The Story Begins When The World Ends...

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Technician Zhe is having one hell of a bad day. Not only has he been sent out from Liquid Space to overhaul a stinking little backwater universe, he's also been tasked by his master (the large and extremely hungry Praetor Primus) to track down his old supervisor Gharfos Nyl. Why in all the hells would a being like Technician Nyl vanish right now, when thousands of alien races have been trying to vaporize him for centuries to no avail? And what could he possibly see in a two-bit mudball called the Earth, a radioactive ruin whose last city totters on the brink of disaster, riven from within by plutocrats, druglords, inbred aristocrats and a faltering A.I. overmind? He's being paid to find out... the only question is, will that paycheck be enough? Elysian Fields is an all-action pulp sci-fi adventure packed with all the violence, destruction and alien terror you can put down on paper. Just like a comic book, only crunchy! 

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Ω

Brother Pious owned nothing but the clothes he wore. His vows of holy duty forbade personal belongings of any other kind.

In a town where a fair few ran around naked in the acid rain, this was a perk of the business. 

Pious was a Valle Crucis monk; his free uniform was meager. A habit of riotmesh complete with a deep and shadowy hood, a simple belt of motorbike chain, and a collection of weapons lovingly and individually named, as per doctrine.

He gets free dental, and a pension plan - should he survive that long.

Patches depicting a heraldic grim reaper adorned the Brother's shoulders, his scythe tearing though a field of silver wheat. Pious thought that the look on the skeleton's face was just a bit too smug.

People eyeballed him suspiciously as he strolled past, but without the fear and loathing they'd reserve for a Celebrant or a Black Technologist. Only sinners feared the Brotherhood.

The Valle Crucis were mercenaries for hire, but worked ultimately for the Vatican. They dispensed justice according to scripture - for the correct donation. And by owning nothing they proved themselves incorruptible to the Subcity poor. Pious and his chapterhouse brothers lived amongst the very poorest.

He was down on the spillway this morning, below sea level in the Pit. Here a concrete incline led from the base of Elysium to the flat bottom of the ocean, made a desert by massive and archaic engineering.

Around him moved a bustling throng of traders and pilgrims, walking the Thousand Stairways up and down from the last city. Pious stepped carefully down the so called Blessed Path, hand-cut from the concrete by Tibetan refugees in centuries past. The builders’ great-great-grandkids hawked green tea and skewer kebabs alongside their franchised staircase, but he waved them away, mouthing apologies. All across the miles-wide face of the incline it was the same; a raft of toll funiculars, dangling ropes, pulley-and bucket relays and aluminum ladders dynabolted down firmly. This side of the spillway was in Vatican territory, where their wedge ran low into the sea. Halfway across began the no-mans land of the spillway army, and then a more organized front with the Ashishim.

Their turbaned and dreadlocked pickets could be seen lolling on observation platforms, trading bullshit on the radio with their Vatican counterparts.

The Spillway Army boys didn't have CB, they were proudly low-tech, some kind of godless inbred cannibals. At least the monks and the Dervashi had some common ground – the S.A. babbled in mangled Esperanto, and were usually hopped up on turnip vodka and bathtub meth.

Ahead of him the concrete ramp fell sharply away, and he could see the tiny spiked security line which separated the Reclaimed Territories proper from the shantytown beyond. Out there was called many things by the ordinary folks of the Subcity, and something different again by each Reclamationist faction. It was a place of exile, inhabited by savages and their war-chiefs.

The Vatican called it 'Purgatorio'; the Burb scum called it 'Beyond Thunderdome'. A lot of folks sent money down there to the families they’d left behind.

Immense dams ran rail-straight into the distance on either side of the Pit, the few functional turbines studding their sheer faces guarded by the tattooed tribesmen of the Ferals.

Far off in the hazy distance the endless Sahara came down into the depths, and with it more sinners eager to win their way up into the shadow of Elysium.

Pious squinted into the rising sun, watching a far-off train of steam-carriages rumble across the seabed toward the Ashishim gates.

The wind rocked him on his heels, sending tiny chips of concrete skittering away down the incline.

He hitched up his chain belt and moved carefully downward to where a great metal rib had burst loose from the spillway. The gargantuan I-beam was forty feet across, rusted to the color of congealed blood. Its tip had been leveled and there, as if in imitation of the artificial gardens of the aristocracy far above, a broad wooden platform had been erected.

