He looked over at the blank vid-screen and was quiet for a moment. “Of course, I’m stuck with your set up. I’ll have to use it – to keep my rep. And yes, when I got the call from Kane, I had to throw some weight around to keep ModPol from digging too deep. Now I’m working on spreading a rumor that the Life Support accident on Barnard-4 was a cover-up. That I, the man known to most only as X, had Jorg Phonson killed because he tried to cross me. So much work, cleaning up after your mess.” He sighed wearily, then attempted a dismissive shrug, which Runstom thought looked a little forced. “I lost two good people – but on the bright side, I get a nastier rep.”

X looked thoughtfully at Jenna Zarconi. “If I had time, I’d come up with something for you too. A rumor that lets everyone know you tried to cross me too, and paid for it.” He shrugged again, this time raising his hands slightly. “Ah, but never over-complicate, I always say. No, I’m afraid you’ll be fatally injured while resisting arrest.” He glanced at Jax, and waved a hand at him idly. “You too. Sorry, Mr. Jackson. You don’t deserve it, but sometimes life gives you the short end of the stick. And someone has to take the fall for this mess.”

Jax laughed. Quietly at first, just a giggle, then breaking into full-on, raucous merriment.

“What’s so funny?” Runstom said, before anyone else could. By now, the officer was used to Jax’s tendency to exhibit inappropriate behavior and as such he was the only person in the room who wasn’t stunned to silence.

“Hey,” Jax said. “Yeah, sorry. You know, Stanford. We were having that conversation the other day, about how this bad guy X has all these pawns that do his bidding. Remember? About how some of them knew they were being used, but I didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Runstom said quietly. He didn’t like where this was going, but they were all done for anyway, so he let Jax go ahead and dig their graves deeper.

“Well, it just occurred to me that this whole time, the big bad X is the pawn!” Jax said, laughing. “This Zarconi psycho-lady here was pulling all the strings.” He cocked his head in thought. “Yeah, that’s it. Just imagine there’s this puppet master, right? And he has all these strings that lead down to these puppets. Well, when he’s not looking, she comes up and tugs on the strings, moving the puppets and making it look like he’s doing it!” Keeping his hands on his head, he made an awkward motion toward X. “Get it? You’re the pawn, in her game!”

Mark Xavier Phonson’s face grew hard and he pulled his baton off his belt. Jax’s giggle faded and he tried to cover his head, but the club came down hard. As Runstom watched Jax’s body go limp, the room grew smoky, and he felt his own body grow heavy and disconnected, as though he were the one that got clubbed in the head.

Dava crouched outside one of the windows on the back side of the house. She could hear voices inside, but couldn’t make out the words. She carefully lifted her head just enough to get a look through the window. She was looking at some kind of little kitchen. It was unoccupied.

She pulled out her thermal cutter and fired it up. The blade grew instantly red from the heat, and she quietly sliced through the locking mechanism on the window, then silently slid it open. She crept over the ledge and onto a tiled floor.

From behind a cabinet, she leaned out just enough to see down the hallway and into the main living room of the house. There were a couple of ModPol officers decked out in full armor standing around with their pistols drawn. It looked like there were a couple of people kneeling on the floor with their hands on their heads. The one closest to her was a green-skinned man.

Her instincts were right. If this was an arrest, there’d be a van here by now. They’d have these guys face down in the lawn, not kneeling in the privacy of the living room. Some bad shit was going down here. They were probably squeezing these guys for information, and once they were done, they’d fade ’em.

She could hear their voices now. She could hear someone laughing, and she tried to get a look. One of the people on the floor, it was a tall, skinny, white-skinned guy. That must be the B-fourean. He was laughing rather raucously and saying something about puppets and pawns.

“Sounds like Psycho Jack is trying to get himself killed,” she said to herself. It was go time. She punched a few numbers on her RadMess and stood up, drawing her small ExpandoKnife from a sheath inside her jacket.

She gave the scene one more good look. There were four large, cushy chairs in a circle in the middle of the room, a cart with a vid-screen of some kind on it, and two small, low drink tables that sat between the chairs. Infrared wouldn’t pick up much of the furniture, so it was important to know where it all was. Bashful Dan had said four ModPol cops had entered the house, and indeed, she counted four purple-armored men, on their feet. One had his helmet off, exposing the bright-red skin of his bald head. He had a baton in hand and was hovering over the B-fourean. He didn’t have a gun drawn, but the other three did. She’d have to take them first.

The little gray canister bounced its way into the room just as the red-headed cop struck the B-fourean across the temple, hard. Psycho Jack went down like a sack of rocks, and the room started to fill with thick black smoke.

She slid the mask from around her neck up to her mouth and the infrared-enhanced goggles from off the top of her head down to her eyes. She took one breath to make sure the mask was working, then sprinted into the main room.

The powered-up shot-poppers that were ModPol standard-issue lit up like little orange toys, floating around the smoke, barely attached to the red snowman-like blobs that flailed around the room. One gun spun around in an arc toward her as she approached and she batted it aside, sliding her knife into the center of the owner’s chest. The purple armor that the ModPollies favored was woven out of a material designed to reflect and filter light-based attacks as well as repel attacks of high-kinetic energy, making them extremely resistant to both hand-held lasers and hand-held projectile weapons, but ineffective against knives, clubs, and so on. The officers’ combat training was supposed to save them from hand-to-hand attacks.

The small blade of the ExpandoKnife penetrated quickly, and she hit the button on the hilt. The cop made some gurgling noises, a mix of sounds coming out of his mouth and from inside his chest, as the knife rapidly doubled in surface area, retracted, and repeated the process six times in a second or two. His knees buckled a little to one side and his top end fell away and down, the small knife in Dava’s hand coming away from his body with little resistance. The infrared showed the bright heat of the inside of the man’s chest as he slid to the floor.

She scooped up the downed cop’s gun with her left hand and crouched low, backing away from the middle of the room slightly. Dava could see three forms on the ground now, red hand shapes covering red head shapes close to red body shapes. The three men standing up waving their guns were shouting at each other, trying to get a sense of their locations in the blindness that the dark smoke created. None of them dared fire a single round without knowing who might be in the line of fire.

One of the men was off to her left and the other two were off to her right. She reached up with her arm and aimed the gun she had just picked up at the one to the left. She popped off several shots quickly, then yanked her hand back down. She could see the man’s gun light up instantly as he returned fire in a vague sweep, causing the other two men to go diving for cover.

“Ow, goddammit!” one of them yelled. “Who the fuck shot me?”

She pointed the gun to the right and fired off a few more rounds.