I slapped the scoot’s controls and the engine spun up immediately. The steering wheel unfolded from under the dash like a large plastic spider and slid over to where I was sitting, nubs on the floor rising under my feet. Manual.

I mashed the accelerator flat and skidded out into traffic, the other cars braking and swerving like a flock of birds. I hit 75kph, the high end of the motor, and blew through the intersection at Balboa, against traffic and ignoring the warning that went up on the inside of the windshield. The car should have taken control back and stopped automatically, but I’d overridden the safeties and it would show up as a ding against my liability rating.

I had a very bad liability rating.

At Havenhurst, I swung left, north, and barreled towards the Van Nuys airport. Danning worked there, had access, knew where to go and how to get where he needed to be. He spent ten hours a day, goofing around with plane and hover engines, waiting for the moment he’d have to leave town in a hurry. God damn it. Stupid, stupid.

He didn’t need to keep contingency supplies locally — he could just walk off with a plane, fly fifteen minutes into the desert and pick them up. Even with a bullet hole in him, if he could make the airport, he could get away.

I slid a finger across dash again, and found the airport control broadcast. It exploded out of the speakers, a confused and angry pile of voices, crawling over each other, kicking and biting.

Something was wrong. Airport control is inevitably calm, the audible equivalent of something either running smoothly or hiding it well. But now half a dozen voices were competing for the primary audio channel, and the data lines where flooded: telemetry, infrared, DNA scans. Tons of junk.

“—say again, Hazmat, secure the fuel dump. Secure the fuel dump.”

“—police and military is aware of the situation and is on-site. County and federal notification is in progress and—.”

“—is in charge here? I need to talk to the—”

“Clear the line! Clear the line!”

“Hazmat, I can see you, you dumbshit. Put on your fucking suit and secure the—”

“—a drill! This is not a drill! This is not—”

“—don’t care if he’s the fucking Pope, he’s going to sit on the pad until—”

“—locked down. I say again, civilians are locked down. Non-essential airport personnel should be in green zones and broadcasting ID. I say—”

“—have confirmation. Shoot-to-kill orders are in effect—”

“—come down there and kick your ass, then stuff it into the suit—”

I lifted my foot off the accelerator and slowed as the riot of activity at the airport entrance came into view. Cops, transport security, even some permanently-assigned military — they were all scrambling wildly, just inside the gates — crashing into each other, staggering back and then rushing on.

The airport was in lock-down. Passengers were corralled into a single building and it was sealed up. Airport personnel were restricted to a few well-documented safe zones. Out-bound flights were grounded and in-coming transports either circled or shunted off to LAX or Burbank. Security had found something scary.

Or someone.

This was for Danning. He couldn’t have gone through main check-in because of the wound. Secure facilities don’t like employees showing up bleeding, out of breath and without explanation.

So he must have hit a tripwire sneaking in and been ID’d. His psyche profile would suddenly look like a worst-case scenario — loner, socially maladjusted, police activity at or near his address — and the airport had gone on alert. It’s always the quiet ones.

I dropped the car into automatic, and the steering wheel crawled back under the dash. I tapped the map and the scoot politely signaled — visually and as an auto protocol broadcast — and swung a wide U-turn and headed south, back down Havenhurst. I wasn’t going to get into the airport tonight. The only thing I could do was watch.

Back at Victory, the car turned east again and halfway down the block reluctantly crawled off the road and into the Leave. The scoot didn’t like abandoning the pavement, one, and distrusted entering a place where non-decomp stuff went to die.

The Leave had been used to play a ridiculous game called golf until four or five decades ago, back before I was born. The block had been a vast stretch of green grass and gently sloping hills, improbably squatting in the middle of Van Nuys, and funded with city money and the enthusiasm of several council members. In the third month of a garbage strike — this was before self-disposal and rapid decomposition — residents had started taking the festering mounds of crap that had accumulated on their porches and driveways and streets and hauling it to where they thought it might get noticed.

The city tried everything it could think of to get them to stop — guards, fences, ultrasonics, landmines — and all sorts of untested and experimental technologies to empty the site. Nothing worked — usually made things worse — until some low-level accountant pointed out that residents had been hauling their own garbage for free for the past fifteen years. The next council meeting, the city quietly and unofficially abandoned the golf course reclamation and gave over the land to the citizenry, to function as an open-air shitpile and gurgling environmental nightmare. It was still listed on federal land surveys as a recreation area, because that sounded better than “biohazard site.”

I pulled to a stop at the crest of largest hill I could find that faced the airport. I checked Chet’s pulse — the patch was working, and he was in a solid commuter sleep — turned the radio way up and stepped out.

I sank into half an inch of thick, gray muck. Whatever had been dumped here over the years had long ago stopped being individual things and had melted into a single phlegm-thick mass. It smelled yeasty, the air sour with digestion. The ground would only reluctantly let go of my shoes as I walked around to the front of the car and looked out at the airport through a pair of mags.

I kept shifting my weight, afraid that if I paused too long, I’d suddenly find my shoe gone, eaten away, and whatever had consumed it starting in on my foot. I could be standing on gone-bad nanotech, choked on its own byproduct, or on the upper-end limits of whatever they put on stuff to make it self-dispose. Or worse things, things I didn’t want to think about. The Leave was no longer a problem of sanitation so much as zoology.

The airport blazed, the perimeter lit up bright and floods sweeping the sky. Multiple security teams were running grid searches, all the way out to the fence. That meant that they were confident Danning was still there, though he must have turned off his ID broadcast. If and when they caught him, I’d either have to hit him from long range, or find a way to get to him inside the system.

