Well, the damn train tube was still alive, yes, alive, after all these centuries, and by just some happenstance, the stealthboat fields were the right waveform and complement to lock on, just like a depthtrain. We rolled forward and up as smoothly as a glass ball in a groove sliding along a frictionless incline.

At the end of the tunnel was the ruin of another depthtrain station, which mustsa-been maybe-been long and long ago to carry freight to the island. The platform was bricked up, walled off. Middle of the wall is a big vault door made of modern materials that looked like crap compared to the fine, ancient stuff behind us.

The plan was that Hesperonado was going to charm his snakes into drilling through at a weak spot, mesh with the door-brain, and interface and override. It called for pretty delicate work, but Hesperonado had light hands and a touch like a surgeon. He was a real artist.

He had two pretty snakes too, metal lines of tapering segments smarter than a dog and nine yards long at full extension. Antiques. They come from the days of the Sylphs, when everyone lived in the clouds, and the Giants burned the cities. Whenever a Chimera has a serpentine go bad, or the bloodline dries up, or the weapon-brain won’t take orders no more, what do you think happened to them, the old, haunted weapons? By one crooked trick or another, they come into the hands of a snake-charmer like Hesperonado, and he gets them to do what he can get them to do.

But he got into some bungle, or ran into ice, and he was picking and tricking and he wasn’t getting paid by the hour. So he took off his gloves. We all started shouting, because Brick told him to suit up again, and Slice was telling him just to hurry it along, and a small exposure never killed anyone. Now, I got to tell you straight-up that a voice in our earphones spoke up and told him to put his gloves back on, and we didn’t recognize the voice, because it was the Judge talking, and he had not said anything for two weeks.

But Hesperonado was looking for a reason to give the Judge an earful of fearful, and he used some words the Chimerae impale you if you look them up in a dictionary, much less use them, and, well, Hesp was snaking the razorgirl during the long watches on the boat, so hers was the last voice he heard. Because he stopped listening after she spoke, see?

Hesp, he got the door open before he keeled over. So, points for him. The man was a professional. Give him that.

We get squirmed into some crawlway maybe two thousand years old. So now the next part of the plan goes wrong, because Slice wants to stay with her man, and she says she’ll wait for us to come back, but Brick wants us to put Hesp out of our misery and get a move along.

Well, the Judge talks again, which made it some sort of world record for the week, and he passes her the first aid box and tells her to stay and mind Hesp, and keep him alive, because we are going to need him to get the door open again to go back out, and he wants me to stay behind too. So the three of them—Brick, Oh-No, and the Judge—take off down the tunnel, with Oh-No in front, and me laughing, because that man’s augmented buttocks filled the whole diameter.

Now, I have to explain something about myself. Y’understand, I was sort of a Greencloak too, in those days. I had been given a medical discharge from Intel, and I was in a lot of pain. My first gland was just to release endorphins, and later I added a morphine gland, both to kill the pain and because I liked it. But then I was losing sleep, so I add a gland for soporifics, and then another for stimulants, and at that point I did not see why a memory-sharpener or a mild euphoric should be illegal. Sometimes the glands gave me acute insight, or helped me solve the case. The hallucinogenic unwound my mainspring when it was too tighty, righty? And then there were neurochemical compounds I could use to slow the subjective passage of time during long, boring stakeouts, or speed up time to make my reflexes lighting quick—and that has saved my life during more than one bit of the nasty, believe you me. And there were others I needed to correct for overglanding errors, and I had to get a sexual supplement to correct for erection limpness, because I was saddling the razorgirl something fierce before Hesp came along. Each gland was twice as expensive as the next. Now you know why I took the case, and why I was going to be in debt to the Lotus King for the rest of my life.

So you also should understand that I just had to squeeze a few drops into my bloodstream while I was sitting in that damn tunnel listening to my old sexhole oo and coo and baby-talk that brainless snake-twiddler. Pretty soon I am floating, and figure there’s nothing wrong with saying whatever I wanted to say, so I tell her the pogostick is a corpse by now and ain’t ever coming back to bed, and she yells at me, so I switch off my radio. When she realizes I ain’t listening, she unfolds one of those molecular-thin razors of hers from her fingernail and waves it toward my mask, and I figure it is time to say till next time.

Sure, if I have been sober, I would have stayed at my post, but I wasn’t, I had oozed some alcohol into my bloodstream, to take the fuzzy edge off the high, so who can blame me? I took off down the tunnel because I wanted to see some deeds.

I got my deeds sooner than I’d’ve liked, because Hesp, who really should have been dead by then, tears off his mask and started shouting in his native yuck-yack at me, and his voice echoes all up and down the tunnels.

There is a noise up ahead, sounds of a struggle, a shot, and by the time I get there, Oh-No is wounded and Brick is dead. The Judge is just dandy-fine, of course, since he was in the back.

Some guard, a Gamma, heard the noise of Hesp shouting, stuck his head into the crawlway, and Oh-No pulled his head off his shoulders, but the guard’s gun, acting on auto, scuttled forward and fired a needle that passed through Oh-No without hitting anything too important but it drilled Brick right through the nose and expanded, out the back of his skull leaving an exit wound the size of a grapefruit. The front of his face was caved in and burnt so even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

But there is no sight sweeter than seeing a Chimera, even a Gamma, killed by a Kine. They think they are better than us, but they die just like us.

So the Judge grabs me like it was my fault somehow and shoved me up past him so that I can pick up the corpse of my partner and crawl along on one hand and two knees, shoving this corpse every inch of the way, and getting his blood and brainstuff all over my suit. Oh-No is shoving the corpse of the dead guard, and he is wobbling a bit himself.

We get to a hatch and all fall out, and now the Judge tells Oh-No to apply direct pressure to his wound, and asks if he can make it back to where Slice is waiting.

The Judge picks up the guard’s radio and opens the back and sticks in a little thinking-stick, does something to its brain, and the radio reports an accidental discharge of a firearm back to central. He picks up the gun and gulls its brain too, because now the gun imprints on me, and thinks I am its master.

“You there, drunkboat, you know how to fire one of these?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You tell it what to point at and when to fire. I served twelve years in Intelligence Command out of Kang Key, Eighth Division. I got a name, you know!”

“Yeah, your name is Juan O’Reilly. One O’Really Roostered Soak. Do you have a sobriety gland in that mess you call your endocrine system? Wring yourself out and fast, because I need you to back me. I am aiming to kill an old pal of mine, and I have to talk him into letting me do it, and that means you got to shoot any guards who come through the door to meddle. I’ve wired the identifier to the aimer, so the gun can see and shoot any guard carrying a regulation radio. All you have to do is make sure the barrel has a clean line, and the ammo feed doesn’t overheat. Can you handle that?”