“Can I talk to them?”
Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.
“It’s better if you don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to the public. If he catches us…”
I put every ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. “Well, maybe you could ask for me…”
The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.
“Sure. I’ll ask around. But not. Not now. You’ve got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment.”
I took her hand in both of mine. “Thank you, Anenome.”
“My name’s not Anenome,” she said abruptly. “I’m called Louise. Call me Louise.”
“Thank you, Louise.” I held on to her hand. “Thank you for doing this—”
“Look, I’m not promising anything,” she said with an attempt at roughness. “Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go. Please.”
She showed me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.
Lit in red.
Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass and I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.
I stopped, turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.
“You waiting for me?” I asked the Mongol’s back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed.
Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory gesture. “Look, man,” he began weakly.
I sliced him a glance out of the corner of my eye and he shut up.
“I said—”
That was when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the car hood with a roar and swatted at me with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but even deflecting it, I staggered back a pace. The dealers skinned their weapons, deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. I twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and I came round him onto the car while the dealers were still trying to work out where I was. The neurachem made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came tracking towards me and I smashed the fingers around the metal with a sideflung kick. The owner howled, and the edge of my hand cracked into the other dealer’s temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the other insensible or dead. I came up into a crouch.
The Mongol took off, running.
I vaulted the roof of the ground car and went after him without thinking. The concrete jarred my feet as I landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but the neurachem damped it down instantly and I was only a dozen metres behind. I threw out my chest and sprinted.
Ahead of me, the Mongol bounced around in my field of vision like a combat jet trying to elude pursuing fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a good twenty metres ahead now. I put on speed, wincing at the sharp pains in my chest. Rain slapped at my face.
Fucking cigarettes.
We came out from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing, as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at me. Cross now. Cross now. Cross now. I already had. The echoes followed me beseechingly up the street.
Past the derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn’t moved from their kerbside resting places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rising from a grate in the side of the street like something alive. The paving under my feet was slick with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The shoes that had come with Bancroft’s summer suit were thin-soled and devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept me upright.
The Mongol cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks, saw I was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared the last vehicle. I tried to adjust my trajectory and cut him off, crossing the street at an angle before I reached the wrecked cars, but my quarry had timed the trap too well. I was already on the first wreck, and I skidded trying to stop in time. I bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge stung my hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between us by another ten metres.
A wayward speck of traffic moved in the sky above me.
I spotted the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the kerb, cursing the impulse that had made me turn down Bancroft’s offer of armaments. At this range a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol’s legs out from under him easily. Instead, I tucked in behind him and tried to find the lung capacity from somewhere to close up the gap again. Maybe I could panic him into tripping.
That wasn’t what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to our left gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. I grinned and followed. Finally, I had the advantage.
Perhaps he was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting me to twist an ankle over the uneven ground. But the Envoy conditioning squeezed my pupils into instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped my steps over the uneven surface with lightning speed, and the neurachem put my feet there with a rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath Jimmy de Soto in my dream. Given a hundred metres of this I was going to overtake my Mongol friend, unless he too had augmented vision.
In the event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the original dozen metres between us when we both hit the fence on the far side. He scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while I was still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. I cleared the top of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard me drop though, because he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with clipping together the thing in his hands. The muzzle came up and I dived for the street.
I hit hard, skinning my hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where I had been. The stink of ozone washed over me and the crackle of disrupted air curled in my ears. I kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past my shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. I scrambled for cover that wasn’t there.
“LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”