Pious checked the address on his commission slip; this was indeed the place.

A fence of bamboo poles surrounded the platform on all sides, their tips sliced off to fashion a pallisade of wicked spikes. Pious was surprised to see any kind of wood used for building this high up the spillway, but bamboo was a real oddity. It wasn't until he was knocking on the door that he noticed the fence was in fact made from lengths of aluminium pipe, artfully painted by hand and welded together.

The door flew open, and a hand grabbed the front of the Valle Crucis' robe before he could catch his balance.

Pious felt three heavy blows strike him in quick succession, and then he was face- down in a little garden of raked sand. He blinked grains from his eyes and focused, his jaw throbbing with agony. Was that a loose molar in there?

"I was told to expect you." said a voice somewhere in the bright blur above him.

A shadow fell across the raked and patterned sand, across Brother Pious' face under its black hood.

"Should you not wonder, Monk, why the Direktor told you to find me here?"

The voice was old, but not reedy or sighing. If spry, cured-hide toughness had a timbre, this was it. Pious rolled left, tucked his feet under him and rose to a crouch.

Facing him across the sand was an old man clad in drab brown robes, his face obscured by a wide-brimmed straw hat.

"I do not wonder" replied Pious, lapsing into the formal speech of his adversary "that you know the name of the one you stole from."

The brim of the hat tipped up, and the red morning sun sparkled in the old man's eyes

"Clever, very clever." he laughed, snapping his fingers. "Let me ask you this, then .... why do you believe your eyes when you watch a threedeeo tape made by a threedeeo magician?"

Pious rose to his feet, his head still aching from those three hammerlike blows. For a geriatric, this guy packed a mean punch. He was right about Direktor Ascher, too.

"I didn't come here to argue philosophy, Murai." he said, reaching under his robe for the handle of his collapsing staff. "The Direktor has evidence, and the fee. I'm only here for the book you stole, and blood need not be shed." To his consternation, Murai kept laughing, slapping his thigh with mirth.

"I'm the last of my nation, Brother Monk" he said, dabbing at his eye with the hem of his robe "Why on earth would that old shrunken head own this particular volume, and not I?"

Pious swore he hadn't blinked, but now Murai held a slim leather-bound book in his hand, its cover slashed with alien calligraphy.

"Do you not think it more likely that he has both the means and the motive to bear this relic away to his fortress above us?"

Pious' face hardened as he saw those red brushstrokes outlined against smooth black leather. It was the same one - the artifact from the security video. His hands were already around the center of the staff as it telescoped outward, snapping smoothly into position.

The old apothecary stepped back out of the weapon's range. He settled into a stance of readiness.

"Accept that you have been fooled, and there can be peace, man of Christ." he said, slowly tucking the little book into his robe. "Surely you don't believe that Direktor Ascher is without sin?"

Pious narrowed his eyes and tightened his grip on the quarterstaff. From one end of the weapon and then the other came a low hum and the crackling discharge of immense voltage.

"Very well." said Murai. “You should have watched more movies, boy. Then you’d know what happens when you attack an old oriental man who appears to be quite defenseless.”

Murai twitched his fingers, beckoning his adversary on, and the quarterstaff whirled into motion. Pious stepped forward swinging. Murai's hat burst into flames as it ricocheted off the tip of the blazing staff, sizzling past the Monk's face so close it singed his eyebrows. He caught a glimpse of the razorblades woven into its brim as it caromed off wide, but he never saw the old man tuck and dive, coming inside the arc of his staff...

Now he kicked Pious' legs out from under him, threw him over backwards, and whiplashed back into a fighting stance as if his whole body were on springs. Pious rolled forward across the hot sand and grabbed Murai's foot. Tightening his grip he spun once, twice, and let his adversary fly into the artificial bamboo fencing. He spat sand and blood - and that busted molar, shaken loose.

There was a very satisfying thud.

The Valle Crucis retrieved his quarterstaff and turned to finish the job, but Murai was already standing, brushing the dust from his robe.

"We shall dispense with the basics, then." he said, snapping off a sharpened length of aluminum and striding forward ...

Ω

As the ring of metal on metal echoed across the spillway, and as the combatants traded technique and attack, an insect inlaid with jet and gold watched their every movement.

The flycam was the size of its annoying namesake; one of a legion carried by cross-traffic thermals through the vents and shafts of Elysium. Its brothers dispersed like seeds from Omnivasive news 'copters and camera trucks; they were placed by a net of operatives.

