sleeping. Wrapping her hair in the towel, she bent to take one of her pistols from her arming pod which she kept beside the bed when she was sleeping. She preferred to have her weapons handy, just in case. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and closed her eyes.

Images flickered over the insides of her eyelids. There was her brother being cut down by laser fire. Annette raised her pistol, placing the barrel under her chin. There was her mother, her body torn and lying against a wall with accusatory eyes staring up at her daughter. Warning indicators appeared in her vision field and the safety locked on. Annette overrode it. There was her father, staring up at her as she pulled the trigger and put another hole in his skull. Annette’s finger tightened on the trigger.

A pair of paws landed on her knees and a wet nose snuffed at the back of her hand. She opened her white eyes and found herself looking into Mickey’s brown ones. He gave a soft whine.

‘Okay,’ Annette said. ‘I won’t. Not today.’

Mickey settled back onto his haunches, looked up at her, and gave a short bark. It had required a lot of soap and water, the judicious use of a pair of scissors, and a good bit of brushing, but Mickey had turned out to be a fairly good-looking dog under the dirt. There was no way he was any kind of breed: he looked like some insane merging of a greyhound and a Yorkshire terrier, with a few other things thrown in probably. He was eating anything Annette put in front of him too. His ribs were looking a little less obvious, but she figured he would be absorbing her spare cash for a couple of weeks yet.

But he was paying for his upkeep every morning when she got out of bed and considered eating a bullet. She had saved him from a likely demise at the hands of the animal control people and she had the strong feeling he understood that. In turn, he saved her, every day, and he would keep doing it until she did not need it any more.

Annette laid her pistol down on the bed. ‘Okay, let me get some clothes on and I’ll get us both some breakfast.’

Bark! Enthusiastic eyes, lolling tongue.

She got to her feet, grinning. ‘If you’re a very good dog, there could be a sausage in your future.’

Bark, bark! Beginnings of drool.

‘That means no drooling on the carpet.’

Slurp. Apologetic whine.

‘Good dog.’

~~~

Sarah, of course, thought that Mickey was absolutely gorgeous and fussed over him for ten minutes every day when he arrived with Annette. Jenny was not quite so enthused and had muttered dark things about fleas and food bills, but even she folded in the face of Mickey’s big brown eyes and the fact that he was clearly a loyal, obedient, and rather intelligent animal.

That had been Saturday. Jenny always spent Sunday with her daughter, Terri, so she had not had time to gather further views on Mickey. Jenny was older than her two working companions. Not by a huge amount, but in street-years, it was half a lifetime. She had welcomed Annette to the pitch she had shared with Sarah for a year, give or take, because it might have been competition, but it gave them the trinity of blonde, brunette, and redhead which, Jenny said, attracted more customers. Jenny was the redhead, of course, though Annette would have described her hair as a rich auburn. Objectively, she was the least attractive of the three, though not by a lot. Her face was rounder and her body tended to the narrow. However, she made up for that with a double-D bust which she put considerable effort into flaunting, and it worked. She was something of a worrier, maybe because she had a four-year-old daughter, and this morning she had something to worry over besides Mickey.

‘Neighbourhood is going to the dogs,’ Jenny said. Mickey gave a soft yip and Jenny added, ‘Turn of phrase, Mickey. Sorry. But it is. I heard yesterday that there’s a Juicer gang making some new designer drug around here somewhere. Widows have been trying to find them is what I heard.’

‘Oh?’ Annette asked.

‘Black Widow doesn’t like that kind of business on her turf. She thinks narcotics dull your senses.’

‘Well, she’s right. Not every drug is a narcotic, however.’

Jenny frowned. ‘They’re not?’

‘Comes from the Greek narkō, “to make numb.” It’s something which puts you to sleep, or tries to. There are drugs that’ll do precisely the opposite, but they’ll still give you a high. That’s assuming they’re making something psychoactive and not some form of combat enhancer. Juicers are big into steroids and more specific combat enhancers.’

‘You know way too much about this stuff.’

‘Chemistry was never my big subject, but I did put in some time in Manhattan.’ Both Jenny and Sarah knew some of Annette’s history and did not care whether she was legally in the enclave or not. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of Juicers opening a lab up around here either.’

Jenny shrugged. ‘Not much we can do about it… Or maybe you could. If you could take the place out and word got to Black Widow… Might make life around here a little easier for you and your friends.’

Annette chuckled. ‘Good, solid, selfish motive. I might look into it.’

28/2/2117.

There was a gate on the southern Sea Wall of the Queens industrial zone. Outside it was a sort of encampment they called the Rock Way which people would come to by boat and wait for their chance to enter the city legally. To do that, they had to go through the Woodmere Immigrant Centre, which housed the gate. It could take months, but there were ways to speed up the process. For example, age was a factor. Someone young enough and on their own could be passed through quite quickly. No one had really tied up the loose ends, however. Once they were in, things did not always go quite as they should.

That was what Stacey was thinking as she walked out through the doors of the reception centre and found herself standing on a road with some signage pointing the way out of the industrial zone… And that was about it. She had a little money and some addresses she was supposed to contact, when she figured out where any of them were. No one had given her a map, though.

So, Stacey walked. She headed north, because all she could see was large buildings which looked like they were factories or something, and south was obviously the wrong direction. There were people about, not many, but some she could have asked for directions. But they all seemed to be busy, rushing from place to place or engaged in some form of discussion. She did not want to disturb them, so she kept walking.

She had a feeling it was Sunday – she had been losing track of the days for a while now – so the thin population was probably to be expected. She was not sure how religious people in the enclave were, but they had to take a day off sometime. Sunday was traditional. Still, she finally found the gate out, through another big wall, because there were more people on the streets, all heading one way. The sun was pretty low in the sky: it had to be home time for the workforce. She thought of asking some of them for directions, but they were all walking huddled in their coats, heads down, too closed off from the outside world for Stacey to feel comfortable talking to them.

And once she was out of the gate, the world did not look more hopeful. She found herself on a broad roadway which seemed to run all the way along the wall. On the opposite side, it was apartment blocks and a few signs indicating hotels. She could not afford a hotel, she was fairly sure of that, but she was really getting hungry and she could see something which looked like a café down the road to the left. That was the way she decided to go, even if it meant walking along a road lined with ‘ladies of the night’ as her mother had called them. It was not night, but they were there. Stacey kept her head down and did not even think of asking them about a hostel.

A mug of tea and a slightly stale sandwich bit into her supply of cash with more relish than she ate the food, but her stomach did not feel so empty and she had hopes of finding somewhere to stay before it got too dark.

It was starting to get dark now. The sun had to be barely above the horizon and with all the buildings and walls, twilight was setting in. She set off east again, her pace picking up as a sense of urgency set in. Maybe there would be a sign, something to indicate there was a place she could stay. Maybe she could find someone to ask, once she ran out of women in short skirts and shorter shorts. They had to be cold; Stacey felt cold just looking at them. Actually, Stacey just felt cold. Maybe a little warmer with food in her belly, but the weather was not exactly tropical. It had been warmer at home…

‘I know that look.’ Stacey started at the sound of the voice and looked around to see a man leaning against the wall of an apartment block. ‘Let me guess,’ he went on. ‘They kicked you out on the street with a few bucks and a list of hostels, but no clue where they actually were. It’s getting dark. You haven’t found a place to stay. You’re starting to think staying home might have been a better idea.’ He took Stacey’s wide-eyed stare as confirmation. ‘Seen it a million times. Actually, saw it in a mirror a few years back.’

A fellow immigrant then. Stacey guessed he was not that much older than her and he seemed to have made it fairly well on the Long Island. His jeans and T-shirt were nothing too special, but he was wearing a long leather coat which looked expensive and he had a confident air about him. And, if Stacey was being honest, he was kind of good-looking…

He spoke again before she could get a reply out, one thumb indicating a direction over his shoulder. ‘There’s a pretty good hostel about two blocks back. Church place. Good people.’

‘Uh, thank you. I… I’ll go find it.’ She glanced either way to look for a road she could use to take her north.

‘Huh… Look, I’m going in that general direction. I’ll walk you over. Streets around here can get a little rough when the light’s going.’

Stacey’s critical instincts kicked in and she thought, briefly, that accepting directions was one thing and an escort was another. But he was quite good-looking… ‘Okay. That would be really great. I’m Stacey.’

He pushed off from the wall and started off the way she had come. ‘Come on then, Stacey. It’s not far if we cut through the alleys.’

‘Alleys?’

‘Nothing to worry about. I know my way around.’ He turned left, into one of those alleys. ‘Come on. It’s quite safe.’

Stacey followed him and, when she got in there, she found that the alley was not really that narrow and there was still light getting into it. It was not that bad and… He had never given his name, which she thought was a little odd, but okay. He would get her to the hostel and she would be safe there.

The alley walls turned from concrete slabs to wooden fences. They were passing by the backyards of apartment blocks, Stacey guessed. Maybe she could get a small apartment, when she had found a job of some sort anyway. She was not really sure what she was going to do. She had few skills worth much in a big place like this, but there had to be something she could do.

‘Not much further,’ her guardian said, turning right at a corner.

Stacey rushed a little to catch up; the guy had long legs. She came to a sudden stop when she found him just standing there, looking down at her and smiling. ‘I-is something wrong?’ she asked.

‘Not a thing,’ he told her.

And then a hand clamped over her mouth from behind.

~~~

They had injected her with something and she woke up with her mouth taped over and a bag over her head. It felt like her wrists and ankles were wrapped in tape too: she could barely move. Fear began to gnaw at her stomach almost immediately, but the drug was still dulling her senses and it all seemed kind of distant. And she could hear voices.

‘This is the best you could do?’

‘You wanted something fast. You can have fast or you can have a choice. She looks pretty strong.’

Stacey recognised neither of the men speaking, but she guessed that they were discussing her.

‘She isn’t exactly the kind of thing we’re generally looking for, is she? Our customers–’

‘She’s what we could get. You want her or not? I can find another buyer for her no trouble at all.’

She was being sold?! Who was the buyer? She could think of exactly one reason for someone to be buying teenage girls and the fear became terror and pushed past the doping. Stacey began to struggle.

‘Now she’s woken up,’ the salesman said, sounding disgusted. ‘Look, you want her or not? I’ll have to drug her again if not.’

There was a short pause and Stacey found herself pausing too, waiting for the reply. ‘We’ll take her. We need someone for tonight.’

Hands grabbed Stacey’s arms, lifting her to be slung over a shoulder. It was a very broad shoulder and she began kicking and screaming as best she could, but her captor did not seem to care in the slightest.

~~~

Whoever the people were who had, apparently, bought her, they were a weird bunch. Most of them looked like someone had inflated their muscles with a pneumatic pump, possibly sucking their brains out in the same process. A few of them were not nearly so pumped up and some of those wore lab coats. Stacey had no idea what they wanted her for, but they had chained her to the floor in the middle of some sort of concrete-lined basement room. It was quite a large room, probably the whole floor area of one of the apartment blocks, or something like that. From the looks of it, the chain and metal collar were a permanent fixture so they had done this before. Whatever this was.

One of the men in the lab coats walked across the room toward her. He had a smile on his face which Stacey did not like. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering,’ he said, ‘why we got you here. Perhaps you’re imagining some perverted sexual activity is in your future.’ He watched as Stacey slowly shook her head. ‘No?’

‘I-I’m not g-good at imagining p-perv–’

‘Ah, a good, Christian girl. Perhaps this will be a more interesting experiment than I’d imagined.’

‘Experiment?’

‘Yes. We normally use men, rather larger men than you. If you survive the injection, the effects should be most interesting. And before you say “injection” in that faltering little voice, yes, we are going to inject you with a new drug we’re formulating. It will, if it’s right this time, turn you into a frothing-at-the-mouth killing machine. You’ll want to bite our heads off.’ He laughed at the expression of horror on her face. ‘We may even let you try to kill someone.’ He looked around at one of the huge bruisers who was walking over, cradling a syringe in his huge palms. ‘One of them. Even with snakebite in you, I don’t think you’ll have much chance.’

‘I think,’ said a voice from somewhere at the back of the room, ‘that that is the worst display of macho posturing I have ever heard.’ Both Stacey and the scientist-type stared, wide-eyed, as a woman walked out of the shadows toward them. Even the gorilla with the syringe stopped and looked on dumbly. It might have been the outfit: corset, stupidly short skirt, and high-heeled boots which seemed to be composed entirely of straps. Plus, even in the dimly lit cellar, the woman was wearing wrap-around sunglasses. The woman stopped, cocked a hip, and said, ‘Haven’t you boys ever heard of girl power?’

‘Who are you, girl?’ the scientist asked. ‘You’ve made a huge mistake coming here.’

‘I’m just an interested party,’ the woman replied. ‘I’m interested in you getting your operation out of Queens.’

The scientist laughed. ‘Don’t kill her. We’ll have two test subjects for the new batch.’

And then the woman in the corset was moving. To Stacey, it was as though a pair of pistols just appeared in her hands and she began firing almost at random. There was so little sound. Stacey had always thought that guns were loud. She was used to hunting rifles and they were loud, but these pistols seemed to make little noise. The bullets hissed as they flew through the air, striking target after target. And then, just as suddenly, there was silence, and none of the men in the room were moving.

The woman moved her pistols back and there were two solid-sounding clicks. ‘Just wait there,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back for you.’ Then she marched off toward a door in the side of the room.

Stacey waited. There was not much else she could do. She heard gunshots, which could not have come from the woman’s pistols, and sounds like shattering glass. And then, once again, silence. Stacey began to wonder whether the woman had, in fact, decided to leave her there, chained to the floor, but then she emerged from the side rooms, marching straight toward Stacey and raising one of her pistols.

‘What are you doing?!’ Stacey shrieked, rearing back.

‘Good girl.’ A bullet from this pistol slammed into the chain near its base and Stacey found herself sprawling backward. ‘Come on. We need to leave. There’s a fire in their lab.’

Stacey gathered up her chain and got to her feet. ‘M-my stuff. Coat and bag. It’s all I have.’

‘There’s a coat and rucksack under the table over there.’ The woman pointed and Stacey squinted, unable to see anything in the shadows. ‘Get a move on. I don’t know when the LIPD will notice the smoke.’

Sure enough, in the shadow under the table, Stacey found her worldly possessions. She struggled into her jacket, grabbed her bag, and then had to hurry to follow her rescuer out of the basement and out into an alley. She followed for half a block through the twisting back alleyways until the woman stopped and turned around.

‘Okay, if you head up that way, you’ll get out onto Bleaker Avenue. You can get home from there, right?’

Stacey stared at her for a second. ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. A-and there’s this.’ She lifted the chain still padlocked around her neck and her rescuer sagged visibly.

‘Oh, for the love of… All right. Okay. You can stay with me tonight. I’ll get that chain off you and you can stay with me. There’s a hostel not far from my place that’ll take you. What’s your name?’

‘Stacey. Stacey Templeton.’

‘Right. I’m Louise. Get a move on, Stacey.’ The strange woman set off at a brisk pace and Stacey struggled after her. ‘Do you like dogs?’

‘Uh… Yes.’

‘Good. You don’t snore, do you?’

‘Uh… Well, I don’t really know…’

‘Fine. But if you do, you’re sleeping in the bathroom.’

~~~

Mickey seemed to think Stacey was okay and Annette was starting to trust the dog’s instincts when it came to people. Mickey seemed to have people analysis software as good as her own, maybe better.

Stacey obviously thought Mickey was adorable, which at least proved she had a good eye for dogs: Mickey was adorable. She fussed over him while Annette divested herself of her arming pod and then sat on the bed to unstrap her boots.

‘I take it you’re new in town?’ Annette asked.

‘They let me in from the Rock Way this afternoon,’ Stacey replied. ‘I didn’t really know where to go and this guy offered to take me to one of the shelters…’

‘Huh. They really need to get a better system for handling immigrants. The guy you met would be one of the local Frankies. They hang around looking for lost newcomers.’

‘Frankies?’

‘Short for “Frankenstein.” You’re actually sort of lucky. A lot of the people they grab end up as involuntary organ donors.’

‘O-oh.’

‘Instead, it seems, they sold you to a Juicer gang that I’ve been trying to track down all week. You know, if you can afford a lottery ticket, it might be a good investment. Your luck seems to be running pretty well today.’ Annette held up a hand as Stacey opened her mouth. ‘They’re called Juicers because most of them are on a synthetic steroid, which is why they look like bodybuilders who didn’t know when to stop. They make a few other drugs too.’

‘They said it was called, uh, snakebite.’

‘Yeah, well, hopefully that’s the last we’ll see of it. Now, come here and let me have a look at that lock.’

‘You’re not going to shoot it off, are you?’

Annette smirked. ‘I could probably make that shot, but I have a “no gunfire in my rooms” policy. I should be able to pick the lock.’ She slipped her glasses off as she turned away to get her kit and Stacey was kneeling beside the bed by the time Annette turned back. It made the sudden recoil more obvious and Annette’s stomach lurched, even though she should be used to the reaction now.

Stacey’s eyes widened in horror, but the reason for it suddenly changed as she put her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh God! Sorry. I shouldn’t have… It’s just a shock. What happened? How did you lose them?’

Annette managed a smile and beckoned Stacey closer so that she could get at the padlock on her collar. ‘I didn’t exactly lose them. I had it done on purpose. It’s part of a cybernetic weapons system with my backpack and pistols. It lets me do things… Well, that most people can’t.’

‘Like seeing in the dark?’

‘Like seeing in the dark. I designed the whole system, built most of it. I wasn’t going to test it out on someone else and possibly leave them blind.’

Stacey’s expression turned quizzical. ‘You designed all that and you live in… Um, you live here?’

‘You can say it. I live in this dump because…’ Annette paused and looked at Stacey for a second. ‘Look, I’m here illegally. I’m basically running from some people who probably want me dead. There’s not much I can do here without someone working it out, so I live here and, just in case the outfit wasn’t a giveaway, I work on my back.’

‘Oh. I won’t say anything. To anyone. You saved my life… Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do either. I might end up–’

‘If I see you down on the avenue, I’ll drag you to the cops myself. No one your age should be doing that. You have options. The hostel should be able to set you up on some courses at the local college. You can get a job in one of the factories, maybe in an office in Sky City. You could be a waitress.’

‘So could you.’

‘They don’t want cyborgs serving customers around here.’ There was a click and Annette smiled as the lock gave in. ‘There we go. Now, go use the bathroom. Wash up and stuff. I think we should get some sleep, don’t you?’

‘It’s been a long day… Uh, there’s only one bed.’

‘It’s just about wide enough for two.’ Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘I only sleep with women if I’m paid to, Stacey. You’re quite safe.’

Stacey managed a half-grin as she got up and got rid of her collar. ‘What if you snore?’

‘I don’t, cheeky. And if I do, I do it really cutely. Get moving.’

1/3/2117.

‘Okay,’ Annette said, ‘you just walk in there and introduce yourself.’

Stacey looked across the short stretch of lawn in front of a building which looked vaguely like it might once have been a school. One of the few buildings in the area to survive the rebuilding it seemed, it housed the Mary Louise Hostel which Annette had brought her to.

‘Uh, you aren’t going to come in with me?’ Stacey asked.

‘They would almost certainly want to ask me questions I’d prefer not to answer.’

‘Oh… Okay. Well, you can count on me. I won’t be saying anything to anyone about… uh, what didn’t happen last night. To me. Or any weird guys in lab coats. Or–’

‘I get it, Stacey,’ Annette said, grinning. ‘I hope you have a good life. Or a better one anyway.’

‘I promise. I’ll make it work.’ Stacey started walking toward the door of the shelter.

Annette watched her go, a smile creeping over her face. She knew what her sudden good humour was about. She had not even considered picking up her pistol that morning, though a little of that was Stacey being there. Well, all of it was. Annette had stopped a new drug from hitting the streets and saved Stacey. She had joined the SAU originally to do good, to help save her city, and her city had turned out to be not quite what she had thought it was. But she still had the urge to help and now she was back to doing it.

Turning to head toward the avenue, Annette walked off with a spring in her step. Okay, so her life was hardly perfect. In fact, her life sucked to a fairly large extent. But she had a way of making things a little bit more tolerable now. Between Mickey and a little vigilantism, maybe the mornings would be a little brighter from now on.

3/3/2117.

Stacey had been at the hostel for all of two days, and already she was making friends and set to start secretarial courses. It was all looking good.

Her room-mate was nice. That was just a plus really, but it was a big plus. Stacey felt like she could tell Connie more or less anything, and Connie had already figured out there was more to Stacey’s story than she was telling. Stacey had said that one of the Frankies had tried to kidnap her, mostly because she had been talking about how scary it was trying to find the hostel. Trying to keep it all a secret was far harder than Stacey had imagined it would be. Hence the story she was spinning now, after lights out.

‘Well, no, you’re right. He didn’t just try to grab me. He got me, but I was rescued.’

Connie, on the bunk above Stacey, in the dark and unwilling to sleep before she had heard what had really happened, nodded. ‘I knew you couldn’t’ve got away from them. Taking people off the street is what they do. Who rescued you?’

‘I don’t know. She–’

‘It was a woman?’

‘Uh-huh. Girl power, you know? She came in and… It was like magic, Connie. One minute she was just standing there, and the next she had these guns in her hands and the men around us were dropping like flies.’

‘You’re saying you were rescued by a witch with a pair of guns?’

‘No, of course not. There’s no such thing as witches. It just seemed like magic. But…’

‘But what?’

‘Well… She never missed. There must’ve been a dozen of them and poof! In like a second, they were all down. It wasn’t really magic. I don’t believe in magic. But it sure seemed like it at the time.’

5/3/2117.

‘There’s a rumour doing the rounds,’ Jenny said as Annette and Mickey arrived at their pitch.

‘There are usually several,’ Annette replied. Mickey settled into his preferred spot, against the wall behind where Annette generally stood.

‘This one says that a bunch of Juicers met an unfortunate end, along with their drug lab.’

‘Oh? Couldn’t have happened to nicer people.’

‘They’re saying that a witch with a pair of pistols took them out.’

Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘A witch? Some people will believe anything. It’ll be ghosts, zombies, and vampires next.’

‘Huh. Just be careful, hun. The Lip around here seem to be okay with you… helping out, but if the Juicers find out it was–’ Jenny stopped as she spotted something further up the avenue. ‘Looks like this is my ride. Just think about what I said, okay?’

Annette’s eyes followed Jenny’s gaze as the redhead stepped closer to the kerb. There was a black town car gliding toward them, its occupant hidden behind tinted windows. ‘I’ll think about it,’ Annette said. ‘You be careful yourself.’

‘Always am, hun. Always am.’ The car stopped beside Jenny, its electric motors virtually silent, and the passenger window wound down. Jenny smiled, opened the door, and climbed in. The car was moving off almost before she had the door closed.

Annette’s attention shifted to Mickey, however. Her scruffy dog was almost flattened against the sidewalk, his body tense, and he was growling. Annette frowned. ‘Sarah, what do we know about the guy in the black car?’

‘Uh… Not much,’ Sarah replied. ‘Jenny says he’s got this pale and handsome thing going. He’s loaded too. Lives out in some big place in Greenland. He’s been coming by and picking Jenny up… Must be about two weeks. He’s got a few weird kinks, I think, but he pays well.’

‘Mickey doesn’t seem to like that car.’

‘Oh. Do you think it might be trouble?’

‘I think I’ll try to find out.’

~~~

Annette spotted the uniform first, but her eyes magnified the image as soon as she focused on the approaching figure. She smiled and waited.

‘Officer Clement,’ Annette said as he got closer. ‘How nice to see you.’

Clement’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘What do you want?’

‘Who says I want something?’

‘Your tone does. I haven’t been on the streets that long, but I have got a sister. I know that tone.’

Annette grinned at him. ‘Okay, I’ve got a favour to ask. It’s kind of a big one…’

‘Louise, you stopped me getting shot a while back. I think I owe you one favour.’

‘Okay. There’s a car, plate number AQ two seven five. I was wondering whether you could find out who owns it?’

‘Does he owe you money?’

Annette shook her head. ‘No. It’s just… Well, Mickey doesn’t like him.’

Clement looked at the grey mutt by the wall. Mickey lifted his head but did not offer any further comment. ‘Well, if Mickey doesn’t like him… I can get it. I’ll put it down as a suspicious vehicle. We run plenty of those around here.’

‘Thanks… Um, what do I call you if I don’t want to call you Officer Clement all the time?’

‘Kerry. Kerry Clement. I never liked it much.’

Annette smiled. ‘Thanks, Kerry. I think it’s a perfectly good name.’

He returned the smile. ‘Right. I’ll let you know when I’ve got something.’ And he set off down the avenue at a steady stroll.

Mickey made a soft noise which Annette could not quite identify and she looked at him. ‘What? He’s a nice guy. I like him.’

She could have sworn the dog was rolling his eyes.

7/3/2117.

Despite Annette’s concerns, Jenny was back on the avenue on Saturday, rather pleased with the haul from an evening with the man in the black car. She did comment that his requests were getting kinkier, but would not be drawn further on the subject and Annette was not inclined to press it.

On Sunday, Annette was in the industrial zone, viewing workshop spaces. There were several buildings with space available and owners desperate enough to see her on a Sunday. Annette was not looking for anything big, but she knew what she wanted to put in and what the minimum space requirements were. She also knew her likely power requirements and she absolutely had to have a good network connection. Getting everything just right, at a reasonable price, was proving harder than she had hoped.

The second-to-last property on her list was a bit of a weird one. The building manager showing her around was not looking expectant and Annette was not entirely sure why. She had skipped her street outfit in favour of T-shirt and jeans, so maybe he had expected someone in a suit. Or it might have been the somewhat eclectic building design.

Someone had, for some reason, put a small shop in at the corner of an industrial unit. It had a standard sort of shop window and door, both of which had heavy-duty roller shutters mounted over them. At the back of a shop floor that was not particularly large, there was what you would have expected was a door onto a storage area, but it actually opened onto a flight of fairly narrow stairs which led down into the basement. The basement had more space than the shop did.

‘So,’ the manager said, ‘when they couldn’t get anyone to move into the shop, they refitted and started trying to get a small business to move in. You’ve got three-phase power, fibre connection to the local network exchange, fully tanked walls, solid concrete floor.’

‘And you could always use upstairs for office space, I guess,’ Annette suggested.

‘Yeah. If you wanted to.’

Annette scanned over the room, trying to figure out why no one had taken the place. It was a little cool, but… ‘Ah, no heating, no air conditioning.’

The manager winced. ‘Yeah, that is a bit of an issue…’

‘Cold in the winter, hot in the summer. Though you should get a degree of thermal stability from it being underground… I could work with this.’ Her software picked out the sudden perking up of the manager’s body language and expression, not that she needed it to notice in this case. ‘The only problem is the cost. The size is right. I actually like the subsurface location. I’d need permission to drill a couple of channels up to the surface…’

‘Probably won’t be a problem, if it’s done properly.’ He was suddenly far too eager to please. ‘And we may be able to negotiate on the price…’

Annette nodded. ‘I’m going to have to go away and run the figures, of course.’

‘Uh, of course. Do you need dimensions or anything?’

‘No, I have those. Accurate enough for my needs anyway. I’m quite good at estimating distances. I’ll be in touch.’

