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‘All right. So what are we going to do in here?’

‘Interrogate this little bastard, for a start.’ He pointed down at the gun, on the floor between his boots. ‘I set it to track your project – OK, OK – and it might just have some traces from before whatever it was happened. Might give us an indication of whether it was all in my mind or not. I think that’s fairly important.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Her tone was ironic.

‘There’s a bit more to it than the state of my head,’ he said mildly. ‘We could now be at the mercy of’ – he put on a voice-over voice – ‘“intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” that could hijack every piece of hardware that has any connection with the global comm networks. In short, everything. Mankind: the complete works. On disk.’

‘Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am! Because the whole goddamn datasphere is meaningless without humans doing things with it. What I remember from the entity I encountered is this total overwhelming curiosity. And a desire to survive which in a sense is derived from that curiosity: it wants to stick around to see what happens next.’

‘Let’s hope it’s an idle curiosity.’

‘There is that.’

‘OK, let’s assume this entity of yours isn’t about to pull the plug on us. You’re sure Stasis can’t get at us here. What else do we have to worry about?’

Kohn grimaced. She wasn’t going to like this.

‘First off, the good news is we won’t be easy to track. Our armored car has signature-scrambling hardware that can make any lock-on spy sat blink and rub its eyes and decide it must have made a mistake. The car will have pinged with the tollgate arch as we went in, but the militia’s privacy code is strict to the point of paranoia. Means of enforcement is outlawry, so it tends to be observed.’

Janis frowned. ‘What’s outlawry?’

‘Loss of legal status.’ It didn’t register. ‘Like, you become an unowned resource.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t look so horrified. Goes on the insurance.’

‘Tell me the bad news.’

‘It’s just that my gang has trodden on a lot of fingers in its time, and the enemies we’ve made – the state, the cranks and creeps – are exactly the people you can count on to have big plans for anyone who messes with deep technology. You saw what happened to the lab. I don’t think that was down to Stasis.’

‘They did the break-in, didn’t they?’

‘That’s possible. It’s also possible that, whoever it was, the cranks were giving them cover. If somebody already knows what the drugs are, they’re sure to come after the missing pieces. They won’t come unprepared.’

He powered up the chunky Glavkom kit, then unclipped the gun’s smart systems and connected them. He put the goggles and phones on and slid his hands into the data gauntlets. Their fuzzy grip went up to his elbows, sensual and relaxing. Corporate logos and threatening copyright declarations floated past his eyes for a few seconds. Whoever had pirated this version of DoorWays™ had evidently not bothered to take them out.

Option selection was look-and-wink, which left the hands and head free. He blinked on Stores, found himself looking around a roomful of labelled dials indicating how much space the gun’s programs and databases currently used.

Needles on full, wherever he looked.

‘Shee-it,’ he said. He heard Janis’s querying response faintly through the phones.

‘Gun’s fucking loaded,’ he said.

He waved reassuringly at her grunt of concern, causing an agitated flurry among some menu screens to his right. He calmed them down and continued investigating. The last time he’d used this front-end to look inside the gun it had represented the internals as a ramshackle collection of armoured bunkers with banks of instruments, a small lab, a snug fire-control module, all connected by a sort of Viet Cong tunnel system…all there, still, but now burrowed under a vast complex of warehouses, libraries, engine-rooms. He didn’t recognize the goods; the books were in languages he didn’t know; and what the machines were doing made no sense at all. He backed out in a hurry.

Sweat slicked the goggles as he slid them off.

‘Found anything?’

Kohn looked