GUNSLINGER GIRL

"Wham, Bang, Fizz, P.o.W."

By

Robert Frazer

"If you think you're free, there's no escape possible."

Richard Alpert

The duvet rustled. The bedsprings creaked. Jose groaned. The pea dug into the small of his back once more and stopped him from getting to sleep.

Jose tossed about again, trying to get comfortable. He tucked up the covers in a tight clutch under his arms, but it was a poor substitute – it didn't fill the hole.

Jose felt as though there was a great depression, an abscess, a pit of absence beside him – he couldn't roll into and fill it because it wasn't physically there, but the sensation, the silhouette tracing the edges of the void, remained. All the time as he lay there he felt as though he was balanced precariously on the very lip of the slope down, quivering from one side of the cusp to the other, and that made it impossible to relax.

He missed having someone to share the bed with. Not for sex – although he certainly wouldn't have objected to it – but just someone to have close. Someone who could breathe in rhythm with him. Someone to be sure and solid when all manner of shapeless horrors hung down above the shell of darkness which the night encased him in.

Someone to keep him warm.

Of course, grey cardigans, starchy shirts, and well-combed bob haircuts did not conduct heat.

Spotless, shining Henrietta. The very model of a proper upbringing that would be a credit to any parent or guardian. Timid, in the way that let adults get on with their business. Immaculately turned-out, in the way that always satisfied sensibility. Attentive in her lessons, in the way that let her rack up a hefty kill-streak. Attentive and obedient, in the way that lets discipline be warmed and brightened into willingness. Faithfully and devotedly at his side, in the way that you pick up a ball and chain.

An angel on his shoulder? The Devil on his back.

These days he daren't even hit a bar and see if he could pick up a girl; he knew what would happen when some shrill idiot gabbler in the Public Front let slip – and one would, as sure as death and taxes – in earshot of Henrietta that Jose had driven into work wearing the same clothes that he had had on the day before. Never mind that – Beatrice, the literal bitch, would be able to sniff a drop of perfume at fifty paces. Scandal! Calamity!

Murderous jealousy!

Rolling over in bed again and trying to trample down his frustrations, Jose caught sight of the sheaf of papers sitting on his desk. Equipment requisition forms for next week's training – he'd completed them before going to bed, but hadn't taken them down to the office because he had wanted to get to bed early and put some sleep in, in case a call came in for him and Henrietta. Best laid plans will go astray – and people winging it don't lose direction only because they never had any to begin with.

Fuck it.

Jose bounced off the mattress, threw on his clothes and grabbed the paperwork. He'd drop the forms off in the office in-tray now. There was no terrible national calamity where taking a few more minutes to respond to his pager would defuse it, and if it happened to be announcing the Second Coming he was confident that Christ in his charity would forgive the tardiness. A bit of exercise crossing the compound would tire him out, and the night air could cool him down. Who knew – maybe Ferro would be appreciative for his promptness and diligence in the morning.

Rico ran down tracks, along streets, up mountains, across fells, through surf – and then a harpoon speared through her arm, its wicked barb hooking cruelly into her flesh and its whirling power pinning her down into her bedroom.

"Gnnnnnnnnk? Whuzza?" Rico mumbled through her pillow.

"Finally!" Henrietta rolled her eyes, drawing her finger away from where she'd been prodding Rico awake. There was a thin coating of blood on the edge of her nail. "You're built to survive an air raid, but that doesn't mean you should sleep through it!"

"Mbbbsoh." Rico snored her assent.

Henrietta puffed her cheeks up in indignation at her sister-cyborg's dozy sloth, and begin yanking at Rico's arms, pulling her upright and holding her there so she didn't sink back down into the duvet. A thin, anxious voice in the back of Henrietta's mind wavered that it was improper to be so pushy – but, well, bigger things were at stake here. She was frightfully conscious of Jose's disapproval... but what had been that saying in the magazine that Chiara had brought back on her last run? "What he doesn't know won't hurt him." She was still showing concern for her handler's wellbeing and happy bearing, so that was OK.