~~~

Of course, the money was more than just an issue. There was no way Annette could afford the space the way she was currently making money. She needed an additional source of income if she was going to start work on additions to her systems. That was not going to be easy. She was contemplating possibilities, and largely coming up with nothing, when she spotted Kerry outside her apartment building.

‘Kerry,’ Annette said as she approached. He had not noticed her and jumped. ‘You’re out of uniform,’ she added, grinning.

‘Yeah. I usually get into that at the precinct. We have our own laundry service.’

‘That’s… a perk, I guess. Am I to assume you were looking for me?’

‘Uh, yeah. I got the information you asked me to get.’

Annette flashed him a smile. ‘Okay. Got time for a drink?’

‘It’ll have to be non-alcoholic for me, but sure.’

~~~

There was a sports bar on the corner about two blocks west of Annette’s apartment building. There was always a rather loud baseball game on the screen near the front of the place: always a replay from the owner’s collection of classic games since there was no longer a league. The booths at the back, however, were fairly quiet and you could chat without yelling.

Kerry started the conversation, after putting down a glass of wine for Annette and a soda for himself, by taking an envelope from his jacket and sliding it across the table. ‘You, uh, didn’t get that from me, obviously.’

Annette retrieved the envelope and vanished it into her bag. ‘I’m not even sure what you’re referring to, Kerry.’

‘Huh. You know, I’ve been wondering since I saw you on the avenue… What’s a girl like you doing in that business? Shouldn’t you be in Sky City, making more money than I’ll see in a decade?’

‘Hmm…’ Annette looked at him for a second or two. ‘I’m an illegal immigrant. Shouldn’t be here. Where I come from, I’m a fugitive. If they find me, they’ll kill me. So, I needed to be somewhere off the grid, where no one asks too many questions. The only place more off the grid than Queens is Brooklyn, and I have some taste.’

Kerry raised an eyebrow. ‘Trusting me with a lot, aren’t you?’

‘How much trouble would you be in if I told someone about that thing you didn’t give me?’

‘Fair point.’ He gave a shrug. ‘I’m not totally sure I’d get more than a private chat with the sergeant, to be honest. Word’s been getting around. I know I’m not the only cop you’ve stopped getting a beating or worse. Your section of Industrial Avenue has been noticeably quieter since you turned up there. The Citizen Deputy Programme hasn’t helped much in this part of Queens. You might not be part of it, but you’re kind of honouring the idea. We need all the help we can get around here.’

‘It makes me feel better about myself. This is not how I saw my life going. What about you? Have you always wanted to be a cop?’

‘Pretty much. I’m the third generation in the LIPD. My niece is a rookie over in Sky City. If I ever meet the right girl, I’d kind of like to see one of my kids put on the uniform.’

‘If it was me, I’d want the uniform redesigned to include some body armour. Back home, the cops wear full-body armour, and they have powered-armour backup. Of course, there’s a reason I ran away…’

‘This from the girl who goes out with a pair of pistols, dressed in a corset.’

‘I have something… more protective if I need it. I haven’t needed it, and I’d do my best to make sure no one saw me in it if I did. And I’m thinking of reinforcing my corset.’

Kerry grinned. ‘Oh, I’m sure that’ll make all the difference.’

‘You’d be surprised.’ Annette pointed vaguely at Kerry’s chest. ‘What’s the cross for? I’ve not noticed it before.’

Glancing down, Kerry tucked the small gold cross on a neck chain under his shirt. ‘I don’t generally brag about my religion. You don’t have Christianity where you’re from?’

‘Uh, actually, no. I guess you’d say the culture there is… supremely rationalist. No religions.’ In a way, there was: the Cult of Doctor White. Annette did not think bringing that up would help, however.

‘Well, I think you’re missing out on something, but I don’t push it. I think someone’s beliefs are kind of private. Personal, y’know?’

‘Not exactly, but I can appreciate the idea. There’s a guy comes down the avenue every couple of weeks shouting about hellfire and damnation. Sarah called him a preacher.’

Kerry smiled. ‘That’s not the kind of religion I believe in. People used to say that the Damnation Plague was sent to destroy the evils of mankind. Some still do. I don’t believe God’s like that, but… Well, it’s personal.’

Annette sank the remainder of her wine and smiled. ‘I should get moving. Mickey will be looking for something to devour.’

‘Sure,’ Kerry said. He finished off his soda and got up, escorting Annette out onto the street where Annette paused.

‘Um… You know, my place isn’t far away and… Maybe you’d like a coffee. Or something.’

The offer was implicit and Kerry was not sure he had ever heard Annette sound quite so hesitant. He looked at her for a second, but… ‘I can’t… My shift starts soon and I have to get changed and…’ He saw her face fall. ‘Really. I’m going to have to rush a little to get there before the sergeant growls at me for not being early enough.’

Annette’s expression shifted to more of a quirky grin. ‘I believe you. Nice Christian boy like you too.’ She raised a finger. ‘Rain check then. Maybe after you get off shift, you could…’

‘Come over for a coffee?’

‘Coffee. Yeah.’

Grinning, Kerry turned to head toward the precinct building. ‘I might just do that.’

8/3/2117.

Mickey had to pull out his best ‘big, sad eyes’ look in the morning when Annette got up alone. It was something of a struggle, but he got her past the part with the metal thing that she put under her chin some mornings.

He suspected that this had something to do with the policeman she liked because she had mentioned his name a couple of times as though to suggest that Kerry might turn up at some point. There had been scents involved which Mickey had decided not to mention, because he was a polite dog.

Whatever the actual case, Annette was in something of a sulk when she went out with Mickey to the avenue. Mickey had tried to indicate Annette’s mood to Sarah, but he was not sure he got it across, and anyway, there was the issue of the Missing Jenny. Jenny, who had smelled… not quite right a couple of days ago, had not turned up, and Sarah was a little worried about her. Mickey was a little worried too.

Annette was frowning a lot. The day was not going the way she would have liked, Mickey could tell. And the cops turning up was not helping…

~~~

Annette had spotted them at a hundred metres, tagging them easily as cops. The woman hid it better, but there was something about her that gave it away. A slim brunette in a pant suit, she wore her pistol in a holster on the back of her belt: it pulled oddly on her jacket as she walked. Her colleague was bigger, a big-framed man with plenty of muscle laid over it. Annette wondered if he was compensating for something because the bulge of a very large handgun distorted the line of his jacket under his left arm. He was blonde, but his hair was short enough to meet armed forces regulations.

‘You’re Louise?’ the woman asked as they closed the distance.

‘I’m Louise, yes,’ Annette replied.

The woman flashed her ID and the shield that accompanied it. ‘I’m Detective Lisa Bradley, this is Detective Melch. We’re investigating the death of an LIPD officer and we understand you saw him yesterday just before the start of his shift.’

Annette’s stomach sank. ‘Officer Clement.’ Sarah let out a little gasp and Mickey covered his muzzle with a paw and whined softly. ‘How did he die?’

‘We’ll ask the questions,’ Melch said, glaring at Annette.

‘What were you doing with Officer Clement?’ Bradley asked, her tone softer. Good cop, bad cop. Great.

Annette took her glasses off and glared back at Melch. ‘We had a drink. We talked about why he became a cop.’ Melch discovered that outstaring a woman with no eyes was fairly futile and looked away. Annette turned her attention to Bradley. ‘If you must know, I invited him up to my apartment, but he didn’t have time before his shift. So, I suggested he might come back later. I was pissed off because he didn’t and now… Now it turns out he had an excuse. How did he die?’

Bradley nodded. ‘The actual cause of death was heart failure, but–’

‘He had a laser burn on his chest.’

‘Close. The burn was on his back.’

‘He was shot with an electrolaser on the lethal setting.’ Annette’s jaw tightened as she said it. ‘Someone wasn’t even willing to face him when they killed him.’

‘Those are very high-tech pistols you got there,’ Melch said.

‘And they fire ten-mil, gyro-stabilised, multipurpose rounds, none of which cause a laser burn or heart failure. Plus, if I wanted Kerry dead, I’d have done it face-to-face.’

‘Right, because–’

‘Did Officer Clement mention anything during your drink?’ Bradley interrupted. ‘Did he mention any problems or anyone who might have wished to harm him?’

Annette shook her head. ‘Nothing. We didn’t discuss his work, but I understood the beat cops weren’t generally assigned to specific cases. No one to decide Kerry needed to be killed over something like that.’

‘Yes,’ Bradley agreed. ‘That’s the way it usually works.’ Bradley produced a card from her jacket and held it out. ‘If you think of anything which might reflect on the case, call me.’

Taking the card, Annette nodded. ‘I will.’

‘Damn,’ Sarah said when the detectives were out of hearing. ‘Officer Clement was one of the good ones.’

‘Yes,’ Annette agreed, ‘and I have a horrible feeling I might have got him killed.’

‘What?! How?’

‘I asked him to run a plate for me.’ Frowning, Annette looked up and down the avenue. ‘No Jenny. I need to see her. I’m going over to her place. Keep an eye on Mickey for me. Mickey, you stay with Sarah. Keep her safe.’

Mickey gave a short bark and shifted his position a little to better guard his charge, and Annette started off in the direction of Jenny’s apartment.

Sarah looked down at the grey dog. ‘I think she knows who killed him.’

Bark.

‘I wouldn’t want to be them when she finds them.’

~~~

The apartment building Jenny lived in was not a lot different from Annette’s, but she knew that Jenny’s actual apartment was a little bigger, a little better. Terri, Jenny’s daughter, had her own bed, even if it was crammed into the same bedroom as Jenny’s, and there was an actual bedroom where Annette’s was pretty much a single room.

Pressing the buzzer on the door got Annette nowhere, so she tried Jenny’s neighbour. Jenny paid the woman to look after Terri when she was out and hopefully…

‘Yes.’ The voice was a little terse.

‘Mrs Wilton, I don’t know whether you remember me. I’m Louise, Jenny’s friend.’

‘I don’t know where Jenny is. She didn’t drop Terri off and she didn’t say she wouldn’t.’

‘No, she didn’t say anything to us either. Um, Mrs Wilton, I’m a little worried about her. Would you buzz me in? I’d like to check she’s okay.’

‘Well… I shouldn’t, but…’ The door clicked open. ‘Thanks, Mrs Wilton,’ Annette said and pushed in, heading straight for the stairs.

Mrs Wilton, sixty-eight, plump, and grandmotherly, was waiting for Annette at the top of the stairs. ‘You don’t think something’s happened to Jenny, do you? Terri could be in there, unable to help. And there’s no way she can reach the lock.’

‘Well, let’s see,’ Annette replied, stepping up to Jenny’s door and knocking. There was no reply, so she knocked again, harder.

And then a timid-sounding voice came from the other side. ‘Hello?’

‘Terri?’ Annette called back. ‘Is that you? It’s Louise and Mrs Wilton. Where’s your mommy?’

‘Mommy’s asleep,’ the small voice replied. ‘She’s been asleep a long time. She won’t wake up.’

‘Shit,’ Annette said under her breath. She raised her voice again. ‘Terri, I need you to move back from the door, honey. We’re going to come in and help your mommy, okay?’

‘Okay…’

‘Should I get the supervisor?’ Mrs Wilton asked.

‘I’d rather not wait,’ Annette replied. She lifted one of her pistols, stepped back, and fired three rounds into the lock. Then she applied her boot to the door.

Terri was standing at the end of the entrance corridor, a little wide-eyed but apparently not scared. She walked toward Annette as Annette walked in, heading straight for the bedroom door. There was a smell in the air, sweat and blood, which Annette did not like at all. She picked Terri up, primarily to keep the child’s face directed away from the bedroom, and pushed the door open.

Jenny was lying on her bed, the sheets thrown off as though she was hot though the room was a comfortable temperature. Her skin was a sickly, pallid shade which was not its natural colour and she was sweating, the droplets glistening in all the areas not coated in blood. Jenny was bleeding from the nose and from a wound on her neck for sure, and it looked like she had also bled from other places which should not have been leaking like that.

Mrs Wilton let out a gasp and Annette put an arm out to stop her entering the room. ‘Mrs Wilton, get an ambulance here. Tell them it’s a possibly contagious disease. They should treat this as a biohazard.’

‘What? But we have to help her!’

‘She’s breathing. I can’t help her, and unless you have a degree in microbiology, I don’t think you can. She needs to be in a hospital. Now!’

~~~

‘You realise I shouldn’t be telling you anything?’ the doctor in charge of Jenny’s treatment said. ‘You’re not her next of kin, or part of the government, or–’

‘Her next of kin is a four-year-old girl, Doctor Mitre,’ Annette replied. ‘Someone has to explain to her what’s happening to her mother and I think it should be someone she knows.’

Mitre was possibly someone’s idea of the perfect doctor. He was tall, not too old, not too young, and he had blue eyes and carefully cut black hair. The effect was a little ruined by the biohazard suit he was still wearing, minus the helmet. He looked at Annette for a second, considering, and then he said, ‘Frankly, I’ve no idea what she’s got. I’ve sent blood to be analysed, but this is nothing I’ve seen before. It shares some properties with the Damnation Plague, but it is not that. Perhaps a mutation… Anyway, Miss Harker is bleeding from her nose and gums, from a rather odd wound in her neck, and into her intestines. She’s exhibiting photosensitivity. Melanin production in her skin appears to have stopped entirely. She’s unconscious, which may be more of a blessing than you might think. We’re treating her with transfusions and antiviral drugs, but… Well, the best thing we can do is pray at this point. If you hadn’t found her when you did, I’m not sure I’d have been able to do anything.’

Annette nodded. ‘Is there any danger of contagion?’

‘Yes, but this suit was overkill. We’ve run the air in the room through contaminant analysis and there are no airborne pathogens present. Did the child touch her mother? Did anyone else?’

‘No, I asked. And I kept everyone out of the room when I got there. Terri knows not to disturb her mother when Jenny’s sleeping unless it’s an emergency and Terri hadn’t quite got to that stage yet.’

‘She seems like a resilient child.’

Annette gave a half-smile. ‘When you grow up around here, I can’t imagine being soft is a survival characteristic.’

Mitre was about to answer when a nurse called his name, marching over to him with a data tablet. ‘Doctor Mitre, the lab sent over the initial results on Miss Harker’s blood work.’

Mitre took the tablet with a smile of thanks, activated the screen, and flicked over it. He frowned, one finger tickling the display, and then sighed. ‘I was hoping they would identify whatever is causing this.’

‘They couldn’t find anything?’ Annette asked.

‘They found something. What is an entirely different matter. I’ve never seen a virus quite like it.’

Annette held out a hand. ‘May I? I’ve some training in biochemistry and I’m not local. Perhaps it’s an import from outside the enclave.’

‘Almost certainly.’ Mitre handed her the tablet and Annette peered at the micrograph on display. ‘Then we would need to consider how Miss Harker came into contact with it and… You do recognise it.’

He was probably picking up on the way her face had fallen, but Annette stayed quiet for a second, checking over the chemical analysis. ‘I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I know what it’s not. It isn’t a virus. Not a natural one anyway.’

‘It’s engineered?’

‘It’s certainly engineered, but not the way you mean. This is a protein-based nanovirus. This is a complex, microscopic machine built out of organic molecules. Your antiviral treatments won’t work.’

Mitre frowned. ‘You’re sure about this? We can’t make things like that.’

‘I’m sure and there are people who can make them, just not here.’ Which was not exactly true because Annette could have made them if she had wanted to put the effort in, though she preferred an inorganic approach for most circumstances. She handed the tablet back to Mitre. ‘I… should tell Terri what’s happening. I’d keep up the transfusions, treat the symptoms, and do more of that praying you mentioned.’

Turning, Annette started down the corridor to the waiting room where she had left Terri. If there was time, Annette knew she could create something which would seek out and destroy the nanomachines in Jenny’s body, but Jenny did not look like she had the weeks it would take. And Annette would be trying out an untested project on a friend. No, something suitable for this kind of application would go on the list, but rushing into it would not help.

Terri was sitting right where Annette had left her five minutes earlier. She was a cute child, maybe a little undergrown for her age and still in the large eyes stage. Green eyes and coppery hair: she was going to take after her mother when she grew up. Right now, she was waiting patiently for Annette to return with a plastic cup of hot chocolate in one hand and the leg of a somewhat scruffy teddy bear in the other. She looked up as Annette returned to sit beside her.

‘Is Mommy going to be okay?’ Terri asked. She never seemed to raise her voice and took more or less anything in her stride. Maybe she would grow up with more sense than her mother.

Annette did not believe that lying to children was a good idea. She had had plenty of that from her father and was not going to start doing it to Terri. However, not telling her the whole truth was another matter. ‘Doctor Mitre is doing everything he can to make sure that she will be.’

Terri took a sip of her drink and then licked her lips. ‘She’s really sick, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, hun, she is. You’re going to have to come stay with me for a little while. Just until she’s better.’

‘You and Mickey?’

‘Yes, me and Mickey.’

Terri nodded. ‘That’s okay then. Can we go now? I’m tired.’

‘We can go. To be honest, this place is making me feel tired too.’

~~~

Annette opened her apartment door and immediately placed a finger over her lips before turning and pointing at the bed. Sarah, who was standing in the doorway, peered around to see Terri, asleep, with Mickey curled up beside her. Sarah just about melted.

‘That’s so cute,’ Sarah whispered and almost tip-toed into the room.

‘Mickey’s not allowed on the bed,’ Annette replied, ‘except in dire circumstances. I figure this counts. Terri’s… coping. Way better than I think she should be, but she’s coping. She’s worried though, and I don’t want her alone tonight.’

‘Okay. Is that why you said I should come over? Are you going out?’

‘I’m going out,’ Annette replied, shutting the door.

‘Got a late job?’

Annette did not answer immediately. Instead, she walked over to a case she had pulled out from under the bed before Terri had fallen asleep. She opened it, reached in, and pulled out a black, full-body suit. Sarah could see what looked like armour plates in the case now that the suit was removed. ‘I have some work I need to do, sure,’ Annette said.

Greenland District.

Taxi cabs came in two forms in the enclave: with a human driver and without. The latter tended to be more trustworthy, but you paid for it and getting one to come out to Brooklyn was an absolute no-go. Cab drivers might inflate their prices, or take a ‘shortcut’ that was actually longer, or they might attempt something more serious if they thought they could get away with it… Or they could be good, honest people just out to make a living, and Annette happened to know one of those.

‘Okay, George,’ she said when her navigation app indicated she was in the right general area, ‘just drop me anywhere around here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

George was in his forties and showing significant signs of male pattern baldness, and he would probably have been handsome except for an unfortunately bulbous nose. He had been a cop in Brooklyn and Queens, which had resulted in the other reason he visited Industrial Avenue for some friendly entertainment: George’s right hand was a reasonably good but metal-skinned cybernetic replacement. Finding a girl who wanted that touching her could be difficult.

His former profession also meant that he was inclined to assist when Annette had told him that she was looking into Kerry Clement’s death and needed to get out to a place in Greenland as quietly as possible. ‘You sure about this, Louise? I can get closer. I can come with you if you want the backup.’

‘You stay out of this,’ Annette replied, smiling. ‘You head home and pretend you never took a hooker in an armoured bodysuit to Greenland, okay?’

George pulled his cab over to the side of the road. More of a track really, but it had tarmac laid down. ‘I haven’t seen you. Neither of us were here. Cop killers deserve whatever happens to them.’

‘I think this one’s more than just a cop killer, but he’ll get what’s coming to him sure enough. And remember, next time you visit is a freebee, okay?’

‘Damn, girl. Do you think I could forget an offer like that?’

Annette opened the passenger door and slipped out. ‘See you soon, George.’ Then she set off across the fields toward her target.

~~~

The car Kerry had traced for Annette belonged to one Joseph Brian Marlow who lived in a large house in Greenland. Kerry had gone a little further than Annette had asked and done a more thorough search on Marlow. The man had been an epidemiologist, but he was retired. Exactly where he got his money from was an unknown, but he seemed to have plenty of it. The enclave’s taxation bureau had investigated him, but they had found nothing wrong, or they had said they had found nothing wrong. Annette had come to realise that money could help you get away with just about anything in the enclave.

Marlow’s slice of Greenland heaven was a walled estate with a house at the centre and landscaped grounds. The south side of those grounds was treed, perfect for Annette to move in closer under cover. She was watchful, taking it easy and scanning for any signs of security systems, but the closer she got to the house, the more she began to realise that she was probably wasting her time.

It was party night at the Marlow mansion. Maybe every night was party night, but it was certainly swinging now. Annette heard the music, dark with a throbbing backbeat, before she saw anything. The house was large and appeared to be all on one level. The windows were large, but Annette could see heavy blinds over some of them. Through the others, she could see people drinking, a few dancing, others engaged in more intimate forms of couple-based entertainment. There was a pool on one side of the building and there were people in that. The March night air was cool, but the pool had been heated enough to show up on Annette’s thermal imaging; the people in the water were skinny-dipping.

And then there was the couple, both women, sitting on the edge of the hot tub. At first, Annette thought they were simply necking, but then one of them moved back to pick up a glass of wine and the other’s head rolled back, the blood flowing down over her left breast from a wound on her neck. Annette froze, her vision zooming in to confirm what she was seeing. The wound was short and sharp, a knife wound, not a bite, but the girl’s skin was becoming pallid, her lips were turning blue, and her arms hung limply at her sides. She was dying, and all her companion did was lean in to drink more of the red liquid pumping out of her.

‘There’s no such thing as vampires,’ Annette said, quietly, to herself. ‘Vampires are a myth with added gloss from old authors who’d never got laid once in their lives.’ Mind you, the ‘vampire’ she was looking at had pale skin… ‘Don’t be stupid. Aside from that, she’s got nothing.’ Body temperature was normal, clearly there were no fangs. There was a delusion and maybe a trigger. Annette had been thinking that Marlow was experimenting with nanoviral weapons, but maybe this was something else.

For now, there was work to be done. Annette reached back for one of her pistols, locked a target marker on the vampire girl’s head, and fired. There was a soft hiss, lost in the music, a sickening crunch, and the woman arched backward onto the decking, dropping her victim as she fell. No one else seemed to notice and Annette advanced up the steps to check on both of them. Neither had a pulse.

‘Bastard’s gonna pay,’ Annette muttered and looked out from the raised decking area into the house where the guests, or whoever they were, were still partying away as though nothing had happened. She located what looked like the entertainment system set against one wall and locked in her target, and then scanned across to find an open section of the windows. She aimed toward the open window and fired, the bullet veering into the house and slamming into the cabinet of electronics. There were sparks and a couple of startled shrieks, and the music died, which was a huge improvement as far as Annette was concerned. Annette got up from her crouch and headed for the short flight of steps which led down to the pool area.

She spotted Marlow as soon as he walked out the door. He looked just like his driving licence photo, except maybe a little balder. He still had quite a full head of black hair with no grey in it, but he was thinning over the temples to give a pronounced widow’s peak. He was handsome enough: chiselled features, blue eyes, high cheekbones. When he smiled at her, he made sure his fangs showed.

‘You must be Louise,’ Marlow said. He had a good, strong, resonant voice too. ‘Jenny mentioned you. The girl with the guns.’

‘Well, Jenny’s in the hospital now. I’m guessing she’s suffering from something you infected her with.’

‘I gave her a gift. A gift I have given to many. And guns are of little use against vampires.’

‘Tell that to the girl by the pool. You aren’t a vampire, Marlow.’

Marlow was still smiling. ‘We see better in the dark, we burn in sunlight, we heal quickly, we drink blood. We know that–’

‘Vampires don’t need to have their teeth capped to give them fangs, idiot. The natural enamel looks different under ultraviolet light. You contracted a type of disease, Marlow. Instead of a typical virus, this is spread by nanomachines. You’re not a vampire – you’re just delusional.’

The knowing smile faded a little, draining from Marlow’s eyes. ‘Kill her,’ he said. No one moved and he raised his voice. ‘Kill her! Now!’

‘You might as well try,’ Annette said. ‘I can’t let any of you get out of here to infect anyone else.’

One of the men, naked from the pool, began to rush forward and Annette put a bullet through the bridge of his nose. She raised her left-hand pistol and swept it in an arc. Glass shattered, people screamed and fell.

‘Get her!’ Marlow shrieked, but instead of rushing forward, he bolted into the house.

For now, Annette ignored him, focusing on finishing off his panicked acolytes. She suspected that was a good word for them: Marlow had made a cult out of an infectious disease with him as the high priest. Real vampires might have been a challenge, but these were rich, mostly middle-aged fools, no more dangerous than a typical overfed civilian.

‘Vampires,’ Annette muttered as she stepped over a body and into the house, ‘should be cooler than this.’

The house was more of a challenge. Marlow had run into the corridors behind his lounge and, for now, was shielded from Annette’s thermal vision. She was going to have to move in and hunt him down, but there would be opportunities for him to turn the tables. She swept her weapons back for her pod to reload and then followed the wannabe vampire.

Internally, the house appeared to have been laid out along only a couple of corridors. One long one ran from side to side, the axis of the building with doors leading off it, but Annette could see a T-junction ahead of her, likely leading to the front of the building. Marlow could have decided to make a run for it, but somehow she doubted it. To run a vampire cult, you had to have an ego…

‘Marlow? Come on out. I’ve got something special for you.’ No response. ‘At least you can tell me why you killed Kerry Clement. You found out he ran that search for your car, right? You’ve got someone in the LIPD computer centre and they told you.’

