Glasshouse - Charles Stross [18]
I don’t want company right now (apart from Kay’s), so I tell my netlink to anonymize me as I head home via the graph of T-gates that connect the Green Maze. People reveal themselves to my filtered optic nerves as pillars of fog moving in stately silence, while my own identity is filtered out of their sensory input by their netlinks.
But not recognizing people is not the same as not knowing somebody is there, and you have to be able to dodge passersby even if you can’t tell who they are. About halfway home I realize that one of the fogpillars is following me, usually a gate or two behind. How interesting, I tell myself as reflexes I didn’t know I had kick in. They’re clearly aware that I’ve got anonymity switched on, and it seems to be giving them a false sense of security. I tell my netlink to tag the fogpillar with a bright red stain and keep my positional sense updated with it. You can do this without breaking anonymity—it’s one of the oldest tricks in the track and trail book. I carry on, taking pains to give no hint that I’ve recognized my shadow.
Rather than retracing the route we took through the Green Maze, I head directly toward my apartment’s corridor. The fogpillar follows me, and I casually ease my left hand into the big hip pocket on my jacket, feeling my way through the spongy manifold of T-gates inside it until I find the right opening.
I’m walking along the nave of altars in the temple of the skeletal giants when my tail makes its move. There’s nobody else about right now, which is probably why they pick this particular moment. They lunge toward me, thinking I can’t see them, but the tag my netlink has added to their fogpillar gives them away—I’ve got a running range countdown in my left eye and as soon as they move, I cut the anonymity filter, spin, and draw.
He’s a small, unremarkable-looking male—nut brown skin, black hair, narrow eyes, wiry build—and he’s wearing a totally unremarkable-looking kilt and vest; in fact the only remarkable thing about him is his sword. It isn’t a dueling sword, it’s a power-assisted microfilament wire, capable of slicing through diamond armor as if it isn’t there. It’s completely invisible except for the red tracking bead that glows at its tip, almost two meters from his right hand.
Too bad. I brace, squeeze the trigger for a fraction of a second, then let go and try to blink away the hideous purple afterimages. There’s a tremendously loud thunderclap, a vile stench of ozone and burned meat, and my arms hurt. The sword handle goes skittering across the worn flagstones, and I hastily jump out of the way—I don’t want to lose a foot by accident—then I glance about, relying on my peripheral vision to tell me if anyone else is around.
“Scum!” I hiss in the direction of Mr. Crispy. I feel curiously unmoved by what I’ve just done, although I wish the afterimages would go away faster—you’re supposed to use a blaster with flash-suppression goggles, but I didn’t have time to grab them. The blaster is a simple weapon, just a small T-gate linked (via another pair of T-gates acting as a valve) to an endpoint orbiting in the photosphere of a supergiant star. It’s messy, it’s short-range, it’ll take out anything short of full battle armor, and because it’s basically just a couple of wormholes tied together with superstring, it’s impossible to jam. On the minus side my ears are ringing, I can already feel the skin on my face itching with fresh radiation burns, and I