Through them, Direktor Ascher saw much that others missed. He took great pains to see things which he wasn't supposed to.

The Direktor would dearly love to own a copy of the Hagakure printed on real paper. It's part of a neat and complex plan. But more importantly - he’s learned a valuable lesson today. The Codex Martial of the Valle Crucis was nothing compared to the sly, antique cunning of Tadashi Murai.

A left hook which left an opening for an excruciating finger jab. A follow-up roundhouse kick which snapped the poor monk’s head around, knocking him out cold...

Direktor Ascher mapped Tadashi's technique with an overlay of glittering wireframes, a skeletal neon scrawl. His computer augmentations chewed up the data, folding and slotting it into place among petabytes of similar code.

All in all, his revenge had been a long time coming. It had made him impatient - sloppy. Emotional.

In setting up his little matches he had almost become predicatable – this would be the third time the wizened little chemist had been assaulted in the last week.

But the time was drawing near, now. His instructions to his tame Lord were becoming more precise. Right now, across the city, twenty altercations were in full swing, meticulously observed by Ascher's cams.

So much hatred, and so much anger. He intended to put it to good use.

The telephone chimed in his head, flashing a little red icon in the corner of one eye. Right on time...

“Ascher, I know it was you!” growled the voice on the other end as he picked up. “Who else is so damned arrogant? And to use the 'Crucis as well... but of course you'd never let the police get involved, would you?”

The Direktor smiled, clear plastic tubes shifting in his mouth as his nerveless lips twitched. He replied with a thought, winging that smug little grin of his down the wire. He always found threats so amusing.

“Relax, Tadashi. You're still my number-one cultural advisor, even if you are getting paranoid in your old age. The project is our little secret, and you're the only one who has the history to fill it out. As if those pious creeps from the V.C. would ever work for me!”

There was a long, crackling silence, and Ashcer could imagine the withered old fool seething with anger.

“Who else could it be, Direktor?” he spat “And as of now, you can find yourself a new cultural advisor. Your project is a mockery of my heritage, anyhow... Tokugawa was a unifier, not some kind of movie monster! Take your filthy money back, and leave me alone!”

The connection cut with a crisp little guillotine click, leaving Ascher alone inside his head once again.

Perhaps the next emissary he sent to visit Tadashi Murai would have to be a little less subtle in his approach...

Ω

There was a narrow bed of steel meshwork down in the Pit, and when the rain came through it spattered and rolled off hanging swathes of opalescent plastic tarpaulin stretched tight above it.

Under that near-transparent roof a man slept beneath a livid gash of light-polluted sky.

His name was Abdulafia 330 – and his family name was a number because he was one of a vast, loose clan called the Ashishim. The 'hashish-eaters', descended from an ancient cult.

Sometimes, Ferals out of the pit or the stupider cops of Elysium's Compliance Division thought that they were peacenik Rastas, grooved-out stoner hippies. Drop the word hash in a conversation, and that was prone to happen. But Afia's boys traced their ancestry back to the Hashishin of Syria; a murderous bunch of zealots more apt to slitting crusader throats than rolling doobies.

That wasn't to say that 330 didn't like a pipe or two. It's just that he was also a knife-weilding quasi-religious death machine, dreadlocks or no dreadlocks.

His face looked young; in design, in structure, at a cursory glance. What most people noticed first was the black Dervashi tattoo which sliced across his left eye - an inch-wide strip of black scarified flesh tapering down to a point just above the corner of his mouth.

His sisters in the Revolution couldn't help but note his whipcord muscles, his face carved out sheer and sharp as if with chisel blows.

But look past that and you'd notice the crosshatching of age, lines of worry scored deep into his milk-coffee skin. He'd been alive for over one hundred years, not counting those little eyeblinks of darkness when he'd had his body shot out from under him. But old? No - he had no time for getting old. As a Dervashi of the Ashishim it was his holy duty to remain razor-sharp and tough as nails, an eternal youth made of scar tissue and nanotech.

Around him rose the black massif of the city, spiraling up into vertigo. Slits and pinpricks of light followed its cyclopean curves up to the heavens, picking out with their loose constellations entire neighborhoods welded to its surface plating. Such real estate was expensive; not so the Pit.