Marlow stepped out of a door maybe ten metres down the corridor. ‘I have people everywhere,’ he said. Then he raised the pistol he was holding and fired. Something like lightning danced in the air between his gun and Annette’s chest. She felt the charge tickle her skin.

‘You are going to have to do so much better than that,’ Annette said and fired a round into the floor at Marlow’s feet. The explosion buffeted his legs, but it was the burning phosphor which made him shriek. He fell, vanishing out of sight into the room he had stepped out of. Annette rushed after him, arriving in time to see him crawling into the cover of a large bed. She stepped around it and aimed one of her pistols at him.

‘No!’ Marlow said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve got money, power, I can–’

‘You killed one of my few friends, maybe two. If it’s two, you’ve orphaned a little girl and I have no idea what state her mother’s going to be in even if she survives.’

‘You can’t kill me, I’m–’

‘You’re so wrong.’ Annette put an incendiary round into his chest, blowing his ribcage apart like a piñata, and followed it with a second round to his head. Then she turned on her heel and walked out of the room. The carpet and bedding were starting to smoulder and she wanted a little time to check out the building before the fire caught and the LIPD came to investigate. That was if anyone noticed: the nearest neighbour was over a kilometre away and it was not far from midnight. Maybe she had longer than she was estimating, but there was no sense in taking excessive chances.

She looked up and down the axial corridor. ‘Now, if I were a rich guy with a safe, where would I hide it…’

Queens District, 10/3/2117.

Annette was not entirely surprised to see Bradley and Melch walking down the avenue toward her. In fact, she had expected them earlier, but at least they were paying her a visit.

‘Detectives,’ Annette said, nodding to the pair. ‘What brings you to this neighbourhood on such a fine morning?’

‘We thought you might like to know that we closed the case on Officer Clement’s murder,’ Bradley replied.

‘You got whoever did it?’

‘Someone did,’ Melch said, managing to make it sound a lot like an accusation.

‘LIPD responded to a report of a fire in Greenland,’ Bradley went on. ‘It looks like someone took out the killer with extreme prejudice, but we found an electrolaser, half melted, beside the body and evidence on the house’s computers that linked this man with Clement. We’ve enough to say we found the guy so we’re closing the case.’

‘At least Kerry got some justice,’ Annette said. ‘He was a good cop. A good man.’

‘Yes, he was. It may not be the kind of justice I’d have liked to give him, but it’s one sort.’

‘Around here, it’s sometimes the best we can get.’

Bradley opened her mouth, faltered, and then said, ‘That’s not how it’s supposed to work.’

Annette shrugged. ‘Could be worse. We could be having this conversation in Brooklyn.’

Melch gave a grunt which almost sounded like he was accepting the comment. ‘Not on the street,’ he grumbled. ‘We’d be wondering where the bullet holes came from by now.’

~~~

‘How’s she been?’ Annette asked, closing her apartment door behind her.

Sarah looked up from the magazine she was reading and smiled. ‘Good as gold.’ Her attention turned to Terri, sitting on the floor with a couple of toys and apparently perfectly happy. ‘We went to the shops and picked up a few groceries. I bought a magazine. And you’re really sure you can afford to have me babysitting while you’re out working?’

‘Mister Marlow provided quite enough cash to pay Jenny’s medical bills, provide some childcare, and take care of a few other bits and pieces. How’s your schedule?’

Sarah giggled. ‘That sounds awfully efficient. I don’t think I’ve ever had a schedule before. The only date I don’t want to miss is Friday lunchtime.’

‘Oh, that blonde businesswoman who picks you up?’

‘Uh-huh. She always tips well and, well, I enjoy being with her. She gives a damn.’

‘I’ll make sure I’m back here for then. I checked with the hospital. Jenny’s still unconscious, but she’s improving.’

Terri looked up from her toys at that. ‘Mommy’s going to be okay?’

Sitting down on the bed to take off her boots, Annette nodded. ‘Looks like it, hun. We won’t know for sure until she wakes up. She’s still asleep for now.’ It had, in fact, been touch and go. While Annette had been out destroying the man who had infected Jenny in the first place, Doctor Mitre had been fighting to keep Jenny’s organs from failing. His battle had been significantly longer than Annette’s, but he had won it, maybe more decisively than she had.

‘Can I see her soon?’

‘I’m not sure. As soon as she wakes up, we’ll all go to see her, okay?’

Terri returned her attention to her toys. ‘Yes.’

Greenland District, 13/3/2117.

Burial was reserved for state heroes in Utopia City. Annette suspected that the same was not quite true for the Long Island Enclave, but she felt it was appropriate that the Clement family had a plot reserved in a cemetery in Greenland and that Kerry was being buried there.

He had died on duty, and the LIPD was making sure he was sent out with the full ritual. The coffin had an honour guard of uniformed LIPD officers, several of them Annette recognised from Queens. One she did not know, but from her looks, Annette guessed that this was Kerry’s niece, standing ramrod straight beside her mother and trying with all her strength to hold the tears back. Kerry’s sister was not bothering to try.

Annette watched from the cover of a tree a dozen metres from the grave. The weather had decided to suit the sombre mood and a steady drizzle was soaking everything from a grey sky. The tree provided a little shelter, but mostly Annette suspected that a hooker at a cop’s funeral was not entirely proper. She waited for the coffin to be lowered and for the crowd to leave the scene before she walked over to look down at her friend’s final resting place.

She had spotted a cart by the entrance to the cemetery selling flowers and on impulse she had bought something. Now, she tossed the single red rose down onto the coffin and whispered, ‘I got him for you, Kerry. Maybe you wouldn’t have approved of the way I did it, but I got him. He won’t be doing anything to anyone else.’

She was not expecting a reply, standing there with the rain soaking into her hair, so the voice came as something of a surprise. ‘You must be Louise.’

Looking around, Annette saw Kerry’s sister walking up to stand beside her. The resemblance was obvious: the Clement genes were apparently strong ones. ‘Yes, I’m Louise.’

‘Kerry mentioned you. I’m Gillian, his sister.’

‘He mentioned you, not by name, but… I’m sorry, I should go.’

‘No. Please stay. I came out to be alone with him for a minute, but now I’m here…’ Gillian managed a weak smile. ‘I don’t know whether you knew, but he had a bit of a crush on you. I know he was going to ask you out.’

‘I knew. We hadn’t quite got to the dating stage, but I knew.’

‘He was taking his time with you. It wasn’t like him so I could tell he wanted to do it right. He used to say “you have to take chances because you could be dead tomorrow.”’

‘Huh. I kind of wish he’d just gone for it.’

‘I’m sure he does too.’

Silence fell as they ran out of things to say, but they kept on standing there, looking down at the coffin, saying goodbye to friend and brother until the chill from the rain drove them away.

Queens District, 15/3/2117.

Jenny was sitting up in bed. She looked weak and pale, but she was awake and really happy to see Terri. She was still wired into several monitors, but the tubes had been removed from her veins. She looked a slightly better colour just from having her daughter in her arms.

One indication that things were not entirely right was the light level. The shades were drawn over the window and the room lights were set on low. Jenny’s eyes were oversensitive to bright lights and the weather had turned almost unseasonably warm and bright.

‘Doctor Mitre says that I’m probably stuck with the light sensitivity and the white-as-a-sheet look,’ Jenny said. ‘There’s no sign of it changing.’

Annette nodded: she had got the full story from Mitre the previous day. ‘There may be some other complications from the illness, but you’re clear of the nanovirus. You’re not infectious.’

‘That’s something at least.’

‘Uh-huh, but I think it’s time to consider an alternative profession.’ Annette flicked a glance at the child nestled against Jenny. ‘Maybe something where you could spend more time with Terri.’

Jenny frowned. ‘That would be great, but I don’t know how to do much else. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for this’ – she indicated the room around her – ‘never mind anything–’

‘That’s taken care of,’ Annette interrupted. ‘Mister Marlow made a generous contribution to ensure your recovery before closing down his little cult for good.’

‘Oh. Well, I’ve relatives, an aunt and uncle, in Nova Scotia. Maybe we could–’

Annette smiled. ‘That’s settled then. When you’re recovered, we’ll make arrangements for you to move up there. Now, I have some other arrangements to make. Mister Marlow’s goodwill payment is going to let me get my workshop going too.’

‘Mister Marlow was a generous man,’ Sarah said, smirking just a little.

‘Sure was. I’ll see you and Terri later. Right now, I have a contract to sign.’

17/3/2117.

Annette opened her eyes and there was the usual slight flicker as her optical processors engaged and began feeding signals to her brain. Other senses kicked in and she became aware that Terri was not in bed with her, but a quick check revealed the child sitting on the floor beside Mickey’s basket. Mickey, it turned out, was a pretty good babysitter, so long as it did not involve preparing food or other tasks involving opposable thumbs. Smiling, Annette moved to slip her legs out of the bed, and groaned.

The previous night had been lucrative. A pair of fairly well-off students at the Long Island Education Centre in Sky City had decided to give a friend of theirs a really great birthday. They had been quite imaginative. Annette had been thankful for her gymnastics training, and they had paid really well, but now she was paying for it. A shower would probably help. That and a couple of months of physical therapy. Well, the latter was not happening, but she could at least take a break…

‘Hey, hun, how do you fancy a trip to the beach?’

Terri took a break from tormenting the eternally tolerant Mickey and looked up. ‘Can I have ice cream?’

‘Sure. Why not?’ Annette started, slowly, for the shower.

‘Okay then,’ Terri said. Annette had the distinct impression that someone around here was being played and it might well be her.

~~~

Sarah and Mickey met Annette and Terri outside the hospital after Jenny had been visited. She was doing well and Mitre expected her to be ready to leave on Saturday. In a way, that made the beach trip more important because Terri would be leaving them soon.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Sarah asked. ‘I mean, are you sure we can both afford a day off? You could go and I’ll–’

‘Nope,’ Annette said. ‘We’re all going to the beach. It’s warm enough and I haven’t seen this Coney Island place yet, and between what I made last night and the money from Marlow, I’m quite sure we can take a day out of it. Besides, you have to grab these chances to have a life. You could be dead tomorrow.’

‘Okay… Nice reasoning, but okay.’

‘We’ll walk up to Queens South Station, but we need to do a little shopping first. I need a bikini or something. Terri will need a swimsuit.’

‘We’ll wait until we get to the beach. There are a couple of places there that do swimwear at a reasonable price.’

‘I bow before your superior knowledge,’ Annette said, grinning. ‘You did remember to bring your suit?’

‘I brought a bikini. It’s pink.’

‘Somehow I knew it would be.’

Coney Island.

Apparently, Coney Island had once been a sort of amusement park beside the beach. There was a metal plaque bolted to the side of the concrete bunker that housed the station. Everything intended to stick around for any length of time was housed in a concrete bunker. The amusement park, wherever it had been, had fallen to the storms which swept in from the Atlantic far too frequently. The beach had been reinforced with concrete piers, but they still had to restore it every year or two.

‘They keep it going so that the poor folks in Queens and Brooklyn stay away from the better beaches,’ Sarah opined as they waited for Terri to select an ice cream flavour.

‘That’s kind of cynical for you,’ Annette said.

‘I have my moments of clarity. I never knew ice cream was such a serious subject.’

Sarah had immediately selected rum and raisin, though the probability of there being actual rum involved was low. Annette had gone for chocolate chip. Terri, however, had to consider every flavour before making her choice.

‘How about,’ Annette said, ‘I get you a selection tub of all the flavours?’

Terri looked at her for a second, thinking. Then she said, ‘Okay.’

‘I think you just got played,’ Sarah said.

Annette nodded. ‘I’ve been feeling like that all morning.’

Ice cream purchased, and Terri already demonstrating considerable skill with a tiny plastic spoon, they set off to make camp. Mickey’s paws were barely on the sand before he determined that a gathering of gulls down the beach were an imminent threat and made it his mission to bring these criminal masterminds to justice. Terri took time out from eating ice cream to giggle at that.

‘Control your dog, Louise,’ Sarah said, grinning.

‘He’s never going to catch any of them,’ Annette replied. ‘If he wants to run around like a maniac while I relax in the sun, that’s his problem.’

‘It is kind of warm for this time of year. We’ll have a storm by the end of the week.’ Sarah rolled a blanket out onto the sand as she spoke. They were not too close to the water and not too close to the promenade at the top of the beach, and just close enough to one of the piers that the slight breeze was blocked. Perfect.

Annette put Terri down on the blanket. The child was already dressed in her new swimsuit, a pink one with huge daisy flowers printed on it, which she seemed to like. ‘I always thought you were an optimist.’

‘Well… I suppose I am, but I’ve lived here long enough to know that this kind of weather at this time of year is leading up to a storm.’

Annette gave a shrug. ‘Meteorology isn’t one of my subjects.’

Sarah giggled. ‘And here I thought you knew everything.’

‘You’re not too old to spank, young lady.’

Wriggling out of her skirt, Sarah looked over her shoulder, grinning like someone who was enjoying herself for the first time in months. ‘I thought you’d had enough kinky last night.’ To emphasise the point, she waggled her butt at Annette.

‘Where on Earth did you get that bikini? What’s it made of, dental floss?’

‘A client bought it for me. He’s got this big penthouse apartment in Sky City, with a pool, and he liked me to wander around in this and go swimming. Which is something I won’t be doing today because you can see everything when it gets wet, but it’s the only bikini I’ve got.’ Sarah’s top went next, revealing a bra which was actually more substantial than Annette had expected. ‘Anyway, quit talking like you’re ancient. You’re not that much older than me.’

‘No…’ Annette considered the comment. ‘A couple of years. Sometimes I feel older.’ She began to remove her own clothes, having kept the bikini she had bought on under them.

‘Not today though, right?’

‘Well…’ Annette looked around at their growing encampment. They had invested in a little plastic bucket and spade for Terri. Sandcastles were a likely feature of the future. There was nothing to do but lie in the sun and play, maybe swim – though Annette was not too sure of her own suit’s integrity upon exposure to water – and generally act like there was nothing to worry about. ‘No. Not today.’

~~~

It was midweek and the beach’s population was not huge. There was enough shift work in the enclave, especially among the residents of Queens District, that several families had decided to get out of the house. Annette suspected that they were expecting the same storm as Sarah, and maybe a bad April to go with it.

It was, primarily, families. Annette could not see a mother alone with her children anywhere in their section of the beach. There always seemed to be a man on hand. One of them had a weapon, a shotgun no less, on hand and it seemed fairly likely that the same was true of everyone. Annette had one of her pistols and a couple of spare magazines hidden away in her sports bag.

However, there seemed to be no immediate reason for the vigilance. Annette had brought her pistol out of habit more than anything. The sun was warm, Terri was doing her best to make a sandcastle out of dry sand, Mickey was still chasing gulls, and Annette felt she could relax. The midday sun was warm on her skin with the breeze kept off her. The Sea Wall held the noise of the city back well and there was not much sound from around her. A few childish giggles, the odd adult laugh, the distant sound of the waves on the sand. Warm and comfortable, Annette closed her eyes and let the world slip away around her…

Until a combination of sounds dragged her back to reality. There was a harsh, male laugh and there was the odd compression sound of a boot on a pile of sand. And there were a pair of Cyber-Kings standing over Terri and grinning. One of them, the one who had trodden on Terri’s sandcastle, was a moderately big guy with a face which had been hit one too many times but was holding onto attractive by its fingernails. He was the senior member of the gang: his left arm was of the grabber hand and exposed wires variety and he had managed to lay claim to leather jeans. His companion was younger, taller, slimmer, and better-looking, but he had yet to be fitted with any cybernetics and appeared to have decided to make up for it with dyed blue hair and a long fringe which could only have maintained its swept-up-and-back look through judicious use of glue. They both had the arrogance of gang members, however.

Annette looked at them through her sunglasses for a second and checked on Terri. The copper-haired girl was, characteristically, neither crying nor making a fuss. If anything, she looked bemused that anyone would have destroyed her architectural masterpiece. The girl was an absolute gem. However, she was too close to the men and Annette was going to have to try alternative approaches before resorting to violence.

‘Are you two seriously trying to make me believe that you get your jollies kicking over kids’ sandcastles?’ Annette asked, propping herself up on her elbows.

The man with the metal arm raised it. ‘We’re Cyber-Kings. This is our turf and we do what we want here.’

Annette stretched her back, slowly, and then got to her feet, smoothly, and stepped closer. ‘Yeah, but you’re Cyber-Kings. You’re cybernetic warriors, rulers of the street. Shouldn’t you be in Brooklyn somewhere, fighting for the right to party?’

‘Blow me.’

‘I doubt you can afford me.’ Annette slipped her shades off and looked the man in the eyes. ‘Being serious, you guys are letting the side down. Cyborgs shouldn’t be picking on kids. It’s demeaning. You guys are giving us a bad name.’

Both men stared at her for a second or two. Metal Arm finally managed, ‘Did you do that t’ yourself?’

Annette grinned. ‘It’s hard to do surgery on your own eyes. I designed and built them. I had a surgeon put them in, along with a few other parts.’

‘That’s so hot,’ Blue Hair drawled.

‘It’s good work,’ Metal Arm agreed. He stepped out of Terri’s sand pile as he did so, and Annette knew she had them. ‘We have t’ make do with what we can scrounge.’ He sounded rather defensive about it now that he had seen Annette’s eyes.

‘It’s not the parts,’ Annette said, ‘it’s how you wear them, which should be with pride and style. I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of your choice in fashion. Bit more of a classic casual girl myself, though I do wear leather for work. But the point is that you make your choices and you own them. Can’t fault that. So what’s with the bullying four-year-olds thing?’

‘Well…’

Blue Hair managed to come up with, ‘We, um…’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Annette said. Turning, she walked back to her bag and bent at the hips to retrieve her wallet. Extracting two ten-dollar bills, she turned to find the two Cyber-Kings looking slightly flushed and wide-eyed. She held out the money to Blue Hair. ‘Okay, you go up the beach to the ice cream place. Terri will have a selection tub, Sarah and I will have rum and raisin. Get whatever you want for you and your friend.’

‘We get some too?’

‘Of course. I’m not cruel.’ Annette pointed to Metal Arm. ‘You take that nice, strong, cybernetic arm and the bucket down to the water and bring some back. Then we can teach Terri how to build something a little more solid.’

Metal Arm cringed. ‘Uh… Could I get the ice cream? If I get water on this, it tends to short the electrics…’

Annette shook her head and grinned. ‘So long as we get water and ice cream, I don’t mind who does what. Get a move on, it’s not like we have all day.’

Sarah waited until the two men were out of earshot before getting to her feet. ‘Louise, are you nuts? They’re Cyber-Kings!’

‘Yes, but I’m a cyborg and, far more importantly, they’re men. We can handle a couple of men, can’t we?’

Sarah looked at Annette as though she was insane for a second, and then a grin spread over her face. ‘Well, when you put it like that…’ She looked down the beach to where Blue Hair was already hurrying back with his plastic bucket of water. She pulled the side-strings of her bikini briefs up higher on her hips, checked the position of her bra cups, and then stepped off the blanket to meet him. ‘That’s amazing,’ she cooed. ‘Such a big man and yet so nimble.’

Blue Hair came to a stop and stared at Sarah for a second, and then actually blushed.

Annette turned away, trying not to grin too much, and waited for the ice cream to arrive.

~~~

‘Your problem is the seal on your battery compartment,’ Annette said. She paused to run her tongue over the inside of the little tub her ice cream had come in. Metal Arm, who was actually named Barry, watched this with the kind of enraptured attention only a man watching an attractive woman do something enticing can achieve. ‘The rubber’s shot,’ Annette went on. ‘Water gets past that and then it’s not only messing with the power supply, but it can get right into the electronics, and then you’re in a world of hurt.’

‘I’ll see if our mechanic’s got a spare,’ Barry managed. ‘I thought it was the exposed wires.’

Annette shook her head, licking the pot again. ‘The grommets on those look fine. Nice, tight fits. Those are a real liability if you get into a fight though. Someone just has to get lucky with a knife and you’ve got one arm.’

‘Yeah…’

Terri giggled and, as she had been shown by Blue Hair, patted the top of her bucket with her spade. Then she lifted the bucket carefully off the sand beneath and she was left with a fourth, quite respectable tower for her castle. Blue Hair, who had turned out to be called Ted, grinned.

‘You are good with kids,’ Sarah said.

‘Nah… Well, I used to do this with my kid sister,’ Ted admitted. ‘Haven’t seen her in a while.’

‘You should go see her.’

‘Ah… When I left home, there were things said. I don’t think I’m welcome…’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m sure she’d love to see you. That’s the way families are supposed to be.’

‘How did we end up doing this?’ Barry asked. Annette had finally finished her ice cream and his brain was starting to regain some of its higher functions.

Annette smiled at him. ‘You’re guys, we’re a couple of attractive women in minimal clothing. You and I are cyborgs and Ted’s aiming to be one, so that provides a connection. I don’t really think you wanted to spend your day kicking over sandcastles because it’s lame and you know it.’ Barry nodded, a bit lamely. ‘I mean, I can understand a desire to rail against the futility of existence, I really can. I wake up every day and have to come up with a good reason not to eat a bullet.’ Annette’s gaze shifted to Sarah and Terri. ‘It just so happens that’s been easier recently.’

‘What have you got t’ worry about?’

‘This time last year, I was a bright young thing with a promising career in cybernetics. Now I’m a fugitive, running for my life, and making a living as a hooker on Industrial Avenue. Do the math.’

‘Oh… Oh, well, put it like that and I do seem kind of lame. I was in a dead-end job I hated. The gang seemed like a way out.’

‘I’m not in a position to judge, but I don’t see the gangs in Brooklyn as having much in the way of a bright future. Mostly they’re the weaker offshoots of the Manhattan gangs and, sooner or later, someone’s going to make a move. I know it’s not easy, but if I were you, I’d be looking for a way out.’ Annette indicated Terri, happily shovelling damp sand to make a wall between two towers. ‘No matter what anyone tells you, that’s the future. Not gang violence and random destruction. Not adding more and more metal until you don’t know what’s really left of you.’

‘Maybe you’re right…’

‘I certainly hope so.’ Annette sighed and checked the time. ‘Terri, hun, we should really go find you some lunch.’

Terri looked around with her wide, green eyes. ‘Ice cream?’

‘I think we should try another food group. I’m sure there’s some place up the beach we can find something.’

‘You really gotta go?’ Ted asked and then seemed to realise how lame that sounded. ‘Uh… I mean, yeah, you better run… Uh, there’s quite a good diner about a block up on the left that you’d better run to while you’ve, uh, got the chance.’

Sarah grinned at him. ‘See you around, Ted. Don’t do anything too nasty to anyone.’ Then she kissed him on his crimson cheek, which only seemed to make it redder.

Barry was helping Annette take care of the blanket. He really was quite dextrous with just a grabber. ‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘And if you tell anyone I said that… You know.’

‘You’ll have to hunt me down and kill me?’ Annette asked. ‘Well, if your mechanic can’t fix those seals, come by Industrial Avenue and I might be able to fix you up. I’ve got a workshop now.’

‘I might just do that.’

~~~

‘You think we will see them again?’ Sarah asked once they had made it to the promenade, leaving the two men watching them from the sand.

‘Maybe,’ Annette replied.

‘They were nice. And you were right about the girl power thing.’

‘Yeah, well, I was ready to shoot them if I had to, but…’

It was turning out to be a really good day, maybe even perfect. They had had some fun, met some new people, and maybe even done a little bit of good in the process. Not bad for a few hours at the beach.

Annette had put her glasses back on to walk to the diner and now Terri, balanced on her arm, reached up and pulled them off. Annette looked at her with blank, white orbs, but Terri just smiled. ‘I like your eyes,’ Terri said and Mickey gave a bark, apparently of agreement.

Annette’s smile broadened. Yes, a perfect day.

Queens District, 31/3/2117.

The predicted storm had come and gone. Rain had lashed the streets of Queens for over eight hours and kept everyone indoors. The following day had been bright and clear, if a little cool, and the weather had chosen to maintain that condition through Jenny and Terri’s departure by ship.

It was still keeping to the same cool, spring weather when Annette turned up on the avenue to meet Sarah with a postcard in her hand. She waved it. ‘From Jenny.’

‘Oo! What does she say?’ Sarah asked, rushing over to look for herself.

‘The usual sort of thing. They’ve arrived. They’re settling in. Everyone sends best wishes. Oh and “Terri sends a big kiss for Mickey.”’ Mickey gave a bark, circled his favourite spot on the sidewalk, and settled down to keep watch.

‘Well, that’s good then. She sounds happy. She’s got happy writing.’

Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘Happy writing?’

‘Yeah. Isn’t it obvious? Her writing’s got a happy tilt to it.’

‘Okay, once again I am educated. A day without learning is a day not worth living.’

Sarah gave Annette a frown. ‘Was that sarcasm? I can never tell with you. You know, you got all that money and you paid for Jenny to get out.’

‘I know. I’ve got the postcard to prove it.’

‘You could have used it yourself. You could’ve set yourself up in Sky City–’

‘Too many people with too many questions.’

‘But you could have got out of the game and you didn’t even think of it, did you?’

Annette shrugged. ‘You’re giving me too much credit. I thought about it. But… I didn’t exactly get Jenny out of the game. I got Terri out of it. That’s no way to grow up. She’s a great kid and she needs a mother. Anyway, I got enough to make my workshop viable, and you got a few days off your back. We all got something out of it.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’ Sarah looked out along the avenue. ‘Now, either she’s lost or she’s looking for something outside her comfort zone.’

Annette followed Sarah’s gaze, vision narrowing to pick out the woman Sarah had spotted. ‘The latter, sort of. I think she’s looking for someone and she’s not in her comfort zone. That’s Kerry Clement’s sister.’

Gillian slowed as she spotted Annette and Sarah. She looked worried and her motives for walking down Industrial Avenue in the middle of the week were obviously not social. Annette fixed a surprised smile on her face and waited.

‘Louise… Uh, hi,’ Gillian said.

‘Gillian. It’s nice to see you, but–’

‘Could I talk to you? Somewhere private?’

Annette frowned, but she said, ‘Sure. There’s an alley a little way back where we can get some privacy. Mickey, stay with Sarah.’

‘It’s Tina, my daughter,’ Gillian said as soon as they were off the main avenue. ‘She’s missing. I didn’t know who else to talk to.’

‘She’s the cop, right? She spoke at the funeral. Surely the police are–’

‘That’s just it.’ Gillian’s fists clenched at her sides. Her body language was all about tension and worry. ‘She’s supposed to be on some undercover drugs operation in Sky City. The police won’t tell me anything, but she just vanished two days ago. I don’t think anyone’s heard from her.’

‘They aren’t going to tell me any more than they’ll tell you…’

‘I know, but… But Detective Bradley, the detective dealing with Kerry’s murder, she told me that someone had killed the man responsible. She was sure it was you, somehow. Somehow you’d found him and you’d… dealt with him. I need you to find Tina.’

Annette chewed on her lower lip for a second. It was not going to be easy. With Kerry and Marlow, she had known where to look; in fact, knowing where to look had been the reason Kerry was killed. Now she would need to work from scratch, more or less. But…

‘I can’t promise anything,’ Annette said. ‘I’ll look into it. I owe Kerry that much.’

‘You don’t owe him anything, but thank you.’

Annette just smiled and led Gillian back out onto the avenue. Whatever Gillian thought, there was a debt left to be paid. Annette had got Kerry into the mess that had killed him and she was going to try her hardest to make sure his niece made it through whatever the LIPD had got her into.

