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  “Three point one million, then.” Vladimir accepts the correction equably. “Considerably less than the cost of outright war, I would submit. For both the Cutters and the Ancients. Yes, I think a war would cost us both considerably more when one takes into account the lost revenue and assets, and the impairment of our ability to capitalize on new business opportunities during the rebuilding phase.” He smiles—I think that’s what he’s doing—his lips forming a thin straight line. “I believe the leadership of the Ancients will see reason.”

  “What about our rep?” Ranger grates. “What are the other gangs going to think when they see the Ancients hitting us hard and we don’t hit back?” He sneers at Vladimir, who merely raises an eyebrow, and I feel the sudden urge to go hide behind Box, But Ranger just rags on. “What are the Seoulpa rings going to think when they see us hurt, and then they see us mincing on over to present the dandelion-eaters with a fragging bill! And what are they going to do?"

  “What they will do,” Vladimir replies, his urbane voice in frightening contrast to the killing look in his eyes, “is nothing. They will see us still on good terms with the Ancients, not distracting and weakening ourselves in a foolish war. They will see us strong and ready to repulse any moves they might make against us. If we declare war, on the other hand, they will see us reassigning to the battle lines the very resources that have so far dissuaded them from moving against us.”

  Perfectly logical, but too much of the time logic is to Ranger what red cloth is to a bull. The war boss is on his feet now and drawing a big breath to say something that’s going to get him in real trouble with Vladimir. Go to it, Ranger, say I.

  But Blake cuts him off. Not by telling him to stuff it, not even by holding up a cautioning hand. No, he merely raises the forefinger of his right hand, which is resting flat on the table. The finger moves maybe a centimeter, but it’s enough to cut Ranger off in mid-rant. That’s power for you. That’s also Blake.

  He waits quietly while Ranger swallows whatever he was going to say and sits himself back down. Then he looks around the table. For a moment Blake reminds me of sims I’ve seen of lions in the wild, before they all died out. He’s got the same air of indolence and latent violence as a big cat looking out over the savanna. Or something. It helps that he’s a big man—nearly a full two meters tall and built like an urban brawl banger—but that’s not all of it. I’ve never seen him move fast, and if his broad, handsome face—a couple of shades darker than the mahogany table—were any more placid, any medico would probably declare him dead on the spot. There’s just something about him that radiates power, pure and simple. I’ve seen people with big brass ones clanging between their legs, people who were death on two feet, walk into the same room with Eilake, and suddenly look like they wanted to roll over onto their backs and whine like wolves submitting to the pack leader. Yeah, that’s Blake.

  Almost in slow motion he scans the faces of the people at the table, shifting his eyes from one to the next. When his gaze settles on someone, that individual seems to shrink visibly. Not Springblossom, because she probably doesn’t notice, and not Vladimir. But everyone else, which sure as frag includes Ranger.

  Then Blake turns that laser gaze on me, and again I want to hide behind Box. ‘‘You’re Larson, right?” he asks in a voice like velvet and midnight.

  I have to think about it for a moment, then nod.

  “And you confirm what Vladimir has said? About the Ancients not knowing the depot was ours?”

  “That’s what the street says,” I tell him, and my voice sounds like a kid’s in my own ears. “I scoped it with a bunch of sources, and they all corroborate it,” I babble on. He nods his acknowledgment, and I shut the frag up.

  Blake looks at Vladimir, and Vladimir raises one eyebrow a hair. Then Blake’s eyes are back on me. “I’d like to hear your opinion, Larson,” he says. “Do we go to war or not?”

  And suddenly every fragging eye in the place is on me— some surprised, some curious, two differentially dilated, and some with looks that could kill. I try to think of something to say, but the only thing that keeps running through my head is Paco’s comment from the night before—Whafuck?— and somehow that doesn’t seem appropriate. “Well, I . ..

  I stammer, and then stall.

  But Blake’s still looking at me, so I mentally give my head a shake. Rick Larson, zero defects. “No war,” I croak.

  “Ranger disagrees,” Blake points out.

  “Ranger’s wrong,” I say.

