The man inside was small and wizened, with unnaturally pale skin and colourless eyes. He looked as if he hadn't seen the sunlight for twenty years.

"Carey Castle," he said by way of introduction. "Pest control. The scavengers raid the net, I raid the scavengers. We have a very convoluted web here, though some of the websters don't realize quite how convoluted it is. I put out a few new feelers when your call came through, but you said to be discreet. Nothing's come through yet."

"Nothing'll come over the net," said Carl, looking round. "The Kid's not stupid enough to feed the disc into a system terminal."

"Never overestimate the capacity which the human mind has for stupidity," said Castle scornfully. "I'm monitoring as much traffic as I can, looking for anything interesting. You can bet your life that a dozen other stations monitored the signal which was sent to me, and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that one or two have decoded it by now. We need to know who else is interested and who's pa.s.sing information on regarding this affair. I don't have anything yet, but I'll get it, given time. Everybody has to use the net."

"Never mind that," said Pasco. "What about the local hackers? Any of them acting suspiciously?"

Castle shrugged. "I put new fibre-eyes through the walls to take a look at the real screwb.a.l.l.s," he said. "They soon spot them and black out the tips, but I can usually get an hour or two of good tape. n.o.body doing anything they shouldn't be."

"Show me," said Pasco.

Castle punched in a few command codes and pointed to a row of screens. Four were active but only two showed an image.

"Pawlak's got the lights outa"it's his bedtime," said Castle. "Zagorski probably found the eye and blacked it out already. He's very sharp, and he often tries to take a bit out of usa"the Kid's traded with him in the past, so he might be our best bet."

"Who's that one?" asked Pasco, pointing to one of the live-action shots, which showed an Oriental busy in front of a screen.

"Yam On Wan. He's M-Ma"has a dish and decoder for their sats. He's watching data-flow way down in the Argentine. Routine, for him."

"And the other?" Carl saw a little old lady, extensively cyborgized, similarly hunched over a screena"but her fingers were plugged in instead of playing with a keyboard.

"Harriet the Hooker. She's out on Cloud Nine, just coasting. She's strictly a small-time pickpocketa"credit fraud, transaction raider. If you want my tip, go for Zagorski. He obviously has something to hide. You want me to run the tape I took before he blacked me out?"

"No," said Pasco. "I don't think so. How often does Harriet use her armchairs?"

"How the h.e.l.l should I know? I'm not a voyeur, you knowa"I don't run these fibres through the walls for the fun of it. I have business to do, and all the scanning programmes in the world are useless unless somebody's paying attention."

Carl saw what Pasco was getting at. The armchair in Harriet's cosy little cave was empty. Its seat was the only bit of vacant s.p.a.ce on view. No one was there nowa"but it was just possible that someone had been there not so long agoa"and had already gone again. The hooker was behaving normallya"maybe expecting that someone might try to have a peek at hera"but for a hooker, carelessness of the physical environment was entirely normal. An empty s.p.a.ce was just the kind of thing she might have forgotten to cover up.

"Call Carmona and have him send out a wrecking crew," said Pasco grimly. "I want a word with Harriet, and I don't think she'll be opening her door to strangers just now."

6.

The moment Harriet heard the drills get to work on her lock she knew the game was up. There was no use taking time out to wonder how that scuzzbag Carey Castle had rumbled hera"though she was convinced that she'd been acting absolutely normally since he ran his newest thread through her wall. By the time he'd opened up the spyhole she'd already stowed her copy of Kid Zero's disc, and it had seemed easy enough to simulate business as usual, but something had obviously gone wrong.

She had no illusions about her ability to hold out under interrogation. She had too much flesh left on her, and all of it could be hurt. She pulled all her connections loose immediately, trying to ignore the headache it left her with.

There was only one thing she could try, so she tried it. She dialled the number of the phone by the pool table, hoping that one of the Atlas Boys would answer it. She had some credit with the Atlas Boys, and they were big fans of Kid Zeroa"maybe his biggest, in more ways than one.

When the connection was made she recognized Cyril's voice, even though he only said: "Yeah?" That was gooda"Cyril was a nice boy.

"It's Harriet the Hooker," she told him. "Something big's going down between GenTech and Kid Zero. The Kid left me something for safe-keeping and the Spiders are battering the door down to get hold of it. I don't know how many there are or who they're working fora"can you help?"

She heard Cyril relaying the message, and prayed that Big Charlie wouldn't be in the middle of a break. The door was already creaking on its reinforced hinges, and she knew that the locks and bolts couldn't hold it against the kind of brute force which the cutting crew could muster.

"We'll be there, Harriet," said Cyril briefly. Harriet hung up before he could hear her sob of relief.