~~~

Annette had never considered herself up to Mariel’s standard when it came to infiltrating computer systems. She had, in fact, learned a lot of what she knew from Mariel during late-night chats about whatever random topic they came up with while they drank themselves into a hangover. Good times… Now Mariel’s lessons, usually couched in terms of ‘this is what a hacker would do, but I obviously never would,’ were coming in very useful as Annette made her way through the security around the LIPD headquarters’ systems in Sky City.

The first stage had been to hijack a couple of public servers to act as relay points. If someone tried to trace her back to the network in her workshop, they would have to find their way past those two blinds first, and she had arranged for several different points to send her probes from so that nothing came from a single source.

Then there had been the research phase. She had sounded out the outward-facing servers to uncover what they were and what software they were running, and then she had gone digging in manufacturer sites and a few interesting forum sites she had located to see what weaknesses she could uncover.

Cracking a backup server which had not been updated as assiduously as it should have been got her access to the LIPD’s internal network and from there it started getting tricky. She had little idea what she was looking for or where to find it. She located the personnel database and so Tina Clement-Bride’s service records. That helped a little: the last entry indicated that she had been assigned to an Operation Anti-Venom and gave the name of a detective who was acting as her immediate superior. So Annette went looking for his records…

It took her hours, but she eventually had what she needed. Operation Anti-Venom had been set up to investigate a new drug which had begun appearing on the streets of Sky City in small amounts. Annette looked at the observed effects and decided they were talking about snakebite. That was before she found a reference to the name among the file entries. Annette had destroyed the lab the Juicers had been using to make the stuff, but apparently not all the people responsible for it. The LIPD had recorded a couple of instances of Sky Lords using the stuff on house raids in Greenland. They had been entirely unable to track down the production facility or those responsible for making it. That had been when a few young Sky City-based rookies had been inducted to attempt to infiltrate the Sky Lords.

Annette had had to go find more information on the Sky Lords since she knew nothing about them. They seemed to be the popular gang to join if you fell into the bracket of young, bored, rich, and stupid in the enclave. Not all of them were actually rich, but they had comfortable lives and parents who probably told them that they were a disgrace to the family name once too often. Annette suspected spoiling the kids in their formative years might have come into play. Whatever, the Lords were more like a wannabe gang than a real one. They were into petty crime in Sky City, more for the fun of it than for whatever they might steal. Their biggest impact on the enclave’s culture was their habit of breaking into large houses in Greenland to hold multi-day parties. However, they almost always held these events when the occupants were away for some reason. It was rare for anyone to be hurt, or caught.

Backing out of all her connections, Annette sat back on the chair she had found to grace her underground hideout. There was not much to the place at the moment: a workbench, an office chair, an old freezer cabinet. The latter was going to become a nanofabricator; Annette had her suitcase unit building parts as fast as it could and she was assembling when she had spare time. Once that was done, things could really get started down here, but for now it was a useful space to work, away from prying eyes and with network access. It was quiet down there, which let her think.

The Sky Lords did appear to be the key to finding the laboratory producing the snakebite. However, Annette did not think she could infiltrate the gang effectively and there was not enough time for an espionage job anyway. No, something more direct was going to be needed. Something much more direct.

Sky City District, 1/4/2117.

‘Come on, Danny, wakey-wakey, rise and… Well, shining isn’t one of your strong suits, is it?’

Danny Farrell struggled out of a deep sleep born of drinking until four in the morning and tried to make sense of what was happening. His brain kicked into overdrive quite suddenly, but it was another second or so before he realised that his desire to set speed records in running out of his current location was due to the gun barrel he was looking down.

‘Please try to maintain bladder control. I had enough of that with the last one.’

Danny managed to focus past the pistol and saw the owner of the voice, a woman with dark-brown hair, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. How had someone got past the security on his building? Perhaps more importantly… ‘Who the Hell are you? What do you want?’

‘The last one of you inbred morons I talked to said I was “that witch from Queens who can bend bullets,”’ Annette told him. ‘Does that help? As for what I want… Simple enough. I want to know where you’re getting the snakebite from.’

‘I d-don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Annette sighed. ‘Now, if the stammer wasn’t a bit of a giveaway, your face is totally screaming “I’m a lying bastard.” Where do you get the stuff?’

Danny pulled together enough wit, even through the throbbing in his head, to evaluate the situation. ‘I’m not telling you a damn thing. How are you gonna make me? It’s not like you can just shoot me.’ Pulling back a little, Annette moved her pistol away from Danny’s face and he began to smile. ‘Told you–’

The pistol stopped moving right over Danny’s groin. ‘Actually, it’s a lot like I can just shoot you,’ Annette told him. ‘I think we’ll start here and then… improvise.’

‘I don’t know where the stuff comes from! Really! You’ve gotta believe me!’

Annette smiled. ‘I do, Danny. I do. But I just bet you know someone who does know…’

~~~

The Sky Lords were slightly misnamed; they were an equal opportunities gang and even some of the lieutenants were girls, generally tougher than the men. Annette could understand that having done a short course in female emancipation while in university. Her lecturer had been fond of the phrase ‘women have to work twice as hard as men to be thought half as good.’

One of the female Lords was called Ashley Jane Simmons. Her mother was the financial director of an electronics company and her father was a partner in a law firm, and Ashley was used to getting her own way. She was definitely not used to being hit over the back of the head and waking up attached to the iron-frame headboard of a bed in a hotel room by cable ties strapped around her wrists.

‘Oh good, you’re awake,’ Annette said from the foot of the bed. ‘I was beginning to think I’d hit you too hard.’

Ashley’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who the fuck are you? Have you any idea how much trouble you’re in? Do you know who I am?’

Annette frowned. ‘Of course I know who you are. I didn’t think you were that stupid.’

‘I’ll have you killed. I’ll have your family killed. I’ll–’

‘My family’s dead, Ashley. I killed the last of them myself. Shot my father in the head. Bang! Brains everywhere.’ Annette tilted her head to the side and smiled.

Now Ashley’s eyes widened. Annette was fairly sure she had sold her faked attitude to patricide. ‘What do you want?’ Ashley said.

‘The location of the lab they’re making snakebite in. Danny Farrell tells me you know where it is.’

‘And you think I’m going to tell you?’

Annette produced one of her pistols from behind her back, but did not aim it. ‘I haven’t actually had to shoot one of you guys so far today. They all cracked under the threat, but you… I think you might actually make me blow holes in you.’

‘I’m not telling you where the lab is, so start shooting.’

‘Don’t think so.’ Annette handed her pistol back to her arming pod.

‘What?’

‘I’m really not into torture and bullets aren’t a great way to do it anyway. So, here’s the deal: you tell me what I want to know and I’ll leave you here for the maid to find in a couple of hours.’

‘That’s not much incentive to talk.’

Annette smiled. ‘You haven’t heard the second part. I owe some Frankies a favour. They’ve been bugging me to give them a friend of mine. She’s cute and blonde, and… Well, you’re blonde and you’ll probably bring a good price.’

‘You’re not gonna sell me for parts. If you won’t torture me–’

‘Oh, they won’t chop you up.’ Annette waved the idea away with a grin. ‘They can get way more out of trading you to one of the gangs in Manhattan, maybe further afield. Hey, maybe they’ll ship you out California way. All that sun will do wonders for you. Well, maybe not the dehydration, but we can’t have everything, right?’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘To save me having to sell a friend? Sure I would. What do you say?’

2/4/2117.

What Ashley said was that the lab was situated in the basement of a currently unoccupied office building in Sky City. Distribution was being run out of the offices at the back of the ground floor. There was a small underground car park – office workers in Sky City usually lived in Sky City and got to work via public transport – which had a loading dock. And Ashley went on at length about how there was no way Annette was going to get in there, not with the Sky Lords providing security along with the Frankies and Juicers who were producing the drug.

Truthfully, Ashley had looked like she thought she might be going a little far toward the end of the conversation. Like maybe giving away the lab’s defences had been a step too far. Whatever the case, she had not been lying: there were people all over the plaza outside the building who looked like they were probably Sky Lords. Going in the front door was probably not going to play out too well. The loading dock then.

There were no guards at the back of the building where the car park entrance was located. Having a couple of Sky Lords hanging out outside the ramp might have drawn attention. Heavy cloud was masking any light which might have come down from the night sky, making the street lights the only thing which might have revealed Annette’s black-clad form as she moved underground, and the lighting in the car park left a lot to be desired, creating more shadow than light. However, there were some good lamps mounted near all the staircases, up and down, and around the loading dock area. The latter also had a pair of guards, Sky Lords, but Annette’s infrared vision suggested that there was something off about one of them: his arms were too cool. Visually, he looked normal, but the heat distribution suggested high-quality cybernetic limbs.

Annette reached back to hand off her pistol and take one of her homing grenades. The two men were close enough; they were, typically for Sky Lords, not the most disciplined of guardians and they were chatting about something or other. They had assault rifles on them, but those were slung over one shoulder. Sneaking up to within the effective range of the grenade was easy enough. She locked the weapon to the man with the cybernetics and tossed it out of the shadows.

‘What the Hell is–’ The query, as one of the two noticed the little disc flying at them, was cut short by the detonation. The small explosion had its immediate target stumbling backward, his arms jerking and then falling limp. ‘Shit! Can’t see. What–’

Annette straightened from her crouch and took aim. Both of them were down before their vision was clear enough to see who was attacking them, but the noise of the explosion might have drawn more attention. And that was what Annette wanted. Turning, she bolted for a nearby door, through that and into a stairwell, and then down to the level below. Either this would be the lab or it would be a utility level she could cut through to bring her up in a flanking manoeuvre. You might have described her plan as a tactic if she had not been winging it all the way. She pushed through the door on the lower level and stopped. It was not a utility area.

It had been put there for storage by the looks of it, a fairly large, open area with columns supporting the building above. Someone had put up wooden batons and nailed plastic sheeting to them, breaking the floor up into smaller areas, each a makeshift operating theatre of sorts. Annette slipped into one of them and found a man there, lying unconscious on a gurney. He was hooked up to various monitors which said he was alive and probably sedated from the low heart rate. There seemed to be no damage to him, but the intention seemed obvious: the Frankies here were waiting to use him for spare parts.

It took Annette three tries to find Tina Clement-Bride. The monitors said she was alive and sedated, like the others. Unlike some, the Frankies had not started taking any major organs out of Tina – Annette had found one young man being kept alive by a machine having had his heart and lungs removed – but all was not well with the undercover cop. The Frankies, it seemed, had found a buyer for her eyes. The extraction had been careful, avoiding tissue damage; Tina’s eyelids were half-closed, sunken into the holes left behind.

Annette’s jaw clenched. Moving deliberately, she held her pistols to her back so that her pod could switch magazines. Indicators came up in her vision field: incendiary rounds loaded. Gillian had asked her to find Tina and she had, just a little too late. And the people in this place, no matter whatever else they were up to, were going to pay for everything they had done.

~~~

Making snakebite was still a moderately hands-on process. Some aspects of it had been automated, primarily the initial distillations, but the later stages were still fairly delicate and a matter of judgement. The last stage, cooking up the final product, required constant observation. The chemists who undertook that stage were watching for certain specific colour changes and then adjusting the temperature of the mixture, and every single one of them was part of the project to create a step-by-step process flowchart which would be used to build a machine to do it. Probably a machine in an armoured cabinet because if you got it wrong, it tended to blow up in your face.

For the one on duty tonight, it came as something of a shock when something slammed into the workbench under the big, glass solvent pot which he was just about to empty via a vac transfer. There was an explosion, glass shattered, and the man began screaming as hot glass and fragments of phosphor began to burn into his skin. The scream was cut off a second later as the contents of the flask erupted into flame.

Annette walked past the bench, oblivious to the flames, and raised her pistols. The man working on the reaction was not the only one in the lab, and the others fell as explosive rounds tore their chests open. Smoke rose from the wounds as the phosphor burned, tearing oxygen out of flesh. Annette ignored the smouldering bodies and kept going. These were Juicers and she had Frankies to hunt down.

Ahead of her, in the corridor beyond the lab, she could hear raised voices. There were more of them out there and it was time to go to work.

~~~

On the ground floor of the office building above the lab was a room which had been turned over to collaboration and bookkeeping. The Juicer was one of the pumped-up bodybuilder types, there for his muscle rather than his brains. The Sky Lord was working on a degree in accountancy and she knew just what she was doing when it came to keeping records. The Franky just had natural talent: he had a head for numbers. For example, from memory, he could give you the current going rates for every organ in the human body.

They did not get involved in the stuff that went on downstairs, and someone else did the drug sales. They were there to count money, which there was plenty of. Body parts tended to sell for cash, generally the well-used, wrinkled kind which was hard to trace, though some people were rich enough that several thousand dollars just vanished into their overheads and they paid in bundles of notes, still in the wrappers. Snakebite, and a couple of other things the Lords had suggested might go down well with the youth market, always sold for cash. And when you were dealing with three independent gangs who all wanted their fair share, you had to make sure everything was carefully accounted for.

When the door opened, slamming against the wall, three heads turned to see who had made such an abrupt entrance. What they saw was Annette in her combat suit. Her normally carefully groomed hair was in disarray, her face was blackened by soot and what looked a lot like blood, and there seemed to be more of the latter making her suit glisten in places. Her blank eyes somehow made it hard to tell she was pissed off, and also seemed to make it worse. She raised her right-hand pistol and fired a round into the Juicer’s chest, tearing his ribcage open and dropping him on the spot to smoulder.

‘You two have exactly two seconds to get out of here before I blow your brains out,’ Annette said, her tone flat.

The Sky Lord glanced at her companion and then back at Annette, who did not seem to have any plans to step out of the only door. The Franky came to the same conclusion faster, picked up his chair, and tossed it through the window behind him before following it as fast as he could go. A second later, Annette was alone in the room with the smouldering corpse and all the money the gang members had been counting. Her left arm was partially numb from the laser wound in it and she ached all over. She probably had ten minutes at best before the LIPD responded to the broken window, but it was time enough to grab what she could.

Queens District.

Mickey sat close by making consoling noises as Annette eased herself out of her suit. There was some bruising under her ribs, but the worst wound was on her left bicep where a laser hit had managed to cut through to burn flesh. The suit had stopped most of it, but there was some deep-tissue damage.

‘It’ll heal,’ she said to Mickey. Mickey gave a bark of agreement. ‘And if it’s taking too long, there’s always a triage grenade. I’ve got cash for materials now. I just hope the LIPD got to Tina fast enough.’ Another bark, this time more one of encouragement. ‘You’re right, I’m sure they did. I didn’t find her fast enough, but I’m sure they will.’

Mickey tilted his head and Annette shook hers. For a dog, Mickey was ridiculously expressive. ‘Okay, so I shouldn’t be blaming myself, but I’m going to for now. It’s how I’m wired, okay?’

She could tell, just from the look he was giving her, that self-recrimination was going to be short or he would be having words with her. Getting to her feet, Annette started for the shower. She groaned. ‘The cash is probably going to be useful. I don’t think I’ll be working much tomorrow. I know it’s going to be Friday in the morning, but I’ve got limits. I need rest.’

Bark! Clearly, Mickey thought Annette pushed her limits far too much as it was.

~~~

The pain was blinding. Literally. All Annette got from her optical systems was a nauseating swirl of colours and she struggled through that to find her emergency injector. Having jabbed the thing into her thigh, she fell back onto the bed and waited for the numbness to set in.

A minute or so later, she felt the mattress shift and then a warm, furry body settle beside her. Mickey put his head on her arm and whimpered, and Annette had enough sensation of location left to reach out and scratch between his ears.