Over on his left he could trace a ragged line of defenses up the spillway; Vatican territory was burning tonight, with bucket chains from various 'hoods competing to put out a blazing platform and salvage the wood. The zoom on his gyrocam picked out a motley assortment of mutant faces – scaly and orange, spiked with bony thorns, or almost human save for slit noses, sharp yellow teeth or blazing purple eyes. All of them wore wooden crucifixes swinging on on lengths of twine.

Way up top they had better cosmetics, but this guy still wouldn't touch them.

The Pit was purgatorial. It was a breeding ground for revolution; his stock in trade. As they say, things could have been worse.

Down there on his rusted cot he connected the custom chrome taps in his wrists to a bank of machines, and watched fluid begin to flow.

You'll know the dope-fiend by his wide and staring eyes ...

Above him, the racing clouds skipped and stuttered like a dysfunctional filmstrip, sick ochre/bilious green/slate.

Searchlights rolled over the metal foothills of Elysium, over the land his migrant people hung onto tooth and nail.It was the stuff of legends to them that he slept under the naked sky. His tribesmen didn't know how he came to be their champion, the hidden labs where his body was sequenced; but they needed hope.

They burned it up like cigarettes.

He slept outdoors, and watching the city above him or the fires of the shantytowns below, making them believe. Once, he saw a star up beyond the corrupted jetstream.

More often it was just the arclight glow of the satellite halo, rolling in endless caravan across the sky. He'd welcome a bullet, most nights. But he knows he’s not that lucky.

His stolen body felt cold and itchy, tight across the shoulders. His real self lived in the black crescent which hugged the back of his neck., in a shell of toughened plastic wrapped around a web of memory cels.

Let them shoot, he thought as the nektar twisted and sparked in his blood. He was one of millions.

It was just as he was getting comfortable that his phone began to ring – orders coming in from his master, the lord of the deep city.

Another shipment of drugs was in the pipe, coming down from out of the high strata. A special consignment, and one he was commanded to snatch.

Abdulafia stretched the kinks out of his long, lean limbs, rocked over to his war-chest and pulled down a shimmering holomesh cloak, a pair of daggers and a pistol.

He was going to buy his people a little more freedom.

Ω

The very silence has turned to liquid. Thick, viscous, a medium through which a pair of eyes stare, blank and wide as the skies over desert worlds. A hand moves crabwise, tethered by its arm, until its hungry fingertips run to earth their prey.

Snap

Pop

Hiss

Ragged breathing.

Fingers fumbling back across a black glass table.

Raw data boils through the air, sparking through a set of wetwired points and into the meat of a genetically uplifted brain. Slices of the Valle Crucis Codex Martial, images of Tadashi Murai...

Snap

Pop

Hiss

Focus. . .

Through a droplet of water balanced on a sliver of glass, down the barrel of a loaded microscope, the world is rendered in binary. Turn that gaze to your own hands.

See.

Your skin already crawls; rife with bacteria, tiny insects - the lice of Pan Kuo who became the human race.

Lord Simeon Blaire saw it all the time; his eyes were crystal, lidded with diamond lenses as smooth and black as drops of oil. The lenses recessed mechanically into the soft flesh around his eye sockets, back up into incisions in the bone.

This time, each lens was powdered with the fruit of Blaire's popping capsuls.

The drugs came and peeled his mind back.

Billions of thrashing cilia filled his horrified eyes, a sea of filthy life seething on the crust of his dead skin. Blaire shuddered with delicious self-loathing.

He staggered. A whirlwind of hot exultation clawed up his spine.

Snapshot his reflection: thin, ash-blond and sweating.

A face which seemed struck from white marble in long, sheer strokes.

His eyes were silver-rimmed domes of diamondglass, the only part of himself he didn’t loathe with a burning passion.

Truth was, he'd rather be code than meat.

He knew all about the filth and disease of the world - should he choose to open the radiation shutters he could view it every day from his lofty steel tower. Tiny simulacra; plastic caftans; bicycles and minimarket trundlers. Down Town.

Sometimes he found their little rote interesting. Most days he lived trapped in his own mind, pacing threadbare strips in his deep black carpets.

Most days were vague in bright, excruciating light.

The estate-spire of his family was sheathed in mirrored glass, polarized to keep the radiation out, and when it rained the droplets slid down its surface like samples on a slide.

That acid and oily rain was a cocktail of heavy metals, falling on a very real experiment.

Look; mek-powered rickshaws; ethanol smoke; oildrum-fried-chicken... Dogpatch Electric.