The door held out for another twenty seconds, and then her nest was wide open to all comers. The first man through had only half a face, and she somehow knew that his manners would be as ugly as his mug. He came over to her and turned her chair half-round so that it faced him. He towered over her. A second man came in behind hima"younger, handsome in a way, but very solid. They both had "hard man" written all over them. She didn't know them, but they obviously weren't gangmen. She hoped they were only Ops, but she knew how desperate that hope was.

"Harriet," said the man with the ruined face gently, "we haven't time to be civil about this. We know Kid Zero was herea"we want to know what you did for him, where he went and how long ago."

"Ain't seen the Kid in over a year," she said valiantly. "I heard he was in New Mexico."

The man with half a face sighed, and said: "You're under arrest, Harriet. We'll make up the charge sheet later, but you now as well as I do how much we have on you, and how much more we can get. If you don't help us, we're going to disconnect you, implant by implanta"and we aren't going to be very particular about how we rip the implants out. You have ten seconds, Harriet, and I want you took look into my eyes, so that you'll know I mean exactly what I say."

As he spoke, he picked up one of her hands, and pinched the plug on her ring-finger between his thumb and forefinger. He pressed just hard enough to let her feel the force of his gripa"so that she could antic.i.p.ate what it might feel like when he tore the plug away from the artificial synapse which linked it directly to her nervous system.

She looked into his eyes, as he had asked her to, comparing the one which was natural with the one which didn't.

He began counting: "Ten, nine, eighta" It was obvious that the man had a real flair for melodrama.

Harriet thought about the afterlife, and about the pain that might have to be suffered before she got therea"and she prayed that Cyril and the boys would soon arrive.

When the count had reached three there were the first sounds of a scuffle outside, and a Spider lurched into the room, collapsing into the armchair she'd cleared for Kid Zero. He was followed by another, who came in without his feet touching the floora"he was being held that way by Cyril Atlas. Big Charlie Atlasa"Charlemagne, as Homer Hegarty called him and as he naturally preferred to be knowna"was just behind him, filling the entire doorway with his bulk. The remainder of the cutting crew was still outside, hopefully accompanied by the rest of the Atlas Boys.

Neither of the Atlas Boys had guns in their handsa"they didn't want any trouble with the Spiders which would lose them a home base, and theirs was a delicate mission, diplomatically speaking.

"Two," said the man with half a face, hauling out a pistol as he said it. That was as far as he went, for the time being. He eyed Cyril and Charlie with open disdain.

"Can I help you boys?" said his companion smoothly, moving to stand in front of Cyril Atlas. Cyril looked around for somewhere to put the Spider down, but the room was now too crowded. He turned around and pa.s.sed his captive to Charlie, who stepped back in order to let him out. Then Cyril turned back to loom over the man who'd had the temerity to confront him.

"That's my mother your friend's messin' with," lied Cyril, without much conviction. "Why is your friend messin' with my mother?"

"We're from the Welfare Department," said the hard man. "We just want to make sure that she collects all the benefits she's ent.i.tled to."

"Call him off, Charlie," said the Spider in the armchair. "You don't want any part of this. It's corp business. You remember Ray Pasco, don't you? b.u.t.t out, or your next home-from-home will be Sandrat City."

"We don't want any trouble," said Charlie Atlas, in his slow ba.s.so profundo. "Peace Through Strength is our motto. We don't believe in violencea"just Dynamic Tension. Seems to me, though, that this here is a tense situation."

"I'm warning you, Charlie," said the Spider, "you're losing a lot of moral credit here. We're the guys who run this joint, and we decide who can do what. Mr Pasco won't hurt Harriet, if she tells him what he wants to know."

"Do you know what he wants to know, Ma?" asked Cyril, loudlya"and when Cyril was loud he was very loud indeed.

"No, son," said Harriet, "I don't know anything. He's asking about someone called Kid Zero, but I didn't ever have a Kid named Zero, did I?"

"I don't have time for this sort of pantomime," said Pasco wearily, and shot Cyril Atlas clean through the right eye.

While the exit wound was spewing out a mess of red cloud and grey matter Cyril's face took on a surprised expression. Then he fell backwards into Charlie Atlas's arms. Charlie had no alternative but to catch him, because there was no s.p.a.ce for him to fall over, and the fact that he had both his arms around Cyril meant that he had no chance at all to get out of the firing-line.

The man with half a face sighted along the barrel of his gun at Charlie Atlas's forehead, and said: "You got two choices, fat man. You can take your freakin' gang back to the bar, and go back to your game of pool, or I'll turn your brain to the same kind of cold porridge you got all over your shirt-front. And if your friends out in the corridor vote that you got to be a hero, every freakin' one of them will be dead before morning. That's not the Spiders talking, it's GenTech. Okay?"

