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There was no heat, but the blast staggered her. Debris whined past her head. Blindly she struggled to keep her footing, slipped, and ricocheted off something warm and alive, banged into something hard and metallic. She pulled her arm down.

Mei Feng stood at the centre of a circle of debris where the vegetable stall used to be. Roz saw an arm protruding from a mound of broken wood, a limbless torso driven into the wall behind. Human or alien? Roz couldn’t tell.

Damn, she thought, collateral.

The pistol had opened up Mei Feng’s chest, pulverized the breastbone and ribs. The remains of her pants-suit jacket hung down like ragged curtains. Inside the bloody cavity Roz saw thousands of tiny fingers – flickers of writhing, purposeful movement.

Mei Feng’s head twitched from side to side, bloody hair flying, the spikes protruding from her eye sockets zeroing in on Roz.

The mouth opened to its full extent and then kept on opening.

The skin of the cheeks split open to show tendons pulled as taut as cables before snapping. The jawbone broke with an audible crack. A ropy cable came vomiting out of Mei Feng’s mouth.

Red gold in the orange sunlight, it flailed towards Roz, its tip a glittering buzz-saw.

Roz shot low this time, the wire flechettes chewing gouges in the pavement and obliterating Mei Feng’s legs at the knees. The N-form lost its balance as the human body it was infesting slumped over. The flashing buzz-saw was whipped out of alignment and buried itself in paving stones.

Roz darted down an alleyway that she hoped connected with the Boulevard Gagarin. Street children slept in huddles against 67

the filthy walls. A brief glimpse of pinched alien faces as she jumped a tangle of legs. She heard sirens behind her as Fury’s hotchpotch of military and civil security forces responded.

The alleyway was blocked off at the end by a two-metre breezeblock wall, red-and-yellow-striped dumpsters lined up against it. Roz clambered on top of one, jumped, and tried to vault over the top. She found herself sliding down the inclined roof of a stall on the other side. The rough recycled wasteboard scraped at her cheek. She twisted, came off the edge feet first, and landed among piles of brightly coloured dresses.

‘Hey,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I say you dangerous lady.’

Roz would have said something pithy but she was all out of breath.

There was a sucking noise, followed by splintering wood. The base of an oak tree to her left shattered. She caught a glimpse of Mei Feng’s torso scuttling along on three pairs of golden legs before the remains of the tree fell between them.

It was teleporting, or traversing dimensional tucks, or whatever. Roz knew she had to do something about that. She ran through her options as she sprinted for the Piazza Tereshkova.

She needed to lay down some subspace interference.

Hyperwave would probably do it, but that was a problem. Most civilian communications would be going through Fury’s main uplink to Aegisthus Station, and the military’s rigs would be too well guarded. Which left the Imperial Communications Company, whose office was just off the Piazza.

All she needed now was a plan.

The thing about hyperwave, the thing that made the whole ecology of the human datascape possible, was that it was always switched on. Once a transmission station was in resonance with another station, a continuous signal had to be broadcast in order to maintain the link.

This standby signal could carry information in low bandwidth packets at almost no cost. You could send text messages from practically any terminal in the Empire and, some people maintained, beyond.

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However, once the information density passed a certain threshold – say that needed to send real-time simcord images – an active hyperwave signal was required. In the ferociously competitive world of media-feed news coverage, a correspondent had to have their images, words and instant analysis of a news event zapped back to their own particular clearing house practically