Rico's refusal to get up was most certainly not.

"Come onnnnnnn, Rico." A more characteristic tremulous note of pleading entered Henrietta's voice as she continued to tug at Rico's pyjamas. "This is the first chance we've had to go out since Angelica died, everyone's counting on it! You can't let them down!"

"Yew? Eyefort 'swuzz yurturn." Rico tried to focus on Henrietta, but the milky smear of the other girl's face was splashed out across Rico's sleep-fogged vision and she ended up fixing on the vase of flowers atop the chest of drawers at the far side of the room.

"I can't go out, me and Jose are on standby rotation, remember, I passed you the note at dinner earlier tonight?" Henrietta hissed, infuriated by the other girl's sluggish dopiness.

"Ngeh." Was Rico's philosophic comment. She then held out her hand. "Munny."

Henrietta, hoping to elicit a more proactive response from the other girl, didn't give Rico the banknote but instead held it up for her take. Rico pawed a few near misses before finally closing her fist around it and crumpling up the fresh paper.

"Am gnnnnnnng, I'm goanininering..." Rico tottered onto the floor. The act of movement seemed to warm up her engine, and her actions became progressively more controlled as she took off her pyjamas, donned her exercise tracksuit and made sure that the money was safely secured in a closed zip-pocket.

"Ahem-hem-HEM."

Rico took her hand from the doorknob and turned back to Henrietta. With her shoulders hunched, her legs tensed, her face screwed up and her eyes fuming, Henrietta looked as though sheer exasperated rage would forcibly mutate her into Rumpelstiltskin and make her tear herself apart stamping through the floor.

Henrietta stabbed a finger towards the table, and the piece of ruled A4 notepaper lying on it, with such vehement force that you could imagine the air snapping apart. "Don't. Forget. The. Shopping list!"

While Chief Lorenzo himself enjoyed very well-appointed chambers in the core building of the compound, Section Two's day office was in the plain and boxy concrete Seventies 'New Block'. The cuckoo in the nest of the rest of the Agency's more classical architecture, it sat on one side of the old military parade ground (now used as a car park), across from the indoor shooting range. The office itself was situated on the middle floor, above the equipment workshop, affectionately called the "Q Branch" by most of the handlers (although the engineer spent more time fixing cover plates on mobile phones stabbed by cyborgs bowled-over by the txt msg revolution, and straightening bent iron sights, than designing jet-propelled football boot-studs). It also lay beneath a disused storey which no-one could think to fill with anything, although Amadeo insisted that it gave an oddly romantic view of the Technology Building and the training ground beyond, and that as the compound's various hidey-holes went it was an underrated place to commune an illicit tryst.

Priscilla had been found there once, although she said she'd gone up for a quiet catnap. In her defence no-one was with her in the room and there had been complaints to Maintenance about the instability of the old drainpipe round the side for months beforehand, so no-one could be surprised by it breaking.

Section Two's office – a single long, low, loud room with rows of small desks directly abutting each other, with a few small briefing rooms adjoining (larger meetings had to be held in another building) – contrasted significantly with Section One's broad, bright and airy open-plan affair. The oft put-upon Section One was the Intelligence wing and their agents did a lot more desk-based work than the handlers, though, so it was hard to begrudge them the comfort, even if Section Two's cracks in the ceiling tiles and lino flooring in the galley were some way removed from the Hollywood (and the handlers'!) ideal of a bustling counterterrorist hub.

As Jose trotted up the stairs, he could see that the office's lights were still on, although that in itself wasn't unusual – the radio desk had to be manned constantly whenever any Section staff were offsite. What was of interest was the identity of the operator – Jose saw him at the far end of the room, and after dropping his requisition forms in the In-Tray, sauntered over to see how he was getting on...

...only to realise that 'he' didn't have a name.

Jose stumbled, but he couldn't very well just about turn and march out after crossing half the room, could he? What sort of humiliating snub would that be? It was too late – he was committed, like a rockfall, or a stalled aeroplane.

