The scoot noticed Chet coming down the street before I did, and lit up a small warning on the dash. I reconfigured the seat for two and popped the door open. He slipped in, his head nearly resting on my shoulder.

He pulled the headkit onto his lap and opened it. The display was off and he was piping the results to his implant. I couldn’t read them as well as he could anyway.

“We need to get closer,” he said. “Unless you want to announce yourself, we’re going to have to use maintenance power levels.”

“OK,” I said and popped the doors again. We climbed out and the car collapsed, folding in on itself, making a tight quarter-ton package sitting against the curb. It armed.

We crossed the street and slowly made our way towards Danning’s house. A couple places had perimeters set up, but anything in the neighborhood worth stealing had been stolen, fenced, re-stolen and thrown away by now. Hopeful dreams of a better life didn’t die here so much as get aborted, morning-after.

Cutting through some bushes, we huddled under a glass-glazed window and Chet opened the kit again. “Good enough,” he said, and started running cracks on Danning’s implant.

Headbugs were another post-D.C. idea, and a year or two after the crisis the government released a general-public version of the standard military’s cochlear implant — storage, fixed-distance transmission, ocular interface. Standard stuff for a vet, but only gadget freaks and the massively self-satisfied had the old civilian version. If you could keep a datacard in your pocket, why bother stuffing it in your brain? A lot of vets used to deadhead their implants after being released from the service, because of the awkward, uncomfortable silences that greeted people who sent data with nothing in their hands.

The government had a lot of excuses why they were suddenly willing to pour a couple of hundred bucks into the skull of everyone in the country: network effects, economies of scale, promote the general welfare, blah, blah, blah. They were “expanding the vistas of citizen interaction,” they were “building a network substrate for the next century,” they were — this last from a Whig Congressman — “raising all boats, and even the rats on those boats, and whatever the rats eat, too. Filthy things, rats. But we’re raising them.”

They were full of shit. The whackjobs had a different, better, suggestion: the government was going to track everybody, everywhere, all the time. The evangelicals started ranting almost immediately — “Mark of Satan! Mark of Satan!” — and where only beaten out the gate by the few people who still thought that privacy didn’t mean being too boring to spy on.

A lot of caveats and a very large ad budget went into countering the conspiracy theories: nobody would be required to get an implant, you could deadhead or radio-silence them at will, a warrant would be needed to perform a search of the ‘plant or its backups. And, over the next half-decade or so, it worked. The vast majority got fitted. There was a general vibe that it would be a good idea, sir, if you went and got your implant. Then we wouldn’t have to book you and spend forty-eight to seventy-two hours confirming your identity. Or check your taxes. Or start that file that will go with the rest of the uncooperatives.

Decades on, it was now part of everybody’s fifteen birthday: get drunk, get implanted, upgrade the software and start downloading porn.

Not that the whackjobs weren’t right, of course. The standard install came live lit up like a Christmas tree. Most people never got around to turning off their ID broadcast, much less learning how to silence or deadhead the thing. They never read the manual. They could have it projected onto the inside of their eye, and they still never read it.

The government provided backup facilities, but anybody with data more sensitive than pictures of their sex lives considered them insecure. Standard procedure on law enforcement matters started to include a sweep through the state implant archives, warrant or no. Private alternatives appeared, but the rumor goes that the government quietly bought them up, and is now turning a profit on illegal searches. The only way to be safe is to run your own backup.

Or skip the implant altogether. I don’t have one because it would complicate my work. The fact that everything in my head was there when I was born is pretty much an admission that I lead a criminal — or religious, or dissident: all equally bad — life, but the trade-off has worked so far. It keeps me out of polite society and I can skip the endless broadcast chatter that goes on every time people with ‘plants get together. I get hassled a lot and it’s inconvenient, but I make up for that by killing people who annoy me. It balances out.

“Damn,” Chet said. “He’s patched. All the holes are closed. He’s been upgrading.”

“What? Really?”

“Even a couple of things that haven’t been officially announced yet. He’s got newer stuff than I do.” Chet was an upgrade whore, and installed anything that got released, officially or not. He spent two weeks blind in his right eye once because the data background on a patch hadn’t been set transparent. The echolocation hack it added was apparently worth more than his depth perception.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “This guy doesn’t upgrade his underwear.”

“His implant is giving an old version number — thirty, thirty-five years old; pre-general release — but it’s not running software that I’ve got a crack for. I’ve tried everything I’ve got and didn’t make it past the protocol handshake.”

“Is he auto-upgrading?”

“Shouldn’t matter. I’ve got three or four cracks for the last official release. Nothing.”

What the hell? I thought. Unresponsive?

“Give him a call and see if he’s filtering alerts,” I said. “He should be entering a R.E.M. cycle now.”

Chet squinted slightly as he pulled up Danning’s casefile, found his public ID and put a query in. A few seconds later, his eyes refocused and he said, “Didn’t even change the out-going when he was discharged. Standard military issue — different channels for private messages and orders. He’s either ignoring calls or asleep.”

OK. Asleep. He hadn’t varied his schedule in three weeks. He was asleep.

I took a deep breath and ran over everything in my head: Danning was inside. He gave every indication of being the easiest target I’ve ever had. The trouble with his implant was strange, but there could be half a dozen reasons for it — an out-of-date military-proprietary protocol, software so obscure that Chet didn’t have cracks, whatever — and none of them outweighed the other information I had. I’d been through the house twice while Danning was at work, and knew the layout — fire-lines, exit routes.

Risk versus reward. The reward was huge. The risk was insignificant. With the potential for new information dwindling to zero, it was time.

