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"Slow down!" he said. "Ross! Wait up, dammit! Don't shoot!" His side was aching. Ross was panting hard, he heard her breathing, he overtook in a cartoon-space doorway, in a dead-end room, where the trail showed hot and bright.
"We have him," Ross said. The audio hype could hear the target breathing, past their exhaust. Even the panicked heartbeat. Ross lifted her gun against a presence behind a stack of boxes.
"No!" he yelled. And the left half of his visor flashed yellow. He swung to it, mindless target-seek, and the gun in his hand went off on Ross, went off a second time while Ross was flying sideways through the dark. Her shot went wild off the ceiling and he couldn't think, couldn't turn off the blinking target square. Four rounds, five, and the room was full of smoke.
"Dave?"
He wasn't talking to Sheila. He wasn't talking to whoever'd triggered him, set off the reflexes they trained in a mech.
Shaky voice from his keyman. "If you can walk out of there, walk. Right now, Dave."
"The guy's in the—"
"No. He's not, Dave." The heartbeat faded out. The cartoon room had a smudged gray ghost on the floor grid at his feet. And a bright red lot of blood spattered around. "I want you to check out the restroom upstairs from here. All right?"
He was shaking now. Your keyman talked and you listened or you could be dead. He saw a movement on his left. He swung around with the gun up, saw the man stand up. Ordinary looking man, business shirt. Soaked with sweat. Frozen with fear. The sniffer flashed red. Sheila's voice said, from his shoulder-patch, "Don't touch anything. Dave. Get out of there. Now."
He moved, walked out, with the target standing at his back. He walked all the way back to the air-conditioning plant, and he started up the stairs there, up to the catwalk, while nothing showed, no one. Sheila said, "Dave. Unplug now. You can unplug."
He stopped, he reached with his other hand and he pulled the plug on the gun and put it in its holster. He went on up the cartooned metal stairs, and he found the cartooned hall and the cartooned restroom with the real-world paper on the floor.
"You better wash up," Sheila said, so he did that, shaking head to foot. Before he was finished, a b&w came in behind him, and said, "You all right, sir?"
"Yeah," he said. Sheila was quiet then.
"You been down there?" the cop asked.
"You saw it," Sheila said in his ear, and he echoed her: "I saw it—guy got away—I couldn't get a target. Ross was in the way . . ."
"Yes, sir," the b&w said. "You're on record, sir."
"I figured."
"You sure you're all right? I can call—"
"I can always call, officer."
The guy got a disturbed look, the way people did who forgot they were talking to two people.
"Yes, sir," the b&w said. "All right."
On his way out.
He turned around to the mirror, saw a plain, sick face. Blood was on the sink rim, puddled around his boots, where it had run off the plastic. He went in a stall, wiped off his rig with toilet paper and flushed the evidence.
Sheila said, "Take the service exits. Pick you up at the curb."
"Copy," he mumbled, took his foot off the seat, flushed the last bit of bloody paper, taking steady small breaths, now. They taught you to trust the autos with your life. They taught you to swing to the yellow, don't think, don't ask, swing and hold, swing and hold the gun. A mech just walked away, afterward, visor down, communing with his i
It was at the human interface things could drop out.
He used the fire-key, walked out an emergency exit, waited in the rain. The cruiser nosed up to the curb, black and black-windowed, and swallowed him up.
"Saved the soft drink," Sheila said. "Thought you'd be dry." It was half ice-melt. But it was liquid. It eased a raw throat. He sucked on the straw, leaned his head back. "They calling us in?"
"No," Sheila said. That was all. They didn't want a debrief. They didn't want a truth, they wanted—
—wanted nothing to do with it. Nolan's body to the next-ofs, the live-in . . . to wherever would hide him.
Another mouthful of ice-melt. He shut his eyes, saw wire-schemas, endlessly folding, a pit you could fall into. He blinked on rain and refracted neon. "Ross killed Nolan."
"You and I don't know."
"Was it Ross?"
"Damned convenient a Company mech was in hail. Wasn't it?"
"No presence at all. Nolan—Nolan was shot between the eyes."
"MarsCorp exec—her live-in boyfriend with no record, no visa, no person. Guy who knew The Arlington's underground, who had a pass key—"
"He was keying through the doors?"
"Same as you were. Real at-home in the bottom tiers. You see a weapon on him, you see where he ditched one?"
"No." Raindrops fractured, flickering off the glass. He saw the gray ghost again, the no-Presence that could walk through total black. Or key through any apartment door, or aim a single head-shot with a computer's inhuman, instant accuracy.
He said, "Adds, doesn't it?"
"Adds. Downtown was seeing what I was. I told them. Told them you had bad feelings—"
"What the hell are they going to do? We got a dead mech down there—"
"The live-in shot Nolan. Shot the Company mech. That's your story. They can't say otherwise. What are they going to say? That the guy didn't have a gun? They won't come at us."
"What about our record?"
"Transmission breakup. Lightning or something." Sheila's face showed rain-spots, ru
"They erase it?"
"Erase what?" Sheila asked.
Silence then. Rain came down hard.
"They want to bring their damn politics down here," Sheila said, "they can take it back again. Settle it up there."
"Settle what?" he echoed Sheila.
But he kept seeing corridors, still the corridors, folding in on themselves. And sipped the tasteless soft drink. "The guy's shirt was clean."
"Huh?"
"His shirt was clean." Flash on the restroom, red water swirling down and down. "He wasn't in that room. Nolan knew Ross was coming. The guy was living there. His smell's all over. That's why the ammonia trick. Nolan sent him for the stairs, I'll bet it's in the access times. He couldn't have hid from a mech. And all that screaming? The mech wanted something. Something Nolan wasn't giving. Something Ross wanted more than she wanted the guy right then."
"Secession stuff. Documents. Martian Secession. Not illegal, not in Dallas . . ."
"The mech missed the live-in, had to shut Nolan up. Didn't get the records, either. A botch. Thoroughgoing botch. The live-in—who knew the building like that? He wasn't any Company man. Martian with no visa, no regulation entry to the planet? I'll bet Nolan knew what he was, I'll bet Nolan was passing stuff to the Movement."
"An exec in MarsCorp? Over Martian Transport? Ask how the guy got here with no visa."
"Shit," he said. Then he thought about the mech, the kind of tech the rebels didn't have. "They wouldn't want a witness," he said. "The rebels wouldn't. The Company damned sure wouldn't. Ross would've gone for me, except I was linked in. I was recording. So she couldn't snatch the guy—had to shut the guy up somehow. They damn sure couldn't have a Company cop arrested down here. Had to get him shut up for good and get Ross off the planet. . ."