‘I’ll be okay,’ Annette said. ‘You know you’re not allowed on the bed.’ Mickey gave a soft whine in response and Annette rolled onto her side, wrapping an arm around her dog. The action sent a shock of pain through her head. ‘Just this once…’

~~~

When she woke up again, the pain was gone but her vision was still flaky. She could see, barely, but the image flickered and broke up whenever she moved. She managed to get a text message out to Sarah before collapsing back onto the bed with Mickey and shutting her eyes down.

Luckily, Sarah still had a key to Annette’s apartment from her time looking after Terri. She came rushing in and, even without seeing it, Annette could picture the concern on her face.

‘Are you okay?’ Sarah asked more or less immediately. ‘I got your message, but I wasn’t really sure it was from you. You usually spell better than that.’

‘I’m having some trouble with my optical systems,’ Annette replied. ‘Can’t see properly. Could you feed Mickey?’

‘Yeah, sure. What happened to your arm?’ Sarah’s voice was moving away to the kitchen area, but Mickey stayed right where he was beside Annette. Food was, apparently, less important than his mistress, which was good to know given how stomach-centric he tended to be.

‘I ran into someone with a laser pistol. Which reminds me, there’s a bag under the bed. Take some money out of it to cover your time.’

‘You don’t need to pay me to come over here when you’re sick.’

Annette smiled and was rather pleased that she was feeling well enough to do so. ‘Charge me BJ rates if you’re uncomfortable, but we’ve both got to eat and last night was reasonably lucrative.’

‘Oh? Come on, Mickey, food. She’ll still be there when you’ve eaten.’ Mickey, seeming reluctant about it, climbed off the bed. ‘How much did you get? This was the drug lab? Did you find the girl you were looking for?’

‘Don’t know, haven’t counted. Yes. Yes.’

There was a scraping sound and Sarah’s voice came from a point which suggested she was kneeling beside the bed. ‘Was she okay?’

‘The Frankies were running a chop shop out of the same building. Her eyes were gone, but she’ll live.’

‘Oh… Sorry.’

Annette felt the sinking feeling that came with failure again. ‘Yeah… Well, they paid for it. And I don’t just mean the money.’

‘Oh. Good. Hey, I think you made it into the papers. Well, not you, but the story. There was a headline on the Times when I went past the newsstand. Something like “Carnage at Sky City Drug Den.”’

‘Huh. Well, the LIPD aren’t breaking down my door, so I’m going to assume no one has tied it to me.’

‘The Lip couldn’t find their ass with both hands. You’ve got a little over sixteen thousand here.’

Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘That was quick.’

‘I’m not bad with numbers. Math, not so much, but numbers I can do.’

‘Sarah Donaldson, I suspect you of being smarter than you make out.’

Sarah giggled. ‘Oh yeah, I’m a hidden genius. When no one’s looking, I put my glasses on and solve physics equations.’

‘Uh-huh. How did you end up in the game anyway?’

‘Oh, well, I was born down in the Blackwater Community. My family were… are very religious and they really didn’t approve of this boy I fell for. We ran away together, got into the enclave, and ended up in Brooklyn. And that was kind of when I found out my parents were right. He joined the Tarantulas and he’d whore me out to his friends. One thing led to another and I ended up on Industrial Avenue.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Life sentence for murdering a cop. He’s in Queens Prison and I hope he stays there. When he was arrested, I took the opportunity to get out of Brooklyn. I mean, what I’m doing now isn’t much better, but…’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen Brooklyn. Why didn’t you go home?’

‘I wouldn’t have been welcome,’ Sarah replied flatly.

‘I seem to recall you saying something to Ted about families when we were on Coney Beach.’

‘Yes, I did, but this is different.’ There was a finality in the statement that at least suggested Annette should not press it further.

‘I’m feeling a bit better,’ Annette said. ‘So… You can go or make coffee.’

Sarah’s giggle returned; the girl could shift emotional gears very quickly, or seemed to be able to. ‘Am I still getting paid?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘In that case, coffee it is, but cover yourself up, will you? Otherwise I might have to charge you full rates.’

Annette located her sheet and pulled it up over her chest, and hoped her eyes would be functional soon. At least functional enough that she could read the diagnostics and find out what had gone wrong.

3/4/2117.

The Long Island Times still had the drug lab’s discovery as its lead story, but now with coverage of the Franky chop shop found beneath it. The Times was the main serious broadsheet among the various daily publications in the enclave and its coverage was fairly sober. The Sky City Tattler was another matter, going for far more lurid reporting which was, as far as Annette could tell, largely made up. The Tattler was popular largely due to its reputation for gossip and sensationalism, but also because it was cheaper than the Times.

Annette was flicking through the reports in both and finding nothing indicating that she had been seen when she noticed a familiar face coming down the avenue toward her. Gillian was walking a little faster and her expression was a little lighter. Annette knew why she was happier and why she was here this time.

‘I need to go back to my place for a few minutes,’ Annette said. ‘Mickey, you stay with Sarah.’

Sarah had, apparently, seen Gillian too. ‘See you shortly.’

Annette intercepted Gillian and led her through the alleys to her apartment block. They waited for more than greetings until they were inside and then Gillian seemed unable to contain herself further. ‘I owe you so much. I’d have come yesterday, but–’

‘You had your daughter to look after,’ Annette said.

Gillian nodded. ‘I was at the hospital all of yesterday. She… Well, her career is over, she’s blind, but she’s alive. I can’t thank you en–’

‘I was too slow,’ Annette broke in. ‘If I’d found her faster…’

Reaching out, Gillian took Annette’s arm in a firm grip. ‘Don’t you dare blame yourself for this. Maybe I should have come to you sooner. Maybe, and it’s just a thought, we should both blame the bastards who did this to her. But, from what I’ve been told, you made sure they won’t be doing that to anyone else.’

Annette nodded slowly. ‘No, they won’t. Look, do you or Tina have any objections to cybernetics?’

‘Not if it can let her see again, but we don’t have the money to–’

‘Right.’ Annette turned and pulled her bag of money out from under the bed. She handed a couple of bundles of cash over along with a data stick. ‘You can say it was an anonymous benefactor, or whatever you like. Just… you didn’t get it from me. There are detailed plans for some eyes they should be able to build here. They’ll look normal, not like mine. They were one of my early designs, but they should give her full function.’

Gillian looked around at Annette’s tiny apartment. ‘You’re living here, and you’re giving me money? You could use this to get somewhere better.’

Annette shrugged. ‘This place has its advantages. They don’t ask questions and they take pets. Take the money. This place needs good cops and if your daughter got close enough to that lot for them to grab her like that, she’s got the makings of a good cop.’

‘I think the enclave needs people like you, Louise. You’re… You’re a hero.’

Annette laughed. ‘I’m a vigilante at best.’

Gillian shook her head. ‘A hero. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different.’

Greenland District, 5/4/2117.

Alison Hennessey opened the door of her office and stepped inside. It was not a typical office door and if it were not for the motors in the hinges, she would not have been able to move the thing. She waited patiently once inside for the armoured, twenty-centimetre-thick slab to close and seal, and indicate that the electromagnetic shielding was operational. To Alison, privacy was not simply a necessity, it was a matter of life or death.

The word ‘office’ failed to adequately describe the room, but that was what she thought of it as. Behind some glass screens, the majority of the room consisted of equipment racks. Alison’s office boasted some of the most powerful computers and best communications equipment in the enclave, and she had a project underway to improve those systems to rival anything on the planet. On the more office-like side of the screens was her desk with its eight monitors, already lighting up to display various preconfigured operational dashboards, and her chair which had been custom-made for her and, given she spent so much time in it, the comfort that gave was appreciated. And against one wall was a cot which she tried not to use too much though she believed she was not trying hard enough.

She walked over to her desk fairly carefully, limping on her left leg. It was always a little worse first thing in the morning and she refused to use a cane in the house. At fifty-four, well, almost fifty-five, Alison was not old, but she had had an active life which had taken its toll. She was wearing her years well, but not entirely without discomfort.

Unlocking her systems fully required a thumbprint and a password, at which point the displays changed from relatively innocuous views related to economics and environmental factors within the enclave, all useful in their own right, to various reports from various assets she had in various locations. One caught her eye almost immediately; she selected that window and then clicked on the contact panel attached to it. A second later, her call went through.

‘You believe you’ve found her?’ Alison asked.

‘Gillian Clement-Bride came through with money to get her daughter fitted with cybernetic eyes,’ the voice on the other end replied.

‘Interesting, but–’

‘It’s not the money; it’s the design documents she supplied with it that caught my interest. I recognise them. I’d recognise the style even if I hadn’t seen this specific design before. I’ve been backtracking Clement-Bride’s movements over the last few days. I’m narrowing it down. I believe I’ll have a definite location today.’

Alison nodded. ‘Good. I want her. If she’s even half as good as you indicated, I want her.’

‘I’m working off old data. She’s probably better than I think she is. I’m sure she was the one who cracked the LIPD network and the drug lab was her work.’

‘Very well. Call as soon as you have a definite location. It’s time I met Miss Barrington.’

‘Will do. I just hope she listens.’

A faint smile crossed Alison’s lips. ‘Mariel, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I can be very persuasive when I want to be. She’ll listen. She won’t have any other choice.’

Queens District, 6/4/2117.

The noise woke Annette several hours before her internal alarm did. She was upright in bed, attempting to assess the situation, in a flat second, but the sound of Mickey barking and men shouting, coupled with the continued distortion she was experiencing in her vision, did not help.

Light caught her eyes, was assessed, and a display appeared indicating that she had seen a sighting laser. Another display came up indicating the continued work to address the protein build-up around her optical systems and was quickly dismissed. She managed to resolve four men, all in black body armour, all carrying close-combat assault weaponry. One of them was shouting. ‘Hands on your head! Do not move! Control your dog or–’

‘First,’ Annette said as she raised her hands, ‘if you hurt my dog, I will hunt you down and kill you. Mickey! Basket!’ Mickey gave one, final, contrite bark and settled into his basket, chin on his paws. He looked like he would go for someone’s throat given the slightest provocation. ‘Second,’ Annette went on, ‘do you want me to put my hands on my head, or not move, or control my dog. At least two of those are mutually exclusive.’

Mickey had, apparently, unsettled the men as much as anything. Maybe they had been told Annette was dangerous, which she was. The equipment suggested police rather than some private concern. Maybe the LIPD’s special operations training lacked something. Whatever, Mickey’s obedience and Annette’s calm voice seemed to settle the four gunmen. The one who had spoken before spoke again. ‘You’re Louise Barrington?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Long Island Police Department.’

‘In that case, yes, I’m Louise Barrington. I have some ID–’

‘That won’t be necessary. Get off the bed slowly. Kneel on the floor with your hands on your head. You will be cuffed and taken for interview. Do you understand?’

Annette looked at him for a second. ‘Yes, I understand, but unless the LIPD normally conducts interviews with nude women, would you mind if I got dressed first?’ Annette could see his eyes narrow behind his ballistic glasses; most of his expression was hidden behind a black balaclava. ‘You’ve got four guys in here and four more in the corridor. I’m good, but those odds are a little long and someone might hurt Mickey.’

The man’s jaw worked behind black cloth. ‘I am covering you. Get dressed.’

Annette flashed him a smile. ‘See? We can all be reasonable if we want to be.’

Sky City District.

The room Annette was taken to was bland and grey, and it was somewhere in the LIPD headquarters building which was to be expected, but not good. She had been cuffed for the ride there, in an unmarked, black van, but the cuffs had been removed before the door had been locked behind her. Then she was left to wait for almost thirty minutes.

The ‘almost’ qualifier came to be important when the door finally opened and a woman walked into the room, because the newcomer said, ‘My apologies for the delay, Miss Barrington. My last meeting overran.’ Which seemed more believable given the irregular time involved. ‘You may call me Alison and, for today, I am with the LIPD’s immigration irregularities department.’

Annette watched as Alison took her seat. She saw a dark-skinned, strong woman with a slightly irregular bob of sandy-blonde hair in a dark-grey skirt suit and black blouse. Kitten heels: feminine, but fairly practical, though Annette noticed the slight limp and wondered whether flats might have been better. Alison had a memorable face, aging gracefully and very attractive. Quite a long straight nose, high cheekbones with sharp definition, full lips, and eyebrows which arched high on their outer edges. Her suit jacket tried to hide quite a substantial bust, but just managed to accentuate broad hips. Her skirt fell below the knee, but her calves suggested reasonable strength, even if there was that limp on the left side. Alison was more than just a paper pusher, or she had been.

‘You said “for today,”’ Annette said. ‘The implication is that this isn’t your actual job.’

‘That would be an accurate assessment.’ Alison settled herself in her chair and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table between them. ‘I’m in asset management.’

‘I’m going to assume that there’s some form of euphemism embedded in that too.’

Alison gave a shrug. ‘I find people with talents and find a way for them to become assets. I make my assets available to others who may have a requirement for those talents. I manage assets. You would make an excellent asset.’

‘Okay…’ Annette watched Alison’s face for a second, but her software was having a lot of trouble picking up anything from the woman. ‘I suppose I should ask what’s in it for me?’

‘I can arrange to fully legitimise those forged documents you’re using. I am not part of the enclave government, but I have close ties to it and I have considerable influence. This is a job, in essence, so you get paid. There’s a reasonably healthy retainer and a bonus for each high-value assignment you undertake successfully. You won’t be working on a street corner any more. I will require you to register under the Citizen Deputy Programme. It’s up to you how you discharge your duties to that, but the certification process helps me with determining the assignments you’re suitable for and… Let’s just say that, given your recent activities, I feel you’ll be a useful addition to the programme.’

Which meant she was associating Annette with the drug lab and Marlow’s place, even if she had no solid proof. Annette decided to let that lie. ‘That all sounds very good. Perhaps a little too good.’

‘Some of your assignments may not be to your taste. I try to avoid that kind of clash. An asset operating outside their comfort zone is likely to be less effective, conflicted. It’s simply good business, but sometimes it’s necessary.’

‘And I wouldn’t get a say in the matter?’

‘Generally not.’

Annette nodded. ‘And just to be quite clear, what happens if I decide I would rather not take your… offer?’

Alison smiled. It was not an especially nice smile. ‘We have you on entering the enclave illegally. Do I really need to spell it out?’

‘No,’ Annette replied, raising her hands. ‘I just wanted to hear you say it so I know what my working conditions are. Sign me up.’ It was not like she had a lot of choice in the matter.

Queens District.

Sarah opened her mouth as soon as Annette got her apartment door open; apparently, the blonde had been waiting there for several hours, worried sick. ‘Where have you been?! You didn’t show up on the avenue and I came back here to check on you and Mickey was barking so I let myself in and I fed Mickey but you weren’t here and…’ There was a pause to draw in another huge lungful of air and Annette took the opportunity to jump in.

‘Stop! Before you burst something. Besides, that top is more low-cut than usual and when you breathe in, it’s like watching continental drift.’

Sarah let out a somewhat hysterical giggle. ‘Mickey made it sound like you’d been dragged off at gunpoint.’ Annette was not going to worry over how Sarah had worked that one out. ‘You didn’t take your guns, so I knew you weren’t out working. Your phone didn’t pick up. I was worried.’

‘Yeah, well… Sit down. I’m going to make sure Mickey knows I’m okay, and then we’ll talk.’ Annette turned to her dog who had given her a sniff, detected no blood, and decided that his mistress was okay and needed to be shunned a little for worrying him so much. ‘I’ll get sausages for later,’ Annette whispered in his ear, which got her both forgiveness and a lick which covered her face in doggy drool. ‘Okay, I didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t my fault.’

‘What wasn’t your fault?’ Sarah asked, dropping onto the edge of the unmade bed. ‘Also, “we’ll talk” is never a good sign. Just saying.’

Annette got to her feet and went to the bathroom to get a towel to dry her face. ‘Okay, so Mickey was abnormally communicative. I was dragged away at gunpoint. Well, not quite dragged, but certainly taken.’ She glanced at the door. ‘And, apparently, they fixed the door while I was out which is… nice of them.’

Sarah’s eyes were now wide, of course. ‘Dragged by who?’

‘Whom,’ Annette corrected. ‘Though that’s a bit pedantic. The LIPD, but they were acting for someone else. Let’s call her a “mysterious benefactor.” She offered me a job which I would be very stupid to refuse.’

Sarah’s face fell a little. ‘A job? You’re out of the game? That’s… great.’

With her face more or less free of mucus, Annette sat down beside Sarah. ‘No, we’re out of the game. I’m not leaving you alone on that avenue. I get paid enough that I can quit this place and get somewhere a bit bigger. You’ll be my room-mate. There may be times when I’m working irregular hours or even have to go out of the enclave. You’ll be looking after Mickey when I can’t.’

‘No…’ Sarah frowned and then shook her head. ‘I can’t just… It wouldn’t be right to be living off your earnings. And what would I do with myself all day. I can’t just–’

‘Oh, I know just what you’ll be doing. You’re going back to school. We can get you caught up on the basics before the new year starts, then we’ll get you into some courses in Sky City. I spoke to my benefactor about it.’

‘Your mysterious benefactor?’

‘Yes, and she thought it was a wonderful idea. She can help getting you placed. She’s… a strange one. I’m not really sure I can trust her yet, but there’s just something about her… Anyway, unless you have any real objections to getting off your back and behind a school desk, it’s settled.’

Sarah grinned. Once again, the girl’s mind had shifted gears from profound worry to glee in a few short minutes. ‘I can’t really think of anything else. And I do look good in a schoolgirl outfit.’

Part Four: Damnation

Queens District, the Long Island Enclave, 19/4/2117.

Annette opened her eyes and looked up at a strange ceiling. It was not an entirely new experience; in fact, she had seen more ceilings since moving into Queens than she cared to think about, but this was her strange new ceiling. This was the ceiling of her new bedroom, in her new apartment, which she had moved into the previous day.

Moving Sarah into the bedroom next door had taken more effort. Annette and Mickey had relatively few possessions, but Sarah had significantly more. That had been useful in that Sarah had picked up a few things for the home that Annette never had, like kitchen stuff and a table lamp, but Sarah also had a lot of clothes. Well, to be fair, there was probably not a lot of clothes, but there was a lot more than Annette had and there seemed to be a lot of pastels.

Mickey, of course, had his basket. Technically, he also had his collar and leash, but the collar kind of went with him everywhere and had not needed much moving. Mickey had sniffed in every corner of the apartment he could find, announced with a bark that it was good, and been perfectly happy. He had given sneaking onto Annette’s bed a try and then settled down beside it when rebuffed, which maybe indicated he needed a little reassurance about the new place. Or he could have just been trying it on. New home, new rules? Maybe? No? Darn. In her mind, Annette thought Mickey’s strongest curse word was probably darn.

Annette’s internal computer reminded her that there were things to do this morning, hence the early rise. She sat up and swung her legs over the edge, and winced as a stab of pain lanced from above her right eye through to the back of her skull. Mickey raised his head from his paws and gave her an inquisitive whine. ‘Just a headache,’ she told him. ‘I’ve had way worse. Now, I’m going to take a shower. Give me fifteen minutes, then you can jump on Sarah’s bed.’ Annette was sure the dog would have snickered if he could.

Getting to her feet, she headed for the door. There were painkillers in the bathroom cabinet. This headache did not seem to warrant her heavy-duty pills. Maybe it was just a headache, given that Sarah had insisted on celebrating their move and they had gone to bed later than expected. Yes, it seemed likely that a Mickey-shaped alarm clock would be in order to get Sarah up for her first day at school.

~~~

‘That was not funny,’ Sarah grumbled as she came back to the lounge after her shower. The apartment consisted, basically, of a lounge/dining room with a corridor linking it to the front door. Off the corridor were the two bedrooms – Sarah had insisted that Annette take the slightly larger one – the bathroom, and the kitchen. The latter had a door/hatch combo between it and the lounge too, and Sarah had to circle around to lean through the hatch since Annette was cooking breakfast.

‘It was a bit funny,’ Annette replied and Mickey, at Annette’s feet supervising the cooking of sausages, gruffed his agreement.

‘It was not! I nearly jumped out of my skin. I thought we were being attacked by rabid werewolves or something.’

Annette looked down at Mickey, who looked back for a second before they both looked at Sarah. ‘We’re both pretty sure that werewolf attacks involve less tongue.’

Sarah bit her lips to stop herself giggling. ‘Depends how kinky the werewolf is. Anyway, thanks, Mickey, I had to boil-wash my face. How do dogs formulate spit like that?’

‘Not sure, but I plan to analyse it as a potential super-adhesive. I’ve got sausages, hash browns, and eggs. You think that’ll be enough to keep you going until lunch?’

‘I’m going to be sitting on my ass for hours and you’re going to stuff me full of calories? I’m going to look like a blimp by summer.’

Annette narrowed her eyes at her younger friend. ‘I don’t believe you realise how much energy thinking hard takes. Your brain uses a fifth of your body’s calorific intake. It’s a massive energy hog. This’ – she pointed her spatula at the sausages – ‘is brain food.’

‘Okay, what’s Mickey’s excuse?’

Bark!

‘Quite right, Mickey,’ Annette said. ‘You tell her. Anyway, he’s coming to the workshop with me so he needs brain food too.’

‘And he’s going to be a big help, I’m sure.’

‘He’s very good for bouncing ideas off. Besides, I’m cooking sausages. How much work do you think I’m going to get done with him making big, sad doggy eyes at me for the rest of the day?’

Sarah pushed herself upright. ‘Now that is a really valid point. I’ll get dressed and eat your brain food. I bet I won’t use half of it.’

~~~

Queens Higher School was about three kilometres from the new apartment. It was a modernised upgrade of an old college which had been there for over a century. Various plaques around the place suggested that education on the site went back to the nineteenth century. Now it had two buildings, one for the eleven to eighteen age group, and one for adults, though some of the facilities were shared. Sarah was attending the adult section, working to get her basic skills up to spec.

‘You’re nervous,’ Annette said as they stood outside the main doors.

‘No,’ Sarah replied, ‘I’m–’

‘It wasn’t a question. You are nervous.’

‘Okay, yes, I’m nervous. What if I can’t do it? What if–’

Annette sighed. ‘Sarah, we both know you’re smarter than you like to make out. You’re fully capable of grasping some basic educational courses so long as you don’t have boys to worry about. I’d imagine you’re over that distraction this time around.’

‘Unless there’s someone really hunky in there.’

Watching a man with thinning hair and a nose you could have used as the centreboard on a schooner walk up the steps, Annette said, ‘I think you’re probably safe.’

‘Yeah… Well, wish me luck.’

Annette shook her head. ‘You don’t need luck, just application. Have a good day. Learn something.’ She watched Sarah troop up the steps into the building and then turned to leave. ‘Come on, Mickey. We have our own work to do.’

~~~

The workshop was really starting to come together. The first of the nanofabricator units was up, running, and busy making the subassemblies Annette would put together to make a second unit. Mickey had a basket beside Annette’s desk and was generally happy to lie in it, watching her work, though he did act as a reminder to pull her head out of whatever project she was working on every so often. That was far from being a bad thing. In a spare moment, Annette had painted the walls a steely grey, which was not exactly pretty but it did look better than rough concrete. At some point, the upstairs section would get a facelift too.

Annette, with the help of the suitcase fabricator, was currently working on a fairly simple project, if one Annette thought important for her new role in enclave society. Alison had sourced a supply of a very fast-acting sedative which Annette was planning to use to subdue targets without much danger of death. To make it as effective as possible, she was adapting her normal rounds to use a thinner, harder penetrator which, she thought, ought to be able to inject the sedative into flesh even through quite dense armour.

To get around the relatively low-velocity rounds her pistols fired, Annette had designed her bullets to use the last of their rocket propellant to blast the penetrator into the target on contact. It was a bit like firing a captive bolt, but without the captive bit. The new rounds did the same, but in place of a programmable density penetrator, there was a high-density, needle-sharp dart filled with sedative.

Annette squinted at the firing mechanism she was working on and considered using some of the sedative on herself. Her headache was, once again, annoying her and seemed to be getting worse. Mickey eyed her with his chin resting on his paws as she took more headache pills.

‘It’s just a headache,’ Annette told him. When that just got her a mournful whine, she added, ‘It’s not that serious. I’ve had way worse than this.’ She got the distinct impression that Mickey was suggesting that self-delusion was a pitiful thing to see in an intelligent woman, but her diagnostics were indicating nothing major. There were a few protein build-ups being worked on, but they were unlikely to be the cause of her pain. ‘I’ve got a hangover,’ Annette stated firmly. ‘That’s all it is.’

Mickey did not look impressed.

~~~

Sarah walked down the steps from the school’s main entrance with a weary look on her face. She smiled when she saw Annette and Mickey waiting for her, and skipped toward them, dropping to her haunches to give Mickey a hug.

‘Who’s a good dog?’ Sarah said, grinning. ‘Have you kept Louise company in her dusty workshop all day? Have you? Yes, you have.’

‘My workshop is not dusty,’ Annette said, smirking. ‘You could eat off most of the work surfaces. Good day at school?’

Sarah straightened up and nodded. ‘I think so. I wasn’t struggling to keep up. You were right about the food though. I was ravenous by lunchtime.’

Nodding curtly, Annette turned for home. ‘Told you. Any potential distractions in class?’

Falling into step, Sarah shook her head. ‘It’s mostly older people who missed out on their education during the plague and war years. I don’t think I’ll be in any danger until I move on to Sky City. The older boys in the junior section might try it on from the looks I got a couple of times, but they’re way too young for my tastes.’

Annette laughed. ‘Some of them are probably less than a year younger than you are.’

‘Only according to the calendar.’

‘Which is how most people measure it.’ Though Annette had to admit that Sarah was probably far older as far as mindset and experience went, even if she did not always seem to act like it.

‘I did meet a couple of nice people,’ Sarah went on. ‘I don’t think I’ll lack friends.’

‘Somehow, I doubt you ever do. You’re a likeable person.’ A twinge of pain shot through Annette’s right temple, causing her eye to twitch. More painkillers when she got back to their apartment…

‘Thank you and right back at you.’ Sarah glanced at Annette, her grin shifting to a look of concern in an instant. ‘Louise? Are you okay?’

Annette stumbled as a wave of nausea passed over her and her vision dimmed. ‘I… Just a hangover. I–’

There were sounds after Annette’s vision cut out: Mickey barking, Sarah’s shriek of ‘Louise!’ For a few seconds, the noises persisted and then they too faded into nothing.

20/4/2117.

The first thing Annette noticed was the scent. Disinfectant, some sort of vaguely floral air freshener, and that weirdly specific, sick-people smell unique to hospitals. There were sounds too to indicate that she was somewhere medical; primarily that was the sound of a heart monitor beeping in time to someone’s pulse, probably her own.

She opened her eyes and confirmed her initial diagnosis. She was in a small hospital ward: four beds set in a square, though only one of the others was occupied and that occupant was wired into so much machinery that it was clear they would not be waking up any time soon. Annette frowned: she was in an intensive care unit.

There was no sign of her clothes or her gear, so she pressed the buzzer for attention and waited. It did not take long before a nurse appeared, took one look at her, and vanished again before Annette could speak. A couple of minutes later, the nurse returned behind a doctor Annette did not recognise.

‘I’m Doctor Amhurst,’ the man said, walking toward Annette and raising a penlight before remembering that pupil dilation tests were going to get him nowhere. ‘We weren’t really expecting you to be conscious so soon.’

Annette gave a shrug. ‘You figured out what happened?’

‘Uh… Not really. We detected some unusual blood clotting and treated you for that. We were scheduling MRI and CAT scans for tomorrow. I’d still like to–’

Annette had pulled up her own diagnostics as soon as he had said ‘not really’ and she cut him off as the headlines came into view. ‘That won’t be necessary, Doctor. I have several cybernetic implants, as you’ll have noticed, and I have a rejection problem. Your scans aren’t going to reveal anything I don’t already know.’ There had, indeed, been an undetected clotting problem. Undetected until it was almost too late. The diagnostics suggested that she had been minutes from a fatal stroke. Trying to keep her concern from her face, Annette said, ‘If you could get someone to take the IV and catheter out, I’d like to get home.’

‘I really think that you should stay in for further tests,’ Amhurst argued. ‘This was a serious attack. You may not be so lucky next time.’

‘I’m aware of that. I have… an appointment lined up with my cyberneticist to resolve the issue. I’m going to see if it can be moved up to a closer date first thing tomorrow.’

Amhurst did not look pleased, but he nodded. ‘I’ll have the release paperwork ready for you by the time you’re dressed.’

~~~

‘Are you sure you’re going to be okay?’ Sarah asked for the third time at the entrance to the school.

Annette smiled at her. Sarah had fallen asleep in their armchair the night before with Mickey at her feet, both of them waiting for news which came in the form of Annette walking in, apparently fine. Neither woman nor dog were entirely buying it. Mickey would not be a problem – he would worry when Annette set her plan in motion – but there was nothing much to do about that. Sarah, however, would want details and then worry all through the day.

‘I’m fine,’ Annette said. ‘I’m going to be very busy in the workshop today so if I’m not here when you come out, don’t worry about it. Okay?’

Sarah made a face. ‘Okay. But if you’re not home when I get back, I’m calling to make sure you haven’t blacked out again.’

‘Fair enough. Now, go have a good, educational day. And don’t tease the boys.’

That brought on a pout. ‘As if I would. You look after her, Mickey.’

Bark!

‘That’s my good nursing dog.’ Forcing a grin, Sarah turned and trooped up the steps.

Annette looked down at her dog. ‘Okay, Mickey, let’s get back to the apartment. You’re not going to like this, but it’s got to be done.’

Mickey looked back and gave a soft whine, almost as though he understood exactly what was going on. There were times, like this one, when Annette thought that Mickey was not so much a mongrel as some form of animal-intelligence genetic experiment. That, of course, was ridiculous. It was, right?

~~~

Well, if Mickey was, in fact, some form of hyper-intelligent super-dog, he refrained from passing comment as Annette settled onto her bed covered only in a sheet. He sat beside the bed, watching Annette’s peculiar daytime activities with a slightly bemused expression. It was the paler-grey, very shaggy eyebrows, Annette decided, which somehow seemed to make his face more expressive than that of a typical canine.

The mystery of Mickey’s brainpower was set aside as Annette prepared herself for the execution of Project Omega. All the necessary configuration and program files had been placed ready in a folder on her internal computer. All she needed to do was execute the software patcher, lie back, and let her systems do the work. The re-engineering was going to be extensive. She would sleep through pretty much the whole thing; she had made sure of that to avoid worrying about what was going on herself. There were things to worry about. There would be a period where her body was essentially devoid of any form of immune system. Not a long period, certainly, but you never knew what might happen and if the new nanomachines did not take properly…

‘No time for second thoughts, Mickey,’ Annette said. ‘You keep a watch for me. I’m going to be going to sleep for a while.’ Mickey replied with a soft whine and settled onto the floor with his chin on his paws. ‘Okay then. Here goes nothing.’ And Annette ran the first file.

~~~

Mickey was not pleased with the situation. While Louise had made reassuring sounds before going to bed, what had happened since was not reassuring at all. At first it seemed like she was just asleep, but then she began to shift under the sheet. He had looked up and moved closer, because it seemed like she was having a nightmare, but it had not been quite the same so he had backed off again.

Then he had begun to smell sweat and gone to check. His mistress was still now, but her body temperature was up enough that perspiration was soaking through the sheet. Mickey’s old master had had fevers, but never anything like this. Mickey knew of nothing he could do except to be there, and he had let out a whine of frustration before settling back down to wait.

Now it was different. Louise was shivering. The sheet was glued to her thanks to the hot stage earlier, but now her body was shuddering as if from cold. This was more worrying than anything. His last master had been like that on the night Louise had taken him home. Shivering, shuddering, and then there had been the stillness even before his breathing had stopped. That was not going to happen again! Rules about being on the bed were made to be broken, especially in dire emergency. Mickey climbed up onto the sheet and pressed himself as close as he could against his mistress. Sharing his heat had not worked on that fateful night, but maybe this time things would be different.

~~~

‘Louise?’ As indicated, there had been no one waiting outside the school for Sarah and, as she had indicated, Sarah had her phone in her hand as she entered the apartment, ready to call if there was no one home. ‘Louise? You in?’

There was no reply from Louise, but there was a bark from her room and Sarah opened the door, looking in to see her friend lying under a soaked-through sheet with Mickey lying beside her. Sarah’s eyes widened and she was just about to dial for emergency services when she noticed the sheet of paper lying on the bed at Louise’s feet. Frowning, she picked it up and read the hand-written note.

I’m not dead! If you’re reading this, the process is taking a bit longer than I thought. Don’t worry and don’t call an ambulance. The hospital wouldn’t know what to do anyway. Hopefully, I’ll be awake to explain soon. Love, Louise.

Sarah looked at Mickey. ‘She’s been like this all day?’ Mickey whined in a manner which seemed to indicate that she had. ‘Why does she do this kind of thing to us?’ Another whine, presumably of agreement.

Not knowing what else to do, Sarah settled down on the opposite side of Louise from Mickey and prepared to wait.

~~~

The first thing Louise noticed when she became aware of her surroundings was the time: 16:48:32. Inwardly, she winced. Sarah would have arrived home and found her unconscious. Hopefully she had read the note before panicking. There was no sound of hospital monitors…

There was a lot of after-action reporting beginning to scroll across the inside of Louise’s eyelids. Some of the figures she was seeing did not look especially good, but they were all transients. Her body temperature had spiked and then fallen: there was a comment regarding the tissue repair those fluctuations had necessitated. The rise had been during the main manufacturing phase, when the mass of nanomachines had been created. The fall had been the result of the shutdown and replacement of the mitochondria in her cells. For a time, her body had been basically shutting down, but the system had coped. Aside from some lingering tissue repair and the tidy-up operation, her metabolism was running at normal levels.

Except that just about everything was being run under the supervision of tiny robots: cellular replication and repair, immune response, energy production, oxygen transportation. Everything was computer controlled, run by machines designed to learn as they went with one, overriding directive: keep their host alive. Well, so far so good.

Louise opened her eyes. She looked to her right where there was a weight on her arm. Mickey was there, looking at her with worried eyes. His chin lifted when she turned to look at him, but he made no sound, as though he might be told to move if he drew too much attention to himself.

On her left, Louise discovered Sarah curled up beside her, apparently mimicking Mickey’s desire to be close by. Louise grinned… and realised that she was thinking of herself as Louise. She had been Annette when she started the process and now she felt much more like Louise. She had really left her old self behind now. There was a display available to her from her health monitors which told her exactly how much waste material needed to be flushed from her system, and when it was gone, it would be washing away the last dregs of Annette Barrington. Or that was how it felt. It also felt like Louise was probably going to develop hypochondriac tendencies given the amount of biological information she had available to her now.

Shifting her legs a little produced that disgusting feel of damp cloth unsticking from skin and a grunt of disgust which produced a sudden and immediate reaction. Sarah bolted up from the bed, eyes wide and staring at Louise. Mickey lifted his head and barked. Wincing, Louise started unpeeling the sheet from her skin so that she could sit up.

‘You’re awake!’ Sarah squeaked.

‘No,’ Louise replied. ‘I’m a zombie and any second now, I’m going to start looking for a way into your skull.’

‘Don’t joke about things like that! I came in and you were lying there and Mickey was beside you and we were both worried and I saw the note and–’

‘Breathe, Sarah. Your body needs oxygen, which it won’t get on a constant exhale.’

Sarah pulled in a huge lungful of air and set off again. ‘What on Earth did you think you were doing? You had both of us scared silly. I could just tell that Mickey’s been worried all day. What process? What did you do?’

Louise reached out to scratch Mickey between the ears. ‘Worried you were going to lose another owner? Sarah would have taken care of you.’

