Horrified, I crouched in the ruined cockpit and took stock of my amazing situation: I’d been betrayed not once but twice by someone in my organization, my two key people were apparently, mysteriously, dead, I was unarmed, and I was surrounded by the dead bodies of official government representatives in the middle of flat wilderness that offered no hiding places.

I suddenly wished I was back in Newark. Blindfolded with a gun to my head sounded better than this shit, and Glee would still be there.

As the roar of the approaching hover grew steadily louder, I leaped up and pulled myself through the hatchway back into the cabin. The three bodies were jumbled together against one of the seats, blood smeared everywhere, eyes open and staring. I pulled myself up onto a seat and stared down at them for a moment, three more people who were dead simply because they’d met me. Reaching down, I smeared the still-warm blood onto my hand and began rubbing it onto myself, my face, my clothes, my hair. As the hover outside landed, kicking up a fine spray of dirty snow, I lay down between seats and pulled the nearest body, the girl, on top of me, put my head back, and stared up at the ceiling. There was always the chance they’d scan for heat signatures, but System Pigs could be arrogant and sloppy. They were still human.

Being a Gunner was about patience-all you did was wait. You waited in dark rooms for people to come home, you waited on busy streets for someone you’d only seen in blurry images to stroll by. You waited in perfect silence and you waited without moving, going mad, muscles twitching. I cleared my mind and fixed my eyes on a rivet in the ceiling of the hover, and waited.

Outside, there was a tangible tremor as the arriving hover settled onto the damp ground of the riverbank, and then silence. Immediately, I heard a cabin door sighing open, and two pairs of heavy feet hitting the ground.

“Control, this is Vaideeki Six-RR-Eight calling in a crashed hover. It’s got a civvy tag, SFN-NY-Eighty-nine-a. Someone get on the wire and tell the DPH we’ve found one of their bricks.”

The voice was smooth and unaccented, almost completely neutral, as if he’d learned English from aliens. I heard the heavy feet walking around.

“Copy that, control,” the voice continued. “Tell the Spooks we’ll secure their property until they find the fucking time to get here, and we’ll breathe real shallow.”

“What’s up?” said a second voice, just as neutral but lower and rougher, a smoker.

“We have been officially advised that this is a quarantine site, Sanjay. The Department of Public Health thinks we might be in trouble.”

“Fucking Spooks. Always doom and gloom from those freaks.”

I could feel the girl’s dissipating body heat on me and smelled her hair with each breath, my throat trying to close up and gag me to death. One of them stuck his head into the cockpit; I could see it as a tan blob out of the corner of my eye. The smell of pipe tobacco filled the air. I hadn’t seen loose tobacco in years. My eyes were watering. I didn’t dare blink, but watery eyes wasn’t good either-they’d notice, the fucking System Pigs knew death almost as well as I did. The hover began to shake and groan as he pulled himself up into the cockpit.

“Shit, look at this asshole,” the first voice-Vaideeki-said from above me. “Should have been strapped in, buddy.”

“You hear the Spooks are supposed to be reforming the army?” the second one shouted from outside. “Can you believe that? What the fuck do the Undersecretaries know about security, about breaking heads?”

“Forget it,” Vaideeki said. “Tricky Dick won’t allow that shit. Watch and see. That shit is going to blow up in their faces.” The hover vibrated again as a second set of steel-tipped boots climbed into the cockpit from the other side.

“I got four more in the back,” the second voice said. “A lot of blood. Looks like five for five, to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Vaideeki said. I wanted to get a good look at these two, at least keep them in sight, but I couldn’t take the risk. My eyes burned, dust falling on them like invisible snow and drying them up, turning them yellow and brittle. “Something’s off here, Sanjay. Look at the pilot. Why wasn’t he strapped in?”

“Had generator trouble and got up to try something,” Sanjay offered. I pictured him shrugging.

“Nah-think about it. You’re sticking a brick through the air and you lose power, you lose steering, whatever. Do you leap out of your seat and go apeshit? All the controls are designed to be within reach from the chair-that’s the point. You stay in the safety straps.”

“All right, genius, you stay in the straps. This is some DPH idiot we’re talking about. One of Ruberto’s assholes. You’re asking me if I think one of those shitheads might panic and fuck up? Hell yeah.”

“Them, too? All of them, just deciding to have a fucking dance party while the hover’s going down, hard? Get DPH on the wire. Find out what this hover was up to.”

I heard the second cop talking into the air, implanted sensors transmitting his voice back to SSF HQ at The Rock. I swallowed slowly, almost choking and having to suppress an explosion of coughs that shook me silently, making my torso twitch. The girl wobbled slightly on top of me as I tried to get my body back under control.

I heard the first one, Vaideeki, pulling himself into the cabin, grunting with the effort. My eyes were tearing fiercely and it was getting hard to stop them from fluttering. I gripped the blade tightly as one of his boots came into my peripheral vision, just a huge blurry object that shoved at the girl’s body on top of me, pushing her this way and that. I saw how it would unspool: he’d notice something-sweat seeping from my pores, the tears pooling in my eyes, the soft, barely-there rise and fall of my chest as I let air painfully slip slowly in and out of my burning, screaming lungs. Something; the System Pigs were too well trained to miss it all. He’d see something and pretend he hadn’t, a tiny hesitation, maybe, the only sign that something had registered. He’d even turn away from me and take an easy step, saying something to his partner, and then he’d whirl, tearing his gun from its holster hanging low near his hip.

Maybe I’d even beat him. Maybe I’d flash the blade and sink it into his throat before he could get the shot off, or the shot would go wide as he staggered back in shock. And then what? And then I go for his gun, fast, pushing off the hundred pounds of dead fucking psionic and trying to snatch the auto from his slackening grip and come up ready to shoot before his partner-who I could only hope had been standing there with his mouth open and his dick in his hand while all this went on.

More probably, I thought with a rising edge of near panic, the second cop would blow my head off about five seconds before I could even locate him. Most probably, I wouldn’t beat the first cop, and I’d just end up dead with nothing to show for it.

The second cop’s voice burst into the cabin, so loud and sudden I almost jumped. “DPH isn’t giving us shit. Says it’s official business under Ruberto’s paper, we need a fucking writ to get into it. You wanna call the Colonel?”

“Shit,” Vaideeki muttered. “Fuck that. We’ll put those pieces of shit down as uncooperative in the report and let it simmer. There’s a reckoning coming for all of them, brother, mark my words.”

His lower body came into view: purple pants, the crease razor sharp, a long leather coat that swirled around his ankles, the boots shiny but serious, the sort of boots you cracked ribs with. Purple fucking pants. I could see him slowly turning around, feet planted on the back of the last row of seats, like he was studying the cabin carefully, looking for hints.