‘Plex,’ I said quietly. ‘On second thoughts, I think you’d maybe better get out of here.’
‘Tak, listen—’
I dialled the hallucinogen grenade up to maximum delay, fused it and let it roll gently away under the table. Plex heard it go and he made a tiny yelping noise.
‘Go on,’ I said.
The lead officiator reached the bar. He stood half a metre away from the woman, maybe waiting for her to cringe.
She ignored him. Ignored, for that matter, everything further off than the bar surface under her hands and, it dawned on me, the face she could see reflected there.
I eased unhurriedly to my feet.
‘Tak, it isn’t worth it, man. You don’t know wha—’
‘I said go, Plex.’ Drifting into it now, into the gathering fury like an abandoned skiff on the edge of the maelstrom. ‘You don’t want to play this screen.’
The officiator got tired of being ignored.
‘Woman,’ he barked. ‘You will cover yourself.’
‘Why,’ she enunciated back with bitten clarity, ‘don’t you go and fuck yourself with something sharp.’
There was an almost comical pause. The nearest barflies jerked around on a collective look that gaped did she really say—
Somewhere, someone guffawed.
The blow was already swinging in. A gnarled, loose-fingered backhander that by rights should have catapulted the woman off the bar and onto the floor in a little heap. Instead—
The locked-up immobility dissolved. Faster than anything I’d seen since combat on Sanction IV. Something in me was expecting it, and I still missed the exact moves. She seemed to flicker like something from a badly edited virtuality, sideways and gone. I closed on the little group, combat rage funnelling my synthetic vision down to targets. Peripherally, I saw her reach back and fasten on the officiator’s wrist. I heard the crack as the elbow went. He shrilled and flapped. She levered hard and he went down.
A weapon flashed out. Thunder and greasy lightning in the gloom at the bar rail. Blood and brains exploded across the room. Superheated globs of the stuff splattered my face and burned.
Mistake.
She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.
I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.
Sarah.
A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. He staggered away from me, screaming, insides tumbling out.
Sara—
‘It’s him!’
Another voice. Vision cleared, and I saw the one with the wounded hand holding his injury out like some obscure proof of faith. The palm was gouting crimson, blood vessels closest to the cut already rupturing.
‘It’s him! The Envoy! The transgressor!’
With a soft thud behind me, the hallucinogen grenade blew.
Most cultures don’t take kindly to you slaughtering their holy men. I couldn’t tell which way the roomful of hard-bitten sweeper crew might lean – Harlan’s World never used to have much of a reputation for religious fanaticism, but a lot had changed while I was away, most of it for the worse. The citadel looming above the streets of Tekitomura was one of several I’d run up against in the last two years, and wherever I went north of Millsport, it was the poor and work-crushed that swelled the ranks of the faithful.
Best to play it safe.
The grenade blast shunted aside a table like a bad-tempered poltergeist, but alongside the scene of blood and fury at the bar, it went pretty much unnoticed. It was a half dozen seconds before the vented molecular shrapnel got into lungs, decayed and started to take effect.
Screams to drown the agony of the priests dying around me. Confused yelling, threaded with iridescent laughter. It’s an intensely individual experience, being on the receiving end of an H-GRENADE. I saw men jerk and swat at invisible things apparently circling them at head height. Others stared bemused at their own hands or into corners, shuddering. Somewhere I heard hoarse weeping. My own breathing had locked up automatically on the blast, relic of decades in one military context or another. I turned to the woman and found her propping herself up against the bar. Her face looked bruised.
I risked breath to shout across the general uproar.
‘Can you stand?’
A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.
‘Out. Try not to breathe.’
Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando. Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.
‘A light,’ he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. ‘A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.’
He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.
‘The angel.’
I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. ‘Take another look, officiator.’
‘The an—’ And then something must have got through the hallucinogens. His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. ‘No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.’
‘Now you’ve got it.’
The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.
I slashed his face open and left.
Deep enough.
Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.
The wharfway that ran behind the hosing station was deserted in both directions. No sign of Plex. No sign of anyone. The emptiness seemed pregnant, trembling with nightmarish potential. I fully expected to see a huge pair of reptilian claws slit through the seams at the bottom of the building and lever it bodily out of the way.
Well, don’t, Tak. You expect it in this state, it’s going to fucking happen.
The paving…
Move. Breathe. Get out of here.
A fine rain had started to sift down from the overcast sky, filling up the glow of the Angier lamps like soft interference. Over the flat roof of the hosing station, the upper decks of a sweeper’s superstructure slid towards me, jewelled with navigation lights. Faint yells across the gap between ship and wharf and the hiss/clank of autograpples firing home into their shoreside sockets. There was a sudden tilting calm to the whole scene, some unusually peaceful moment drifting up from memories of my Newpest childhood. My earlier dread evaporated and I felt a bemused smile creep out across my face.