‘Look, you yank this back as far as it’ll go and the reserve load drops. Right? Then you’ve got about a dozen shots before you have to reload. Very handy in a firefight. You go up against those New Hok karakuri swarms, you’re going to be grateful you’ve got that to fall back on.’
The sprog muttered something inaudible. I wandered about, looking for weapons you could conceal easily while Sylvie stood and scratched irritably at her headscarf. Finally the sprog paid up and left with his purchase slung under one arm. The woman turned her attention to us.
‘See anything you like?’
‘Not really, no.’ I went up to the counter. ‘I’m not shipping out. Looking for something that’ll do organic damage. Something I can wear to parties, you know.’
‘Oho. Fleshkiller, huh.’ The woman winked. ‘Well, that’s not as unusual as you’d think round here. Let’s see now.’
She swung out a terminal from the wall behind the counter and punched up the datacoil. Now that I looked closely, I saw that her hair was lacking the central cord and some of the thicker associated tresses. The rest hung lank and motionless against her pallid skin, not quite hiding a long, looping scar across one corner of her forehead. The scar tissue gleamed in the light from the terminal display. Her movements were stiff and stripped of the deCom grace I’d seen in Sylvie and the others.
She felt me looking and chuckled without turning from the screen.
‘Don’t see many like me, eh? Like the song says – see the deCom stepping lightly. Or not stepping at all, right? Thing is, the ones like me, I guess we don’t generally like to hang around Tek’to and be reminded what it was like to be whole. Got family, you go back to them, got a hometown you go back to it. And if I could remember if I had either or where it was, then I’d go.’ She laughed again, quietly, like water burbling in a pipe. Her fingers worked the datacoil. ‘Fleshkillers. Here we go. How about a shredder? Ronin MM86. Snub-barrelled shard blaster, turn a man to porridge at twenty metres.’
‘I said something I could wear.’
‘So you did. So you did. Well, Ronin don’t make much smaller than the 86 in the monomol range. You want a slug gun maybe?’
‘No, the shredder’s good, but it’s got to be smaller than that. What else have you got?’
The woman sucked at her upper lip. It made her look like a crone. ‘Well, there are some of the Old Home brands as well – H&K, Kalashnikov, General Systems. It’s mostly pre-owned, see. Sprog trade-ins for mimint smasher gear. Look. Do you a GS Rapsodia. Scan resistant and very slim, straps flat under clothing but the butt’s automould. Reacts to body heat, swells to fit your grip. How’s that?’
‘What’s it ranged at?’
‘Depends on dispersal. Tightened up I’d say you could take down a target at forty, fifty metres if your hands don’t shake. On widespread, you don’t get much range at all, but it’ll clean out a room for you.’
I nodded. ‘How much?’
‘Oh, we can come to some arrangement on that.’ The woman winked clumsily. ‘Is your friend buying too?’
Sylvie was on the other side of the emporium, a half dozen metres away. She heard and glanced across at the datacoil.
‘Yeah, I’ll take that Szeged squeeze gun you’re listing there. Is that all the ammunition you’ve got for it?’
‘Ah… yes.’ The older woman blinked at her, then back at the display. ‘But it’ll take a Ronin SP9 load too, they made them compatible. I can throw in two or three clips if you—’
‘Do that.’ Sylvie met my eyes with something in her face I couldn’t read. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
‘Good idea.’
No one spoke again until Sylvie had brushed through the shell curtains and out. We both stared after her for a couple of moments.
‘Knows her datacode,’ chirped the woman finally.
I looked at the lined face and wondered if there was anything behind the words. As a blatant demonstration of the deCom power her head had been scarfed to disguise, Sylvie reading detail off the datacoil at distance pretty much screamed for attention. But it wasn’t clear what capacity this other woman’s mind was running on, or if she cared about anything much beyond a quick sale. Or if she’d even remember us in a couple of hours time.
‘It’s a trick,’ I said weakly. ‘Shall we, um, talk about price?’
Out in the street, I found Sylvie stood at the edges of a crowd that had gathered in front of a holoshow storyteller. He was an old man, but his hands were nimble on the display controls and a synth-system taped to his throat modulated his voice to fit the different characters of his tale. The holo was a pale orb full of indistinct shapes at his feet. I heard the name Quell as I tugged at Sylvie’s arm.
‘Jesus, you think you could have been a bit more fucking obvious in there?’
‘Ssh, shut up. Listen.’
‘Then Quell came out of the house of the belaweed merchant and she saw a crowd had gathered on the wharfside and were shouting and gesturing furiously. She couldn’t see very clearly what was happening. Remember, my friends, this was on Sharya where the sun is a violent actinic glare and—’
‘And where there’s no such thing as belaweed,’ I muttered in Sylvie’s ear.
‘Sssh.’
‘—so she squinted and squinted but, well.’ The storyteller set aside his controls and blew on his fingers. In the holodisplay, his Quell figure froze and the scene around her began to dim. ‘Perhaps I will end here today. It is very cold and I am no longer a young man, my bones—’
A chorus of protests from the gathered crowd. Credit chips cascaded into the upturned webjelly sieve at the storyteller’s feet. The man smiled and picked up the controls again. The holo brightened.
‘You are very kind. Well, see then, Quell went among the shouting crowd and in the middle what did she see but a young whore, clothing all ripped and torn so that her perfect, swollen, cherry-nippled breasts stood proudly in the warm air for all to see and the soft dark hair between her long, smooth thighs was like a tiny frightened animal beneath the stoop of a savage ripwing.’
The holo shifted for an obliging close-up. Around us, people stood on tiptoe. I sighed.
‘And standing over her, standing over her were two of the infamous black-clad religious police, bearded priests holding long knives. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust and their teeth glinted in their beards as they grinned at the power they held over this helpless woman’s young flesh.
‘But Quell placed herself between the points of those knives and the exposed flesh of the young whore and she said in a ringing voice: what is this? And the crowd fell silent at her voice. Again she asked: what is this, why are you persecuting this woman? and again all were silent, until finally one of the two black-clad priests stated that the woman had been caught in the sin of whoring, and that by the laws of Sharya she must be put to death, bled into the desert sand and her carcass thrown into the sea.’
For just a second, the grief and rage flickered at the edges of my mind. I locked it down and breathed out, hard. The listeners around me were pressing closer, ducking and craning for a better view of the display. Someone crowded me and I hooked an elbow back savagely into their ribs. A yelp, and aggrieved cursing that someone else hushed at.
‘So Quell turned to the crowd and asked who among you have not sinned with a whore at one time or another, and the crowd grew quieter and would not meet her eyes. But one of the priests rebuked her angrily for her interference in a matter of holy law, and so she asked him directly have you never been with a whore and many in the crowd who knew him laughed so that he had to admit that he had. But this is different, he said, for I am a man. Then, said Quell, you are a hypocrite, and from her long grey coat she took a heavy-calibre revolver and she shot the priest in both kneecaps. And he collapsed to the ground screaming.’