The man looked up. "Oh, evening Mr. Croce. Burning the midnight oil as well?"

"Oh, just 'Jose' will do..." God damn the interfering wretch for sticking his oar in where it wasn't wanted! God damn Jose himself for not having the wit to just close off with a full sentence! Jose tried to smile endearingly, and check his pace to give him more time to think before getting close, but in his nervousness the smile became some distorted, crazed rictus grin. So he approached, shuffling in a half-dead, lurching gait, with a manic, demented expression and a strangled sentence hanging in the air.

"It's Avise Mancini, Jose." The man smiled indulgently. "Don't worry about it, I only knew half of my company by the nametags on their jackets."

Thank Christ! Jose's relaxation into relief was so immediate that he almost slithered across the rest of the room towards Avise. It was a more than a bit embarrassing, not knowing the name of someone who would eventually be becoming a brother-in-arms, but in all fairness as Avise was still waiting on a suitable cyborg candidate he was rather inescapably the 'New Kid', swivelling about along the rim of the periphery but always being tangential to requirements, never quite locking into an everyday orbit. He'd been pretty much mobbed by everyone at the dinner table on his first day, all eager to get a good look at the newcomer, but he'd still looked quite bamboozled and overwhelmed with it all – much like the New Kid just arrived at school, in fact – and hadn't been very talkative.

That memory came from about two months ago, and since then Avise had been tied up in procedural lectures, handling tutorials and tradecraft practicals, and by and large kept different hours to the rest of the Section. Indeed, Avise almost seemed like a subordinate cyborg himself – tonight was one of the few occasions where he hadn't had his own handler from Section One or the Section Two support staff minding him about the compound.

The last time Jose had seen Avise was a full week gone – he'd been walking Henrietta to the Long Range and espied the poor man flailing in a dented Fiat on the Spaceship Pad (or so was called the field-sized slab of asphalt in the training area) and murdering orange traffic cones in what was probably meant to be a powersliding exercise but had become an expensive game of skittles. Jose had asked Avise about it at dinner that night, and the former officer had growled back that when he was at the controls of a Dardo he could just drive through walls and shunt aside other cars.

It wasn't the most positive note to part on by any means, but seeing Avise's open expression now it appeared that he wasn't holding any resentment over it.

Avise was indeed occupying the position of the radio operator, and had the headset slipped down low to form a collar around his neck while it wasn't in use. The desk was densely piled with books and papers, although he'd cleared a space in front of him, stacking up a small theatre of stationery, to indulge in a personal activity to while away the downtime. He had a pistol on the desk, but an unusual sort – instead of the familiar geometric L or jagged mechanical 7 of most sidearms, a curved grip instead described an more artful, languid, easier J. Its freer design spoke of an earlier time, and it was indeed something of an antique – an old Mk. IV Webley service revolver, its matt-black finish glinting with threads of silver where time and use had worn at its contours. Weapons were not wines, but with its bright edges you could well imagine the conceit that the Webley had matured and improved with age. Avise wasn't using the revolver in a way that wholly befitted its venerable stature, though – indeed, he was almost playing with it, cracking open the top-breaking barrel and cylinder and then trying to toss it closed again with flicks of his wrist, his eyes alight with the eagerness of a challenge.

Jose watched the other man curiously for a few seconds, before sweeping his arms out to encompass the desk. "They're being rather demanding aren't they, having you work nights as well as during the day?"

Avise shook his head. "No, actually, I volunteered for this, to fill out the gap after Guilio was sacked."

"You did? You've already made the cut, Avise, you don't need to keep jumping through the hoops to show that you're keen anymore!" Jose joshed light-heartedly.

Avise smiled indulgently. "No, I'm serious. It stops me dicking about in the evening, and it's a bit of extra cash on my paycheque. I live on the compound so I'm only five minutes from bed anyway."

Jose blinked in surprise. "Isn't that a bit... confined?" Every handler had his own room in the Agency compound, and they were quite well lived-in (Raballo had even moved several bookcases into his by the time that he died), but they were chiefly provided for when fratelli were on standby and handlers had to be onsite for immediate response; no-one really chose to stay in them when there were larger and more, well, homely places to settle into comfortably. "I mean, they don't even have bathrooms."