Harriet could tell that it wasn't okay. In fact, she could tell that the man with half a face had just made himself an extra enemy. Charlie didn't like to see his boys maltreated, and he didn't think Cyril had been anywhere near provocative enough to deserve what he'd got. On the other hand, Charlie was no fool. He could tell when he was out of his depth. He knewa"and Harriet knew tooa"that there was nothing Charlie could do but back off. She knew that Charlie and the Boys would feel pretty sick about it, but there it was. She felt pretty sick about it herself.

"You'd better not hurt Harriet," said Charlie, in the most menacing tone he could muster. "Harriet has a lot of friends."

It was news to Harriet. She appreciated the gesture, impotent though it was.

"It's okay, Charlie," she said softly. "I was wrong. I shouldn't have called. I didn't mean to get Cyril killeda"I'm really sorry."

"That's better," said Pasco, who still hadn't lowered his gun. "The tension's going out of the situation already, you see? Harriet's a businesswoman, and we're just here to do a little businessa"that's all."

The doorway looked very big and very empty once Charlie Atlas was no longer filling it. In fact, the room seemed very much larger, because he had dragged Cyril's body out with him.

"That wasn't very sensible, Harriet," said Pasco grimly. "The Kid should have warned you that we'd mean business this time. He hasn't done you any favours by dragging you in, and you don't owe him any in return. He's overstepped the mark, this time. He's already deada"just living on borrowed time. Like the Atlas Boys, you have only two choices, Harriet. You can be on Kid Zero's side, or you can be on our side. There aren't any neutrals any more. Which is it to be, Harriet?"

"I'll get you the disc," said Harriet faintly. Pasco let her go while she rummaged around for it. She wondered briefly whether she ought to have made more copies, but realized that she was too deep in the s.h.i.t to think about pulling flankers.

She handed the disc to Pasco, who glanced a it briefly before pa.s.sing it on to his friend.

"How many are there?" he asked.

"Four," said Harriet tonelessly. "The Kid took the other three. One to stash, he saida"the rest he's going to try to get to the CIA. The guy who gave it to him was a government agent of some kind. The Kid wants to complete the delivery."

The man with the ruined face looked at his friend, who looked back stonily.

"Where'd he go?" asked Pasco silkily.

"I don't know," said Harriet truthfullya"but this was one of those time when the truth just wasn't enough.

Ray Pas...o...b..oke the implant from her left ring-finger. She heard the snap before the pain caught up with her, because sound travels faster through the air than electrical impulses travel through the nerves.

She fainted. Old age was on her side, and it wasn't going to let her take much suffering. She'd have been only too pleased to fall into a dream, but she didn't. She fell into some dark pool of pain, where she was out of touch with the world but hurting through and through. It wasn't a pleasant place to be, so she struggled to get back again.

When she came round, she found that she was curled up on the floor with a close-up view of Ray Pasco's boot. The man with the ruined face was talking to a Spider who'd just come ina"not the one who'd headed the cutting crew. The cutting crew had gone.

"aheading north-west," the Spider was saying. "Five hours ago. If you step on it, you might just catch him."

"It's good," Pasco's companion said. "We can concentrate the search. Maybe we can put the word out without attracting too much attention."

Harriet gave out an unearthly groan, trying to sound as if she was about to die, and rolled over. Then she pretended that she was unconscious again. Pasco nudged her in the ribs with his toecap, but he was too preoccupied to take a closer look. That was good.

Her right hand was now shielded by her body, and there was a low-lying connect-point from which she could control some of her supplementaries. She couldn't interface with the net, but she could open up some outside lines. She switched on half a dozen voice-mikes, then opened up an old wire Zagorski had run into her equipment. She was certain that Yam On Wan had a good tap into Zagorski's machinerya"and that meant that anything else which was said would be half way around the world within minutes.

"Why north-west?" asked Pasco. "He's doubling backa"that doesn't sound to me like he's trying to get to the government. There's nothing out there but sand and ghost towns."

Harriet withdrew the connection, and groaned again. This time, Pas...o...b..nt down to pick her up. He wasn't as wide as an Atlas Boy but he was every bit as tall, and he held her up as easily as if she'd been a rag doll.

"What did he tell you, Harriet?" he askeda"but she could tell that the menacing manner was all bluff. He thought that if he hurt her, she'd only faint again.

"He told me that what he had was really big," she said, trying to sound terrified. "He told me that it was worth millionsa"but the Kid don't care about money. He just wants to give it away, to anyone who'll use it to hurt GenTech. He wants to crack your org wide open."

Are you listening, boys? she added silently, offering up a prayer that this wasn't just going on to some stupid tape that Zagorski wouldn't play back until Christmas.

Pasco set her down in the vacant chair, then looked around.

Too late! she cried in the empty reaches of her head, hoping that she was right.