I rose into a squat and pushed my back against the side of the house, directly beneath the window. I pushed my overcoat aside, reached under each arm and pulled two handguns from their holsters.

Chet said, “You’re gonna do it now?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Let me shut down.”

I use two guns for a couple of reasons. First, it looks awfully good. Second, the type of people who have assassins sent after them are acutely aware that they’re the type of people who have assassins sent after them. They defend themselves. Usually very well. They use layers of defenses — paramilitaries, metal detectors, bio and chem scanners, violence suppression systems, mag doors. To get to someone, you’ve got to pass through layer after layer, and whatever trick you find to get through the first isn’t going to work on the second. A single weapon is only going to last until you hit something it can’t beat.

One gun was a refurbished .44 Magnum, the clip alternating between depleted uranium and ceramic slugs. Chemical propellants were old-fashioned, but they couldn’t be defused at a distance. Most projectile weapons these days were railguns and they work great if you’re shooting metal and the electronics work. If not, well then, you’re screwed.

The other was an Boris pulsegun, and something I wasn’t supposed to have. It would get me arrested and executed long before the murders. It’s not even legal for local or corporate law enforcement to use them anymore, given the damage they’ve caused. I primed it and checked the power cell.

I had others, too: a couple of small chemical pistols strapped to my ankles and a magnetic handgun hanging against the small of my back. The bonegun had been reinserted and new skin grown over it. But the Magnum and the pulsegun were what I normally worked with. I wasn’t quite to the point of naming them. I know guys who did and it was always a bad sign.

“I’m done,” Chet said and folded up the kit.

“I’ll meet you back at the scoot,” I said and stood up just in time to catch the ottoman that came through the window full in the back of the head. I went pinwheeling away from the house, arms back and fists clenched. Both guns fired. The Boris burrowed a hole in the ground six or seven feet deep, turning the dirt to vapor as it went. The Magnum put a ceramic round into the house maybe four inches from Chad’s head. He yelped, collapsed in on himself and huddled on the ground, arms wrapped up over his neck.

I hit the dirt face first, rolled onto my back and fired the puslegun through the broken teeth of the window. The room lit up for a split second as the charge passed through the far wall near the ceiling and started a fire somewhere in the attic.

I pulled my feet underneath me, leaned in and sprinted towards the house. I sent a DU slug through the window to test for a mag door. Clear.

I planted a foot on Chet, heaved myself up through the window and was hit directly in the face with an end table, swung from the right.

Both guns went off again — Chet tightened his fetal ball, well on his way to becoming a diamond — and I could feel the tip of my nose make contact against my cheek. I came down hard, arm underneath me, and my shoulder dislocated with a crunching, popping sound. I screamed like a little girl.

“Son of a bitch!” I bellowed, my breath blowing dirt. “Shit!” I bit down on a back tooth and pain supressors flooded into my mouth.

I hauled myself to my feet again, the Magnum lost, dropped, gone somewhere. I hugged my loose arm to my side with the hand that held the pulsegun and staggered around the front of the house, and up onto the porch. I put a pulse into the lock on the cheap plastic door and it bored a hole as big as my head. I kicked at the door, but it didn’t move. Around the edges of the damage, it had fused to the frame.

I screamed in pain and anger and frustration, and let loose with the pulsegun. The door disappeared, along with a good portion of whatever was behind it. A fire erupted deep in the house, casting crazy flickering light out into the darkness. I took a step back, off the stoop, and strafed the front of the house, left to right and back. I heard Chet yelp again. The pulsegun was getting hot in my hand.

I stopped, still held the gun at the house, and listened. Took a deep breath and held it.

Around the side, Chet was whimpering to himself. Inside, the fire was growing, and there was the hiss of gas ejection as cheap plastic furniture melted and bent. Way, way off in the distance, sirens. Getting closer.

It was too early for sirens. Neighborhoods like this, even assuming that somebody bothered to call as soon as the shooting started, have a mean response time of over fifteen minutes. The assistance request would have had to gone in as soon as I pulled onto the street and parked my car.

Goddamned motherfucking Unresponsive. I was going to kill him next. I was going to finish this job just out of spite.

I heaved myself back up onto the porch and had one foot over the threshold when two hundred and fifty pounds of Roland Danning swung down from the ceiling, his hands wrapped around a retrofit hydrogen pipe mounted over the door and his feet aimed directly at my chest.

I heard my ribs crack more than I felt them. I was thrown back six or eight feet, landed hard and skidded as far again. I tried to draw in a breath and it felt like the air had turned into broken glass.

Danning dropped to the ground, fixed clear, sharp eyes on me for a moment, then ran off, around the side of the house opposite from where I’d tried to go through the window.

“Son of a bitch,” I wheezed.

I raised my arm to fire, but the pulsegun had been knocked clear, lost somewhere in the dark. I staggered to my feet, pulled the backup from my lumbar holster and tottered after him.

There was an alley behind the house, lined with garages turned into apartments and yards in various states of defense against squatters. I lurched out from the side of the house and swung left, firing randomly. The gun gave a quiet whisper as it spit each bullet. I spun around, and caught a glimpse of him, sprinting through the night.

I raised the gun, wished I had my other arm to steady it, and aimed, head cocked down and both eyes open. I waited half a second — between heartbeats — exhaled, and pulled the trigger.

Danning caught the slug in his upper back, between his shoulder and spine. He spun, momentum changed, and went down.

And then, in one continuous motion, he rolled and got right back up and kept running. He reached the street the alley intersected and disappeared around the corner.

Well.

Shit.

That could have gone better.