"And it's the cleaners' job to muck out the Ablution Block, not mine." Avise shrugged. "I've been in base accommodation for most of the last two decades already, it's no big deal. Besides," his lips twitched up in a scampering grin. "It saves an absolute fortune on rent."

Jose winced inwardly as Avise's remark brought to mind his last council tax payment. All roads led to Rome... and all that wrapped around each other made the ringway a very tight noose.

At night the perimeter of the compound was regularly patrolled by a security detail, accompanied by a pair of dogs whose senses could see wherever the guards themselves weren't looking. It was a formidable obstacle that presented a deep challenge for the cyborgs to overcome, despite the patrol's diminutive physical size. It couldn't be a simple matter of evading their sight – the uncooperative fence always demanded an inevitable delay, one which could allow the patrol to stumble across the essayer (starting behind them was no advantage, because they could and did double-back on occasion), and even if they eluded sight their treacherous bodies shed a tell-tale trail in smell and sweat to set wet noses quivering.

They'd quizzed Beatrice for advice on how to deal with the dogs, and she'd come up with the goods. All of the first-generation cyborgs had volunteered their own weekly extra-curricular run, with multiple loops of the compound perimeter. The adults had nodded appreciatively at the girls' dedication to their fitness and training, and it had the added advantage of absolutely marinating the area of the fence in the girls' sweat as a matter of course, so the dogs would not detect anything untoward about a trace of one of the girls rubbing along it. Beatrice had exacted a steep fee for her consultation, however – a multipack of Mars bars, copies of two different celebrity gossip rags every week for a month, and a huge three-litre bottle of Pepsi.

As for the guards themselves, the risk could never be wholly eliminated (although Chiara had enthused that it spiced each sally with a delectable dash of danger). Dona, bless her, had suggested that they imitate a videogame that she'd seen being played while on an extended mission and just biff the guards on the head until they were unconscious so that they'd be none the wiser. After a well-aimed book had demonstrated to her the folly of that venture she had made up for it with a daring and valiant raid into the forbidding Terror Incognita of the Section One document store. The rest of the girls had paced about their rooms pensively, chewing their cheeks and haunted by the agonisingly lengthening watches of the night, clammy palms never daring to reach for the board and cross out their sister as Long Overdue. To a surge of relief, though, Dona had emerged from the shadow of the foreign veil into the light of the dormitories once more, and bearing a precious prize – carefully cradling within her skull the guards' routines, scanned with her photographic eyes.

It was this information that Rico was trusting to now as she picked around the gravel path leading up to Claes's garden for a few stones of suitable sizes. Through his inimitable method of 'fostering independent study' and 'encouraging original thought', during his (decidedly hands-off) school lessons Jean was frequently happy to let the video recorder play while he nipped off around the back of the building for a quick smoke. Consequently, Rico and the other cyborgs had seen a lot of cinema... and, let's just say, not always the mind-numbingly worthwhile French arthouse films that Jean had put in when the lesson had begun. It equipped Rico with enough knowledge to know that throwing a rock to distract a guard with the distant sound of its impact was an indefatigable tactic, but it was also common sense to see that it was only something that would grant you a few seconds' reprieve to sneak around a corner or through a door – you couldn't keep throwing stones for the fun of it as the enemy would soon cotton on the deception.

Having equipped herself with her arsenal, Rico ran across the compound towards the perimeter and leopard-crawled the last hundred yards across the grass behind the second-generation dormitory, keeping low just in case Alessandro was in the mood for playing Casanova tonight and Petrushka had her window open to receive his serenade. Once a short distance away she rolled herself parallel to the fence to get a better angle along its length, ran a quick mental calculation behind her eyes, and then with quick, economical motions, sat upright, snapped her stones up towards the sky, and quickly lay flat again before anyone could espy her.