‘Yeah, but who’d have taken care of me?’ Sarah whined. ‘And you didn’t answer the question.’

‘I need a shower. You can stand outside and listen to me chatter while I wash what feels like a week’s exercise off me.’

Sarah threw up her hands. ‘Oh, sure. Tease me with showering after worrying me half to death.’

Grinning, Louise climbed to her feet and set off toward the bathroom. Both Sarah and Mickey followed, though it was doubtful the latter would get much out of the conversation aside from the reassurance of being near to his mistress.

‘I feel like a new woman,’ Louise said as she started the shower.

‘Well, there’s always something to be said for novelty,’ Sarah replied, leaning against the doorframe. ‘I’ve had some good times with a new woman, or man, but I liked the old Louise.’

Louise giggled. ‘My personality hasn’t changed. Well, not much. I might turn into a hypochondriac and I’m probably going to be giddy about not having headaches for a while. But the old Louise was really Annette.’

‘Oh. You changed your name?’

‘Sort of. I was born Annette Louise Barrington. Now my ID says I’m Louise and… I kind of feel more like I’m really her.’ Louise stepped into the tub and under the stream from the showerhead, sighing as the hot water washed the sweat away. ‘I’ve replaced my entire immune system with nanomachines. They’re tiny, tiny robots that can do… Well, they can do just about anything you like, really, but in this case, they’re doing the same job my normal immune system did, just better and without the problems I had when my body rejected my cybernetics.’

‘Okay…’

‘And there are a few other improvements. Additional oxygen transport in my blood, replacement of the cellular replication system and mitochondria.’

‘Mito-what?’

‘Mitochondria. They’re the parts of your cells that, um, make energy. With the upgraded oxygen transport, I’ll tire less quickly.’

‘Stamina’s always good. It, uh, sounds like you’ve changed a lot.’

‘Uh-huh. Believe me, it wasn’t something I did lightly. I’ve had this solution in planning since I realised there was a problem. If it fails for some reason, I’m basically a walking corpse. I’ll have weeks to live. But some diseases could do the same to you and without this, I was going to die. I was lucky yesterday, Sarah. I was pretty close to a stroke. I could’ve been dead, or a vegetable. It kind of put the risks into perspective.’

The shower curtain was pulled aside and Sarah paused for only a second to look before stepping forward to hand Louise a towel. ‘Well, I guess if you’ve considered all the risks…’

‘And the benefits. I considered the benefits too.’

‘Well, yeah. Not dying is a fairly major one.’

‘The major one.’

‘Right.’ Sarah paused again, watching Louise dry herself with the warm towel. ‘Why haven’t we ever had sex?’

Louise’s drying stalled and she looked at Sarah with widened eyes. ‘Way to derail a conversation.’

‘Sorry. But why haven’t we?’

‘Well, I’m not really into girls–’

‘But you’ve taken girls as clients.’

‘Yes, but… Well, I guess the job has opened my eyes a bit, but then there’s… um… Do you want to have sex with me?’

Sarah’s face scrunched into a concentrated sort of frown. ‘Yes. No. I did, but now… Whenever I see you naked I want to, but then I think about it and it’d be a bit like…’

‘Kissing your sister?’

‘I was thinking of more than kissing, but yeah.’

Louise nodded, lifting a leg to the side of the tub to dry it. ‘I think I feel the same way. I’m sure we’ll survive without.’

Sarah sighed. ‘I won’t if I keep watching you doing that. I’m going to start on my homework. It’s math. I might need some help later.’

‘Oh, sure. I’ll get my “strict schoolmistress” outfit ready.’

‘Oh… Now I’ll never be able to concentrate!’

21/4/2117.

For the first time since moving to Queens, Louise walked down Industrial Avenue with no intention to pick up men. She still wore her skirt and corset, with her arming pod attached at the back, but now it was there as camouflage. That was how she liked to think of it anyway; one of the girls in short skirts you usually saw there was not going to attract attention, right up to the point where she dropped you for doing something you should not be doing.

It was a reasonably good plan, but it was the only plan she had right now. Alison had left her to work out for herself how she was supposed to handle her duties as a deputy. The paperwork had gone through without even the slightest comment, and she had passed the evaluation with flying colours thanks to her weapons system and having all the legal documents she needed available on her internal computer. But neither Louise’s mysterious patron nor the LIPD had passed any opinion on the best use of her abilities. She had decided to patrol the area around Industrial Avenue because the Black Widows had a more tenuous grip on the area, she knew there was more crime there, and she could do it on the way to and back from her workshop. She was still not sure how well it was going to work.

And she was still wondering about that when she heard the gunfire. Near the main gate through the Factory Wall, a group of Black Widows had taken exception to a group of Cyber-Kings who, if the bags they were carrying were any indication, had just managed to pull off some sort of raid in the industrial zone. It might have been a matter of waiting until the noise died away and then checking for survivors, but there were civilians pinned down by the gunfire and the Kings were using a guard post for cover. It was cover which was beginning to look the worse for wear.

Louise reached back to collect a pair of seeker grenades, programmed them, and threw them out toward the combatants. As the devices split, each heading for a different side of the road, she reached back for her pistols and checked the loads. Full magazines of the new tranquiliser rounds. This would be their first combat test, but she was confident. There were twin bursts of light, a few shrieks, and Louise started firing. The spread was a little wide for the grenades to fully affect everyone. The EMP had effectively taken down the largest of the Kings and blinded a couple more. Similarly, there were three Widows fumbling around wondering what had happened, but there were others unaffected. Louise focused on the ones who seemed to be still functional, picking off one on each side before selecting more targets. She was pleased to see that the drug appeared to be working exactly as advertised and the confusion her grenades had sown was doing the rest. A few seconds later, there was no one standing up except for her and various non-combatants who were cautiously stepping out of whatever cover they had found.

The gate guard was not doing so well. At least one of the bullets the Widows had fired had penetrated the wall of his post and he was unconscious, but still breathing. Louise tossed a triage grenade into the hut while she put through a call to the local LIPD station. With a bit of luck, the guy would be on his feet before the medics arrived. She looked around at the various fallen gang members and nodded. Okay, maybe this was not the best use of her talents, but there was a certain satisfaction to it and she had probably just saved at least one man’s life. That was not bad for a first day on the job.

~~~

‘So, they let the Widows off with a warning,’ Louise said as she busied herself in the kitchen. ‘They couldn’t identify who had shot the guard. I guess that was the best they could do under the circumstances.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Sarah replied.

‘No, I don’t, but I understand why they did it. They need to keep the Widows sweet to keep peace in the district and they were, sort of, stopping a crime in progress. They just endangered a lot of civilians doing it.’

‘Which might happen if the cops were doing it.’

‘I think they take more care, but not actually untrue. Same is true of me.’

‘You have those sleepy darts. And you saved the guard that was shot. You are a hero.’

Louise giggled but decided not to argue about terminology. ‘When I’ve got the rest of the gadgets I’m working on functional, it should be even safer. Uh, for me and any onlookers anyway. I’ve got this gas trap in the works that’ll go off when someone goes near it. Doesn’t really hurt, but it’ll make anyone caught in the gas throw up his guts. It’s really hard to fight when you’re retching.’

‘Shouldn’t that be banned under some sort of cruel punishment rule?’

‘Probably, but I checked and any non-lethal ordnance is acceptable. I may have to get special clearance for the proximity mines, but I’m really not planning to use those in public places.’

Sarah looked up from her homework. ‘Proximity mines?’

‘Thermobaric mines set to detonate when someone gets close. They’re… um, nasty. But if I’m worried about someone following me… Well, I won’t be worried about someone following me.’

‘You do love long words.’

‘Thermobaric just means that it creates a lot of heat and pressure. Really big versions can be almost indistinguishable from nukes, but mine will be tiny, in comparison. You still wouldn’t want to be near one when it goes off. I’ll explain the mechanics sometime.’

Sarah giggled this time. ‘Oh yeah, and I’ll understand it.’

Louise paused. ‘Yeah, I think you will. It’s not too complex an idea and you’re underselling yourself again. Have you actually needed any help with your homework yet?’

‘Well… no. But I’ve barely started.’

‘Okay. True. We’ll see.’

‘Just you wait. Tomorrow I’ll need your help.’

Louise smiled. ‘We’ll see.’

23/4/2117.

By Friday, Louise was still waiting to be asked for help, but she had something else to occupy her mind anyway. As a cover for the retainer Louise was receiving, Louise was to be employed by a company called Perfect Partners, based out of an office building in Sky City. Other arrangements had been made for a while, but someone from the agency had called to arrange a meeting for that week; basically, it was time for Louise to fully settle into her new life.

Perfect Partners was a form of escort agency. In fact, ‘escort agency’ was more or less the perfect way to describe it. People, of both sexes, could ring up and hire someone to escort them to whatever function or other venue they wished and the agency prided itself on being able to supply the perfect partner for the occasion, no matter what was needed. It was a legitimate, tax-paying company though it obviously trod a fine line; prostitution was illegal within the enclave, so there was never any suggestion made of sex being available, but it was also understood that some clients expected it. Just so long as no one actually said they were hiring someone for sex, no one had to be arrested.

Given that Perfect Partners was supposed to be something on the upmarket side of the business, Louise had gone out and got herself a new dress. It was your fairly basic LBD, a tank-style garment with a short skirt and plenty of cleavage, but still fairly decorous. Certainly, it made her street costume look like pasties and a thong. Louise could see more of the same ilk in her future and that was not an unpleasant thought; she had come to sort of like her corset, skirt, and boots, which was another reason she continued to use them for her patrols, but the idea of dressing with a little more style was nice.

At first sight, the agency seemed something of a let-down, however. It occupied a fairly small office in one of the older buildings in Sky City, not far from the government buildings, but not exactly prestigious. On entering, Louise found herself in an outer office containing a couple of chairs for people waiting and a desk, behind which sat a rather bored-looking woman with long, straight, black hair and a rather drawn face. The latter did not help with the impression that the agency’s receptionist seemed to hold the entire world in disdain.

Louise figured she had to get things going since the receptionist did not seem to want to. ‘Good morning. I’m Louise, I–’

The receptionist reached out a hand to the phone on her desk and pressed a button. ‘Sandy, your ten o’clock is here.’ Then she let go of the intercom without waiting for a reply and gave Louise a bored smile. ‘Go right in. She’s not busy.’

‘Thanks,’ Louise replied, returning the smile, and walked over to the inner door, knocking once before pushing it open and stepping through.

The inner office was somehow more friendly than the outer one. The decoration was in a slightly darker but warmer tone, and it had red shades instead of a duck-egg blue. The desk was nothing out of the ordinary, a stock office desk, but it looked like Sandy, the agency’s owner, actually used it. Sandy herself was a pretty woman with a trim body, aside from her substantial bust, a cloud of strawberry blonde hair, and blue eyes bright with intelligence. Louise’s software detected certain immobility in her facial muscles which suggested cosmetic drug use: Sandy was older than she looked, but holding age back quite effectively.

Looking up from her computer as Louise walked across from the door to the only guest chair in the room, Sandy smiled, and there was a hint of greed in her voice when she spoke. ‘Oh, honey, we are going to have clients lining up to book you. Let me see the eyes. If anything’s going to be an issue, it’s the eyes.’ Louise slipped her shades off and paused, standing beside the straight-backed chair, white eyes on Sandy. ‘Mm… Some will lose interest, but they’re more exotic than anything. Nothing else is artificial? The data I have says no…’

‘My immune system, but I don’t think your average person’s going to notice that. Everything aside from the eyes is entirely internal.’

‘Excellent. Have a seat and we’ll go over a few things. Normally I’d be conducting an interview to ensure you’re suitable for us, but you’re one of Alison’s…’ Sandy flashed a smile. ‘I’m not going to suggest you try somewhere else.’

‘You have more of Alison’s “assets” on your books?’

‘One or two. Obviously, it depends on the person. With your looks, you’re a shoe-in here, but I don’t think everyone she, um, employs is suitable. Now, I’m required to point out that Perfect Partners is here to arrange meetings between clients and suitable escorts. What happens while you are on a “date” is purely your business. Perfect Partners does not condone nor engage in any form of procurement for the purposes of prostitution.’

Louise nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Normally, we charge a fee for the introduction and you would get a percentage of that, plus any tips. However, since you’re with Alison, you’re on a monthly retainer instead. However, you do still get to keep any additional monies the client sees fit to hand over for whatever reason.’ Sandy paused, apparently waiting for questions, and got none. ‘Okay, engagements with clients are generally just for an evening, but we do more extended periods and, in your case, we do “special bookings” which could be for an indefinite period. You may receive those from us or Alison. Generally, if it’s a bodyguard job or something like that, it’ll be handled as a regular engagement through us. Oh, there’s nothing in your file. How are your acting skills?’

‘I’m not exactly planning a stage career, but I can lie competently. I can read other people’s expressions very well too.’

‘Stick with us and you’ll get better.’ Sandy’s gaze flicked once more over Louise’s body. ‘Oh, you might want to consider some implants.’

Louise blinked and then grinned. ‘I’ve got a lot of those already, even if most aren’t–’

‘No, dear.’ Sandy aimed a long finger at Louise’s chest. ‘Implants.’

Louise looked down and then back up. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. She really had no idea what she was supposed to say to that.

~~~

Louise was pacing. She was stripped down to her panties and walking from the bathroom, where there was a full-length mirror, to the lounge, grumbling all the while. When she got to the mirror, she would stop, stare at her chest, and then turn around for another loop. If she wanted to walk so much, Mickey was thinking, then she should get his lead and take him out to somewhere nice to do it, like the beach.

She let out an exasperated growl on the next lap. ‘No one’s ever complained about them before!’ Mickey tried the ‘consoling gruff of agreement’ even if he was not sure what he was agreeing with. From the bathroom, he heard, ‘I mean, they’re not exactly perfect, but whose are?’ He waited for her to reappear before trying another gruff. Louise looked at him. ‘You like them, right?’

Gruff.

‘Well, you would say that. You’re too nice for your own good. I am not getting a boob job done for this!’

Giving up on basic tactics, Mickey employed a technique only the true masters of doggy cuteness could get truly right. He dropped his head onto his paws and rolled his eyes up to look plaintively at his mistress.

Louise sagged. ‘Okay, okay. I’m letting one little comment get me all worked up. I’m not normally this insecure. I mean, I’m attractive. What’ve I got to be worried about?’ Mickey knew full well that giving up at this point would be fatal. His eyes widened and got more pleading. ‘Ah, damn, okay. I shouldn’t be getting mad about it. I’m sorry. I’ll just work on my self-esteem. I promise. Please stop doing that. I’ll buy you a steak.’

Mickey lifted his head, his tongue lolling out. Excellent. His work here was done.

~~~

Mostly to avoid starting on another rant about cup sizes and disturbing Sarah’s homework, Louise decided on a late-evening patrol along the avenue that night. It was Friday night, not the best time to be out on the street looking for work, though often lucrative, and it seemed like a good time to be looking out for the girls who had once been colleagues of a sort. In all probability, Louise would be back in the warmth of her apartment before things got really bad, but she felt the effort was warranted.

Apparently, she was right, but not for the reason she expected. She had been out for about fifteen minutes when she spotted a squad of women walking down the avenue. The clothing, the arrogance of their stride, and the armament they were carrying said they belonged to the Black Widows, so she followed along behind them, watching. They did not usually move around this area in such large numbers and it suggested they were up to something.

Of course, they might have been out on a bar crawl… Except that there were far more bars up in the northern part of the district, which was also more their natural territory. Maybe they were out picking up girls…

Well, they were up to something with the girls, but not propositioning them. Louise stopped as the group moved in on a couple of avenue regulars, their attitudes gaining in menace as they went. Louise stepped closer and the voices became clearer.

‘…so you’d be advised to move on,’ one of the Widows said.

‘This has been our patch since I started coming to the avenue,’ one of the street girls replied. Louise recognised her: Eleanor, or Lena to most. Lena had been there long before Louise, or even Sarah, had been around. She was black and beautiful, and she had all the attitude to pull off the look, but it was not having the desired effect on the Widows.

‘Well, now it’s our patch. We’re expanding and we need the space. You move, or we move you.’

‘You get this spot over my dead body!’

‘That can be arranged,’ the Widow replied, and the street lights glinted off a knife as she pulled it.

And that was when Louise shot her in the back. Both pistols out and at her sides, Louise walked forward as everyone’s attention turned toward her. ‘Let me make this quite clear,’ Louise said, ‘I am not about to let the Widows take over this part of town. And if you do decide to push ahead with this plan, I’m going to put so many of you behind bars that you won’t be able to hold the rest of your territory.’

Of course, the remaining Widows were not going to take that lying down, unlike their leader who was now very much lying down and unconscious. One of them went for a pistol, and went down before her fingers closed around the grip, quickly joined by another. The last two drew knives and rushed Louise, which just meant they skinned various body parts on the sidewalk when they fell. Louise rolled her eyes and handed her pistols back to her pod.

‘Louise?’ Lena asked. ‘What up, girl? I thought you got out of this racket?’

Louise closed the distance, grinning. ‘Off the street, but not off the avenue, Lena. Part of the deal was that I joined the LIPD deputy programme. Apparently, there aren’t many of us in Queens and I still live around here.’

‘Well… Looks like we might need someone to keep things to the status quo.’ Lena’s dark eyes were looking over the sleeping Widows and her brow was furrowed.

‘Maybe. Um, could you make yourself scarce for twenty minutes? I’ll try to get this lot off the street fast, but we probably don’t want the cops seeing you here.’

Lena sucked a tooth and nodded. ‘I could do with a coffee break anyway, hun. Be seein’ you around.’

‘Later, Lena.’ Louise put the call through to the local station as she watched Lena and her companion strut away. If this was the start of some sort of expansion by the Widows, things on the avenue might be looking a little dicey for a while, and it was people like Lena who were likely to end up suffering the most from it.

24/4/2117.

The call had come through on a blocked number late in the evening and Louise had more or less expected that it would be Alison’s voice on the other end. ‘I’ve got a job for you. A simple delivery job, not exactly what I’d normally put you on, but it’s short notice and I need someone in the area.’

When Louise had found out the details, she was a little perplexed. ‘You do know that I put five of her people in prison yesterday, right?’

Alison had not been worried about that. ‘Black Widow contacted me. She knows I’m sending someone and she knows what will happen if she does anything untoward to my operative. This is business for her. If she’s going to be mad at you for doing your job, she’ll be mad on her own time.’

Louise walked up to the converted hotel which housed the Widows’ main HQ, hoping that Black Widow had the same sense of etiquette as Alison. Inside, the lower floors of the building were now a nightclub, moderately discreet from the outside, but very loud within. It featured cage dancers in the more forward areas and things just got more naked and wild as you moved inside, but Louise was not interested in that aspect of the business. She walked up to the reception area with its staff of lower-ranking Widows, noting the narrowing eyes as she approached.

‘Black Widow is expecting me,’ Louise said to one of the girls. ‘I’m her courier.’

Someone, it seemed, had passed word down that the boss was expecting someone and that they would introduce themselves in that manner. Frowning, the girl behind the counter said, ‘Elevators are on the right. Press the button for the top floor. You’ll be met up there.’ She was reaching for a phone as Louise turned to head for the elevators.

As the car went up ten floors, Louise had her pod run a check on munitions. Her pistols were loaded with lethal kinetic rounds. If Black Widow was going to do something stupid, she was going to get a very forceful response. But when the doors opened on the top floor, there was no sign of an unwelcoming committee. In fact, there was no sign of anyone. Frowning, Louise stepped out of the elevator into a wide, dimly lit hallway. She suspected it was mood lighting, though dim was a better description. Not that it made much difference to her. The decoration was heavy and the dark reds were also moody.

Across the room, a pair of heavy doors opened. ‘You do get around, Gunwitch.’ The speaker had to be Black Widow. She was a moderately tall woman, though Louise easily had a couple of centimetres on her, with a skin tone which suggested some Hispanic ancestry: dusky, smooth, and distinctly attractive. That went with the rest of her: a tightly muscled body with fairly long legs and a moderate bust was heavily displayed by a skirt even smaller than Louise’s and a top which was basically a sports bra. The low waistline of the skirt allowed her tattoo to peek out, a black widow spider design had been drawn on the front of her right hip. She had black hair which fell down over her breasts, full lips painted a rich, dark red, and her one visible eye was a brown almost dark enough to call black. The other eye was hidden behind a patch; Louise had heard that the Widow had lost it in a fight early in the life of her gang. The visible eye was watching Louise, appraising.

Louise raised an eyebrow. ‘Gunwitch? Okay, if you like. I’m here to do this delivery job you contracted for, though I’m not sure why you need outside help.’

‘I can’t be seen to be directly involved in this transaction. It’s as simple as that. Come through. I may be… displeased with your recent activities, but that can be reserved for a later date.’ Black Widow turned, walking back into the room beyond the doors, and Louise set off to follow her.

It seemed that the leader of the Widows lived in some comfort. The first room in her suite was a large lounge with a lot of soft sofas and a large entertainment system, and a bar off to one side. The décor still tended to the dark reds and the lighting remained moody. One wall of the room was equipped with a huge fireplace in which flames from some sort of gas burner were dancing, and in front of that was what looked like a very thick fur rug. Louise imagined that the Widow made her own entertainment there, but right now, the woman was headed for the bar.

‘Not, you understand, that I’m going to let the matter rest for long,’ Black Widow said as she reached under the bar counter. ‘I can’t allow someone to interfere with my plans the way you have and get away with it.’

Louise slipped her glasses off and hooked them into her bodice. When the Widow straightened up and placed a metal briefcase on the counter, she found herself looking into Louise’s white eyes. ‘Since you brought it up,’ Louise said, ‘you have to understand that I don’t feel I can let you push this expansion down the avenue. I know the girls down there and they won’t join you, or take being moved on well. Not everyone wants into your happy little girl’s club, but they do need to work. Push them off the avenue and they’ll be forced into Brooklyn and you know what it’s like in there on the street. Leave the avenue alone. If you don’t, I’ll have to do something about it. And if you come after me, well, you could stand to lose a few people. You come after any of my friends and I’ll take out your other eye.’

Not entirely sure what she should expect after her little speech, Louise was a little surprised when a slow smile touched the Widow’s lips. ‘I am not sure how things are going to work out between us,’ Black Widow said, ‘but I think it’s going to be fun finding out. I think I’m going to like you, Gunwitch. I’ll even reconsider the Industrial Avenue situation. I’m not saying I’ll stop… This is the package. The recipient knows the combination. You don’t need, or want, to know what’s in here. You know where you’re taking it?’

Louise nodded. ‘An address in Sky City.’

‘Right. Ask for Daz. And be careful. Another reason I’ve contracted this out is that I don’t trust him.’

‘You didn’t have to tell me that. If he tries to kill me, you might get me out of your hair without having to lift a finger.’

Black Widow’s smile broadened, revealing a lot of very white teeth. ‘Where would the fun be in that?’

Sky City District.

The address Louise had been given was on some sort of light industry park in the south-western corner of Sky City. Not the extreme south-west: as she exited the train, she looked to the west and the bulky shape of the Bay Park Fusion Reactor building which occupied the corner where the Sea Wall met the Bulkhead Wall. The buildings here were not the high-rise, glossy structures to the north. Here, the practicalities of life prevailed and someone had put up a lot of low structures for smaller businesses to work in, probably undercutting some of the rents in the Queens industrial zone to fill them.

There was no signage up on the building Louise had been directed to. There was a roller-shutter door which looked like it had never been used, and a human-sized door with a light over it. No windows, but there were cameras positioned at the corners of the building and one over the door. Louise figured that whoever was inside, this ‘Daz’ hopefully, was well aware that she was walking up to the door. It was locked, but there was an intercom buzzer beside it. Louise pressed the button.

‘Yes?’ The voice was male and sounded vaguely annoyed. Not a great sign.

‘I’m the courier,’ Louise replied. She lifted the case toward the camera. ‘I have a package for Daz.’

There was a short pause and then the door buzzed. ‘Right, come in.’ Pulling the door open, Louise stepped through the door and into an entrance lobby. The same voice spoke from an overhead speaker as soon as the door was closed. ‘Go through the door on your right. Daz will receive the package there.’

Louise looked to her right and spotted the door. It looked like a typical interior door, but her imaging system suggested that it was unusually thick and that the wall around it was the same. It could have just been insulation, or even something to ensure privacy, but somehow Louise thought that care was required. Black Widow did not trust Daz. Why she was doing business with someone she did not trust, Louise had no idea, but the cloak-and-dagger stuff going on here was making Louise think that trust was in short supply all round. She stepped toward the door, reaching back to take a stun disc from her pod as she did so.

Opening the door, Louise paused, scanning the room behind it. It looked like a small warehouse, complete with various packing crates littered about. But the external door to this area had looked unused and, when she checked, it seemed to have been entirely boarded over. So, the crates were there because… Because they made almost perfect cover for the men hiding behind them. Louise could make out infrared signatures, just about. She set her grenade to target one of the closer bodies, stepped in through the door, and let the grenade drop behind her. No one seemed to be watching her so the men were unlikely to know what she had just set loose, and they were unlikely to start anything until the door closed and she had moved into clearer space. She took three steps forward and heard the click as the door latched shut, saw the first stirrings of movement in the figures around the room, and let go of the case, reaching back for her pistols, and then her stun disc exploded in someone’s face, sending a flare of light out across the room.

There was a cry of ‘What the fuck was–’ but Louise did not wait for anyone to figure it out. She had targets, four of them, though one of those was currently blinded and reeling. She raised her pistols and turned, firing as her system indicated she was in position to hit a target. There was the sound of an automatic weapon firing, bullets impacted the ceiling and white powder began to float down. Four bodies hit the concrete floor and Louise turned, scanning for more shooters.

She was quite sure that Daz was not among this lot. He had been somewhere else, directing the operation through his cameras and speakers. At the darkened back of the storage room, Louise spotted a door and she headed for it, leaving the case and its mysterious contents behind her. She really did not care what was in there, or why Daz seemed determined to shoot the messenger: what she intended to do was make sure he never shot another one.

Raising her left pistol, she put three rounds through the locking mechanism on the door and then slammed her boot into it. Beyond was a corridor, a short one leading to another longer one which seemed to run from the front to the back of the building. Her guns swept up to either side as she reached the junction and she fired to the left as she got a target lock. Her head turned that way in time for her to see the man she had shot falling to the floor, a bullet hole in his forehead. Infrared suggested no other warm bodies in that direction and the walls in this part of the building looked thin. Louise turned to her right.

Still there was no one visible, but there was a void space toward the rear of the building. Thicker walls were screening one of the offices. Louise marched down the corridor until she found a locked door and fired three rounds into it. There was a sound like a cannon going off and a section of the door more or less vaporised under the impact of some high-calibre weapon fired from inside. The shooter had been firing blind, however, and all he succeeded in doing was making a hole big enough for Louise to toss a stun grenade through. It had not been targeted at anything and light flared through the hole in the door as it stabilised itself and immediately detonated. There was a rather high-pitched shriek from inside the room, and Louise kicked the door open.

Daz was a fairly well-built man in a very expensive suit. He was waving a big shotgun around, but since he could no longer see where he was shooting, it was not a major issue. Louise lifted a pistol and locked on, and paused. What was she supposed to do now? She had been attacked so she could probably have Daz put in Queens Prison for that at least. But then there would be a lot of questions about why she was there and what was in the case… And Louise got the feeling that, when she was working for Alison anyway, the police were not to be involved unless there was a specific directive to involve them. Louise pulled the trigger, ruining that expensive-looking suit, and then she put two more rounds into Daz’s head, just to be sure. And then she put through a call to a number she had been given ‘in case of emergency.’

‘Problem?’ Alison’s voice said before Louise was even aware the call had connected.

‘The recipient refused to sign for the package,’ Louise said. ‘He was quite forceful about it and I had to resort to being forceful back.’

Alison did not seem the least bit fazed by this. ‘I’ll take care of it. You’re secure?’

‘Currently, but I’d like to leave the area. What do I do with the package?’

‘Leave it there and go home. I’ll take care of everything.’

Louise turned and started down the corridor toward the front of the building. ‘Right. Is this sort of thing going to happen a lot working for you?’

There was a pause, as though Alison was considering just hanging up without answering. ‘I doubt you’re going to be bored working for me.’ And then the connection was closed.

‘Yeah,’ Louise muttered, handing her pistols back to her pod. ‘I need to get this corset fitted out with armour.’

Queens District, 25/4/2117.

‘I don’t really know a whole lot about Black Widow,’ Sarah said from the bathroom door. She was watching Louise looking at her breasts again, even if she was attempting to look like she was just having a conversation. ‘I’ve seen her. I know the story of her founding the Widows and losing her eye and stuff. I don’t really know much about her. I’m not sure anyone does.’

Louise shrugged. ‘I just wondered. You know, since you’re standing there ogling me, I thought I’d see if I could find out more about her.’

‘I am not ogling! I’m…’

‘Staring intently at my boobs?’

‘Yes. No! I’m having a conversation. About local VIPs, not your boobs.’

‘Uh-huh. What do you think of them?’

Her cheeks turning scarlet, Sarah choked a little and then rallied. ‘They’re good. I mean, they’re a nice shape and D-cup is a nice size.’

‘You’re a D-cup.’

‘See? Good size.’

‘You don’t think I need implants then?’

‘God, no! Why on Earth would you need implants?’

Louise turned from the mirror and reached for her bra. ‘I don’t. Obviously. Black Widow just seemed a bit… weird. I mean, she said something about not liking me kicking her girls around and then, when I told her I wasn’t going to let her take over the avenue without a fight, she… seemed to like it.’

‘Huh? Well, maybe she’s not used to someone standing up to her. Or she likes a challenge. I mean, she left Manhattan and forged herself a new gang, exclusively of women. That’s gotta take someone who likes a challenge, right?’

‘It’s a point,’ Louise agreed.

‘Or maybe she fancies you.’

Louise coughed. ‘Beg pardon?’

‘Maybe she fancies you. You’re beautiful and a bit crazy. So’s she. Some people really like someone who’s willing to stand up to them. They don’t get it a lot and it adds spice.’

‘Right…’ Louise frowned at her reflection in the bra she was wearing. An idea began to percolate. ‘Somehow, I don’t think that’s it. She did say she’d reconsider her policy on the avenue, so I guess we’ll see what happens.’

Sarah grinned. ‘I guess we will. My money’s on you, just for the record.’

‘Your confidence and loyalty are both noted and appreciated. I need to work on some code.’

‘Code?’

‘Mm, just an idea I had. We’ll see how that goes too.’

26/4/2117.

Louise opened her eyes, checked the time and her morning diagnostic read-out, and grinned. Slipping out of bed, she headed for the bathroom. She always timed her waking to give her shower time before she woke Sarah, which she inevitably had to do, but this morning she wanted the bathroom to herself for another reason. There were experimental results to examine and experiments were among Louise’s favourite things.

Starting the shower, she turned to the mirror and examined herself. She nodded. Nothing too excessive, very much not implants: improvement, yes, but without surrendering herself to Sandy’s suggested course of action. ‘I have feminist principles to think of,’ Louise told her reflection. Her reflection would, she thought, have raised an eyebrow if physics allowed it. ‘You can shut up,’ Louise told it, and turned to the shower.

