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Random electricalnoise and intrusions of what seems to be a GalNetadvertising broadcast for a spanner that undoes the bulbs inhand-held torches.I m having to extrapolate the meaningfuldata.One minute, thirty-two seconds.I whistled through my teeth.Even factoring in theprocessor time involved in cleaning it up, that was a hell of alot of data.The gash in my shoulder was still hurting, so totake my mind off it I flipped through the various GalNetnewscasts of the day, filtered and stored via Box s secondaryfunctions to tag keywords and images of interest to me.Almost immediately I hit on a face I recognized, on account ofthe fact that I saw it in the mirror most mornings.Apart fromthat subtle wrongness that comes from seeing a still whenyou expect a mirror image, other things had been done to it;little changes here and there that, while it was stillrecognizable as me, turned it into something slightly brutishand nasty-looking.I cut in the soundtrack:.denounced by a conclave of incorporate representativesand administrative officials, this man had been declared anOpen Target with a level-fifteen bounty.Caution: this man isarmed and combat-trained.If you do not have the requisitetraining and experience, do not, repeat, do not attempt to -Ever have one of those days? The time stamp showed thatthis item had been in circulation for something like fourhours by now and I d completely missed it.Declaring an Open Target is not done lightly, involving as itdoes a firm consensus among a working majority of all themyriad factions in the Chain.It takes some Crime AgainstLife so horrendous that these factions can agree on howhorrendous it is, and I was pretty sure I d never doneanything quite so horrendous as that.The only answer wasthat, never mind my worrying about all the people gettinginto Box, someone had got into the core systems of the Chainitself and had used them to finger me.Fraudulent or not,though, the upshot of it was that absolutely anyone who feltlike it, and thought they had the means to do it, could have apop - and I started thinking uneasily of just how many waysthese people could find out where I lived.The copying of the ARVID file still had almost half a minuteto run.I had to force myself not to simply pull the wafer fromthe slot and start running - telling myself sternly thatanother twenty-odd seconds wouldn t make a differenceeither way.It seemed like an eternity, though, before Boxspat it out.I grabbed the thing, stuck it in my jacket.Out ofthe door, straight for the tubes - and right into three figurescoming out of them: the SecServ"! investigator, Forrester,and two bulky Secmen in full armour, their riot-controlweapons already drawn.I just had time to remember that the Gun I was reachingfor had been fired dry before they zapped me.Forresterwalked over to me and loomed over me, as the charges fromtwo different taser attachments did interesting andconflicting things to my nervous system. I ll have to ask you to accompany me to the station to helpwith our enquiries, he said with nasty satisfaction. You refucking nicked, me old son.BACKGROUND 8Kara flipped the readout back from her eyes. There s asecondary blip maybe five and a half kilometres from theIncorporation itself.I think that s where all the ground-to-airstuff came from. So we ll avoid it, I said, fiddling with the weapons-controlboard and wishing like hell I d spent a bit of time practisingwith it rather than just trusting to the fact that I knew howto operate it from my implants.I know how to wear shoes, ifit comes to that, but you don t go out dancing in a brand-newpair.I was also kicking myself for having suggested this Idioticexploit in the first place.It d seemed like a good Idea at thetime - the Angels main force sets up and fortifies abeachhead at the portal we had opened, and fights off theobvious reaction to that, leaving Kara and me to scoot onahead in a high-powered, overarmed and heavily armouredflier at ground-zero, and hopefully under the defence net thathad taken us out before.As the only operatives with directexperience of Sharabeth, we knew the score, and the pair ofus had been kitted out with total-sensorium broadcast rigs topump back everything we learnt and when we learnt it,depending on what I hoped we d learn if it was actually in theplace I hoped we d learn it.(It s just occurred to me that it might seem a little strangethat we hadn t had all this high-end stuff the first time weentered Sharabeth s spaces.Well, all I can say is that nobodyhad clue one as to what we were dealing with the first time.This time we had some vague idea - and so we were goingloaded for armour-plated ursine, though, like I said, at thetime I was too busy kicking myself to think much about it.) We re coming up on the main mass, Kara said, in thatabsently chatty kind of way people like pilots get when themajority of their mind is concentrating on their job. Prettysoon now, we re gonna smack right into the side. Let s ditch, then, I said.There s a largish clump of movingthings down there on the ground coming up.I say we justland on them. Fine by me, said Kara, and she ploughed the flier, througha bank of rubble and a collection of basically humancreatures who I assume were some kind of guard patrol.Iwas ejecting a couple of fragmentation clusters to take care ofany survivors, when a subsidiary system on my board startedhaving a small but insistent fit.There s contamination trace out there, I told Kara. Notmuch of it, but it looks like some kind of mutagenic gas,Fifteen per cent chance one of us would breathe in a still-active molecular chain. OK. Kara tossed me a gas mask and, while I was sealingmyself into it, busied herself setting the flier s securitydevices. Active or passive? Oh, go on, I said,  live a little and make  em active.I detonated a couple of concussion charges to shift some ofthe rubble and other items that had piled on top of us whenwe hit, and shot the canopy.The weight of the flier hadruptured what appeared to be an underground sewer main,and it was from this that the gas had escaped.I shone a lightdown the hole and saw a tangled mass of bones andcanisters in a slurry-like pool of some decomposing mush.I dforgotten the immediacy of the conditions here on Sharabeth;saliva spurted in my mouth, but fortunately we had comeprepared this time and had been fitted with a beta-blockingcompound on IV, so I didn t mess up the inside of my mask.We circumnavigated the rupture and pressed on.Some timelater, we heard a quite impressive detonation as somesurviving basically human creature no doubt got a bit tooinquisitive about the flier [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]