The thrown stone couldn't distract an enemy more than momentarily, but then the hero in the movie was usually at a range of only a few yards, and a cyborg had a better pitching arm than Roger Moore. The perimeter patrol would still be a good five hundred yards away, and a flurry of impacts around them would throw them into a lather – the distraction and distance combined would give Rico the window that she needed to cross the fence.

This presented its own conundrum. The fence was twelve feet high and crowned with a dense spool of razorwire. This in itself wasn't a problem – any cyborg of any age could easily have cleared it with a bit of a runup – but motion sensors were spaced alongside the exterior. They had a moderate tolerance level – otherwise klaxons would be sounding every time a fox or badger trotted by – but still the landing from such a dramatic jump would have set every alarm in the security centre shrieking. Nor could Rico just get to work on the wire with her teeth and gnaw a way through. Right underneath the fence the grass started to bunch up thickly in tight, unruly knots – at a glance it would have looked unkempt and ill-tended, an affront to the very soul of any regimental sergeant-major who ever ironed a trouser-crease, but the effect was actually quite deliberate. It could require a close inspection before a neatly-clipped cut in the wire would be noticed, but the long grass, scraggy like a child's uncombed hair, would be trampled down by activity and make the signs of disturbances around and breaches through the fence more obvious.

If this dense cluster of troubles were just laid down as obstacles in the road it would still take a veritable contortionist to squeeze around them, and indeed Rico had to conduct something of a gymnastic feat to deliver herself across the fence. Leaning forward over the grass to grasp the wire in her hands, using the grip as a pivot to heft her legs over the offending strands, and then pressing all of her body against the slick links to scrape every last square centimetre of contact and joule of friction, scrambling up in a spider-crawl, before having to swing up, around and over the razorwire with no more than a finger-grip in the gaps between the blades to secure herself to – while the young girls enjoyed some advantage with their small hands, it had been at this very stage five trips ago when Chiara had sliced her hand open on the razorwire. The lengths they had gone to conceal that from her handler...! Chiara had had to suddenly acquire a Damascene love for cats so she could always have her hand buried in the fur of one of the compound's resident mogs whenever there were grown-ups about. It had been a positive relief when she'd been sent out on an operation and could get herself shot in the hand and obliterate the scar.

After curling around the razorwire, Rico then had to ensure that she had enough moment left to continue the swing and slap herself against the far side of the fence (this was the gamebreaker – even the most yielding fence couldn't help but jangle noisily at this contact, and any error in the placement of the perimeter patrol out of earshot would spell certain doom) and not just fall off the top and crash into a game-over on the ground. After that, it was comparatively easy – just an inverted spider-crawl fighting against gravity and balance with every twitch of her limbs until she could slither to the ground, then a tentative worming forward so as not to overly antagonise the motion sensors, and then she was up and away.

And laughing.

Avise went back to spinning the cylinder of his Webley, watching the rotating drum click around with the absorbed expression of a child with a spinning top.

"You'll break it if you keep that up." Jose chided him.

"Oh, not you as well!" Avise groaned with comic extravagance. "I got enough earache from your brother about that – he was practically ramming a Beretta automatic down my throat. The Webley's old, I'll admit, but it's not that fragile. There's a few bruised bonces back in Iraq that'll attest to that." He finished with a chortle.

It was a late night for both men – Avise didn't realise, and Jose didn't cotton onto, the inadvertent slip that he'd pistol-whipped prisoners. "Where'd you get something like that, anyway? It's not exactly standard issue. Do they even make them anymore? How do you get the ammunition?" Jose asked, genuinely curious.

"A gunsmith friend of mine imports the right calibre rounds from India – and one perk of this new job is that the Agency procurement office now covers the cost! As for the Webley itself, it's an heirloom." Avise said, his voice swelling with proprietorial pride. "My grandfather won it when we conquered British Somaliland. During the war."