"Burn it out," said the man with the ruined face to the Spider. "Turn it all to slag. Take the woman out by the back way, and pa.s.s her on to our people when they can get down here. They can use drugs to find out whether she really knows any more or not, but we don't have time to play right now. Preston and I had better go out the same way, in case we get held up by more moronic giants. So far, our luck's helda"we know when the Kid left and which way he wenta"it's only a matter of time before we pick up the trail. With luck, we might nail him today or tomorrowa"but either way, he's finished. There's nowhere at all he can go."

"You got it," said the Spider shortly.

"And you have a big pay-off coming right down the line," said Pasco. "If you can keep your mouth shut. Carey Castle will monitor every signal that goes out of this place, and if one word of what you just overheard gets broadcast, you're dead."

Harriet was trying hard to be convinced that Ray Pasco was locking the stable door after the horse had already bolted. Ten to one she was right, but there were no certainties in life, alas.

She wanted to say something brave and defiant, like "You'll never get the Kid," but she didn't have the strength, let alone the certainty. She could only hope that GenTech's drugs would give her pleasant dreamsa"and that when Kid Zero's reckoning finally came, Lady Venom would get in a bite or two in order to even up the score.

7.

There were times when Homer Hegarty hated his job.

He loved being a TV stara"not only because the pay was ten times better than he'd ever made teaching college but also because he was a bit of a sucker for the line of patter which he fed the punters, about being the only man in America who could see the writing on the walla"but being a TV star was only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of it was travelling the country with a fleet of copters and cameras, on the road six days a week, living in c.r.a.ppy motels and trailer-parks. It was the sick and schticky business of trying to weave epic storiesa"or mock-epic stories, anyhowa"out of the petty squabbles of brainless a.s.sholes, most of whom had as much real backbone as the average jellyfish.

Homer hated his job most when it took him to the parts of America which had been s.h.i.tholes even in the good old days. The worst of all those s.h.i.tholes, in Homer's anything-but-humble opinion, was Texas. He firmly believed the old joke about G.o.d having made a real mess of landscaping Texas but worming his way out of trouble by creating a bunch of potential settlers so mind-bogglingly stupid as to like it just the way it was: flat, infertile, and ugly as h.e.l.l.

The trailer-camp where he and his team were presently lodged was out on the edge of the Staked Plains. It was technically only semi-desert, but that "technically" covered a mult.i.tude of sins. It was the back of beyond, where even sandrats and scavengers had a hard time making out.

The trailer-park had only one advantage: it was secure. In fact, its owners claimed that it was every bit as secure as the older PZsa"which Homer was prepared to believe, having recently visited New York and Chicago. The security men called themselves the Delta Force and claimed to have belonged to a crack regiment of the U.S. Army in the days before privatization, but Homer didn't believe thata"these guys were too bright ever to have been real soldiers; some of them could even read. He figured that they were ex-juvie gangculters who'd survived long enough in the NoGos to know how to move upmarket.

Homer figured that he needed an outfit like Delta Force to watch his rear, even though most of the gangsters thought he was the next best thing to G.o.d. There were always crazies out there, who might figure that the quickest way to become a celebrity was to knock off the guy who was the nation's number one celebrity-broker.

Tonight, Homer had retired early to his trailer. He always had a trailer to himself, and rarely entertained people there. He liked his own company, and talking to himself was the only chance he ever got to hold a conversation on a reasonable intellectual level. Also, he liked to have time to read; it was a habit he'd never shaken off, even though his years teaching college were long-gone, and he treasured it all the more during those times when the job made him sick. Tonight, not for the first time, he was reading Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. He found it utterly engrossing, as he did any opportunity to escape into the abstract realms of philosophical thought, where he need not be bothered by the stink of the s.h.i.theap that the modern world had become.

He was so engrossed in the book, in fact, that he didn't even notice the door of the trailer open and close. It wasn't until the reek of sweat and dirt told him that someone else was present that he looked upa"and by that time, the party in question had sat down on the spare bunk, opposite to the one in which Homer was lying.

For one awful moment, Homer thought that he was a dead man. He looked into the anonymous, characterless face of a juvie panzer boy: gaunt, hollow-eyed, inhuman. It seemed like the contemporary mask of the Grim Reaper, come to carry him off to some mysterious Underworld where all the dead, unwanted children of the world played games of murder and destruction.

But then he saw that the face wasn't characterless. He saw that there was intelligence and curiosity in those pale blue eyes, and that a kind of smile played around the thin lips. He realized that it wasn't anonymous, either. He was face-to-face with one of those unlucky souls whose sordidly violent exploits he hada"with great difficulty and even greater ironya"trans.m.u.ted into the stuff of legend.

He was glad to see that the Kid wasn't pointing a gun at him. He was so glad to see it that he didn't even try to reach for the alarm bell that would have brought half-a-dozen Delta Force heavies racing to his aid.

"Hi Kid," he said, trying with all his might to sound as if this sort of thing happened all the time. "You wanna beer?"

Kid Zero nodded.