Nova Swing

"Bad luck, Paulie," the assistant said.

"You should keep your eye on the prisoner," Aschema

Vic stared at Aschema

DeRaad ignored him. "I appear like this in person, it's not in my best interests," he said to Aschema

"You fucked yourself, Paulie," Vic said. "I was only the bearer of the bad news."

But Paulie was already making his way back to the rickshaw in the piss-wet rain, leaning heavily on Alice Nylon's shoulder. He left behind him a feeling that the edge had gone off the situation. Aschema

So it would have remained, but the weather changed. Onshore winds peeled the cloudbase back in raw hundred-metre slabs.

Inside the cloud unpredictable gusts and eddies came and went, full of rain and daylight one minute, wet snow and night the next. Electromagnetically disoriented and still awaiting instruction, the Site Crime fire-team-comprising code jockeys, weapons specialists and a human pilot hardwired into the DBH delivery vehicle- found itself drifting sideways at a brisk seventy knots into the event site. No one wanted that. The pilot weighed things up, shrugged and side-slipped blind into the first gap that offered itself. She was out of there, she said, for a fact.

"Abort, abort," ordered Aschema

The DBH breached the cloudbase, clipped the southeast corner of the Baltic Exchange and, condensation swirling off its asymmetric weapons pods, shot low over Aschema

Since there was no correct interpretation of this move, everyone used their initiative. Vic Serotonin got down behind the Cadillac. Alice Nylon's gun-kiddies engaged the remains of the fire-team with hand-held thermobarics and Chambers guns. The fire-team, unable to respond at that time, called for help. Alice Nylon got off a shot at Aschema

"None of this was intentional," Aschema

"You fucks are all dead for this," Paulie told Aschema

Inside the DBH, the situation was out of everyone's grasp. The hull had been breached. The code jockeys were dead. The pilot's roof-of-the-mouth implant, ripped out by G-forces, hung from the console, a mass of fine gold wires, each one tipped with fresh brain matter. In an attempt to save itself, the ship had disengaged. In an attempt to save the pilot it had pumped her full of epinephrine and SSRIs, but her eyes were looking in different directions and her smile was as unplugged as her hardware. Worst of all, code had begun to leak through the compromised navigational firewalls and crawl over the living perso

Aschema

No one wanted another escape on their hands.

A

"Is this your car?" she asked him.

"No."

"Only you'd have thought it was, from what Paulie said. I seen it around. 1952. You got your V8 pushrod, 330 cubic inches, bore amp; stroke 3-13A x 3-%. Best engine they ever made. Nice body too." She trailed her fingers down the smooth candy-and-pearl blends of the rear quarter. "And you got your wide whites. Fact is," she said wistfully, "I'd rather be one than own one. So, are these here your friends?"

"Not really," Vic said.

"Only I work for Paulie most of the time."

"No one more generous than Paulie," Vic said, "when he's on the right side of himself." He said, "You should keep your head down now." He worked along the body of the Cadillac until he could stick his own head out past the front fender. That moment the fuel-cell of the Site Crime vehicle went up with a kind of damp crump and a lot of white smoke trails curving randomly into the sky. Bits and pieces began clattering to earth. Vic winced away, then made himself have another look. "Fuck," he said. "She's still alive." A little later he added, "In fact I think she's the only thing alive out there." When he said this, he appeared puzzled but also as if a small sluice of panic had opened inside him. He crawled back to the rickshaw girl. "If she comes this way," he advised, "you should make it a point to leave."

"I got no fare," the A

"Suit yourself."

Weird mint-coloured light broke through the overcast, angling down on to the Lots where the policewoman, uncharacteristically still, continued to stare at the burning wreckage as if she was failing to understand something. This made Vic impatient as well as angry, so to divert him the A

"So there's your fare," Vic pointed out.

"He ain't so much a fare as a liability," she said. "You smell him? Jesus." The fact was, she said, she felt sorry for him, he was nothing but a Point kid who did no harm to anyone-though she believed there were always two sides to that kind of passivity- and she wondered if he would get home all right. As a result, when Vic said that, it was like having permission. No one else was interested in her-they were just standing around in shock waiting to see what the policewoman would do next-so she went over to her rig, got between the shafts and wheeled it round to Vic's side of the Cadillac. Vic was back to sitting with his legs in front of him.