No, I thought it was during the 1972 General Election? Jose didn't , as the British had pretty much abandoned Somaliland at the first hint of trouble and then came back and turfed out Il Duce's pride in fairly short order Jose sincerely doubted that Avise's grandfather – disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel which smoked from bloody execution – had prised his trophy from the cold, white-clenched grip of a vanquished champion at the crest of a mound of Anglian dead. On seeing Avise's almost childish glee at recounting the story, though, Jose thought it impolitic to press the issue.

"Still, sorry Avise, call me yellow but I wouldn't want to rely on that in a pinch. Sod's Law – it'd break on me just when someone had me cold."

Avise smiled, and tapped the body of the revolver with a sound that he must have thought was a deep thunk of solidly-built quality but which sounded awfully tinny to Jose. "I wouldn't blame you, Jose, but this one's proven. I've been able to depend upon it. Kosovo" – Avise brightened up again with the opportunity to tell another exciting war story – "I was leading a party to arrest a KLA boss who'd been disarming his mob as we agreed, but by selling the weapons off to the Russian Mafia. He set a pack of dogs on me – I shot two down as they charged, and the third..."

Avise rolled up his right sleeve to reveal and display a forearm which still showed rough and mottled flesh from some very enthusiastic gnawing and tearing.

"...got indigestion from its, aha, vitamin supplement." He rolled a loose round across the desk with his left hand.

Jose was silent for a moment, remembering that time in the APC compartment on the road to Belgrade, swaying in a box that shuddered and yawed as the road rippled with blasts and was rent up under its tracks. Shouting into a radio, bawling at a little box, trying to steer a blind battle by the probing feel of RPGs thudding against the side, the desperate blatting of the weak turret cannon less a ferocious, pummeling club and more a thin, tapping cane.

"I was in the Balkans, too, you know." Jose said, quietly.

"What part?" Although the announcement pleased Avise – it was a parallel familiarity, a point of contact over which they could communicate – he sensed Jose's reflective, maudlin mood and so did not break out into smiles and matey and comradely welcomes. He simply offered his interested understanding.

"UNAPROPISER." Or the United Nations Army for the Protection of Peace In Serbia, tangled up into a ball and then squidged flat with a rolling-pin.

Avise sucked in a hissing breath, and then nodded with respect. "Eh, the Croats' great chemical revenge? Bad business, that. I've never had to deal with that sort of thing, but even in the drills, it's no fun."

"No. It wasn't." Jose muttered.

The two were saved from a morbid reverie when Avise's radio squawked.

"Ah, one moment, Jose." Avise slipped on his headphones and flipped down the microphone. "Good evening, sir, and welcome to the Brothers of Courage, uplifting support for those in need of grace."

Jose blinked quickly.

"Certainly sir." Avise continued, perfectly imitating the received pronunciation of a Fifties newsreader. "Today's thought is: 'We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking only to learn that it is God shaking them'. Have a peaceful and revitalising night."

Avise slid the headphones back down his neck, spent a moment scratching an entry into a ledger at the side of the desk, and then looked up. "Good Lord, Jose, you look as gormless as a bloody goldfish. Didn't your mother tell you not to walk about with your mouth open? If the wind changes, it'll stay that way!" Avise wagged a finger at the handler.

The handler lifted up his jaw. "What was that on the radio? Are you moonlighting as a call centre operator?" Jose sounded offended.

"Call centres? Perish the thought! That's the Dèvills' work!" Avise laughed. "No, that was just Cristiano making his nightly check-in."

Cristiano – Silvia's handler. The fratello had distinguished themselves by a deep-cover infiltration of the Hannibalists, the chief Bolognan faction of Padania, for a full year; hoodwinking arguably the most vicious and downright fanatical of the Five Republics' militants constituting a feat that was acclaimed as a genuine masterpiece of spycraft. Even the new second-generation cyborgs gradually being rolled into the Agency – primarily built for espionage – had not been able to match it. While Cristiano and Silvia had not been so deep since, they were still only a rare sight at the compound.

"You're being a bit, well, earnest with all that though, aren't you, Avise?" Jose shook his head in bafflement.