I sat down on the hood, scraped the bottom of my shoes along the bumper and rested them there. I felt like I was inside someone’s stomach, and I had no desire to see what the intestines were like.

The search went on. The teams would clear a section of the grid and move to the next. They varied the pattern to keep it from being predictable, someone up in the tower organizing the whole thing.

It might take all night for them to get through the entire airport, and I pulled my coat tighter around me, hunkered down and waited. If they caught him, I might be able to get a shot off. If they didn’t, then it was back to whichever plan was the plan before this one. C? D? Something like that. It hadn’t been a good night.

A light rain opened up, and I watched small pores on the ground dilate, taking the water in. I pushed myself further up the hood. Maybe spending the night here wasn’t such a good idea.

But something at the airport caught my eye. There, again. The roof of a hanger bulged suddenly, like the building trying to stand up. A shudder ran through it, something on the inside straining to get out, and a couple of cops ran from their posts, shouting and pointing back.

The hanger torqued awkwardly, and the walls flexing in, the top bowing upward again. A crack appeared along the peak of the roof and it slowly tore open, a black L.A.P.D. hover scraping its way out of the hole. Sparks began to strike off it as the security teams and police converged, firing uselessly.

Danning wasn’t dumb, I’ll give him that. There’s nothing that local law enforcement or regional military could throw at an armored hover that would do it any damage. They might bring it down with another hover, but getting someone to volunteer to crash two of them together would be a neat trick. Even the missiles the hovers carried were effectively useless against anything that wasn’t on the ground.

The air beneath the hover roared and boiled, the hanger shaking itself apart in the downdraft. Danning banked slightly and dipped the nose, and the hover edged out over the tarmac, towards me.

That was a little unsettling. With the hover, he could basically go anywhere he wanted, as long as he got there before the Feds scrambled something heavier and he stayed over populated areas, obscuring the heat trail they’d use to track him from satellite. The cloud cover would help, too. So why come at me?

No, that was stupid, paranoid. He couldn’t see me. He didn’t know where I was.

The hover titled further forward, now lit up with a burnt-sodium fire, the faint plink-plink-plink of DU bullets and shattershells carrying over the whine of the engines. The radio was going nuts.

“—Bring it down! Down! I don’t care how! Just—”

“—Force has been notified. Catalina is scrambling. Would advise you not be anywhere near target in—”

“—tention L.A.P.D. hovercraft DZ-015, attention LAPD hovercraft DZ-015. Land immediately, or you will be fired upon. Repeat—”

“—already firing at him, you jackass! You’re not—”

“—put on the goddamned fucking suit, or I’ll come down there and shove it so far up your ass that it will be wearing you—”

“—armed! Repeat: ATS has armed! Pull back! Pull—”

It’s a funny thing, having a missile pointed at you. Your arms and legs get very cold, very quickly, and your testicles head north with disquieting enthusiasm. Your scalp tingles. And your heartbeat suddenly gets loud, very loud, making sure you notice that it’s performing a vital function here, ticking off the moments you have left to live.

A small hatch had slid open underneath one of the wings of the hover, and a spindly white thing had quietly lowered itself into the space.

Without thinking, without breathing, before the thumping boom of another heartbeat, I was off the hood of the car, and onto one knee in the muck, the pulsegun out and priming. I brought it up, sited the hover and squeezed the trigger just as the missile dropped away from the wing and its engine flared.

The light hit me, blinded me, whited out the airport, the Leave, the night sky. Half a second later, the blast wave picked me up and threw me against the car’s windshield, spiderwebbing it. The sound of the explosion roared past, bouncing the ground, causing it to convulse and squirm.

The world washed in and out, scurrying away and only reluctantly returning. I couldn’t see — eyes open, eyes closed; it didn’t make a difference — but I could hear the occasional heavy crash as pieces of the hover came falling out of the sky. My ribs, even through the traction vest and the patches, keened in agony. In the distance — again, again — were sirens. There was probably a hole in the airport tarmac the size of a meteor impact. Anybody on the ground within a few hundred meters of the explosion would need to be mopped up and poured into a body bag, and anybody within a few thousand meters would need to find any stray limbs lying around and have them sewn back on. Fire, military, national security, local militia, anybody with the legal ability to run stoplights and rough up civilians was converging on the airport. They’d want a few questions answered right off: how could someone penetrate airport security? How could they steal an L.A.P.D. hover? And who the fuck was the guy with the pulsegun?

I was way too high on that list of questions.

I rolled off the hood of the scoot and crawled into the driver’s seat. I couldn’t see the dash, so I gestured an emergency code and let the computer handle the rest. The windows would blacken, ID codes would cycle at random, and the car would take a very long, very confusing route home.

I felt the engine wind up and the wheels struggle slightly against the goo as the car started to roll down the hill. With any luck, we should be able to get out onto the street before the cops make it around to the south side of the Leave. More than likely, anybody with a car that wasn’t on fire was hiding in the back seat. And nobody would be dumb enough to investigate in a hover.

I fumbled with the supply box and found another couple of patches. They were texture marked as well as color-coded — somebody deserved a nice bonus — and I tore off the two that were already on my neck and slapped new ones in their place.

The pain was caught by surprise and fled, taking my consciousness with it. The steady hum of the car blurred against the womb-quiet of a good drug-induced stupor, and I faded into black with one happy thought failing to find a solid wall to echo off of:

Roland Danning was dead. The job was over.