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And there they were. Two, three – zoom, key to track – four, crouching and scurrying. Two with rifles, the others lugging a pack. The best-straight-line of their zigzag rush arrowed the Alexsander Institute. The AI block.

Cranks, then. No compunction.

‘Do it for Big Blue,’ he told the gun. He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over; it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y-chromosomes.

‘Targets stunned.’

What was it on about? Kohn checked the scrolling read-out. The gun had fired five high-velocity slugs of SLIP – skin-contact liquid pentothal. It had put the cranks to sleep. He could have sworn he’d switched to metal rounds.

‘HED detected. Timer functioning. Reads: 8.05…8.04…8.03…’

‘Call Security!’

‘Already copied.’

Kohn looked over the parapet. Two figures in hard-suits were running across the grass towards the unconscious raiders. He thumbed the Security channel.

‘Lookout Five to Ready One, do you copy?’

(‘7.51.’)

(‘Yes, yes.’)

‘Ready One to Lookout. Receiving.’

‘They’ve got a time-bomb with them. Could be booby-trapped.’

They stopped so fast he lost sight of them for a moment. Then an unsteady voice said, ‘Hostiles are alive, repeat alive. Our standing instructions—’

‘Fuck them!’ Kohn screamed. He calmed himself. ‘Sorry, Ready One. My contract says I override. Get yourselves clear. No dead heroes on my call-out. Shit, it could be dangerous even from there, if it’s a daisy-cutter…Hey, can you give me a downlink to the UXB system?’

‘What hardware you got up there, Moh?’

‘Enough,’ Moh said, grinning. The guard took a small apparatus from his backpack and set it on the grass. Kohn adjusted the gun’s receiver dish-let, hearing the ping of the laser interface. The screensight reformatted.

‘OK, you got line-of-sight tight beam, user access.’ The guards sprinted for cover.

Normally Kohn couldn’t have entered this system in a million years, but there’s never been any way around the old quis custodiet (et cetera) questions. Especially when the custodes are in the union.

Fumbling, he keyed numbers into the stock. The gun was picking up electronic spillover from the bomb’s circuitry (no great feat; AI-abolitionists didn’t really go for high tech) and bouncing it via the security guard’s commset to British Telecom’s on-line bomb-disposal expert system.

‘2.20.’ Then: ‘No interactive countermeasures possible. Recommend mechanical force.’

‘What?’

In a distant tower, something like this:

IF (MESSAGE-UNDERSTOOD)

THEN; /* DO NOTHING */

ELSE DO;

CALL RE-PHRASE;

END;

‘SHOOT THE CLOCK OFF!’ relayed the gun, in big green letters.

‘Oh. All right.’

The gun lined itself up. Kohn fired. The screen cleared and reverted to normal. The gun was on its own now.

‘Status?’

‘No activity.’

He could see that for himself. The pack containing the bomb had jerked as the bullet passed through it. So had one of the bodies.

Kohn felt sick. Ten minutes earlier he’d been annoyed that these people weren’t dead. No one, not even his true conscience, would blame him, but the twisted code of combatant ethics revolted at pre-stunned slaughter. He stood, and looked down at the prone figures, tiny now. The one he’d hit had an arm wound; at the limits of resolution he could see blood oozing rhythmically…

Therefore, not dead. Relief flooded his brain. He talked into the chin mike, requesting medicals for the injured hostile. What about the others? Campus Security wanted to know.

‘Put them in the bank,’ Kohn said. ‘Credit our account.’

‘Lookout One? What’s the name of your account?’

Disarmed, waking from their shots, the attackers were being handled gently. They’d gone from hostile to hostage, and they knew it. An ambulance whined up.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Kohn said. ‘The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence collective. Nat-Mid-West account 0372 87944.