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'White face, silver eyes?' asked Dogface.

'You know her?'

'What's the message?'

'I don't know. It's in his comms buffer and you didn't answer my question.'

Dogface looked back down at the Hitachi's display plate avoiding Lambada's eyes. Lambada folded her arms and glared at him. Blondie was shocked, it wasn't like Dogface to back down.

'I'm not sure,' he said, 'but it sounds like the Angel Francine.'

Lambada closed her eyes and went very still for a moment. 'Christ in a bucket,' she said. 'The fucking V Soc. Like we don't have enough troubles.'

'Whatever they want it's nothing to do with us.'

'Better hope so.'

Blondie waited until Lambada had gone before he asked, 'What's the vee sock?'

'Veterans Society,' Dogface told him as he initiated the wake-up sequence on the old Hitachi. 'You've got your triads, your Cosa Nostra and your yardies. And then you've got the V Soc. And if you get them on your ass, you truly have someone on your ass.'

Dogface picked up a hypo and slotted in a lOcc adrenaline cartridge. 'You watch a lot of vids don't you,' he said as he pressed the hypo against Old Sam's neck. 'Ever see Frankenstein?'

There was a long hiss as the drug went in.

Isle of Dogs

Emerging into sunlight for the first time in days, Ming went straight past the line of waiting autokarts and started to walk home. Westferry Road was a broad curve round the Isle of Dogs lined with genetically engineered plane trees. Real air blew up the curve of the river from the Thames estuary, a brine-smelling wind that shook the silver leaves. Many of the trees were over a hundred years old, planted to scrub the London air, locking up the cadmium, dioxin and lead in striated layers of cellulose.

A couple of protestors from the European Heritage Foundation stood between the joke palm trees in front of the old church. The EHF had leased the building as headquarters for their save the wharf appeal. A bright yellow canary with a crutch under one wing and a bandaged head stared winsomely out of a daylight hologram attached to the wall. Ming remembered the red-brick shopfront had once been an Orthodox church, before that a mosque, before that a synagogue and before that?

Waves of migrants rolling up old father Thames and depositing rich layers of ethnic silt on the shores of East London.

One of the protestors waved a sucker-box at Ming as she walked past. On a whim she slotted in her moneypen and gave them a hundred. What the hell, she could afford it. The portable credit unit was yellow with black stripes, a wax seal over the output jack was embossed with the seal of the Charities Commission. She guessed that most of the money would go on icebreaker programs to mess up the autodozers of the demolition firm.

The protestor thanked Ming in franglais and pushed a leaflet into her hand. She waited until she was round the comer in Harbinger Road before pushing it unread into the paper slot of the nearest bin.

Ming's Mansion, as it was known locally, was a lovingly restored maisonette set in its own grounds off Hesperus Crescent. A hundred and fifty-four years old, it had by a freak of planning avoided demolition. Ming had bought into the top floor when she started working for STS and over the years by dint of careful planning and some judicious intimidation, had managed to acquire the whole building. She used up a few favours getting it fixed - Kings Cross became the primary Northern European transit hub instead of the Gard du Nord and Ming got a preservation order on her home plus a grant for restoration, high-pressure water cannons blasting decades of grime off the concrete walkways.

Number One Husband Fu was tending a window box on the first floor balcony. Of the red painted doors behind him only two were real, one leading to the flat he shared with Number Two Wife, the other to his office.

Fu grinned when he saw Ming coming and ran down the external stairwell to meet her. The same bounding steps as he'd used on their wedding day forty years ago, he and his friends forcing the