  Not a politic comment, I guess. Ranger’s on his feet, his cheeks so flushed he looks like he’s hemorrhaging, and I’m suddenly a scapegoat for all the anger he doesn’t have the cojones to direct at Vladimir or Blake. “What the frag do you know about it, you snot-nosed punk?”

  The wire’s different today—I’ve slotted an escrima chip instead of one for my H & K smartgun—but it still wants to kill Ranger. And that’s my excuse for snapping back, “More than you, drekhead.” My hand slips into my jacket pocket. No firearms at councils—a rule applying even to bodyguards like Box (not that he needs firearms)—and some electronics I shouldn’t be carrying tell me that the ops room has hardware built into the door frame to detect smuggled holdouts.

  Null sweat, though. Chem-sniffers and metal detectors don’t pick up my “click-stick,” a collapsible baton like the Jap cops use. It’s made of a modified densiplast that’s as dense as iron and lets it pack some heft, but it’s totally nonmagnetic. Collapsed, the stick’s a cylinder about twelve centimeters long, and just the right diameter for a comfortable grip. Snap your wrist and it extends with a triple click out to about thirty centimeters, with enough mass in the bulbous tip to crack bone.

  Ranger clouds up even more, growling something that sounds suspiciously like Whafuck, and then lunges. His big right hand whips behind his back, re-emerges with a composite blade, his own nonmetallic holdout.

  I reach for the wire, and the brutal simplicity of escrima fills my mind. It’s from the Philippines, escrima is, and I wouldn’t classify it as a martial art because there’s nothing artistic about it. There are no forms, no formal rules or competitions. It’s about as brutal and pragmatic as the military-style hand-to-hand taught at the Academy, but it’s better for my needs because it assumes your opponent’s armed. Apart from the balisong “butterfly" knife, the only weapon it teaches you to use is a short stick or wand—the kind of “weapon of opportunity” you can pick up just about anywhere—which just happens to be about the same size as my click-stick. What a coincidence.

  As Ranger lunges, out comes my click-stick. Snap the wrist, clickity-click and I’m ready for action. I want to growl out something chill, something like, “Okay, sunshine, let’s see what you’ve got,” but I don’t have anywhere near enough time.

  He comes in low, aiming to drive the blade straight toward my gut, one of the toughest knife-moves to stop. I leap back half a meter, catch his wrist ir. the vee formed by my left wrist and the click-stick in my right hand, deflecting his thrust past my left side. (Just past: I feel the blade tug at my shirt.) Then I snap a quick backhanded shot at his head with the baton. The sharp crack as the stick hits Ranger’s forehead echoes in the room, and blood sprays from his scalp. For an instant he’s frozen, eyes defocused, wide open. It’d be so easy to drive the tip of the baton into his throat, shatter the hyoid bone and rupture his larynx, then just stand back and watch him die. Easy and, in the grand scheme, probably a very smart move.

  But at the moment probably not the best political move. Killing during a council is somewhat frowned upon, and hardly the best way to win friends and influence people. So instead of the throat, I jab the baton into his solar plexus, but nowhere near as hard as I want to. He says whoof, sits down abruptly—missing his chair by a meter, so sorry—and ceases to pay attention to the proceedings.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see something like a leather-covered wall coming up on my flank. “It’s chill,” I tell Box quickly, stepping back out of striking rang
e of Ranger. As coolly as I can manage, I crack the baton tip against the ferrocrete wall of the ops room to release the ferrules, then collapse it and slip it back into my pocket. Hands nice and visibly empty, I turn back to Blake. “You were saying?” I ask.

  For an instant the big man’s lips move in what could almost be a smile. His laser-beam gaze is steady on my face. He was expecting something like this, I realize. He orchestrated the whole thing as a kind of test. But a test for who: for me or for Ranger? If for me, did I pass or fail? Fail for goading Ranger, or pass for dropping him? Who the frag knows?

  “I was saying, you vote against war,” Blake says coolly as though nothing at all’s gone down. “Why?”

  “Too expensive,” I shoot back. “Too high a cost, too little return.”

  “What about rep?” Fahd snarls.