~~~

‘Not in your corset?’ Sarah asked as she blinked sleepily through the kitchen hatch at Louise.

‘Uh, no,’ Louise replied. ‘I’m going straight to the workshop, so I didn’t bother getting dressed up.’ There was, actually, a far more embarrassing reason for Louise to be in a cropped T-shirt and jeans, but she was not going to tell Sarah what it was.

‘Okay. You going to be late or should I expect you and Mickey outside the gate?’

Louise did a few calculations in her head. ‘I’ll probably meet you there.’

‘Cool. I think it’s a good thing you’re taking me this morning. I am having so much trouble waking up.’

‘I told you that wine was a bad idea.’

‘But it was on offer! And it was pretty good, right?’

‘Uh-huh. But I don’t get hangovers now.’

As Sarah began to deny her hungover state, Louise smiled. Maybe it was the drowsiness, but so far Sarah had not noticed a thing. Louise was wondering when her friend would spot the change. She figured, Sarah being that kind of girl, it would not take too long.

~~~

Mickey had noticed. Well, he had not exactly noticed what had changed, but he knew that there was a change and part of it was that Louise was pleased with herself.

Louise had installed a full-length mirror in the workshop because she did manufacture clothes there, or planned to, and wanted to be able to check the fit without having to go home. Right now, as the big chest thing that hummed a lot was busy humming over something Louise had programmed into it as soon as she had got in, Louise was standing in front of the mirror, topless, examining the results of her overnight experiment more thoroughly.

‘I just changed the shape,’ Louise said. Mickey settled his chin more comfortably on his paws and looked at her. ‘They aren’t actually any bigger, they’re just… more upright.’ She flicked a glance at Mickey. ‘It’s not cheating, and I’ll thank you to keep your accusations to yourself.’ Mickey made not a single sound. ‘It’s just rigging. It’s exactly like wearing a push-up bra, just I don’t have to wear a bra. It’s not breast implants, I’m not caving to pressure, and you are not getting another steak.’

Mickey relaxed his awesome, doggy telepathic powers. Some you won, some you lost.

~~~

Sarah frowned as she walked down the steps to where Louise and Mickey were waiting for her. ‘Is that a new corset?’

‘Uh, it’s the same design, but it is new, yes,’ Louise replied. ‘I decided I needed a bit more protection. This one has armour over, well, most of my vital organs.’

Sarah pursed her lips. ‘Same design, just armoured?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘No, there’s definitely something…’ Sarah’s eyes widened. ‘What did you do to your boobs? Even if you changed the corset, they shouldn’t be that… up-thrust.’

Louise turned on her heel and started for home, mostly to hide her smirk. ‘I had my nanomachines put in some rigging. It’s like having an internal push-up bra. They’re not bigger, they’re just firmer and more–’

‘Up-thrust. Can you do that to me?’

Louise giggled. ‘Not really. You don’t have the cybernetic additions. Well, I suppose I could work something out, but you don’t need anything like this.’

‘Neither did you.’

‘Apparently, that was debatable. But you think it looks good?’

‘Could I kind of jam my face in your cleavage and lick them all over?’

Louise giggled again. ‘No.’

‘In that case, I think they look absolutely terrible. And the next time I see you without a bra on, I’m going to make catty comments about your cellulite.’

Louise frowned and, without really thinking about it, looked down at her thighs. ‘I don’t have–’

‘Ha! Made you look.’

Sky City District, 28/4/2117.

The problem that had spurred Louise to make the new corset was the same one she had with a lot of her clothes. The T-shirt had been okay since it was designed to just hang over her chest, but most of her dresses, and her combat suit, were going to need refitting. On the plus side, Louise could do that herself as she was quite good at sewing. On the minus side, it was going to take time to go through everything and make the adjustments.

The black tank dress she had bought for her Perfect Partners interview was something of a case in point. She had been directed to a studio in Sky City to get some stills taken for her portfolio, so she had pulled the dress out again, put it on, and it was the corset all over again. When she had tried her corset on that first morning after her ‘experiment,’ it had fitted, but if she jumped or moved too fast, there had been about a fifty-fifty chance of severe wardrobe malfunction. The dress fitted, but now the edges of her areolae tended to show over the low neckline. It was going to need adjusting, but she had no time for that and it did not look too bad…

And it also seemed that it did not matter. Sandy had said that there would be a couple of head and shoulder shots, maybe a profile, and a couple of full-body pictures. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes and Louise would be out and on her way. Well, the photographer seemed to have other ideas, not to mention a strong desire to get Louise out of her dress for as many poses as he could manage. The more she posed, the more he snapped.

‘Thart’s it, dahling. Flick the haar. Yas, perfect. Just poosh those out in front, darling. Yas, perfect. Point the toes, dahling. Yaaas!’ Oh, and he also had the most outlandish accent Louise had ever heard. She was sure he was putting it on, but… whatever.

After two hours, he had taken enough pictures to fill a major gallery, but had finally declared that he had enough and ‘Yas’ it was perfect. Feeling vaguely shell-shocked, Louise got dressed and wandered out into the midday sun of Sky City vowing never to go near a photographic studio ever again.

Queens District.

‘Did you know,’ Louise said, ‘that there used to be tribes around who refused to have their pictures taken because they believed the process would suck out their soul and trap it in the picture?’

Sarah looked up from her algebra homework. Any distraction was worth it when you were doing algebra homework. ‘I did not know that, no.’

‘I always thought it was superstitious garbage, but I’m wondering whether they might have something. I’m sure that guy today was at least trying to suck my soul out of my body.’

There was a giggle, followed by, ‘I thought he was just trying to suck your clothes off.’

‘Huh. Well, he managed that. I’m not sure Sandy wanted “tasteful nude” shots, but that’s what she’s getting.’

‘Maybe we could get a few of them printed,’ Sarah suggested, looking back down at her problem. ‘You know, blown up and framed for the wall…’

‘You are not getting framed nudes of me on the wall, young lady.’

‘Spoilsport.’

Louise looked around and smiled. Then her eyes lifted to the wall which was kind of empty… She shook her head and went back to cooking. No, that was just a little too egocentric.

29/4/2117.

The only reason that Louise spotted the note hidden among various diagnostic messages in her morning read-out was that, given the relatively recent installation of her new immune system, she was paying attention and looking for anomalies. Even now, not that long after she had deployed Project Omega, she was getting complacent about it, but the notice of detection and elimination of a nanoviral threat caught her attention.

With the information she had gathered on the virus Jenny had been infected with, Louise had programmed her system with data allowing it to counteract that nanobug if it ever encountered it, but everything else was supposed to be learned as Louise met new problems. This one was not new, but it was not the ‘vampire’ virus either. She dug into the details.

Another virus recognition template had been created while the system was being initialised, one she had not programmed in and had not noticed, though when she checked the, very long, report on the process, sure enough it had been noted. The template had been inferred from her body’s own natural defence mechanisms and simply noted as ‘Immune Response Action 47A.’ Helpful. But it had been for a nanovirus, not a natural virus, and there was only one nanovirus Louise knew of that she was supposed to be immune to…

Worried now, she checked the time her system had responded to the infection. There had been various instances of viral material entering her body via the lungs and nasal tissues, all of them after Sarah had got home from school.

‘Shit,’ Louise said, and Mickey’s ears pricked up. ‘Double shit with shit sprinkled on top.’

Mickey got to his feet. Louise was busy swinging her legs out of bed in a manner that suggested some form of action was needed, and she rarely used the kinds of words she was using right now unless there was really something wrong… If only he knew what so that he could fix it.

Louise was busy putting a call through to the local hospital. She had the direct number of a certain epidemiologist who was likely to be the best person to deal with the situation, and the emergency number was just going to cause more trouble.

The call connected. ‘Doctor Mitre? It’s Louise Barrington. You remember we met when– Yes, exactly. I think I’ve got a bigger problem for you. I’m not absolutely sure, and I’d really like you to tell me I’m wrong, but I think my housemate has contracted the Damnation Plague.’

~~~

Sarah looked scared and confused which, Louise thought, she had a right to. She was locked away in an isolation room and the only people she was being allowed to see were dressed in biohazard suits, and none of them were telling her what was going on.

Louise turned from the observation window as Doctor Mitre entered in scrubs. ‘Doctor?’ Louise asked. The rest of the question was unsaid, but obvious.

‘You were right,’ Mitre said. Louise had known it just from the telltale signs she was seeing: anxiety suppressed with all his might in the interests of his patient’s friend. ‘I’ve detected viral material in her blood. It’s the Damnation Plague. She’s not showing symptoms yet so the infection must have occurred recently. A day or two ago.’

Louise turned her attention back to the window. ‘The only likely source is the school.’

‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

‘You ran my blood at the same time?’

Mitre raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes. There are plenty of things in there which, frankly, none of us have the slightest idea about, but you’re clear of the plague. As you said you would be. That is fascinating technology you have there, Miss Barrington.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ Louise said, frowning. ‘Her chances are beyond slim, aren’t they? And she won’t be the only one?’

‘Once symptoms begin to show… She’ll have days. I’d imagine that others will exhibit the effects and go before her. She can’t be the first person infected; she won’t be the first to die.’

‘What is the enclave doing about it?’

‘They’ve started. Queens is being put on curfew. Essential movement only. I suggested they implement that over the whole enclave, but they’ve ignored me so far. They believe it’s a small outbreak and can be contained.’

Louise sniffed. ‘I doubt it. I’m going to need access to your data on the nanovirus, Doctor. Everything you have. And I’m going to need you to get me on that list of essential personnel. I need to get to my workshop.’

‘You don’t think–’

‘I think that if I start work now, base the tech off the machines in my own system, and have enough data, then I might be able to come up with something which will save her life. Probably a few others too, but you’ll forgive me for thinking of my friend first. The problem is going to be volume. If the disease is allowed to spread too far… I have limited production capacity and I won’t be able to keep up with demand if too many people are infected.’

Mitre nodded, but there was a hint of hope in his anxiety now. ‘You really think you can cure it?’

‘Cure, yes. I think I can make a hunter-killer nanomachine with the plague virus as a specific target. What I can’t do so easily is make something to inoculate people against it. That’s a whole different kettle of fish which… It’s possible, but we need it now, not in a couple of months. In Utopia City, everyone’s inoculated against it at birth. If I hadn’t just trashed my immune system, I might have been able to reverse engineer something, but…’

‘We’re stuck with fire-fighting instead of prevention. It’s better than watching everyone die, Miss Barrington. I’ll get the paperwork started to have you listed as essential medical personnel.’

Louise nodded, her eyes on Sarah. ‘Thank you, Doctor. I’ll get started as soon as possible.’

~~~

The streets of Queens were unnaturally quiet. Industrial Avenue was empty of girls and even the Cyber-Kings seemed to have decided that the threat of biological hazard was something they should consider before breaking the curfew.

There were LIPD officers wearing filter masks at the gate into the industrial zone. They checked Louise’s ID before allowing her through, without actually making contact and with their hands near their weapons. It was not, entirely, paranoid; the infection process for the Damnation Plague was relatively well known and Louise had been a little surprised to discover that the documentation on the virus which she had available to her here was better than what she knew from Utopia City.

She had spent her time walking from the hospital to her workshop familiarising herself with the information Doctor Mitre had given her, and it was impressive. Infection could be achieved in almost any way imaginable. The virus could enter the body on prepared foods through the digestive tract. It could enter via mucous membranes, which meant it was transmissible through unprotected sex, on the skin into eyes or mouth, or directly into the bloodstream through a wound. Infected individuals breathed out viral particles even before symptoms developed, and those could be breathed in to cause infection. If you could avoid exposure, and most of the usual antiviral barrier techniques worked for that, you were fairly safe. If you were exposed, however, there was little chance that the infection would fail to take.

Once infected, symptoms could take anything from four to fourteen days to show up, but you were already living on borrowed time. The first symptom to show up, almost immediately once the disease began to bite, was joint pain. That was followed quickly by photosensitivity and an intolerance to pain, which made the joint aches worse, then nausea, muscle pain, blindness, haemophilia, yet more pain… Soon, the victims were left in total agony and needed artificial respirators to keep breathing, and if they survived that, they faced seizures which tended to toss blood and other bodily fluids around. It was a horrible way to die and some said that surviving it, which was rare, could be worse than succumbing.

What Mitre and his people had, largely obtained in the latter years of the first outbreaks, was more detailed structural data than Louise had ever seen in Utopia City. She recognised the virus as an organic nanomachine and so found some of its capabilities to be less surprising than the people who had gathered the information, but it was still a marvel of engineering. What had been thought to be a rapid mutation of the protein shell structure by the biologists, Louise saw as a rather clever camouflage trick. The plague virus was able to alter its outer structure to make it look different in almost every victim. Certainly, she doubted you would see a repeated pattern in most city-sized populations. Creating any normal vaccine for such a beast would be extremely difficult.

It was possible to see where Mitre had thought the vampire virus appeared to be similar, however. Louise began running a full analysis of the basic protein structures even before she got to her workshop, but there were clear similarities. And she was sure that that was the way to attack the virus. She was not aiming to make something which would protect its host the way her own nanomachines did; what Louise was aiming at was a specific nanophage machine designed to infect the host, locate the plague virus, and destroy it.

Down in her workshop, Louise took off her arming pod and placed it on the floor beside Mickey’s basket while her dog, which she had decided to pick up on the way there, settled onto his bed with a worried look in his eyes.

‘Okay, Mickey,’ Louise said, ‘for once, I won’t be shooting my way out of the situation. This is going to be one time when it’s all down to brain power. Sarah’s going to be dead if I can’t do this, so–’

Mickey stopped her with a bark, lifting his head off his paws and staring at her.

‘You’re right. I should stop second-guessing myself and just damn well fix this.’

Once again, Mickey settled his chin on his paws. Louise would fix it. If his mistress could not fix whatever was wrong with Sarah, there was no way any other human could.

1/5/2117.

The staff at the hospital were all looking the most tense that they had been since Sarah was brought in, and Sarah had noticed. It had taken her a day to find out what it was they thought she had. No one had wanted to tell her in case she panicked, and she had, but she had done it quietly and in the knowledge that Louise was working on something which would cure her. Louise had never once lied to Sarah, that she knew of. She had not told her the whole truth about everything, but she did not lie. If Louise thought she had a way of saving the day, then Sarah knew that her friend would move Heaven and Earth to do it.

On the other hand, Louise looked less than happy when she entered the isolation room Sarah was housed in. At first, Sarah thought something might have gone wrong, but then she started recognising signs of tiredness. Louise was, mostly, tired and Sarah flashed her a smile.

‘How come you don’t have to wear one of those plastic suits when you visit?’ Sarah asked because it was not a question about how things were going.

‘Because no virus in its right mind would try to attack me,’ Louise replied, smiling back as she pulled up a chair and flopped into it. ‘I’m immune. I was before I implemented my new immune system, and the immunity carried over. My system learned how to block the plague virus from my body. I just wish it was easy to get what it learned out. It’s embedded in the nanomachines and they were never designed to read back their learned programming. Not every design flaw is weeded out during prototyping.’

‘Hopefully, this cure you’re making will not have design flaws.’ Sarah grinned to be sure Louise knew she was joking, but Louise seemed too tired to care that much.

‘I’m sure it’ll have a couple, but nothing that’s going to make any difference. I’m making progress. I just had to take a break before I fell over.’

‘If you’re too tired to think straight, you’ll make mistakes. You make sure you get your rest, young lady. And enough to eat.’

‘Yes, Mother. Mickey’s keeping me on the straight and narrow, don’t worry. They, uh, got their first patients with symptoms today.’

Sarah grimaced. ‘Is that why everyone’s looking more worried?’

‘Probably. There were two in Queens this afternoon, but that was after they got three before breakfast in Sky City. The count is up to seventeen, and that includes three in Greenland and two in Hamptonville. The government has enforced an enclave-wide curfew. It’s really quiet out there, Sarah.’

Sarah shook her head. She felt fine and was rather annoyed to be cooped up in the hospital room, but it sounded like being outside would not be much more fun. ‘How could this happen? There hasn’t been any sign of the Damnation Plague in years.’

‘No… No, I went over the records Doctor Mitre has. This area has had no cases since the establishment of the enclave. There have been a few outbreaks in some of the other enclaves, but not in over a decade. From what I’ve heard, the current theory is that someone illegal, probably from one of the wasteland gangs, brought it in, but I don’t think that makes sense given the pattern of victims that’s showing up now.’

‘So, what do you think?’

‘They’ve had basically no cases in Brooklyn and more in Sky City than in Queens. The cases in Greenland and Hamptonville can be explained by people going to Sky City for meetings. I think someone’s deliberately spreading it. They went for the school in Queens because it’s one of the few places you can guarantee a large crowd and extended exposure. They chose several sites in Sky City, because there are more places like that to work with. Government offices, commercial offices, theatres… I think this is a deliberate, biological attack.’

‘By who?’ Sarah’s eyes were wide, shocked.

‘If I had to guess… There’s only one group of people who could spread this disease without ending up as victims themselves. That I know of anyway. I think this has come from Utopia City.’

‘Probably best if you don’t mention that to too many people.’

Louise nodded. ‘I’m not anxious to have it be public knowledge, but I’m going to tell someone. Maybe she can make something useful from it, because I can’t think of anything right now. Knowing how this started is never going to be as much use as knowing how to stop it.’

2/5/2117.

‘We had the first two deaths today,’ Mitre said. He was watching Sarah through the observation window and Louise had just joined him. ‘They were both in Sky City, but one of the patients here won’t make it through the night.’ His voice sounded hollow. He sounded hollow, as though the loss of someone to the disease was a deep, personal wound the man found intolerable. The only way he could deal with it was to empty himself of emotion and push on.

‘I’m sorry,’ Louise said, not knowing what else to say.

‘How’s your work coming along? Nothing we do does anything more than stave off the inevitable.’

‘It’s… coming. Another two days. Maybe three. That’ll be a couple of samples ready for human testing. You’ll need some subjects. I, um… Look, I’m trying everything I know to test this stuff. Modelling, tissue and blood tests, and more modelling.’

‘But when it comes to it, you won’t know whether it works, or even whether it’s safe, until it’s tried on a patient.’

‘That. Yeah. I’m rushing this a little. I read the data you got me and I knew we’d be seeing corpses soon and…’

Mitre’s eyes stayed on Sarah. ‘And one of those corpses could be hers so you’re motivated. Tell me something. Do you have something we could use, right now, to cure her? To cure all of them?’

‘I have something which kills the virus. That was easy. Damn, it’s an organic structure and there are plenty of things which could destroy it, but pretty much all of them would kill the patient faster than the virus does. What I have now is probably safe, but–’

‘But you’re testing in as many ways as you can. I do not believe you are rushing, Miss Barrington. Many might take far greater risks. When I was your age, I… I believe I would have tried what I had and prayed.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t believe in the God you people seem to put so much faith in, Doctor. I have to believe in the science and the science says I should make a few more checks. Can I get blood samples from as many of the patients you have in as possible? I can run batches, check for adverse reactions.’

‘I’ll make arrangements,’ Mitre said and turned to leave.

Louise made her way through the airlock into Sarah’s room. The blonde girl smiled; she was still showing no symptoms though, from all the information Louise had, her body would now be almost saturated in infected cells.

‘Hey,’ Sarah said. ‘You’re looking a little less washed out. Any news from outside? They really don’t tell me much.’

Louise thought of the deaths, and the ones soon to come, and she fixed a smile on her face. ‘Nothing much. I’m still working on the cure. Should be ready to test on Wednesday. I think they’ll want to try it on some of the more seriously affected patients first, but… Well, we’re getting there.’

Sarah’s smile looked just as forced now. ‘Wednesday? I might be one of the seriously affected patients by then.’

‘Nope,’ Louise replied. ‘I’m betting the stuff figures out how awesome you are and decides not to affect you at all.’

‘Oh yeah, sure. You’re just trying to make me feel better.’

‘Is it working?’

Sarah held up her thumb and forefinger, measuring a centimetre or so between them. ‘Little bit,’ she said.

5/5/2117.

It was just after one in the morning when Louise burst through the doors of the medical centre, Mickey right on her heels. Security guards started toward her, but they halted when they recognised her. It was the nurse on reception who let out a shriek when she saw the dog who was not going to be so easily pacified.

‘You cannot bring that animal in here! It’s unsanitary! It’s–’

‘You have a plague outside which only affects humans,’ Louise interrupted, ‘and you’re worried about a dog?’

‘Pets are not–’

Louise yanked off her glasses. ‘He’s my seeing-eye dog. I’m clearly blind, right?’

‘You’re not fooling anyone with that one.’

‘Fine! Mickey, stay with the nurse.’ Louise turned, poking a finger into the nurse’s chest as the woman’s eyes widened. ‘He is a very good dog. Very obedient. He will be no trouble. If he is not here waiting for me when I come out, I will shoot you in the face. Please would you page Doctor Mitre and have him meet me in isolation. He’ll know what it’s about. It’s urgent.’

Apparently, news of what ‘the woman with the weird eyes’ was doing with Mitre had spread further afield than Louise might have expected. The nurse’s expression shifted. Hope pushed surprise and anger out of the way. Maybe this nurse had someone she knew in the isolation ward. ‘I’ll let him know you’re on your way. A-and don’t worry about the dog. He’ll be safe with me.’

