“You looking for something, tourist?”
There were three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-metre giant naked to the waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle graft sales for the year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire and a glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons. His face was seamed with scar tissue from the freak fights he had lost and there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens screwed into one eye. His voice was surprisingly soft and sad sounding.
“Come slumming, maybe,” the figure on the giant’s right said viciously. He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face and there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be the fastest.
The third member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath tightly strapped leather.
Time was shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.
“I’m just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.”
There was a brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his hand, fell back a step and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.
“Like I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.”
The giant was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a fighter long enough to spot combat training and the instincts of a lifetime in the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the neurachem lashed out with something sharp and the augment went for my right arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him round on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around him and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow. The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right hand a centimetre from his eyes.
“Don’t,” I said quietly
The kid moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for something in his face.
I backed away down the alley about a dozen metres, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail work his way through that and catch me up.
The alley made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd and started looking for street signs.
Outside Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass. The club sign was alight and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with the Mongolian had been replaced several times over.
I crossed the street and stood before the robot while it padded me down, and the synth voice said, “Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?”
“What’s the deal in the bar?”
“Ha ha ha,” went the laugh protocol. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”
“Cabins.”
“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”
Down the stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.
“Louise?”
The curves of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in the cabin flung stripes of light across her.
“Louise, it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.”
A smear of something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive inside me. Then the glass door slid aside and the girl’s body sagged off its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder, pointed at my head.
“Right there, fucker,” said a tight voice. “This is a toaster. You do one wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to solder.”
I froze. There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very dangerous.
“That’s it.” The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. “Now you put her down, real slow, and stand back.”
I lowered the body in my arms gently onto the satin padded floor and stood up again. Bright white light sprang up in the cabin, and the revolving cherry blinked pinkly twice and went out. The door behind me thudded shut on the music while before me, a tall blond man in close-fitting black advanced into the room, knuckles whitened on the trigger of his particle blaster. His mouth was compressed and the whites of his eyes were flaring around stimulant-blasted pupils. The gun in my back bore me forward and the blond kept coming until the muzzle of the blaster was smearing my lower lip against my teeth.
“Now who the fuck are you?” he hissed at me.
I turned my head aside far enough to open my mouth. “Irene Elliott. My daughter used to work here.”
The blond stepped forward, gun muzzle tracing a line down my cheek and under my chin.
“You’re lying to me,” he said softly. “I’ve got a friend out at the Bay City justice facility, and he tells me Irene Elliott’s still on stack. See, we checked out the bag of shit you sold this cunt.”
He kicked at the inert body on the floor and I peered down out of the corner of my nearest eye. In the harsh white light the marks of torture were livid on the girl’s flesh.
“Now I want you to think real carefully about your next answer, whoever you are. Why are you asking after Lizzie Elliott?”
I slid my eyes back over the barrel of the blaster to the clenched face beyond. It wasn’t the expression of someone who’d been dealt in. Too scared.
“Lizzie Elliott’s my daughter, you piece of shit, and if your friend up at the city store had any real access, you’d know why the record still says I’m on stack.”
The gun in my back shoved forward more sharply, but unexpectedly the blond seemed to relax. His mouth flexed in a rictus of resignation. He lowered the blaster.
“All right,” he said. “Deek, go and get Oktai.”
Someone at my back slipped out of the cabin. The blond waved his gun at me. “You. Sit down in the corner.” His tone was distracted, almost casual.
I felt the gun taken out of my back and moved to obey. As I settled onto the satin floor, I weighed the odds. With Deek gone, there were still three of them. The blond, a woman in what looked to me like a synthetic Asian-skinned sleeve, toting the second particle blaster whose imprint I could still feel in my spine, and a large black man whose only weapon appeared to be an iron pipe. Not a chance. These were not the street sharks I’d faced down on Nineteenth Street. There was a cold embodied purpose about them, a kind of cheap version of what Kadmin had had back at the Hendrix.