  I could be politic here, but something—maybe it’s the look in Blake’s eyes—tells me that’s not the way to play it. Time for a risk, maybe. If I win, I’m into the inner councils, suddenly increasing my value exponentially. “What about it?” I fire back. “Your way, the rep we get is that we’re stupid for wading into a costly war we could have avoided.” Fahd the weasel’s face goes white, and I know I’ve made another enemy. Busy day. I consider stopping there, but whafuck? “You want to stroke your ego,” I tell Fahd directly, “go beat the drek out of someone who’s not going to bloody your nose. Cut a deal with the Ancients, like Vladimir says, but go butt heads with the Eighty-Eights.” I name one of the local Chinese-style triads. “They’ve been getting too frisky anyway.”

  And there are Blake’s laser eyes burning into my skull again, and I feel like he’s counting my fillings or sifting through my brain. For an instant I’m drek-scared that maybe he’s a shaman or a hermetic who can actually read my mind. But I put that one aside immediately. If Blake could do that, he’d have done so already, and I’d be suffering from a nine-millimeter migraine right about now.

  The silence stretches painfully, and I feel the irrational urge to babble just to fill time. But before I lose it, Blake nods slowly. “The Eighty-Eights,” he muses, “yes. An object lesson to others, hmm?” He smiles at Vladimir, who nods too. “You’ve got a free hand to approach the Ancients leadership about compensation,” Blake tells his advisor. “It’s your baby.”

  Then the leader turns to Fahd, and the weasel seems to shrink back from the boss’ speculative gaze. Again the silence stretches, then Blake taps the table top with a forefinger—a major display of emotion for him. “There will be no reprisals against the Ancients,” he says firmly. “None. I’ll hold you responsible for telling that to him." He gestures to the still-unconscious Ranger. “But, I want some raids against the Eighty-Eights. Hit them hard, hurt them. And make sure the street knows who’s doing it. Tell him that, too.”

  The gang boss pauses, and this time there's no mistaking the faint smile. “And tell him I think he should use Larson here as a major asset,” he adds.

  From the way Fahd is looking at me, I can imagine just how that message is going to get presented to Ranger. I keep my face expressionless as I glance at Blake. The question I asked myself earlier is suddenly much more important. Which one of us is he trying to test? Because the way things are working out, one of us isn’t going to make it out of this alive.

  And that seems to be just what Blake has in mind.

  4

  The meet’s set to go down at the Coffee Bon, one of the high-tone kissaten—Japanese-style coffeehouses—that have recently begun to spring up in Seattle’s downtown core. The CB’s probably the most profitable, and the most prestigious, right in the middle of the corporate sector, just across the street from the Yamatetsu HQ at Fifth and Pike. The decor’s just the right weird, kind of a retro view of the future—how somebody in 1954 predicted 2054 would look, or some such drek. Lots of mirror-flash, lots of high tech masquerading as low tech masquerading as high tech, if you know what I mean. The background music, if you can call it that, is all randomly synthesized tones, supposedly monitored by some kind of algorithm that selects for combinations that would be pleasant to the (meta)human ear. Yeah, right. At least the coffee’s good—real coffee, not soykaf—but then, for fifteen-plus nuyen a cup, it oughtta be. No free refills, either.

  The meets always go down in different places, and I never know who my contact’s going to be. There’s no schedule either, because a schedule could be predicted. Sometimes I go for two, three weeks without checking in with anyone. That’s why they call this deep cover, I guess. The Star uses a couple of different channels to get word to me—and vicey versey—but the best is also the simplest. Among the Cutters, I’ve got a rep as a kind of techno-wonk. Other soldiers spend their spare time getting brain-fried, getting laid, or getting into fights. I do my share of that—the requirements of my cover, not because I enjoy it, ha!—but I spend at least some time every day logging onto UCAS Online, this big public bulletin board service on the Matrix. (I’m a nullhead—no datajack, just my chipjacks—so I use a low-cost, palm-size computer.) UOL has a drekload of chill features, but the big selling point’s the massive message base. Lots of slags from all over the continent—even some from Europe sometimes—log on to connect with special interest groups or real-time online free-for-alls about anything and everything. With so much message traffic, it’s easy to slip a coded message into the data stream. Nothing tricky—it doesn’t need to be—and nothing that resembles a code in any way. You’d really have to know what you’re looking for to spot the kind of messages we exchange. (Frag, sometimes I miss them myself; I’ve hosed a couple of meets that way, but sometimes that’s the price you got to pay.) The message telling me to show up at the Coffee Bon today read like a typical neo-anarchist rant against the monopoly on the news media—badly argued, badly spelled, and badly out of date.

