"Fifty."
She turned on the maxiscreamers, and the riot-control noise boomed through the town, shaking teeth loose, bursting eardrums, bringing rickety buildings down.
"Spot on. They're running around like chickens at a geek convention."
The smartguns locked, and flashed READY at her.
When she was out of this, she'd check out a sexclone with a moustache like Bronson Manolo and a body like Stallone, rent herself some clean water and a whirlpool bath, and have herself a party and a half.
She initiated the firing sequence.
"They're about to scatter, ma'am."
"So much the better."
The guns started spitting intelligent death into the night.
0235.
Jessamyn saw a crowd going down, those damned smugslugs spinning through the air like midges.
GenTech had developed the little bastards. But once they were on the market, the corp had spent a lot of R and D money coming up with a way to beat them. And Doc Threadneedle had access to that technology.
She took a deep breath, and a tiny sponge inside her heart—a bioengine—inflated, changing her heart's signature. It was peculiarly like having the hiccoughs. Thanks to the little organism, her life signal would change every twenty seconds for anything up to half an hour.
People she didn't know died around her, but she was untouched.
0199.
Bronson Manolo hummed a Butthole Surfers number to himself, and touched up his hair, using the rearview mirror as he patted his coiffeur. He wanted another beer, but Gari had him on one-a-day for as long as his organic rice diet was holding up. Dammit, he deserved another brew. He was working hard. Let the Pyramid Pooper take a hike just this once, eh?
0196.
What the hell, people in Africa were gasping for a beer, and he had a whole case stashed here. He reached for a can.
0188.
"You can be a success," he chanted to himself, "your mind is a chisel, your will is a hammer, and life is a rock."
He focused on the miniature plastic pyramid on the dashboard, and willed this mission to succeed.
0179.
Rodriguez took up a command position in the old jailhouse. It must have closed down when the state police pulled out, abandoning these backwaters to the gangcults.
His crew were in pairs, going on a house-to-house, and he was ticking off the cleared locations on his streetmap. He had taken off his helmet and gloves for the job, and was stabbing with a stub of lightpencil at the screenmap Manolo had given him. Half the town was down by now.
But still no Jessamyn.
He remembered their girl as she had been when he first had her through the system in Denver. She could have been hardly eleven then. But with a clown-white face and fetish-chains, she looked older than sin.
"Livery stable clear," Baldrey barked in his ear. He checked the building off.
He also remembered Jessamyn's Old Man. Now, there was a seriously disturbed individual. No wonder his precious had ripped his throat out.
"Any sightings of Jessamyn?" he asked on the open channel.
"Don't worry," Terhune said. "She hasn't got a chance."
She had had big, sad, green eyes. Two of them, then.
"No, Susie. You're right. She's never had a chance."
0156.
The Argies were coming for him, bloody buggering bastards of dagoes that they were. He could hear the grease on their hair frying from ten miles away.
Sarn't Major Biggleswade signalled for his troops to follow, and made a dash across the burning street.
"Forever England," he shouted, "the Falklands are Forever England."
Teddy-bear shaped Argies rushed at him, firing ineptly. He was over the top like PC Dixon taking out a French terrorist cell.
"Come on lads, we can whip 'em. Corned beefeaters! Pansy Sanchos! Gaucho gauleiters!"
He was hit in the legs, but he backed out of the line of fire. Where was the Union Jack? Someone was supposed to be carrying it.
"For England, God and St George!"
0134.
Jessamyn fell to a crouch, and clambered across the square on all fours, recalling her sandrat days. She was a good animal again.
A soldier loomed over her, and she rolled, firing upwards in an arc. The suit punctured and bled, the faceplate cracking.
Wriggling her shoulders and pushing with her feet, she covered the last ten yards. Her karate jacket ripped, but the skin of her back was unabraded.
She got to the command ve-hickle, and spread herself against its treads, firing across the square at some stray killers.
0086.
Simon Threadneedle was almost burned out now. His eyes had popped, but the sensors inside his skull fed him heat patterns that were clearer than any visual input. Most of the tissue was gone, but the bio-implants still functioned. And he still had his greymass.
Magda ze Schluderpacheru was dead, had died near the beginning of it. That was a shame. She had been soft and warm, the last of his meatform's attachments.
Curtius Kenne was dead too, and most of the other citizens. He hadn't kept track, but he thought he had sensed Jitters going down.
Where was Jessamyn? She should survive. She had been a walking ruin when she came to him, and he had made her better.
Better than anyone. Better, even, than he had made himself.
Should he have told her, he wondered? Should he have mentioned the strange symptoms and side-effects he had been observing in his own case?
The detachment. The languor. His feelings were heightened, but his drives had been running down. He could barely relate to people. Before Jessamyn had come to him, he had sometimes spent days at a time sitting in front of the windows in his bedroom, looking at the unchanging, unmoving desert as the sun and the moon did their daily dance.
The moon…
0050. Manolo belched, and excused himself. 0049. 0048. 0047. 0045. 0043. 0039.
"Ma'am," said Danny Riegert, "we've got a weird reading, close to the ve-hickle."
Susie Terhune slipped the lase to automatic, and let it continue slicing up the rooftops.
"Specify."
"Down low, by the treads, in actual contact with the module."
"Our girl?"
"Hard to say. The heartbeat doesn't match, but it also keeps changing. I think it's some kind of systems error."
"Idiot, don't you read Guns and Killing? She's had a heartsponge implant. Let me think, let me think…"
Terhune's fingers flew over the keyboard, pulling a close-range weapons menu out of the memory.
1:MINISCREAMER
2: CLOSE-RANGE SMARTGUN
3: ELECTROCHARGE
4: GAS GRENADE
She punched in a Code 3, and a Confirm.
The ve-hickle buzzed, as it discharged.
"See how you like that, hag witch!"
0036.
Jessamyn felt her body arch as the electricity hit. She sucked in a double-lungful of air and screamed, but not in pain. It was her predator's howl of triumph.
She remembered Doc Threadneedle suggesting she try sucking her finger and sticking it in an electric socket.
Every nerve in her body came alive. She had never felt stronger. How long would this last?
She scrambled up onto the top of the ve-hickle, still feeling the hyperbuzz.
Sex could not be better than this.
She came to the smartgun mounting, and ripped the multi-barrelled weapon out at the roots. It came away as easily as a dead treebranch. Metal tore. Wires shorted out.
The screamers started again, and she let the durium shields up inside her ears.
There was a battened hatch on top of the ve-hickle. This was going to be like opening a can.
0029.
Biggleswade saw the British heroine climb up onto the Argie tank, and cheered. He dragged his dead legs behind him, and pulled himself towards the battle. The girl was bloody buggering Victoria Cross material, and he wanted to be there to see her run the Union Jack up the flagpole at Port Stanley. Puerto bloody buggering Galtieri in-bloody-buggering-deed! The girl got a good grip on the hatch, and pulled it away, tossing it across the square like a dustbin lid.