Avise frowned, disliking what Jose may have been insinuating. "I'm not a God-botherer, Jose. It's all in the tradecraft textbook." He reached over the desk and held up a plain green hardback book. "I haven't had to bone up so much since second-order differentials back at university." He gave a strained grimace of overwhelmed entreaty to Jose.

They must have put out a new edition out since Jose was green – back when he had been picked up by the Agency, "Code White, Acknowledged" did the business well enough.

"Does he have to go through a whole theatrical circumlocution every time? What would he say if he was in trouble?" Jose asked.

"Probably something like 'Argh Jesus Fuck No I've been rumbled need backup now help help dear God blam blam blam blam click dial toneeeeeeeeeee...'"

They both laughed.

"How are you finding all of that, anyway? It must be a change of pace from what you're used to." Jose motioned towards the textbook.

"Well, I can handle the paperwork, half of what an officer does is just forms and dockets as it is. Still, it's a bit of bind." Avise tipped his head to one side under the strain of an invisible weight. "I mean, I'm sure that the needs of all of this cyborg management aren't half as complicated as they're making it out to be."

You don't know the half of it, New Kid. Jose's thoughts gently admonished the hapless novice.

"It's all very revolutionary science I know," Avise continued, "and the tech crew are no doubt proud of it, but they don't need to crow about it from the rooftops with all of this bloody verbiage." Avise reached over to another part of the desk and lifted up a thick wodge of plain paper held together with a plastic spiral bind. "All 292 pages of this is just the list of Primary Commands!" He cried out in exasperation. "'Primary Command Exit All' – induce vomiting and defecation?" Avise curled his lip back in disgust. "Does one of the boffins have a scat fetish?"

Jose frowned – that last part was a bit unnecessary. Avise was a man who was certainly very sure of himself, but that confidence could easily confuse fact with opinion, or override tact and decorum with pugnacious attitude. "It's a purgative action, a countermeasure to limit the effects of poisoning. Not pleasant, but entirely necessary" The handler explained, labouring his words and the point.

Avise tipped his head up in realisation, accepting his mistake. "Ah, yes, I guess that makes sense." Avise looked at the booklet again, and his expression this time was more thoughtful. Reflective, even. Jose took a step back, leaning against another desk and waiting.

"It takes effort. I know that." Avise began. "It's hard, but then... it's an endeavour." He put the booklet down on the desk, and then placed his palm down on the cover, resting it there for a few moments, as though he was earthing something through it.

You might even have thought of it as some strange sort of benediction.

"When it's time..." Avise turned his head away from Jose, and a faraway look drifted over his eyes. A slow, wan smile crept across his complexion. "It'll be worth it."

Rico had spent long enough in the Agency training area that she could navigate her way around in the dark even without her eyes switching to low-light vision - the rough hummocks of grassed-over craters and the crumbling asphalt of dilapidated metalled roads traced a map under the soles of her feet. That said, it was important to remember that familiarity bred contempt and this place too held perils and pitfalls to humiliate and ensnare the overconfident and unwary. A couple of trips ago Henrietta had almost blundered into the midst of an entire battalion of Army infantry who had been assigned the area for a night assault exercise, and in her struggle to avoid being seen by sentries, the hapless cyborg had snagged several tripwires, set off a Carnevale firework display's worth of boundary warning flares, broke several ambushes ahead of schedule, caused a highly-strung lance-corporal to lose his stripe with a frantic magazine of negligent discharges, and generally left a lot of officers with a lot of paperwork and a lot of privates with a lot of ablutions duty.

That wasn't a problem tonight, though – there was only Rico, her wonderful legs, her sweeping arms, the parting kiss of the wind and then the stars above, winking coyly at her mischief.

The exterior border to the training area was a simple chain-link fence with none of the sophistication of the Social Welfare Agency's perimeter, and Rico practically hopped over the inconsequential thing. After a careful walk over a road – remember the Green Cross Code - there was only a three mile overland tab through the broad avenues of commercial woodland, something that a cyborg could manage inside of twenty minutes at a steady lope.

And then, Shangri-La.

Which, being interpreted, means "the Montabari Junction Motorway Service Station".