  So that’s how come I’m jandering into the place just before the hour when the junior suits start drifting out of the skyrakers to deplete their expense accounts over lunch. I don’t belong in the CB; every head that turns to look at me, every lip that twists in scorn, every voice that hesitates momentarily, tells me that. I’m obviously from the wrong side of the tracks, and that makes me dangerous and suspect. I don’t wear Zoe, Mortimer of London, Gucci, or Bally, sateen or synthsilk. My fashion tends more to Skulz, Doc Marten, synthleather, and kevlar. Of course, nobody’s going to point that out to me. The current political climate considers dress codes “elitist” (except on actual megacorp turf, of course, where anything goes and you might as well protest the law of gravity). As long as I’m not packing ordnance, illegal armor, or restricted cyberware—at least nothing the tech drek in the doorway can pick up—nobody can tell me I don’t belong. That won’t stop every slot in the place from trying to communicate that concept without saying it outright, however. Any other gangers in the area might wonder why I’m even bothering, except that I’ve carefully built up a rep for hanging in suit bars and restaurants just for the pleasure of slotting people off.

  I jander in, give the slag behind the big espresso machine the old stare-down, and sashay toward the back of the place. I see my contact at once. She’s at the bar, sitting on one of those retro-nuevo chairs that must have been designed by a frustrated proctologist. She used to be a chummer (and more than that for one weekend at the Mayflower Plaza Hotel that I’d like never to forget, thank you) when we were both back in Milwaukee, going through the local Lone Star Academy together, and then again while I was learning the streets and how to work them. Ever since we both got transferred out west, I know she’s carved out a niche for herself in the data management side of the Organized Crime division of the Star. Her name’s Catherine Ashburton, likes to be called Cat, and she’s drop-dead gorgeous, always was, always will be. Petite’s the word, I guess: stands not much more than a meter and a half, weighs about fifty and most of that’s in her rockets. Straight, short, copper-colored hair, the kind of color that makes you think she’d look hot in emerald green. But instead she always wears cranberry
or certain shades of pink, and looks like she just stepped out of a fashion-trid title sequence. Today her eyes are a deep violet.

  Cat’s dressed exactly like a member of one of the schools of brightly colored secretaries that flit around the skyrakers at lunch and after work, trying to avoid-attract the barracuda managers. An ice-maiden, unapproachable, unless your monthly pay’s eight-K nuyen or up. Then she’ll be all titters and smiles and unspoken invitations. Me, on the other hand, the only way I could get eight-K nuyen in a month would be to sell my folks into slavery, then hit big in the lottery. She sees me strolling her way and freezes up.

  So I of course swing myself onto the stool right next to her and give her the once-over, copper top to stiletto heels. “Double espresso,” I snap to the counterman without taking my eyes off the sweetmeat next to me. Cat plays it perfectly. Everything about her shows her internal turmoil—terrified of the street monster beside her, yet equally scared that moving or reacting at all might provoke me. For an instant I catch her violet eyes, and I see the flash of cool amusement. She’s enjoying this, getting out of the office and into the field. And, who knows? Maybe deep down she doesn’t mind seeing me again.

  My espresso arrives. The barista running the machine is working at top speed, getting my order out fast so I’ll leave. I knock back the little cup of bitter coffee and push the empty toward the counterman. “Another,” I tell him.

  I give Cat another top-to-tail scan and a feral street grin while I’m getting ready for the exchange. These meets have two purposes. First, I hand over my report of what’s gone down with the Cutters since the last one, and second, I pick up new instructions from my superior officers. Instructions? Actually, they’re usually limited to something like, “Keep your head down and keep reporting.” Maybe it’s surprising in this age of high tech and high expectations that a physical meet’s the way to go, but it makes sense if you think about it.