A machine was entertained by them.

They were medieval dirty.

Their Lords, isolated in towers high above were purebred, rarefied gods.

As one of them, Simeon would never know true disease. But he was still unclean.

With his face to the slide he looked out over the roofs and arches, plazas and avenues of Elysium, one cheek against the cool glass. Cold black, bisecting a thin and bitter smile...

The walls followed him as he moved, the ever-vigilant and lidless eyes of cameras taking in the shimmer of his nanomesh suit, a tech-polymer extruded number in funereal grey. It was tailored by a machine the size of a shipping warehouse and cost the equivalent of three Subcity lifetimes of meager wages.

Above him, the great bass-string of the space elevator coiled out into black heaven.

And, as it should be, the city among its titanic roots lay at his feet.

Blaire was secure in his implanted sensibilities.

His manicured fingertips reached out to a floating tabletop and grasped the handle of a bubble-thin transparent china cup, brimming with hot artificial lapsang souchong.

His hands were ivory pale, having never seen an honest day's work - utterly smooth and marked with tiny scarred barcodes instead of fingerprints. They had the precision of nanotech biopsy forceps, transferring the cup to his lips without so much as a tremor.

Simeon could see the thunderhead-colored bruises swelling over his knuckles. He could see the tiny pins under his skin holding the cracked bones together. He watched the membranous stretch and pulse of his skin as numberless hordes of medi-scarabs remade him. So he could play the Game this evening.

I don't fear death. I fear defeat. But if I fear, defeat is certain....

His reflection hovered like a phantom in the black glass as he paced, pensive.

The machine had given him his father's high cheekbones, his grandfather's sharp nose and blue-black eyes. It grew him.

For every one of the hierarchs of the noble houses it was the same. They ruled in name only; kept by a smotheringly overprotective machine as a test-tube sample of the human race. Time and inbreeding had killed off all but the last few hundred, and the burgeoning middle classes had broken down their monumental corporations in the economic equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.

Still, there was one thing which thay could do better than their lowly subjects. Because they'd found out long ago that their keeper wouldn't let them die... at least not permenantly.

That's the nautre of the Game, and with that in mind Blaire's skin could hardly contain the hardware which fueled his ambition.

He was the beau of the Razor Clique.

He was a living butchershop of sharp artifice, a safe bet to double your money, a Threedeeo star ne plus ultra and a range of bold fragrances for men.

Slow harpsichord and mournful violins followed him, music projected from flitting microamps crafted to resemble jeweled dragonflies. Their diamond-fiber ornithopter wings rippled the scented air, silent twin rainbows framing each slim carapace. Simeon ran one hand along the glass, leaving fingerprint trails to evaporate behind him.

Down Town, they hustled and scattered in the acidic downpour. Holes burned in plastic; a homeless geek peeled Slades out of a crawling burbster's billfold in exchange for a space in his tinfoil shelter.

Visions of writhing bacteria sparked in Simeon’s head.

His reflection lay over the view like a blurry hologram, cut up by the tracks of rain.

With a sudden motion his fist flashed out, impacting with a whipcrack sound, radiating a starburst of fissures across the windowpane. The glass was bulletproof, made to withstand more than just radiation and diseased rain. But in a halo of chips and shards it bent outward, held together by a net of wires.

Blaire held his stance, shivering with murderous delight. The face he hated so much was gone, erased.

Slivered into a million leering replicas...

Fractal whirlpools spun off of him like smoke.

Slow zoom.

Sparks behind his eyeballs, burning into soft tissue.

He got lit.

The pulsing meat of his brain waxed positively neon.

Zhe had discovered a flaw.

With a barely perceptible flicker the alien Technician’s filters over-layered the screens, jamming in close to that sculpted, unreal face. He saw an emptiness in Simeon Blaire's eyes, like the aperture of nothing replicated a billionfold at the center of his cameras.

This human was wrong.

It couldn't possibly enjoy the pain of the neuroprobes, lancing up from their hooks in its jawbone, weaving wire through resisting flesh.

Yet still, impossibly, Simeon smiled, his ego smashed to ruin as the bones in his shattered hand knitted smoothly back together.

And far away, Direktor Ascher laughed, watching his pet through the kaleidoscope eyes of a jeweled chrome dragonfly.

All was in preparation. It was time to show Tadashi what he'd helped to create.

Ω

There were creatures out on the skin of Lord Blaire's city.

