I shifted behind his eyes.
Reluctantly, he stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then he stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.
The weakness of weapons, Virginia Vidaura had called it, and from day one in Envoy training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall into it.
A weapon — any weapon — is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys.
In the ranks, Jimmy de Soto coughed his amusement. At the time he was speaking for most of us. Ninety per cent of Envoy intake came up through the Protectorate’s conventional forces, where weaponry generally held a status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. UN marines went everywhere armed, even on furlough.
Virginia Vidaura heard the cough and caught Jimmy’s eye.
“Mr de Soto. You do not agree.”
Jimmy shifted, a little abashed at how easily he had been picked out. “Well, ma’am. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better account you give of yourself.”
There was a faint of ripple of assent through the ranks. Virginia Vidaura waited until it subsided.
“Indeed,” she said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. “This … device punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.”
Jimmy hesitated a little, but then pushed his way to the front and took the weapon. Virginia Vidaura fell back so that Jimmy was centre stage before the assembled trainees and stripped off her Corps jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and spacedeck slippers, she looked slim and very vulnerable.
“You will see,” she said loudly, “that the charge setting is at Test. If you hit me, it will result in a small first degree burn, nothing more. I am at a distance of approximately five metres. I am unarmed. Mr de Soto, would you care to attempt to mark me? On your call.”
Jimmy looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.
“On your call,” she repeated.
“Now,” he snapped.
It was almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the five-metre gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on Jimmy before he realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under his nose.
The moment stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.
“A weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension — you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”
Shrugging his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin & Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.
Got the frags, Virginia.
Breathe, she said. Move. Control.
And we went out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a tea-house and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks, getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The half-hearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south. I paused on a corner, signalled an autocab down from the prowl lane above and saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.
He was beginning to annoy me.
The cab curved away southwards. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the visitors’ blurb panel.
“Welcome to Urbline services,” said a smooth female voice. “You are linked to the Urbline central datastack. Please state the information you require.”
“Are there any unsafe areas in Licktown?”
“The zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its entirety,” said the datastack blandly. “However, Urbline services guarantee carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits and—”
“Yeah. Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent criminality in the Licktown area?”
There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.
“Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic damage, two hun—”
“That’s fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San Bruno?”
“Straight line distance is approximately one kilometre.”
“Got a map?”
The console lit up with a street grid, complete with location cross hairs for Jerry’s and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of moments.
“All right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.”
“As part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an advisable destination.”
I sat back and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.
“Thanks.”
The cab set me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had been a typical machine understatement.
Where the streets I’d chased the Mongolian through the night before were deserted, this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads swivelled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green; canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.
The second cab was spiralling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen metres away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made their play.