‘Mickey,’ Louise said. ‘His name’s Mickey.’

‘Right. Come on, Mickey. We’ll go call the doctor, shall we?’

Mickey gave a short bark. Louise suspected he might have been saying, ‘Yes, let’s do that, stupid human woman who is not my glorious mistress,’ but maybe that was reading too much into a relatively short sound. Maybe.

~~~

‘I have two people I’d like to try it on,’ Mitre said as he rushed to put his biohazard suit on.

‘I’ve got three trial doses,’ Louise said, ‘so that’s good, but slow down with that suit before you rip something. I’d rather not have the senior epidemiologist in the isolation ward as a patient.’

Mitre paused, took a breath, and did begin being more meticulous about his dressing. ‘You’re right. I cautioned you not to rush… However, one of the patients is in the final stages. We’ve already had to intubate. We’ll likely have seizures and probably death within eight hours.’

Louise bit her lip and checked her notes. ‘That’s not patient one nine two seven D six, is it?’

‘I’d have to check. I don’t think so. Why?’

‘I found an adverse reaction in one of the samples you gave me. That patient number. The nanomachines I’ve made will attack some of their cells. It’s an unusual protein structure which is close to the one targeted in the plague virus. I don’t think it would kill them on its own, but it’ll cause damage and if someone with that tissue type is close to death anyway…’

‘The cure could kill them.’ Mitre nodded. ‘We’ll check. I don’t suppose you know how common that tissue variation is?’

Louise shrugged. ‘You’ve given me fifty-nine samples and one of them was affected. But it’s not a big enough sample size to be sure of the overall population.’

Mitre sighed, his helmet in his hands. ‘Frankly, these people are dead without your cure, no matter what odd side effects we may encounter. We go ahead and try it, and if it won’t offend you too much, I’m going to pray. If that patient you identified isn’t one of the ones I’ve preselected, we may use that third dose on them, depending upon their current state. If we know what to expect, we’ll be ready to help others who exhibit the same problem.’

Louise flashed him a smile as he pulled his helmet on. ‘And that’s why I’m the engineer and you’re the doctor.’ Mitre just smiled back. ‘Oh, and if you want to pray, you go ahead,’ Louise added. ‘It can’t make things worse and maybe you’re right.’

~~~

Louise started awake at the sound of Mitre’s office door closing. She had fallen asleep in his chair, leaning over his desk, which was not the best place to pass out, and she found herself having to wipe drool off her chin as she looked up, blinking, to see the doctor not paying attention to her. Considering the drool, she thought that was a good thing. Mitre looked tired, more or less exhausted actually, but there were other emotional traces vying to control his expression and Louise smiled at him.

‘It worked,’ she said.

His head turned and he saw her white eyes looking up at him. ‘I was hoping I hadn’t woken you. Yes, it worked. The labs rushed the analysis, but they’re sure the virus is gone from the first patient to recover. The one we were more worried about took longer to respond. The lab hasn’t even started checking yet, but we’ve been able to take them off life support and the seizures we expected never came. I believe we can say that your cure works.’

Louise’s eyes narrowed. ‘What about the third patient? The one I got the bad reaction with?’

Mitre nodded and sighed. ‘Yes. The cure worked, but there were some complications. Reduction in white blood cell count, essentially. The cure is impairing their immune system. We’re attempting to regenerate it, but so far that is not working well.’

Brow furrowed, Louise looked down at the table for several seconds. ‘The nanomachines were programmed to terminate when they could no longer find viral cells to eliminate. They degrade and get flushed from the body normally. But in that patient, they’re being fooled into thinking they still have work to do. They’ll keep killing cells so long as the body keeps producing them.’

‘Is there a way to stop them?’

‘Does the patient have any cybernetics? Particularly heart, lungs, vital stuff?’

‘No. I’ll double-check, but no.’

‘We hit them with an EMP. Fairly big one. The police should have something suitable. I have an EMP weapon, but I think we need something bigger. EMP will take out the nanomachines, then you just have to keep the patient alive while they recover normally. I’ll put a kill switch into the next generation so we don’t need to resort to police anti-robot weaponry.’

Despite his weariness, Mitre smiled. ‘When can we expect the next generation?’

‘I’ll go back and make the adjustments now. I can have… a couple of hundred doses ready by tomorrow. If I can get the time to get my second fabricator finished, I can get almost five hundred a day out.’

Mitre pursed his lips and then nodded. ‘You focus on your second machine. I’ll have medical delivery drivers come out to your workshop every… Let’s say every four hours from midday today. There are thousands of victims that we know about already, Miss Barrington. We need all the doses we can get.’

6/5/2117.

Louise had invested in certain security measures at her workshop. There were cameras, and the cameras were hooked up to a computer running some fairly basic AI software which Louise had cobbled together using the threat analysis system from her internal computer. Identified threats were categorised and forwarded to her, and then the camera view would appear for Louise to make her own assessment. She had much of the street outside covered from several angles and was fairly sure that nothing much could get near her building without her noticing.

The threat which reared its head just after nine a.m., the morning after she had completed her second nanofabricator, was not exactly a threat, more of an annoyance. It did pose a threat to her work, however, and she started up the stairs to the ground floor as soon as she saw the two large black cars with their LIPD escort pulling up outside the building.

There were men in suits waiting outside when she raised the metal shutter. No good ever came of men in suits. In particular, no good ever came of men in suits wearing a superior attitude. Louise frowned. ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ she asked.

‘Miss Louise Barrington,’ one of the men said, lifting his chin a little so that he could try to look down his nose at her. Louise was about to acknowledge her name when the man continued. ‘Under the strictures of the current emergency, the Long Island Enclave is confiscating your equipment to ensure–’

‘You are not going to do any such thing,’ Louise interrupted.

‘I don’t believe you understand, Miss Barrington,’ the man said, smiling while various LIPD officers moved their hands to their weapons. ‘Under the strictures–’

‘Nuh-huh, no strictures. Here are the facts, Mister Government Official. The machines currently producing some four hundred and eighty doses per day of a vital nanodrug that is going to save the lives of your citizens are very delicate and fairly large. If you move them, they will have to be dismantled and reassembled at your chosen location. It took me almost a month to manufacture and construct the second one, and it will take a good two weeks to pull them apart and rebuild them. That’s fourteen days and the loss of six thousand seven hundred and twenty doses of the cure. You will have consigned almost seven thousand people to a horrible death. What was your name again? I want to be sure I get it right for the newspapers.’

The official blanched, but what he said was, ‘I have my orders. Are you unwilling to comply with the enclave’s request, Miss Barrington?’

‘Given that the enclave is making a huge mistake on the assumption that they can take control of production of the drug… Yes, I’m refusing to comply.’ Louise was no longer really watching the man she was talking to; her threat assessment software was flagging the six cops as an immediate threat and, given the numbers, her system was busy loading lethal rounds into her pistols. ‘I suggest you confirm your orders with your superiors, given what I’ve just told you. Preferably before this situation gets any more tense.’

The man was about to speak when his phone rang. He frowned and then tapped at the wireless unit in his ear. ‘Yes? Uh, but… No, I understand, but– Very well.’ He tapped the earbud again and his frown deepened as he looked back toward Louise. ‘It seems that my orders have changed. We will be placing a rotating LIPD security force outside your facility to ensure its safety.’ The cops, and Louise, relaxed.

‘That’s… sensible,’ Louise replied and turned to walk back into the building.

As she did so, her computer popped up a message window indicating the arrival of a text message. It simply said, You’re welcome. A.

Louise did her best not to smirk as she closed the shutters, though it did beg the question: how had Alison known what was going on?

7/5/2117.

Louise was pulled out of a fitful sleep, this time leaning over her own desk, by her remote threat assessment software and, at first, she could not work out what the problem was. The camera feeds which had triggered the alert were clear. There was no sign of anything which would constitute a hazard of any kind. She was about to run a diagnostic check on the system to uncover the reason for the error when she realised what she was not seeing: there were no cops visible outside the building.

Accessing the video feed, Louise pulled up the last five minutes from the buffer and ran it through until she saw the two cops who had been on duty being attacked. They had gone down quietly, hit from behind, and their attackers had not shown up on video. Louise turned back to the live feed from the camera monitoring the shutter and switched it over to infrared. There were two figures crouched in front of the shutter’s external locking mechanism, invisible to the unaided eye. One was a lookout while the other worked on bypassing the code lock.

Louise frowned. She had never seen any of the Cyber-Kings sporting camouflage systems, but it was possible that some of the ones from Manhattan had obtained the technology from the UDF. Possible, but not especially likely. The Infiltrator technology was fairly tightly controlled; only the SAU was supposed to have that level of cybernetic tech, though Louise obviously knew that the Insurgency had it, if only from defecting SAU personnel. And that was the thing: it seemed way more plausible that Louise was watching SAU operatives trying to break into her workshop.

She got to her feet and Mickey lifted his head. ‘Stay here, Mickey,’ Louise said. ‘I have some business to take care of upstairs.’

~~~

There was the clunk of latches unhooking and one of the Infiltrators, the lookout, glanced back at her colleague with a grin. ‘Nice work,’ she said over the radio.

‘I didn’t–’ The denial was terminated as something trailing white smoke zipped into the space between them from under the rising shutter and exploded. There was white light and suddenly neither of the two could see.

Louise moved forward from the rear of the darkened interior, her pistols at the ready. The two UDF operatives were quite visible now. One man, one woman, both naked so that their camouflage system worked properly. Two Infiltrators… It was possible that they had been sent as an assassination team, but…

Lightning streamed through the air, missing Louise and striking the concrete wall at the rear of the room. Her targeting system identified the two new threats as they emerged from cover on the opposite side of the street. A Tank and a Gunner, the latter using the former as a shield as he moved out onto the roadway, preparing a second shot. Louise fired first and three rounds arced out through the space between them. Louise saw the Gunner’s eyes widen just before he was hit in the head by three bullets which punched through his skull and then turned his brain into pulp. Three rounds had been total overkill, but Louise was not worried about conserving ammo.

The Tank let out a roar of anger and reached for the assault weapon slung across his back. The roar had been one of anger, but it also seemed to serve another purpose. From behind the big cyborg, a dozen more appeared, though they were significantly less threatening than the SAU man. Cyber-Kings, all of them armed, and Louise went into all-out attack mode as her system locked its targets. Smoking bullets streamed from her guns and the Cyber-Kings fell. Even the Tank was staggered by the impact, but the penetrator could not punch through his dermal armour and reinforced skull. He raised his weapon and opened fire.

There was not as much pain as Louise had expected. Somehow, she had expected that being shot would cause a lot of pain, but what she felt was a weird numbness, as though someone had just cut all the nerves to her abdomen at once. There were numerous alarms going off in her head, messages indicating that her body had taken a massive amount of damage in the abdominal cavity. So much for the armoured corset. She staggered backward, into the cover of the stairwell down to the workshop, reaching back as she did so.

More bullets slammed into the concrete walls, but now she was behind one of them. The Tank was not the sharpest of combatants: he was wasting a lot of ammo hitting nothing but wall. However, he was very hard to hurt. He had weak points, but they were basically just his eyes and those were hard targets to hit, even if you were not bleeding all over the place. Louise dropped a triage grenade at her feet and waited for a gap in the firing.

By the time it came, Louise was already feeling the effects of the enhanced nanomachines from the grenade, which meant her wound was closing, but she was starting to sweat. She ducked her head out to see the Tank swapping the magazine in his carbine, standing right in the doorway of the shopfront. Of course, Tanks had one other minor weak point which most people were not really equipped to exploit; Louise tossed a stun grenade out into the room and then ducked back behind the wall.

When she stepped back out into the room, the Tank was on the floor where he had fallen as his cybernetics had shut down. That was the thing about Tanks, and the main reason she had built the stun grenade devices: they were incredibly tough, but if you disabled all the mechanical enhancements, they were basically quadriplegics with thick skin. Louise looked down at him as he struggled to move with what little organic muscle the technicians and surgeons had left for him. Her pistol rose to aim at his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ Louise said, and then she pulled the trigger.

~~~

Louise watched the body bags being loaded into a van outside her workshop and sighed. Two of the bags contained the bodies of LIPD officers.

‘Is there any indication of how they found out where this place is?’ Louise asked.

The senior officer on the scene, Louise had never got his name, gave a shrug. ‘If there is, no one’s told me. We’re increasing the LIPD presence in the area. They’ll have heavy weapons available in two hours.’

Louise nodded. ‘Make sure they have infrared goggles or something similar available. The Infiltrator cybernetics don’t work well in the infrared. Body heat still shows up. Though, to be honest, I don’t think they’ll try again.’ She lifted a couple of plastic vials and peered at the red liquid within them. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have an analysis to run.’ She turned toward the shuttered front of the building.

‘Uh, sure. What’ve you got there?’

‘Blood from the Infiltrators. Utopia City citizens are immune to the plague. If I’m lucky, I can find out why.’

‘You think you can inoculate people against it?’

‘It’s been done before. I just hope I can reverse engineer it. If I can…’

‘Huh. If you can, someone might give you a medal.’

Louise looked down at her corset, which now had a hole in it she was going to have to repair. ‘Where are they going to pin it?’

8/5/2117.

The call had come through from Mitre early in the afternoon and by the time Louise had got the latest batch of cures sorted out and rushed to the hospital, Sarah was unconscious. The symptoms had started up: nausea, pain, and photosensitivity in one rapidly developing rush of discomfort. They had sedated her and Louise had watched as Mitre personally administered the injection before retreating to let it work. Louise had not retreated.

Sarah opened her eyes, blinked a couple of times in the dim light, and then resolved the shape sitting at the side of her bed. ‘Louise?’ There was a soft ‘ruff!’ from below bed level. ‘And Mickey? How did you get Mickey in here?’

Louise grinned, lines of worry washing away in the relief of seeing Sarah awake and, apparently, no longer in pain. ‘Doctor Mitre snuck him in the back way. He said that Mickey was actually safer to have in the building than most of the humans. How are you feeling?’

‘I feel… a little weak, but the pain’s gone. And the light doesn’t hurt my eyes.’ Sarah pushed herself into a more upright position and grinned. ‘And I don’t feel like throwing up any more. They gave me your cure?’

‘Hand delivered and personally stuck in your arm by the good doctor. He’ll want to know you’re awake.’ Leaning forward, Louise pressed the call button beside Sarah’s bed. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

Sarah nodded. ‘How many have died?’

‘I haven’t seen any official figures. I doubt they’ll know for sure until they get the immunisation programme going and clear the decks of the current victims.’

‘Immunisation programme?’

The answer was delayed because the door opened at that point and Doctor Mitre walked in, not in a hazard suit, and smiled. ‘Awake, I see, and officially clear of the virus.’

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Sarah said, smiling.

‘Thank Miss Barrington. She’s the one who came up with the cure.’

‘Yes, but I’ll be doing that every morning for the next month. I wanted to thank you now.’

‘My pleasure. Really, my pleasure. I never thought I’d be seeing most of the victims of the Damnation Plague surviving it. And as for being able to protect people against it…’

‘You think you can reproduce the inoculation then?’ Louise asked.

Mitre nodded. ‘Something of an unusual discovery, but it should be possible to use a simple retroviral treatment to get the body to produce it. We’ll have it ready to go into production in… less than a week. And we can manufacture it in large quantities using our own medical synthesisers.’

‘What was the discovery?’ Sarah asked, looking perplexed. ‘You needed your super-high-tech fabricator things for the cure, right?’

Louise nodded. ‘Active hunter-killer nanomachines are a little outside the capabilities of the fabricators the enclave has in general use, but the immunity doesn’t use that kind of technology. There’s a protein in the blood of Utopia City people which binds onto a site on the virus shell. It’s one of the few invariant structures on the viral wall and it’s that that my system uses to detect the viral particles, but it’s a little strange. It acts like a kill switch. When the protein slots in, it activates an immediate shutdown of the virus particle. There’s no way it’s an accident. Someone engineered the virus with that feature so that it could be immunised against.’

‘And your Doctor White discovered that and created an inoculation for Utopia City?’

‘That’s what I hope happened,’ Louise replied, frowning. ‘The man’s a genius. He makes me look stupid. He could’ve analysed the plague virus, discovered the termination mechanism was built-in, and made a retroviral treatment to cause his people to produce the protein molecule.’

‘Or?’

‘Or… He already knew about the kill switch system in the virus because he was involved in creating it.’

‘You’re suggesting that the man who created the North-West Enclave and Utopia City also created the Damnation Plague?’ Mitre asked. There was not quite enough disbelief in his tone for Louise to think the idea was a shock.

‘Some of the structures in the virus could’ve come right out of the textbooks for the organic nanomachine courses I took in university. That morphogenic quality to the protein shell? I’ve seen techniques like that used in bio-fabric designs in Utopia City. And you have far more complete data on the virus here than I ever saw there. How could he have worked out that trick when there’s no record of plague virus research in any of the databases? It’s not proof. It just really stinks. Add in the SAU attacking my workshop… I think Doctor White created the original plague, and he just tried to use it again to wipe out the Long Island Enclave.’

11/5/2117.

‘I agree that the evidence is both circumstantial and fairly damning,’ Alison’s voice said into Louise’s head, ‘but I’m doing an information management job to suppress the idea becoming more public knowledge.’

Louise nodded, her eyes on the hospital’s main doors. ‘Reasoning?’ she asked, because she wanted to know whether Alison was on the same page as her.

‘If it becomes public knowledge that Utopia City mounted a biological attack on the enclave, there will be calls for some form of retaliation. This enclave is not ready for that. It may never be. All we would be doing was giving White an excuse to mount a full-scale war on us.’

‘That was my thought. Doctor Mitre isn’t saying anything about his suspicions to anyone, but he’s concerned.’

‘As he should be. Between the two of you, you’ve created a programme to make the Damnation Plague obsolete as a weapon, but White could engineer something else. I’ve pushed a few buttons at my end. Doctor Mitre is likely to discover that he’s the recipient of several grants to produce more effective emergency response plans and research anti-nanomachine technologies. He may come to you looking for assistance.’

Louise allowed her lips to curl a little. ‘Is that an assignment?’

‘A… side project. Keep me informed of any hours you spend on it and I’ll at least make sure your expenses are reimbursed.’

‘I think I can live with that.’ Louise spotted a blonde figure being wheeled toward the doors by an orderly who looked like he could stop bullets with his chest. ‘I have to go, Alison. I’ve an ex-patient to take care of.’

‘My regards to Miss Donaldson,’ Alison said, and the call disconnected before Louise could respond.

Anyway, Louise had to brace herself to stop Mickey, who was actually on his leash for once, from pulling her over as the dog barked happily and tried to rush ahead. ‘Calm down, stupid dog,’ Louise said. ‘She’s coming home. You can get all the cuddles you want when she’s back in the apartment.’

Nothing was stopping Mickey, however, from pulling on his leash as Sarah was allowed to stand up and walk out through the doors. Louise’s software highlighted the signs of fatigue around Sarah’s face and the slight falter in her stride; the girl was fit enough to leave the hospital and not contagious, but she was not back up to full strength yet, and Louise dug her heels in to hold her dog back until Sarah could close the distance and control the greeting.

Mostly control the greeting. ‘Thanks, Mickey,’ Sarah sputtered. ‘Lots of kisses, yes. I’m going to need another shower when I get home. Okay. Enough already!’ Mickey graciously decided that he had slobbered over enough of Sarah’s face and backed off.

‘I’m not kissing you,’ Louise said. ‘You’re covered in dog spit.’

Sarah got to her feet, shaking her head. ‘See what you’ve done, Mickey?’ Mickey gave an apologetic whine and Sarah grinned. ‘Let’s get home. I want to be in my own home again so much. If I ever get another plague, just lock me in my bedroom until I get symptoms, okay?’

‘If you ever catch anything like this again,’ Louise replied, ‘I’m having you put in a hermetically sealed bubble for the rest of your life.’

‘That’s going to severely limit my social life.’

‘Uh-huh. So, that’s an incentive not to catch life-threatening diseases.’

Sarah giggled. She was fairly sure that Louise was joking… ‘You’ll get your name in the papers over this,’ she said to change the subject. ‘You saved–’

‘Nuh-huh,’ Louise broke in. ‘No papers. It’s bad enough when “the Gunwitch” gets mentioned in them. I don’t think Utopia City was really aware it was me who made the cure and I’m not giving them an easy target. No newspapers, no internet channels, no publicity. I’ve forced Doctor Mitre to take the credit.’

‘Oh. So, um, they’re really calling you that then? The Gunwitch?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Makes you sound like a superhero.’

‘Ha! I am not a superhero.’

Sarah giggled. ‘Well, you are to me. You’re a hero, and you’re super.’

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘Can I be your sidekick?’ There was a bark from Mickey at that. ‘Mickey wants in too. Um, we could be… Blunder Girl and Wonder Mutt?’ Bark! ‘Is he complaining about my name or his?’

Epilogue

Queens District, the Long Island Enclave, 14/5/2117.

The two cops walking down Industrial Avenue looked just a little wrong. For starters, Queens did not have the budget to have officers patrolling in pairs unless they were actually expecting trouble. It was a controversial policy, as in the cops did not like it and the enclave refused to implement budget increases, but it was what they had. Second, they were something of a disparate pair. The man was significantly older and more than a little over the recommended weight for his height, and his uniform was far from new. He had the easy stride of a seasoned police officer: energy economy was the primary consideration. The woman walking along beside him was a lot younger, a lot prettier, and her uniform looked like it had been taken off the rack in the shop that morning. You could have cut stone with the creases in her slacks.

Louise, standing on a corner and watching the world go by, recognised them both, but she doubted that the girl would recognise her. As she watched, she saw the pretty blonde girl spot her, narrow her eyes, and obviously decide that this was not going to do. She pulled herself up to her full height, all one hundred and seventy centimetres of it, and strode forward.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ the girl said.

Louise smiled at her and then turned her gaze toward the older man. ‘Hi, Frank. How’re the kids?’

Frank, Officer Turner under more formal circumstances, grinned. ‘Oh, you know how kids are.’

‘Not really, but I get the idea.’

‘This is Tina,’ Frank went on. ‘Officer Clement-Bride, just transferred over from Sky City. I’m showing her the best places to get shot, where the doughnut houses are, you know? The usual.’

Tina was looking a lot fitter than she had the last time Louise had seen her. Infrared showed up the slightly cooler temperature of the cybernetics in her eye sockets. Louise’s software was registering the slight confusion in the girl’s expression.

‘Tina,’ Frank said, ‘this is Louise. She’s one of the local deputised civilians. The Widows have started calling her the Gunwitch, so you might hear that name too.’

Tina’s eyes widened. ‘Louise? You mean you’re–’

Leaning forward a little, Louise pushed her glasses down the bridge of her nose so that Tina could see her eyes. ‘How’s your mother?’

‘You two’ve met before?’ Frank asked.

‘Sort of,’ Louise supplied.

‘I was unconscious at the time,’ Tina said. ‘Uh, sorry for thinking you were… You know.’

‘Well, I was,’ Louise told her, grinning. ‘Now the outfit is just camouflage. Amazing how many people you can catch doing bad things when you aren’t in a uniform.’

‘Huh, yeah. Louise saved my life. She’s a real hero.’

‘No, I’m–’

‘Don’t have to tell me, kid,’ Frank said over the top of Louise’s denial. ‘You ask around. There are plenty of people in the Queens station who’d be in a casket if Louise hadn’t been there to stop it. Come on. We’ll head over to the gate into the industrial zone. We get Cyber-Kings sniffing around there sometimes…’

Louise watched them walking away, Frank still strolling while Tina’s gait was more urgent and purposeful. At least one good thing had come out of the last few months and, once again, someone with the Clement name was keeping Queens safe.

It was kind of weird to be thought of as someone’s hero. Louise had managed to laugh it off when Sarah had said it; the mention of ‘superheroes’ had helped, making the whole thing too surreal to take seriously. With Tina and Frank, it was different and, maybe, Louise was going to have to take it seriously.

It was a big change. At the start of the year, Louise had been an illegal immigrant, turning tricks on this very street to keep a roof over her head. She had left a life of comfort, even if that comfort was really something of a smokescreen to hide the lies it was based on, to become a hooker with no prospects in a strange city. Now, barely three months later, she was some sort of hero.

Louise turned and started down Industrial Avenue at a pace not unlike the one Frank had been keeping to. Well, if she was a hero, she had better get on with keeping her patch safe, and this was her patch. It was run-down and largely ignored by the rest of the enclave, but it had good people on it and, yes, it did deserve a hero: the Gunwitch.

###

About the Author

I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.

Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.

I got into writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote science fiction when I was playing Traveller. I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing City of Heroes. I still love the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.

Recently I took the big step of quitting my day job and taking up full-time writing. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, J.D. Robb, and Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.

For More Information

Take a look at the Witches and Ray-guns blog: http://witchesandrayguns.wordpress.com

Amazon US Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B006J6II9O

Amazon UK Author Page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B006J6II9O

Other Books by this Author

The Thaumatology Series

Thaumatology 101

Demon’s Moon

Legacy

Dragon’s Blood

Disturbia

Hammer of Witches

Eagle’s Shadow

Ancient

Dragonfall

The Other Side of Hell

For Whom the Wedding Bells Toll

Vengeance

A Midsummer’s Nightmare – Early 2017

Anthologies in the Thaumatology Universe

Tales from High Towers’ Study

Tales from the Dubh Linn

The Aneka Jansen Books

Steel Beneath The Skin

The Cold Steel Mind

Steel Heart

The Winter War

The Greatest Heights of Honour

The Lowest Depths of Shame

Hope

The Ultrahuman Books

Ugly

Shadows

Hunting Mink

Frostburn

Guardian – 2017/18

True Dark – 2017/18

The Unobtainium Books

Kate on a Hot Tin Roof

King Solamet’s Mines – 2016/17

The Reality Hack Books

Reality Hack

The Fox Meridian Books

Fox Hunt

Inescapable

DeathWeb

Criminal Minds

Emergence

The Ghost in the Doll

Eden Burning - 2017

The Princeps Venator Books

Hunter’s Kiss

Be My Valentine

The Gunwitch Books

Gunwitch: Rebirth

Table of Contents

Part One: Utopia

Part Two: Rotten Apple

Part Three: Dead Tomorrow

Part Four: Damnation

Epilogue

Foreword