Not real people; not genepure toys for the machine.

Just a pack of struggling, cognizant and mournfully hopeful beings who tried to stay alive from day to day; maybe get a little sex, a little altered perception.

Kronos - the computer which ruled Elysium - considered them to be somewhere between cockroaches and domestic dogs on the evolutionary scale.

Most of these Subcitizens looked just like ordinary hairless apes, in a palette ranging from blue-black to albinotic white. Others had come up from the rad-lands and the forbidden zones, and sported mutations that you’d better not stare at – if you wanted to keep your eyeballs.

All of them were bolted and studded and plugged with metal and plastic; as much as they could afford. Tech meant status, and just like in every city since a human being put one mudbrick on top of another, status meant power.

Check out your options in this little slice of the free market...

In darkened plastic cubes the mediteks wait, spider silent, credit hungry, sharpening their scalpels.

The patient saw their hands, black plastic tendoned with wire, but never their faces.

It’s by their art that Kaito's blood sings, a pitch too high to hear, hordes of tiny steel bugs rampaging through his veins. They were tricky and expensive scarab nano, and they came in a range of colors.

Kaito chose blue. By a freakish coincidence, the very same shade as Technician Zhe’s hated protein sandwiches.

Because, right, if some sub scum stabbed him tomorrow night, red wasn't gonna impress the ladies.

That went a long way to explaining the Kaito Kayzi manifesto.

Now he was racing, pulling the throttle open, hunkering down as the wind pushed him back in his seat. Feeling the hum of the engine, black rubber on the road, black rubber against his sweaty palms. A thousand pinpoints, baleful red microsuns shivered frozen in his motorcycle’s paintwork, a match for his crimson concussion armor.

Kaito's ride was a wickedly chopped Consolidated Industries STX Saber, juiced up on hi-test ethanol out of a shantytown still kitchen.

Completely goddamn irresponsible.

Kaito wasn't genepure enough to live in a dome. He wasn't career-oriented or mentally weak enough to buy into the bimburb lifestyle; the Kayzi was a creature which regarded domesticity as a kind of living hell.

He lived just deep enough in the substrata to be disreputable; unemployable; homogenized and scrubbed clean of almost any ethnicity and culture.

His loose tribal affiliation was recorded somewhere as 'biker.'

Kaito was also a trainee Electromagus, a neophyte to the mysteries. That’s what they called a computer hacker in this town, where religion and hokum had coated over technology like a sheen of nacre. But that little fact wasn't recorded anywhere - because he was good at what he did.

The Saber's front wheel was chrome-wirespoked, hissing across the transdome highway low and long on sprung, stretched forks. Crazy patterns flashed out from the whirling spokes, a shatterburst of neon reflections. Kaito lay back, twisting the throttle up there on the Saber's left apehanger, and he felt the ethanol-powered chopper bust 200.

Neon fragments, hot waves of silver slick across his helmet visor...

But as usual his mind was elsewhere, only barely scanning the road ahead as he flew out into space, out beyond the city with its tantalizing, inaccessible spacelifter dangling above. Chrome flickered in the glow of halogen lamps and votive candles, sliding clockwise 'round the dome at 225.

He paid no attention.

Kaito didn't know if his edition of the state EduPlug was buggy. But ever since he heard of gravity he'd seen the world like a fly upside down on a ceiling, with the interstellar gulf below the top of his head. It felt like he wanted to somehow let go and swim in hard vacuum.

Hence, of course, the drugs. And the scarabs in his veins, to release those drugs to every nerve-ending simultaneously, to keep him from addiction tremors and overdose. They also told him how fast the bike was going, because it was far past the speed where to twitch was to break your neck. Kaito could tune a mean engine, too.

His mind was similarly pared down and streamlined; his grey matter caged and cradled in intelligent wires. The bio-onboard rig was linked through fiberoptics under his skin to a pair of modern plastic pistols, battery-operated magnetic railguns mercilessly miniaturized by some Reclamation zaibatsu. It began to arm them as Kaito’s intracerebral G.P.S. zoomed in, overlayering reality with a textured wire-frame map of the city.

He ran through the plan again in his head, making sure all the angles were covered while railpistol status readouts flickered in the corners of his eyes.

The Saber bust 250 over a clear stretch of arching support girder, and crosshairs flashed red across the scarred silver roadway. He trusted that his colleague wouldn't be late...